Sunday, January 27, 2008
Quick

Sunday Mail

 Letters to the Editor

From protozoa to proletariat in 20 minutes or less

Bob Zaslavsky’s column, “Evolution and Creationism: Only one is science” (Jan. 20), was very, very good. I am a creationist, but I agree with Zaslavsky that creationism should not be taught in schools. I’m not a fanatical creationist like the ones his column describes, and I feel compelled to apologize for their outrageous ignorance, imposition and insecurity. The problem with these fanatical creationists is that their information is very limited and they are extremely insecure. If they possessed potent information, they wouldn’t care that evolution is being taught. I couldn’t care less that it’s being taught in schools because I can easily disprove it in less than 20 minutes.
    
I say let evolutionists teach it as much as they please without interference. Dr. Kent Hovind even offers a $250,000 reward to anyone who can prove evolution. Evolution is science, but it’s junk science.

Watch out! He’s got a truth compass!

In response to yet another of Dr. Robert Soloway’s letters (Dec. 23): Am I “upset” by your depression-era-like observations? Hardly. Fatigued by your relentless rants and whining malapropisms? Oh, yeah.
       
A truth compass (and my turning stomach) prompted obvious action. First off: I guess you didn’t get the recent good news, Doc. According to Gallup, “84 percent of Americans are very satisfied with their lives.” I don’t think your 60 million impoverished Americans claim fits Gallup’s numbers.
     
Sixty million without health care? Just recently, liberals were spouting the 40 million figure. Leave it to you, Doc, to up the ante another 20 million without blushing. If your figure were even remotely true there would be sick and dying people covering the streets. Show me how it is that 60 million people in this great country cannot go to a hospital and get care if they really need it. Been to an E.R. lately? Guess what? They receive treatment. Just because people do not have insurance does not mean they are neglected in this country. Where on earth did you get that figure? Some liberal think tank? Reminds me of the ’80s, when the mainstream liberal media was stating, unabashedly, that we had “tens of millions” of homeless in cities all across the country. The real figure turned out to be about one-tenth of that.  

Your overstressed statements, i.e., “No Child Left Behind is unanimously considered a horrible failure,” again beg the question: Where, oh where, do you get your “facts”? If NCLB has been met with continued unionized demonization after a mere five years, it’s because the liberal-run public education system—your system, Doc—has eroded it like everything else it touches. Your people have run our public schools into the ground like a shattered airplane. To infer that NCLB is responsible for the dismal state of the Democrat-dominated public education system in this country for the past 40 years is the height of joyous disingenuousness.

The dollar is not, as you so glibly put it, “in the toilet” (and neither is another of your favorite pink slips, Iraq). Few serious and apolitical economists are truly worried about the dollar—only you, in your continued sullenness. It is the world economy that is “sending jobs overseas.” We’re all in this together. Isolationism is as passé as a selfish hippie. Then you come out with another ludicrous, non-factual opinion: “… if we still made anything in America.” Do you really live in America, or are you sending these letters from some socialist country? Are you aware the average hourly earning rose to $17.71 in December, a 0.4 percent increase from November? For all of 2007, wages increased 3.7 percent. Gee, I wonder what all those workers are doing, if they’re not “making anything?”
     
In addition, the annual deficit as a percentage of our $15 trillion gross domestic product is the lowest in 40 years—a deficit that has plunged $250 billion in the past three years.

“Thinking we’re in a recession” isn’t the same as really being in one, is it? A recession is a fact (two straight quarters of negative growth), not a “thought” or even a misconceived “feeling” promulgated by you and your allies, the mainstream news media. Not to diminish the issue, but the simple fact is that a majority of the poor in this country have a standard of living that qualifies them as almost comfortable as compared to the poor of the rest of the world. How many chic cell phones and iPods make it under the American poverty line, anyway? But that’s a topic for another day.
     
And where did you get that “long-term unemployment” is near an all-time high? What you call “short-term unemployment” has been under 5 percent for the last three years running. The body blows delivered by 9/11, mighty hurricanes, etc., have been absorbed by our grandly resilient economy.  

Do you ever look at the causes of effects? A couple of eternal truths: Cycles and timing. No economy is always perfect. Aren’t you a tad long in the tooth to be taking such naïve viewpoints?
     
Another “fact,” Doc, conservatives have produced 8.3 million jobs since August ’03 as a result of a record 52 consecutive months of net, new-job creation.  
 

The economy and tax cuts

President Bush’s proposal to bolster our nation’s economy via straightforward tax rebates is meeting resistance from the usual quarter—those who will never master their phobia of anything that might wither the spirit of the welfare state.

John F. Kennedy recognized, when he finally signed on to the rationale for federal tax cuts in 1963, that all citizens truly benefit from a rising economy and that all are hurt when narrow partisan agendas succeed in hobbling it—as might his party’s election-year dalliance with yet another income-redistribution scheme. Democrats who now scorn Kennedy’s insights would do well to scorn instead that wing of their party seemingly unable to credit workers with the sense to decide how best to spend their own earnings.

Given the opportunity, Americans intuitively meet their needs better than any distant, self-infatuated bureaucracy. No less than the writings bequeathed by our nation’s founding fathers are replete with similar sentiments—certainly as visionary now as in the age they were so revolutionarily penned. Some in Congress need reminding.

An election year that asks us to believe that being the spouse of an officeholder translates into “experience,” or that a flair for dramatic rhetoric can similarly stand in for the crucial administrative know-how demanded at the helm of the world’s sole superpower, certainly has the capacity to accept as self-evident that only the return of dollars to the hands of their earners can fairly serve both equity and the economy.


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