Letters to the Editor
midnight04
Published Letters: 213 Editor's Choice: 9
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WHOA
[Read the article: Mike Huckabee's leap of faith]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]We are not electing a pastor for our church. We are electing a President for our nation. I see no sign that Huckabee is competent to fill that role. He is a revenant, a person who believes the universe is six thousand years old, that women needing medical services should be limited to what Christian conservatives think are appropriate services, that seculars, Jews and Christians ought to be tolerated and not allowed full use of their human heritage. Do we want four more years of malapropisms and incompetence? Not this citizen, thanks.
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Saltypappy
[Read the article: Mike Huckabee's leap of faith]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You are part of the problem. We are not a "Christian nation," old bean. We are a nation shaped by men who were baptized Christian but learned, over the years, how limited that is. Most of them became Deists as they matured, including Jefferson, who rewrote the Bible to reflect his sense that Jesus was not, indeed, divine.
You are a right wing advocate of theocracy which varies from Taliban/Wahhabi Islam only by labels. You want women crushed under your heal, homosexuals murdered, women's health care providers murdered or imprisoned and Jews and Muslims (as well as moderate Christians) sidelined and deprived of the vote.
You are the Ebola virus of democracy, Pappy. You infect the victim (the Constitution) and break it down until it bleeds to death.
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Transpartisan
[Read the article: Michael Bloomberg: Trans-partisan savior]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I agree with the designation as opposed to non-partisan, which Bloomberg most certainly is not.
What he has going for him (his bankroll aside) is competence. The man is blazingly competent and has shown himself to be so in everything he has done.
In New York, he has healed a lot of the wounds Giuliani inflicted and found a way to work with minority leaders. He has moderate instincts and uses them. He is very strong on collaboration, which speaks well of the way he would run the government both domestically and internationally.
The argument that he has no foreign policy experience is bogus. You don't build a multi-billion dollar enterprise without having figured out foreign policy issues and negotiated them. The argument that he has no domestic policy is also bogus. He has had one for a long time.
I'm worried that he would, by running, make the White House Republican again but I would not have trouble voting for him if he ran and the Democrats ran a turkey. His lack of charisma is not a problem for me -- I am probably going to vote for Richardson if he is still in the race by the time New York votes in a primary.
The absolute necessity of healing the wounds Bush opened up, bringing the country back from the brink and making it work again confronts any POTUS. Bloomberg brought New York City back from the brink toward which we were propelled by a combination of Rudy Giulini and Osama bin Laden. He can do it for the country, too.
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DP
[Read the article: Who would Antonin Scalia torture?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't see why a single drug can't be used to execute someone. That's secondary to the argument about whether it coarsens us as a nation to do it at all and also to the danger that someone, probably poor and probably non-white, will have had a totally impotent defense and will die even though he or she is innocent.
New Jersey took the step and I think the rest of the country ought to, also. Yes, there is a possibility that someone like Ted Bundy gets his sentence commuted to life without parole but there is also the possibility that someone will not die who should never have been sentenced in the first place.
Now to the economics. It is cheaper to maintain a prisoner in maximum security until he is eighty than it is to keep a prisoner on death row for ten years. Not only the appeals, of course, but the increased security costs militate toward life without parole. The family of the victim can be assured that the person who killed their loved one is in a kind of hell surrounded by his peers.
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Fear
[Read the article: GOP to voters: Be afraid, be very afraid]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Fear only goes so far. When the newly created Homeland Security people started moving the color alerts, people got it. We were being manipulated by fear into surrendering our rights as Americans. The cynicism grew with every adjustment of both local and national threat levels.
We are more concerned now with domestic fears and the cost of the lie that took us into Iraq. We are more concerned with the incompetence that destroyed and still plagues New Orleans. We are more concerned with keeping a roof over our heads because of the unchecked greed of the home finance industry, a greed fostered by the Bush administration. We are more concerned with our cost of getting from point A to point B, a cost hiked by Cheney's secretive energy policy conferences early in the administration.
Fear has become meaningless to most of us. It's like desensitization therapy for allergies or phobias. The more a person is exposed to it, the less powerful it gets. We walk in a climate of moderate fear and we have become used to it. We also resent those who imposed it in the first place. We don't resent Osama bin Laden but Bush for not having caught him. Of course they haven't caught him -- it's quid pro quo. You stay out there scaring people and we will leave you alone. We need him to keep people intimidated. Only it doesn't work. I wonder how much of the bounty we put on his head wound up in his wallet.