Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 211 Editor's Choice: 44
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This Country is Based Upon Distrust of Government
[Read the article: The Leader isn't protecting us and keeping us safe]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm sure some of you have actually read the Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights, but it's always worthwhile to understand what was going on. The French and Indian Wars had left Britain with a huge debt, and it was decided in Parliament that the best way to deal with it was to tax those who had, in the government's opinion, benefited from it: the American colonists. All of this was done, of course, for our protection, having got rid of the French, it was now necessary to keep out the Indians. This cost money. So taxes were imposed, troops were required to be quartered in people's houses, and when people protested, more troops were needed for our own protection. When people protested more, additional steps were taken, like empowering commissioners to ferret out the truth about who had committed terrorist acts (like burning the revenue cutter Gaspee), and allowing them to arrest people and take them to England for trial. And when that didn't work, they tried the trick (to benefit the East India Company, the Halliburton of the time) of lowering a tax on tea just to prove it would be paid if the tea were cheap enough. When that didn't work, they shut down the Port of Boston and sent some troops to go arrest the terrorists who were training to fight the authorities militarily.
We call that the Battles of Lexington and Concord.
If you read the Declaration of Independence (the boring parts in middle), that's what they're talking about. If you read the Bill of Rights, that's what they're protecting against. The right of the people to peaceably assemble. To petition for redress of grievances. To not have to quarter troops in their homes. To be safe in their persons, property and houses. To not be searched without a warrant, and warrants not be issued without probable cause. To have a jury of their own peers. To have due process of law. To not have cruel and unusual punishment.
If you asked a Founding Father about this stuff, it wasn't theoretical. It wasn't remote. And even if it didn't happen to them personally (I don't think anyone was quartering troops in Mount Vernon), they understood that those it did happen to were their fellow citizens.
This is the country that was created by our Founders. This is the country that is currently being disassembled, bit by bit, by this administration, with the active participation of the most activist, least text-bound judges and justices in American History. And all under the smokescreen that they are the "serious" and "grown up" leaders who follow the Constitution as it is written.
Thank God for the small cadre, like Glenn Greenwald and Chris Dodd, who call bullshit on all this. It is unAmerican to support these clowns, because this Administration and its runnin dogs are as opposed to the principles on which this country was founded as Osama bin-Laden himself. And everytime they ask us to give up our civil liberties in the name of security, they do his bidding.
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What Obama Has Going for Him
[Read the article: A week of petty though typical attacks on Obama produced nothing]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Is that he's never turned into a "Senator." You know what I mean, the kind of way of talking that Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen used with one another, "Senator, . . . ." It's antithetical to the natural rhythms of his speech, and to the way he thinks. So he talks to people, listens to people and makes an impression that way.
John Kerry was nothing but a Senator. John McCain is nothing but a Senator. Hillary Clinton was a Senator before she was ever in the Senate.
Obama will be able to get past all the muck because he can communicate with Americans past it. And when he debates McCain, McCain (who has no instinct himself for the jugular) will be eaten for lunch.
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An inspiration
[Read the article: Don't press the Wikipedia delete button]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Nicholson Baker gets it. There is no one perfect way to preserve information, and getting rid of one form of information because another is more easily retrievable, as in the case of electronic card catalogs and microfiche of newspaper archives, makes no sense.
Long live curmudgeonhood!
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Paying for Statistics
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Statistics don't bring money in the door. No one pays to go see Troy Tulowitzki play shortstop for the Rockies. They may pay to see the NL champion Rockies (I imagine Coors Field will be full all year), but if one has discretionary income one doesn't go and say "let's go see Troy T. play today" or "let's not go, I understand Tulowitski is taking the day off."
Yet, baseball's salary arbitration rules take statistics and service time and pretty much nothing else into consideration. Result is that you can have a pretty bad team of highly paid players (witness the Cubs, Orioles, Rangers, etc. over the past decade), and they can all demand and get raises.
There's only one baseball player who can demonstrate statistically that he consistently puts money into the owners' pockets by putting bodies in the seats and ratings on the tube, and he can't get a job.
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His last pass
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Was a poorly thrown wobbler that was intercepted and kept his team from going to the Super Bowl. To me, that summed the guy up. He made a great show of being all about everything, but he was ultimately too arrogant to keep from throwing up balls like that, because he couldn't fathom the idea that his team could succeed without him being the sole reason for it. That may have played in Peoria, but it never played with me.
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Christian's Line
[Read the article: "Project Runway": The rundown]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As it went by, I said to my wife, "It's Cavalier versus Big Bird: the Gay Musical."