Letters to the Editor
Frank Smith, Bluff City, KS
Published Letters: 131 Editor's Choice: 15
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Humpty Dumpty: "A Word Means Just What I Choose It To Mean."
[Read the article: Sister, can you spare $2 million?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Do any other Salon readers sense the irony that the same legislators who perenially rail against regulation are the same ones who have tried to regulate choice out of existence?
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all." – from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
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Stevens, Young, Alaska legislature corruption goes way back
[Read the article: Ted Stevens' remodeling, or when the FBI does the final inspection]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Senator "Uncle" Ted Stevens may be toast. His son Ben certainly is. He's yet unindicted, but he is described though not by name in indictments. This has to do with for-profit prisons, fisheries and of course, oil companies.
With Alaska's biggest oil service and construction company owner/executives taking plea bargains, anyone could wind up in the pokey.
Don Young certainly is a candidate for a striped suit.
The prison corporation, Cornell Corrections, tried to get the Bridge to Nowhere built for free, way back in 2001-02, so they could build a prison on Gravina Island. They wanted a $75 million electrical intertie thrown in with the deal.
Two former legislators go to trial next month and a third, recently resigned, is going to have to explain why he starred in all that Cornell consultant's videotape over the last few years.
A Cornell lobbyist pled guilty months ago, but has yet to be sentenced.
This won't be the end of it.
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Richardson, "not there yet."
[Read the article: Don't ask, don't tell]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Hey, I'm not there yet on Richardson, and I don't think I ever will be. There's the little matter of the persecution of Wen Ho Lee. There's his cozy relationship with now-indicted ex-Senator Manny Aragon. There's his appointment of a for-profit GEO Group (ex-Wackenhut) prison warden to run New Mexico's prison system and his shilling for that corporation in Clayton, NM, and all the dough he's taken from them.
I'll stick with Kucinich. His wife showed at a vigil for immigrant prisoner families (women and children) in Taylor, Texas, at the infamous T. Don Hutto Corrections Corporation of America prison. He says what he means and means what he says. He wants to say goodbye to our carnage visited upon Iraq. He probably won't go anywhere, just like me, but we'll raise a lot of hell on the way there.
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Huckabee, the religious right and Christian Nationalism
[Read the article: From tears to cheers: Huckabee's surprise second in Iowa]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The religious right does not just want to be able to home school...it wants the rest of Americans to pay for the religious education of its children. It's joined in the endeavor and funded by the corporate right that doesn't want to pay any taxes, personified by Charles and David Koch, big time Brownback backers. Here in Kansas, the RR took over the state Board of Education, twice. It wanted to eliminate not only the teaching of evolution, but also any sex education, world history, geology, physics, etc.
Huckabee may dodge this question but the truth is that his supporters vigorously support the Iraq war because it is, in their minds, a holy war against non-Christians. Many support the Israeli war against Palestinians because they believe that it is necessary for Jews to achieve a temporary triumph in order to pave the way for Armageddon and the rapture.
Huckabee's Christianity is hardly benign, no matter how he might cloak it in an air of populism. Salon can surely do better than this in covering this threat to democracy and human rights.
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Bush reading a newspaper?
[Read the article: P.S., Mr. President: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Next you'll be telling us there were no WMDs.
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False promises
[Read the article: Will psychologists still abet torture?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I've attended conventions of the APA decades ago and am not surprised by the result that condems torture in a manner that allows it to persist all the same. The media was effectively manipulated. No roll call or actual vote count was reported in the dozens of sources I've scoured...only that the substitute resolution (torture-lite) passed "overwhelmingly."
While the APA weaseled around in San Francisco, I was at a meeting of the American Correctional Association in Kansas City. This is another organization that purports to support human rights and professional practice but by its very participation in the process endorses the abuses that occur.
I propose an analogy. The ACA sets policy standards but effectively ignores practice. It enthusiastically conveys its imprimatur on the for-profit prison industry in a way that allows operators to undeservedly claim adherence to such standards.
In actuality, when I have used Open Records Act (Freedom of Information) requests to pull prison monitor records from state after state that exports inmates thousands of miles, out of sight and out of mind, I have found little evidence that monitors actually prevent abuse. In fact, monitors have ignored some of the worst abuses happening right under their very noses and in doing so let operators clearly understand that accountability and contractual consequences are a fiction.
Let me suggest that psychologists who are and will be participating in the continued extra-legal (according to international conventions, rather than Bush conceits) coercion and deliberate humiliation of detainees are those least likely to be protective of any rights of the accused in a Kafkaesque process.
When the APA was given the opportunity last week to vigorously condemn extant practices by organizational withdrawal from same, it instead endorsed those practices by relying on the fiction put forth by a zealous participant in the process, U.S. Army Colonel Larry James. He said: "If we remove psychologists from these facilities, people are going to die."
I believe the contrary is true. If psychologists continue to involve themselves in the process, cooptation is inevitable and can only foster the delusion that the APA can make a progressive or humanitarian difference.
I think that the APA should expel or refuse membership to those who are working in America's death and torture camps. When the disempowered prisoners have no other option to resist (and Bush has punished those who would render legal assistance, even from within the ranks of the military), they will increasingly use the sole remaining option available to them: Suicide.