Letters for December 16, 2004

That’s why the re-counts being conducted are a waste of time. You might as well expect to get chocolate milk from brown cows as get a true count from machines owned and operated by Republicans pledged to elect Bush. We, the taxpayers, paid for those machines, after Bush and company passed the Help America Vote Act, but now the machines are so compromised that we might as well junk every one of them.

They can’t be trusted and neither can the people who run them. This isn’t the first time that the vote has been skewed, but it’s never been used to help elect a Democrat.

The one sure way to get an honest count is to scrap these $3,000 machines and replace them with $200 machines from India. Then, have everybody vote again, even the people of color. It shouldn’t take more than one or two counties to reveal that fraud has been committed, which is why this won’t happen unless we insist.

These machines were designed to prevent fraud, and they do just that. To find out more about these amazing machines, go to slate.msn.com/id/2107388.

It’s time to make a choice, people: Either drink the Kool-Aid and be content with this thug-ocracy or look into the telescope and insist on having a Democracy. Right now, we’re spending money we don’t have, fighting a war that we can’t win and supporting a Congress and administration that live in their own little world. This cannot stand.

Chuck Garner
Doyle, Calif.

Eat the powerless
Re “A home for the holidays,” (RN&R, Cover story, Dec. 9):

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”

After reading your article I’m left rather disappointed by what seems to be your central point: Individuals are created by their environment and not by their choices. Many of the people written about suffered from poor childhoods, but that is no excuse for their poor choices.

I myself grew up in a single parent, poverty-line household, and yet I survived to go on to college and live fairly decently, though I still fail to afford most of the merchandise advertised in your newspaper.

Instead of creating scapegoats for my problems, I transcended them, yet your anti-individualism article states that my success was mere luck.

I empathize with poor, downtrodden individuals, but I recognize the source of their problems is in themselves. Until these poor souls realize they control their own destiny they will remain victims.

Howard Knudsen
President,

Campus Libertarians

Money protects money
Re “Bush received a mandate,” (RN&R, Right hook, Nov. 11):

While I usually enjoy Mike Lafferty’s column, I think that his gloating about the great “conservative” election victory in the Nov. 25 issue is misplaced. If Bush is a conservative, why doesn’t he want to do anything to control illegal immigration or end corporate welfare? Why does he push tax cuts, which will make the filthily rich richer, when, according to studies by nonpartisan groups, most of the lost revenue will have to be made up by further squeezing the middle class?

It appears to me that filthily rich liberals, like Teddy Kennedy, and filthily rich businessmen calling themselves conservatives, like Dubya, have one thing in common—they’re protectors of their own pocketbooks first, and liberals or conservatives second.

Bill Hamma
Reno

Calling Captain America
After Sept. 11, just about everyone put up American flags on the front of their houses to show solidarity and that America was united to fight those who attack us. We also started seeing a lot of Spiderman and other superhero movies coming out showing us heroes to inspire us to fight against evil. I wondered, “What about Captain America? Where is he? Why has no one made a movie about America’s namesake hero? Who better to go after the bad guys in a post-9/11 world?”

I knew a movie about this red, white and blue superhero would kick ass.

But there’s not anyone out there making a Captain America movie. Such a shame. The idea left my mind, until one day I was in a bookstore, and I was walking down an aisle where there are some hardcover comic books. The line was long so I thumbed through the book on the history of some various superheroes. I read the pages about Captain America’s origins in the 1940s and the Captain’s arch enemies: the Nazis and Fascists. I had a realization at that moment of why there is not a Captain America movie in production. We might not like to discover who Captain America’s real enemies are these days.

Michael Troy Moore
Rocklin, Calif.