Letters to the Editor
MAV in Florida
Published Letters: 309 Editor's Choice: 22
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No, wait a minute, timbuk
[Read the article: Quote of the day]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]That was Japan. Elderbush blew chunks onto the prime minister of Japan, and I believe the excuse at the time was that he supposedly had the flu. The effect was that millions of people across the United States suddenly said "Wait a minute, if he's sick, and if Dan Quayle is the Vice President.....oh my GAWD!"
Of course, given the father-son antagonism in the Bush family, it was natural that junior would then try to upstage his daddy by drunkenly groping Angela Merkel during his state visit to Germany, but it just didn't quite have the same inventiveness.
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Oh, so THAT'S why they want to kill us!
[Read the article: "Islamist extremists ... don't distinguish between Democrats and Republicans"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Because we're Americans! And not because we placed military bases in Saudi Arabia, which was seen as propping up the corrupt and murderous Wahabbi regime! And not because we starved, then bombed, then invaded, then occupied Iraq, and built military bases there and now pledge to stay for decades to come. And not because we unconditionally back Israel's use of retaliatory bombardments with weapons made in the USA when they are plagues by the attacks by Palestinian militants.
This is almost as good as Bush's line about "They hate us because of freedom!" To which Bin Laden (remember him?) said in one videotape, "If that's the case, why didn't we attack Sweden?"
What I sometimes find frighetning is that Americans know so little about the rest of the world that gibberish like this from our ostensible leaders sounds credible.
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Big money and Small money
[Read the article: Obama more than doubled Clinton's January fundraising]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Frederico, and the people who answered, brought up a question I've had for some time about our lazy mainstream media (which in my younger days I worked for a few years). For months they have been reporting dollar totals of fundraising, but not how many people gave that money.
In other words, if Hillary Clinton got two $1 million donations, and Barrack Obama or John Ewards or anybody else had received 20,000 donations of $100 each, the totals were reported in the media as if the two candidates had the same amount of popular support.
In the day when political donations were reported on paper and laboriously typed into a newsroom computer by the lowest-ranking person around, I suppose that was just teh way it is. In the day when the data is available with a right-click and can be rehuffled and restacked by a variety of criteria, it's just lazy journalism.
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Thank you, uberhobo
[Read the article: John Gibson wants rappers arrested for their lyrics]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]OK, now we hear the kid was white: Uberhobo's observation still applies, that to many pundits, journalists and everyday people think that all of the members of that OTHER group are a homogenous mass.
Sometimes it works in your favor, such as places where I worked where the managers who were not veterans had this weird Hollywood-inspired idea that if they spoke too sharply to them, I might go ballistic. Sometimes it works against you, such as with people who think that because I live in Florida, that I can't correctly vote or that might I approve of arresting a kid for using dirty words outdoors
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There are some excellent observations here about the fallacy of the "ticking time bomb"
[Read the article: Bill O'Reilly's tortured logic]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I thank those people such as Slackie and others who pointed out how the "ticking time bomb" (presumably drawn by the scriptwriters of "24" from old episodes of Roadrunner cartoons) is basically a paranoid fantasy. In response to Slackie's comment that the tortured person could just give a false address, I wondered what would happen if the torturee said "It's in a black limousine that's driving around Washington DC!"
There's only one case in my tangled mind that I can think of that comes close to such a scenario: After the Hiroshima bomb was dropped, the Japanese were torturing a captured American fighter pilot for information about this thing called an atom bomb. He, of course, didn't know anything about it, but he used his imagination and knowledge of sci-fi of the time to concoct a wild story about the bomb: that was a huge hollow lead tank filled with positive and negative atoms that when dropped over a city, would create a thunderclap that would destroy the city. He then added that the next target was Tokyo.
Moral: torture yields crappy information. It's just that simple.
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"why the hateration on the Cubans? Maybe you'd like to kick them all out...."
[Read the article: Can a Cuban Democrat win in South Florida?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm not sure what "hateration" is -- perhaps an electronic version of hatred. But I don't "haterize" Cubans. But I would like the noisy minority of anti-Castro immigrants to let the rest of the people in South Florida enjoy the Bill of Rights and allow people to disagree with them about Castro without being the targets of vandalism, death threats and and slander. It was only a few years ago that the head of the Cuban American National Foundation organized a harassment campiagn against teh Miami Herald that included smearing dog poop on newspaper vending machines and making bomb threats against the publisher. These bomb threats had a certain seriousness as there were some Cubans who years ago argued that it was time to just get over Castro having taken power, and then had bombs put under the hoods of their cars.
When Elian Gonzalez was returned to his dad, Cubans in Miami took to the streets to burn the Stars and Stripes and wave the Cuban flag. Not exactly the best way to make friends over a broad political spectrum, y'know. Cubans who tried to say that the kid should be returned to his dad were shouted down, bullied, threatened and hgustled off the street by cops. Again, why can't they have their First Amendment rights? The Dade County head of the ACLU (who, by the way, is a Cuban fellow) has argued in vain for years to the local establishment that, as he said, "There is no Dade County exemption to the First Amendment."
The "hateration" is not against Cubans (except by the inevitable rednecked types who, ironically, are on the same end of the political spectrum as the anti-Castro Cubans). It is against extremist bullies.