Rick Larsen is more than “an ideal target for conservatives” (News-Times editorial, Jan. 13). Most people I know think he is merely a vessel for special interests.

He rarely moves until he knows which way the wind is blowing, and his “fair winds” tend to blow from industries that fill his war chest ­— insurers who profit handsomely as his constituents struggle to pay for health care, timber interests who clear-cut national forests and leave the logs to rot on the ground because they aren’t worth shipping to mills, and a host of builders, lenders and advertisers who profit by convincing people to buy things they can’t afford, or in his words, “make loans more accessible.”

He says he will base his 2010 campaign on “jobs,” but he has spent most of his 10 years in Congress serving industries headed by executives who pay themselves a thousand times more than a rank-and-file employee but, like Boeing, still relocate to areas where labor is cheaper and regulation is looser.

A dental insurance lobbyist before he ran for Congress, he reminds me of the scorpion who delivered a lethal sting to a benefactor who rescued it from a flood. It’s just his nature.

Jim Bruner

Oak Harbor