Letters to the Editor
3reddogs
Published Letters: 186 Editor's Choice: 43
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Let's All give George Bush the (Purple) Finger
[Read the article: The State of the Union, or what ever happened to the purple finger?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]George Bush had a chance to do something about the skyrocketing cost of prescription drugs by including a provision in his Medicare Plan D program that would have allowed the government to negotiate lower prices for drugs covered by the plan. Instead, the ability to negotiate lower prices was removed from the program and Medicare Plan D is now just one more in a long line of George Bush's "windfall" programs. This time the windfall goes to the drug companies and the insurance companies, not the people who need some relief from the cost of prescription drugs. Tonight he's going to propose expanding tax deductions for medical expenses (won't all the people who are faced with bankruptcy because of huge medical expenses be thrilled) and he's going to promote tax-deductible health savings accounts (HSA's). Gee, won't that be swell for all the young healthy people who can afford to put some of their income into these accounts (and get a tax break to boot) and won't that be swell for whoever gets the use of all the money that'll come pouring into these accounts! But wait a minute ... how is this going to help the 46 million people who can't afford health insurance? If they had any spare money to put into an HSA don't you think they'd be using this money to buy health insurance instead??? And how are bigger tax deductions and more money in HSA's going to lower the cost of health care? George Bush has all but ignored America's health care crisis during his entire 5 years in office. If, after all this time, bigger tax deductions and HSA's are all he has to offer I would hope the Democrats and the American people will collectively give George Bush the finger that he so richly deserves.
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A Rose By Any Other Name ...
[Read the article: Letters to the Editor update]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Sorry, Salon, but I think your asking us to sign our names is way off base, especially the part that implies that it'll make us more thoughtful with our responses. I, for one, resent that. And to compare these posts to the Letters to the Editor in a newspaper is also pretty unrealistic. When I googled myself a few weeks back I was shocked to have been presented with links to two of my Salon posts (the only two containing my real name). I doubt that even google's massive mighty search engine extends into any letters I may have written to the editors of the Akron Beacon Journal or Cleveland Plain Dealer. As I explained when I asked you to remove those two posts from your database, my boss is a staunch Republican who might very well google me some day and might very well hold my political views against me. Personally, I have issues with Salon making our posts available to search engines like google but that's probably one battle I'm not going to win. So withhold your Editor's Choice stars if you must but I think it smacks a bit of elitism. As a matter of fact, I liked "N." 's suggestion -- let the readers rank the comments (instead of or in addition to the editors' ranking).
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FIREFOX/Windows PROBLEM
[Read the article: Salon gets (more) interactive]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm running Firefox 1.5.0.1 (the most recent release) on a Windows 2000 PC and also couldn't get to the survey. On a brighter note, I have a FF extension that allows me to right-click on a link and open it in Internet Explorer ("IE View"). Once I did that, the survey magically appeared.
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Ideas
[Read the article: Salon gets (more) interactive]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In a previous post I indicated that I'd like to see the "Editor's Choice" system continue (but posts shouldn't be penalized simply because the authors don't choose to use their real names). I think it would add some interest if readers could also select posts that are particularly interesting or worth reading ... maybe call it "Readers' Choice". Readers could "select" deserving posts and once a post receives a predetermined number of votes it would receive the coveted Readers' Choice designation. Perhaps you could get Diebold to come up with a system that would prevent people from voting for their own posts. (Err, come to think of it, maybe Diebold wouldn't be such a great choice for doing that, but then I'm from Ohio so what do I know.)
A tiny addition that I think would be helpful would be to add the time to the top of each screen (i.e., the time, hh:mm, when the page was loaded). Since I use Firefox, I tend to have 2 or 3 Salon instances (War Room, front page and Daou Report) open all day, each in its own tab. By adding the time to each of your pages, I'd at least know how long it's been since I refreshed each page.
As someone has already suggested, having all of the posts on a single scrollable page would be a very nice improvement (or at least give people the option of selecting whether they want multiple pages or a single really long page).
Last but not least, I spend most of my time in the War Room (3 cheers to Tim Grieve) ... I, for one, would like to see more political discourse at Salon (articles by Salon staff, guest writers and readers).
Thanks for giving us the opportunity to throw our 2 cents in !! I'm liking a lot of the suggestions that have been put forth so far. Gee, maybe we could vote for those too. (Sorry, it's this Ohio/voting thing I have.)
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Even if he did ...
[Read the article: Bush administration: The president didn't mean what he said in SOTU]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Since only 10-15% of our total oil supply comes from the Middle East, my first reaction to his statement was that replacing 75% of our Middle East imports with something else doesn't amount to a hill of beans. (Come to think of it, I'm kinda surprised he didn't include a hill of beans when he mentioned the wood chips, stalks and switch grass.)