Letters to the Editor/<br>  Free Press Forum

Our country is being bled dry as good jobs leave. Large, multi-national corporations have no loyalty to any nation. Their only goal is to maximize profits. They will go where labor is cheapest and laws regarding safety, pollution, etc. are least or non-existent. If they can employ workers in China for 25 cents a day, you would have to work for 20 cents a day to compete. It is a race to the bottom. There are places where child labor is available even cheaper or slave labor is available at no cost at all. How do we keep jobs here? The answer is not to work for pennies a day, or keep expanding prisons to provide more slave labor or let our children be abused and discarded or give up benefits and retirement or continually work longer hours for less pay or eliminate all our health and safety laws. Instead of tearing down the wages and benefits of American workers and reducing our standard of living to the point that we make only cents per day like they do in impoverished nations the answer is to build wages up in these other countries to the point their wages are comparable to ours.

Friends:

Mr. Wasserman's essay is right on target, cutting through all the bullshit and side issues to reveal the essential truth of our situation. And what is to be done about it? Shall we be "Good Germans" and make-nicey to a tyrannous plot against everything we were taught America stands for? Shall we resist and obstruct?

One way we, at least the men among us, can silently declare that WE KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON is to grow a Hitler moustache in protest. I am trimming my 'stash back to a Shickelgruber this week.

Peace n Love,
Mike Citizen

I'd like to thank Harvey Wasserman for his expressively written "The Latest Bush Mega-catastrophe is Now Pharmaceuticals" which had me trying to stifle screams of laughter at 3:20 in the morning.  The ability to exactly capture the multiple mega-catastrophes issuing from the Bush buffoons while framing it as an apocalyptic farce is a rare talent.  It's also helpful as a way to keep track  of a seemingly unending stream of scandals, tragedies, and crimes.

Dear Editor,

Should President Bush be impeached?  That’s a very interesting and highly controversial question to be answered in the light of current situations going on today.  However, I feel that this question might have to address once again.  Since the very beginning of President Bush’s second term, the majority of American citizens have taken special interest in his ways of dealing with the Iraqi War, unethical procedures on International foreign diplomacy, his pro-Christian ideology on marriage, the mishandling of New Orleans’ natural disaster (Katrina), and now this current eavesdropping fiasco in dealing with National Security and Terrorism.  But, a verbal minority of Americans believe that the president has deliberately violated the US Constitution and is trying to re-establish a Neo-American Imperialism once formulated by a past president a hundred years ago…namely Theodore Roosevelt and should be hear by impeached.  Their convictions are warranted for formal debate…he has done some unconstitutional acts that could very well lead to his impeachment.

RE: Warren County, Ohio: most successful voter registration drive in American political history, or stuffing the ballot box
by Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D.
December 1, 2004

Prior to the election of 2004 I believed it was prudent to listen to analysts.  I don't any longer. 

I grew up in Warren County.  I began living there in 1958.  I have been away for many years in military service, but it is my home of record and I vote there by absentee ballot.  Dr. Philips wrote "an analyst who has all the vote data for 2000 and 2004 by precinct in several Ohio counties did a detailed analysis by precinct of the huge increase in Bush votes and margin in Warren county."  The analyst fails. 

On December 13, 2004, I came forward with an affidavit, which included the statement that a TriAd employee dismantled the computer that housed, on its hard drive, the tabulation of votes for Hocking County. Votes, when being handled (hard drive) need to be in the presence of board members and any other persons who are entitled to witness the official canvass. The technician was left alone while dismantling the computer. A hearing was scheduled by the board members to investigate TriAd’s reason/reasons for this action. Surprisingly, the board found no wrongdoing by the TriAd employee.

Just as new species are constantly evolving, old ones are going extinct. Such background level extinctions are the consequence of natural selection, when species can no longer cope due to changes in their ecosystems to which they can’t adequately adapt. One of those changes is the evolution of new species. The march of evolution is not, however, some sort of progress, in which species are becoming better and better. This is teleological thinking, like the Great Chain of Being (), and has no scientific value.

There’s also no evidence for built-in senescence or obsolescence of species, which makes sense: there’s no way to select for such a trait, just as there’s no way to select for a trait ahead of time that would be a useful response to a future, novel challenge. We can also rule out the idea that species can acquire traits through the life experience of individuals. There’s no mechanism whereby your offspring can be made stronger through inheritance of a strength you’ve acquired by pumping iron, because there’s no way to program your genes to specify the acquired property.

There have been accusations by the board of elections, labeling me as disruptive, incompetent and not a team player. Not only are these stigmas not true they are troubling and contradictory when coupled with the board's show of confidence in me during my employment with the The Hocking County Board of Elections.

... that the answer isn't perpetual reform (unless the necessary reforms get overturned after we get them passed). The answer is that voters get legally-binding copies of their ballots (check brantl's posts on blackboxvoting.org) to check on and correct their votes with and we pass election financing reform to create a universal fund for elections, and each legal candidate gets 1/xth of the money where X is the number of candidates for the particular office! And then the money doesn't mean sh*t! And we take our politicians out of corporate pockets, and we start getting people that give a damn about the US in power again.

Dear Editor:

In her column ("They must really think we're morons" - Creators Syndicate Columnist Molly Ivins - January 10, 2006), Molly Ivins writes falsely that Newt Gingrich was "fined $300,000" for "misusing nonprofit organizations for political purposes, personally benefiting from political contributions, cutting a sleazy book deal and giving false statements to ethics investigators."

Ms. Ivins has been around long enough to have known the facts. Democrats filed 84 politically motivated ethics charges against Speaker Gingrich. All of them were found to be without merit. The last three were dismissed on October 10, 1998, including the charge of using tax-exempt foundations for political purposes. The fact is, not a single ethics charge filed against Speaker Gingrich was ever found to be based in fact - not one.