The American Spectator

Reader Mail

DUMPING ON RICHMOND
Re: Joseph P. Duggan's How Many Richmonders Does It Take?

While the RTD is still one of the world's greatest newspapers, I am shocked that they would lay off Gary Brookings, the successor to the late and great Jeff MacNelly. My hope is that the RTD will recover and return Mr. Brookings to the newspaper's editorial page where he belongs. 
-- Michael Skaggs
Murray, Kentucky
P.S. How many Richmonders does it take to screw in a light bulb? Answer: 51. One to screw it in and fifty to sit around and talk about how Robert E. Lee would have won the war with the old one. 

There isn't anything "Southern" in Richmond after 5:00 PM each day except the Monuments and the dead from times past. The Times-Dispatch is trying to survive in a place where the Carpetbaggers started to show up in 1865 and the flow has never stopped. They are trying to publish something of value for a city-bound population that is ignorant and can't read or write at the level of the typical newspaper today. If the Times-Dispatch wants to survive it needs to move/adapt to where the literate people with real incomes went and that was out of Richmond proper long ago. It is a sad state of affairs I know and Richmond is by no means unique or alone in this state of affairs but the people who fled Richmond decades ago and only visit there when they have to or have to work there know from where I speak. In my trips to Atlanta I've been surprised at how un-Southern Atlanta is today too. That's where the Crummy Network News and the Atlanta-Urinal Constipation operations are headquartered right?
-- Thom Bateman
Newport News, Virginia

A GREEN CONSTITUTION
Re: The Prowler's Just Following Orders:

There is something far even more frightening in this article and that is the incontrovertible evidence that our Constitution is either dead or dying.

1.  Ramrod Emanuel "...will not allow the cap and trade plan put forward by Rep. Henry Waxman in late March to move very far along the legislative process."

Where is it written in the Constitution that anyone in the executive branch controls the legislative process?

2.  "Emanuel has been attempting to calm concerns in the business community that the Obama White House has lost control over the House and Senate Democrat leadership...."

When did the executive branch have the Constitutional authority to "control"  House and Senate Democrat leadership? And here I thought the Constitution makes the Congress subject to control by the people.

Do I need to go any further?

Yes. 3. Emanuel "claims to have warned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that the Waxman-Markey bill cannot be allowed to reach the floor of the House for passage."

Am I right to be outraged? The Constitution used to be clear: the executive branch used to have the options of either signing or vetoing legislation presented to it by the Congress, and recommending legislation, but not forbidding it.

"Dead or dying"? Or murdered and butchered by the proto-dictator and his enforcer-assassin?
-- A. C. Santore

HELL-TH CARE
Re: Hal G.P. Colebatch's Socialism on Display:

While Socialists are good at mouthing platitudes about individual rights and human dignity, the record shows that individuals are simply a means to an end. Anyone with a passing knowledge of history of the 20^th Century can see that socialist countries have slaughtered millions in the name of progress (e.g. U.S.S.R and The People’s Republic of China). If a human being is expendable, then it is logical that multitudes are as well. (See Mao’s Great Leap Forward.) Marx, himself, wrote that generations would be needed to be sacrificed for the greater good of creating a workers’ utopia. As long as a human being is seen as a "means to an end" instead of a "end in itself," bestowed with a unique divinity given by, and a reflection of, our Creator, man will find ways to exploit man. Britain’s National Health Services are a logical extension of Socialist thought and behavior.