Letters to the Editor
Frank Smith, Bluff City, KS
Published Letters: 131 Editor's Choice: 15
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"Aye" votes came mostly from close elections
[Read the article: The Democratic freshmen on Iraq]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Of all the "New Democrats" voting "Aye" only two polled more than 54% in the elections. Zach Space took 63%, Brad Elsworth 61%. Go figure why they voted for the funding.
TX & FL - Nick Lampson and Tim Mahoney had the advantage of literally running against Tom DeLay and Mark Foley. Yet Lampson polled only 52% and Mahoney 50%. Who wouldn't be nervous?
NY - Kirsten Gillbrand won 53% against wife-beating and alcoholism charges plus George Bush.
KS - Nancy Boyda (50%) won on a stealth campaign, riding Gov. Kathleen Sibelius' coattails, with Kansas moderate Republicans sick of religious fanatics. (Jim Ryun spoke "in tongues" at campaign appearances, bought his house from an Abramoff-controlled non-profit for $100,000 off.) Late visits from Bush and Cheney failed to rescue Ryun from poor constituent services. Boyda was not even on pundits' charts as having a chance.
NC - Heath Schuler (54%) not only ran against Bush but incumbent's ethics charges.
AZ - Gabrielle Giffords (54%) won against Bush, the Foley scandal and a loopy non-incumbent who couldn't get an endorsement from the retiring, long out-of-the-closet Jim Kolbe.
PA - Altmire (52%) was supposed to lose.
WI - Steve Kagan took 51% against non-incumbent after a rough primary.
The oddest races were by former rep Ciro Rodriguez. His district was the only one "ungerrymandered" by the Texas courts after DeLay's money-laundered redistricting. In the November special election for the newly drawn district, he got hammered in most counties, finishing as low as 4th and 5th. But "incumbent" race traitor Henry Bonilla missed election by 1%, and Rodriguez obviously had divine intervention after gathering only 20% in the special. Bonilla's "Osama" charges backfired and his former majority juice was long gone by the runoff. Clearly divine intervention was a factor.
The Lord achieved balance by getting certifiable lunatic Michele Bachmann elected over Democratic pre-race favorite of some, Patty Wetterling, by a large margin.
Bottom line. Courage failed most of the "New Democrats" voting "Aye."
Most courageous? Newcomer Patrick Murphy, PA-8 prevailed over Michael Fitzpatrick by 1,528 votes yet voted "Nay."
Retired admiral Joe Sestak was somehow omitted from Salon's list. He won after the FBI raided scandal-plagued incumbent Weldon's office just prior to the election. He campaigned against Iraq war, yet voted "Aye."
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Deliberately crafted? "Benchmark" or "poison pill?"
[Read the article: The complete myth driving our Iraq "debate"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The big benchmark is for the Iraqis to privatize most of their oil production/reserves. They would have to be out of their minds to do that. They also overwhelmingly support the withdrawal of U.S. troops. So what better way for us to storm back out of Iraq while saving face than to set a goal that's beyond reach? Talk about a "win-win" situation.
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Salon posters disappointing
[Read the article: Inside the Creation Museum]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Slogging through 12 pages of postings about this article, one can't help but getting a bit forlorn.
Most posters complain about the theology behind the museum. But that specific theology is shared by a good 40% of U.S. citizens.
Of those complainers, one wonders how many believe that if they are good, they will go to "heaven?" Is there any better basis for a belief in heaven than there is for saddled dinosaurs broken to ride?
The posters ignore the fact that perhaps the majority of that most-deluded 40% are in fact decent people who care about our world and try to do the right thing.
The 40% afraid to die in large part, so they try to propitiate "the" god by believing in some fairly vacuous silliness. How many posters, on the other hand, aren't afraid to die?
The 40% constitute a large majority of the people who believe Bush no matter what humbug he's pushing, even when the words, even as they are spilling out his mouth, are as disprovable as the fantasy about the Biblical "flood" and the Grand Canyon.
And that goes to the core of the problem, perhaps. How may we sway them to believe that global warming is more real than are the prayers of Pat Robertson or James Dobson? How can we get them to understand that the Constitution never meant to force the working and middle classes to pay for the private schooling of the children of the rich? How can they learn that AIDS is not the well-deserved consequences of sin, but a problem to be dealt with rationally including via legitimate sex education and population control programs? How can we get them to understand that the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are at least as important as the continued existence of some unfettered monozygote swimming around in a uterus?
These things are important. Anger and disdain won't rectify or ameliorate these problems any more than quoting scripture will.
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Richardson will need more than Sancho Panza to bail him out
[Read the article: The Democratic Don Quixote]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As media scrutiny of candidates intensifies, even among the lackluster MNM hacks who stared blankley as Monica Goodline "explained" voter caging, how long will it be before Richardson's extremely cozy relationship with influence-buying GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections) comes under the microscope?
Richardson has taken $75,000 from these characters, shilled for a new pen in remote Clayton, NM, and installed a former GEO warden, Joe Williams, as head of his corrections department.
(GEO is very bipartisan. In Kansas they gave 98% of their campaign contributions to Republicans as they sought to have excluding statutes repealed. In California they gave Schwartzenegger $90,000, the last $30,000 while they were negotiating contracts with him. They go directly to power.)
Manny Aragon, another NM pol with similar GEO ties who is the former Speaker ProTem of the NM Senate, was recently indicted.
While Richardson's professed goals sound terrific, rapid withdrawal from Iraq in particular, why should voters believe anything he says?
And then there's the little matter of Wen Ho Lee.