Letters to the Editor
qazwart
Published Letters: 129 Editor's Choice: 31
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Tried singing it in Spanish, but I still can't hit them high notes.
[Read the article: Oh, say can you care?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Oh, great! Another language in which no one can sing the Star Spangled Banner in.
I'd say we switch to Yankee Doodle. It's more associated with our fight for independence, we all know the words, everyone can sing the tune, and no one will ever be able to translate "doodle" into Spanish.
Besides, I like a national anthem that proclaims that how handy we Americans are with the ladies. It drives them cheese eating surrender monkeys up a wall.
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Could we have stopped once the die was cast?
[Read the article: How we lost Iraq]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There is a lot of speculation about stopping the drive towards Bagdad and mopping up what was quickly becoming the Iraqi insurgency in the South. However, I wonder what would have happened if we did.
Much of fighting a war is about momentum. What made General Grant successful when other Northern generals failed was Grant's dogged insistence of pushing ahead. After battles that would have caused the other generals to retreat, Grant pushed ahead. Stopping the advance may have singled to the insurgents that they were successful in their tactics, and caused even more insurgents to join their cause.
Still, there has to be some balance to the situation. Pushing on too fast and outrunning your ability to maintain your rear and supplies could cause your troop formation to break and give the enemy the ability to stop you and force you into retreat. This happened to the Germans in Egypt in World War II.
The big question is why we were so unprepared in the first place. It's one thing to think you could fight and win in Iraq with so few troops. It's another thing to not even have the extra troops ready for deployment. Why didn't we have another 100,000 troops sitting in Kuwait ready to be deployed in a moment's notice? When we noticed we were having supply line problems and irregular forces fighting in our rear, we could have deployed these troops and still push on ahead towards Bagdad without any worry.
We also should ask why we pushed into Bagdad so quickly when it was a natural spot to stop, rest, and secure the areas we already possessed. We could have slowly blockaded the city while negotiating with the enemy. It might have been possible to have a peaceful and orderly surrender of the government, thus preventing the lawlessness that happened when the government fell. We did this in Haiti back in the 1994 when we put Aristide back in power. We first told the Haitian government we were only there to restore order (and actually got permission to invade), then negotiated the junta's surrender after we surrounded Port-au-Prince.
In a war, you're suppose to plan for all contingencies, and it is obvious that we didn't. We never had extra troops ready for deployment. We never had a plan for governing a former totalitarian state once the government collapsed and nothing was left. We had no plans in case we weren't greeted like liberators. Our plans ended once we toppled that big statue of Saddam.
Having extra troops and contingency plans wouldn't be a problem if things went well. We could send the extra troops back home, and be grateful that everything went so smoothly. The Bush administration could have basked in the glow of victory. And, if things turned out as they did... Well, we would have been prepared for it.
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Colbert wasn't that funny
[Read the article: Cohen: Colbert was rude, and his defenders are dangerous]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It would be hard to be. I've seen both the video and the transcript. A few old jokes, a few misses, but the transcript is generally pretty funny. The video was flat, and no wonder... It's hard to give a comedic performance when your audience isn't responding. Your timing is off, and Colbert was stuck waiting for laughs that never came.
Why the poor reception? Because the people there felt that Colbert had "crossed the line". Sure it's okay to poke fun of the president a little bit, but Colbert's hard hitting satire was an absolute shock to those at the dinner. Stephen Colbert committed a terrible faux paux -- he made the president feel uncomforable!
Then again, what did they expect? That he'd spend the evening talking about the threat bears pose to our American society? As a friend said "Didn't they watch the show before inviting him?"
And is there a bit o' anger in the Democratic voice? Hmmm... I guess seeing your country go from budget surplus to the largest deficit ever, to see a compentent agency like FEMA become a crony ridden agency, to see your land of freedom and liberty be accused of torture might make you a wee bit upset.
And yes, anger is a terrible thing to have, but it's a temporary problem for us. I think we'll be over "our anger" by the end of the first week in November.
In Texas, I use to be known as a "Yellow Dog Democrat" because I'd vote for a yellow dog if it was running on the Democratic ticket. But, I'd take a Democratic yellow dog over any corupt GOP old goat any day.
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And what about the cost of transportation, fertilizer, etc?
[Read the article: The trouble with ethanol]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]According to recent research on ethanol's environmental benefits from the University of California at Berkeley, corn-derived ethanol produced by a natural-gas powered plant offers a 38 percent greenhouse-gas reduction compared to gasoline, while corn-derived ethanol produced by a coal-fired plant offers a greenhouse-gas benefit of only about 19 percent."
Are the estimates in this article based upon the production of ethanol per gallon or by how much cars will actually use? Remember that cars burn between 7% to 30% more ethanol than gasoline. That 19% which still sounded pretty good to some people may come to naught when actually placed in a car.
Also remember that almost all the corn we grow heavily depends upon lots of petroleum based fertilizers, must be mechanically planted, tended, and harvested with gasoline powered machines, and since we don't have a lot of ethanol pipelines running through Iowa and Nebraska, must to be trucked into gas stations. Even with gasoline prices breaking the $3.00 per gallon mark, ethanol is only viable due to special tax breaks and other incentives.