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 20th 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.
The many elderly who needlessly died of Clostridium
difficile, from a socialist perspective, had
already outlived their usefulness. People with any sense of
compassionate would argue that these elderly people have earned
their rewards of living out their final years peacefully and in
as a healthy manner as possible, but from a strict (and
jaundiced) view point of the Socialists, these elderly people
contributed according to their ability and now represent a drain
on society; it is the elderly who are being selfish by not
fulfilling their obligation of dying and getting out of the way.
If the Socialists are consistent in their philosophy, they must
ask themselves, what “good” is being produced by keeping the
elderly and infirm alive? The question goes answered without ever
being asked, for what human with any sense of compassion, love or
sense of fairness, can look himself in the face and deny the
dignity and humanity of the elderly without first denying his
own?
Americans of all ages would do well to examine Britain’s NHS
before considering the left’s single payer model. The promise of
a single payer platform is life on the cheap, but the reality is
it’s dealing death at a bargain basement closeout.
— Ira M. Kessel
Rochester, New York
DON’T GET INVOLVED IN POLITICS, JUST PLAY THE
GIG
Re: Bill Croke’s What’s a
Conservative Deadhead to Do?
I’m a conservative, age 52, and I can empathize. Used to be
apolitical. I just heard over the weekend that The Dead had
Tipper Gore play drums at one of their shows. That’s terrible and
discouraging. I want nothing to do with Tipper Gore, Al Gore, or
Barack Obama.
I went to a dozen Dead shows in the 1970s, when they were a good
band. I still have dozens of recordings of theirs from the 70’s,
nothing after 1978. Musically they’re not what they were then,
and some of their judgement calls are atrocious. Supporting Fidel
Castro, B. Obama, and Tiper Gore — too dismal for words. But I
still listen to the recordings from the halcyon days, i.e. the
1970s.
— Dan
New York and California
CLUB TALK
Re: Asher Embry’s Hugo’s
Book Club:
Snippets and Quips from Chavez-Obama exchange:
Obama: I’m glad the gift book is in Spanish so I won’t read it.
Chavez: It’s called “Open Veins of Latin America,” but it’s not
about the closing veins of our outdated oil equipment.
Obama: The opened veins of your persecuted people mean that when
you say “Give me five,” you keep the fingers.
Chavez: I like the little touch that you wore sulpher
after-shave.
Obama: When they said Venezuela is oily, I thought they meant the
country, not you.
Chavez: At least you’re not a white devil.
Obama: Any suggestions on how to change the rules so I, too, can
be elected for life?
Chavez: I do have some machiso ideas on how to keep your wife
from outshining you.
— Richard L.A. Schaefer
Dubuque, Iowa
ARE YOU STILL THERE?
Yankee Doodle, are you still there?
The fog around you is dense.
There are many who want you to disappear,
But I stubbornly have a sense
That you’ll be here forever,
That it’s not just me seeking you,
But millions of average Americans
Still color themselves red, white and blue.
There are heroes among us every day,
Each fighting for you in their own small way.
Let politicians sneer at our middling roots.
They are not worthy to polish your boots.
So stick a feather in your cap
And blow the fog away.
You’re still our ultimate hero
While we breathe freedom another day.
— Mimi Evans Winship
COAST IS CLEAR
Re: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.’s
The Arrogance of His Power:
Yes, early on Obuma poked his head out to see if the coast was
clear to attack America. Undoubtedly pleased and surprised
no one chopped it off, and encouraged by the warm appeasement of
his vituperative remarks by the evil big media, the beast is
slowly emerging farther out of his hole to vent progressively the
full vials of his bottled up hatred against his own
country.
— Robert Henderson
LOOKING AHEAD
Re: Philip Klein’s
Obama’s Big Government Gamble:
Once elected, will a Republican President and Congress be
able to undo the overspending, or even be willing to do so once
their districts become addicted to mainlining D.C.
narcobucks?
— David Govett
Davis, California
