Listening and watching the phony screeching from the left and their compliant friends in the media just shows how out of touch and out of any new ideas both are.

If a Democrat was cutting the fat and waste out of our government there would be calls for a new national holiday and for them to be on Mount Rushmore, but it’s “orange man” and the “unelected” Musk doing this long overdue task.

I would hope all Americans would think this is smart and necessary as we are over $36 trillion in debt and this is not sustainable going forward.

But we live in a world where common sense and a supposed common bond can’t even be agreed upon even though it would help us all.

Being spiteful and against a good idea only because of politics is foolish and childish and if the last election didn’t show that to the “ruling class” that has run this country into the ground, they will continue to lose “bigly” around the country.

Thomas C Wahlberg

Dedham

It’s certainly a step forward when the spokesman for a right-wing think tank acknowledges that climate change exists, as Eli Lehrer eventually does in the fourth paragraph of his opinion piece (“There are better ways to handle natural disasters,” Feb. 12).  He even agrees (tentatively) that our rapidly transforming climate may have made disasters “more common.”

Unfortunately, Lehrer then confuses the issue with a misleading claim that since disasters “have many causes,” cutting US carbon emissions won’t do anything to make our homes and properties safer. Here’s a thought for Lehrer — almost everything in our modern interconnected world has “many causes.”  To offer an obvious example, we can’t say with absolute certainty that a specific case of lung cancer was caused by smoking — but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea to quit.

Warren Senders

Medford

I was pleased to read that the dedicated bus lane is getting removed because it “has not functioned as intended to justify the space allocation,” (“City removing Back Bay dedicated bus lane,” Feb. 13).  However, I was disappointed to read that this conclusion was made through “observational analysis.” Said another way, the city tested dedicated bus lanes in situ with a high taxpayer cost and an even higher commuter cost. One of the city’s top priorities is to keep traffic moving; after all, traffic is commerce and commerce is revenue.

This is 2025 and every US city should have a continuously operating traffic monitoring system that measures travel time along all its routes.  Such a system would not only serve the immediate need to guide traffic re-routing and free potential jams but it would also serve as a testbed to simulate the impact of proposed changes, such as dedicated bus lanes (and bike lanes and building construction and more).

Uber, Lyft, Apple, Google and many other organizations maintain realtime traffic information and use it to make routing decisions.  Boston and other cities should easily leverage technology that has become commonplace in the private sector.  Doing so would mean avoiding bad ideas before they impact Bostonians.

David H. Sprogis

Watertown