Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 214 Editor's Choice: 44
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If you're going to argue the numbers, you've got to quibble over the details
[Read the article: The trouble with ethanol]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As far as I can tell, the gist of this article is "we need to conserve, so it's okay to fudge the numbers to move people away from biofuels as part of a solution to peak oil." It sounds like something you'd get out of the GOP in Congress or the Bush Administration.
For those of us who actually care about facts, though, the evidence is pretty clear that ethanol and biodiesel have a part to play in energy independence, in dealing with diminishing oil reserves, in carbon dioxide reduction. Fudging numbers because you don't like the conclusion that some may draw from them is the kind of thing Enron did. I prefer to live in a marketplace of ideas, not propaganda.
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The Replacement Player Issue is Interesting
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I hadn't heard that Lidle was a replacement player, even during the extended coverage on SportsCenter last night (where they gave more coverage to Lidle than they had to Buck O'Neil a few days before). It explains, for instance, why there was no statement from Donald Fehr, since replacement players were not members of the union. And it may explain why Bud Selig was so over the top in his comments (since management wants to encourage people to think of replacement players as other than scabs). So congrats to King for mentioning it, though I think it deserved more coverage.
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There's a kernel of value amongst the self-deception
[Read the article: Sullivan's travels]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"I trusted the Bushies" is, in general, a pretty untenable position after, oh, say, the 2000 South Carolina primary or the staged riot in Miami during the 2000 recount crisis. So Sullivan, I ain't buying your general gullibility.
The one place where one might at least give them a bit of the benefit of the doubt, though, was in the actual running of a war. Bush I had done a pretty decent job in Gulf War I, putting a genuine coalition together, getting Israel to be patient in the face of a load of scuds, and not getting involved in a quagmire. Cheney was part of that, and so was Powell. Powell had always been a key proponent of never putting American troops in danger unnecessarily, and helped Clinton to realize that the Somalia adventure of the last days of the Bush I administration was a disaster, so that "cutting and running" became nonpartisan police.
So it was at least reasonable to assume that there were voices within this Administration who would not be so damn stupid as to do what it in fact did, disbanding the army, allowing looting except at the Oil Ministry and pretty much letting the Iraqis destroy what was left of their country's infrastructure.
There's a word for what Cheney and Feith and their ilk did, and it's defined in the constitution as giving aid and comfort to our enemies. Can you imagine if Bill Clinton had run the wars in Croatia or Kosovo this way? So, yes, Sullivan got disillusioned, but why did he have to wait for Abu Ghraib? At what point after the fall of Saddam's government did they do anything right?
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The real culprit is the bedsheet ballot
[Read the article: "Hacking Democracy"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]For some reason, we Americans think it's a great idea to have all our elections at the same time, which is something most other democracies have rejected. The reason the Canadian model one letter-writer commented on works is that elections for Canadian federal parliaments occur separately from all other elections. A voter is given a single sheet of paper on which he or she marks exactly one box, to indicate a choice for the federal parliament, and nothing more. It's pretty hard to make a mistake when you have nothing more to do than that.
In our country, we make sure that we're voting on everything from Congress to the state legislature to ballot initiatives to dogcatcher at the same time. This not only greatly complicates the process of the election, it also complicates the process of designing the ballot (think Palm Beach County butterfly ballot) and the counting of the ballots. It probably also greatly lessens the care with which the bottom of the ballot is filled out.
In the name of democracy, we essentially take away our technical ability to control our government.
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How Can He Face His Kids?
[Read the article: O.J.'s profit motive]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Hi, kids, guess what? I did kill mommy brutally with a knife, and her friend to boot. And I got off, too. What would you like for dinner?
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It Wasn't a Palestinian Chaim Weizmann They Lacked
[Read the article: Nation building]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It was a Palestinian Gandhi. Trying to beat the Israelis with force has been demonstrated time and time is not going to work. Why not try nonviolence?
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We haven't "gotten over" Watergate
[Read the article: The man who ended our Nixon nightmare]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]And I hope to God we never do. As Ford himself said, Watergate established the principle that we are a government of laws and not of men. Right now, the presidency is held by a man who reads the Constitution as including two phrases in big bold letters, one that says that the executive power is vested in a President of the United States, and another that says that that President is commander-in-chief. Everything else, in his constitutional view, is in footnote-size type and need not be bothered with.
What is the source of this? His principal advisers are two men who cut their teeth running the government in the Ford Administration, Ford's two chiefs-of-staff, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. These men came from the school that thought not that Nixon had gone too far, but that he hadn't gone far enough. What he should have done was to burn the tapes on the White House lawn and declared himself above the courts and the Congress. Nixon's own shell of a sense of justice stopped him from doing that. They now advise a president who believes he can interpret the Constitution on his own and the laws Congress passes as well, and that his powers in a self-declared war (notwithstanding a clear mandate in the Constitution that only Congress may declare war) are virtually unlimited.
What little chance we have in this country of ridding ourselves of this scourge is the legacy of Watergate.