Writer Michael Ray Dillier makes a big to-do about statements made by Missouri's U.S. Senate candidate Todd Akin. He says Republicans will never live it down. Of course he ignores the idiotic utterances made by Barack Obama, the president of the United States.

Obama tells us that businesses are not created by business people but are developed for them by someone else, that Midwest people are bitter and cling to their religion and guns, and that the present troubles in Libya and our economic woes are just "bumps in the road." This is the same guy who was attending a love-in in Las Vegas while our legation in Libya was still burning. How will Democrats live that down?

In the past, millions of people have become successful middle-class citizens without any of the items Dillier claims they need. During the Great Depression my father started a lumber and tie business that did very well. He hired 12 people, getting them off the public dole. My father could not start such a business today because of all the things Dillier claims he wants.

Federal employees do not have collective bargaining or the right to strike and neither should any other workers who derive their salaries directly from the taxpayers. Perhaps if we stopped these obvious conflicts of interest, this state would not be broke today.

Leon Anderson

Collinsville