The American Spectator

Reader Mail

On the Offensive

6.26.02 @ 12:01AM

CHARLIE DANIELS' BAND
Re: The Prowler's Ready for Primetime:

I am perfectly willing for PBS management to make whatever decisions they want about what they show or don't show as long as they go out and get somebody to pay for it voluntarily. Any chance of using this absurd situation as a lever to kill taxpayer finding of PBS?
-- Jay Van Nostrand
Winston-Salem, NC

These PBS types are really showing their true colors. Keep up the pressure on these anti-American goons.
-- unsigned

PBS -- the people who bring us "DIVERSITY" with our tax dollars -- except they don't. Oh well, 2003 and another $350,000,000 tax dollars to keep the lefties off the unemployment lines.
-- Mike Horn
Tracy, CA

DISK COVER
Re: The Prowler's The DNC's Dirty Disk:

Howard Kurtz of Washington Post in his column "Media Notes" quotes from The American Prowler:

"The presentation was made using a White House laptop and the Hay-Adams projection system. There was no disk, because you can't easily store a full PowerPoint presentation on a disk like that. It's easier just to store it on a hard drive and use the computer," says a White House source. "We know the computer wasn't stolen, so it had to come from somewhere else."

I don't know how sophisticated the Hay-Adams hotel projection system is. But, from all I know about Laptops, Notebooks and projection systems, in such a scenario, the projection system is fairly a "dumb one," merely displaying the received video signal onto the screen. No memory or storage is inherent in these systems.

As to "a full PowerPoint presentation" not being easily stored on a disk, that is both true and false.

True, you cannot store any half decent PowerPoint presentation on a "Floppy Disk," its size being limited to a mere 1.44 Megabytes. However, when it comes to such presentations, the medium of choice is a Zip disk, which is available in 100 or 250 Megabyte capacity. That should be enough to contain most fairly complicated presentations. In addition to that, one can store such a caned presentation on a CD-Rom, which can accommodate a whopping 650 megabytes. Most notebook computers nowadays easily accommodate either a Zip disk or a CD-Rom.
-- Ramakrishna

If the document was prepared by the White House it was a public record. White House officials have no right to be engaged in elections, that is not why I pay my taxes. But if they were engaged in political campaigns any work they create is owned by the taxpayers. Therefore I have a right to see it -- unless release of it could damage national security.
-- Tom Krajewski
Madison, Wisconsin

LISTING
Re: Jed Babbin's Top Ten Things to Do About Terror:

Makes sense to me. Can we bring it up for a vote?
-- Jenny Woodward
Bloomington, IN

Now that we know that not all of the terrorists arrested or held here were temporary visitors. Some of the vermin came as students, tourists etc. to escape this highly objectionable world I take in writers of great learning and erudition. One such writer was Albert Jay Nock. In his Journal of These Days an entry of May 5, 1933, from Portugal includes the following:

"In these days of passports, surveillances, and inquisitions, it seems to me that some country might do itself a good turn by establishing a strict cultural test for tourists, as a measure of self-defense, like our silly formulas for keeping out anarchists and adulteresses. Portugal might set a wholesome fashion by doing this. Suppose, for instance, an American came in for a visa with a passport marked 'travel,' the Portuguese consul in N.Y. would say, 'Sorry, but my government demands unimpeachable evidence that you are a man of high culture, and that you have a specific cultural purpose in mind for coming to Portugal. We are very particular about this, as particular as your government is about moral character and political opinions -- we are not interested in those. It is not enough to say you want to go places and see things; we must know specifically why, and all about it. If you satisfy us of this we shall...but if you do not satisfy us, we do not think your interests or ours would be furthered by your presence in our country, and we can not admit you."

Letter to the Editor

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