Louisiana senator outed in D.C. madam scandal
Re: “Can’t we keep private sins private?” July 13 E.J. Dionne column.
E.J. Dionne calls for us all to turn a blind eye and give a free pass to Sen. David Vitter, Republican from Louisiana. This, after the good senator, who had campaigned on (heterosexual only) family values and the importance of marriage, was revealed to have frequented prostitutes. I say no, we cannot when the person whose sins are in question is a lawmaker.
It is necessary to expose a lawmaker who votes to make laws that regulate the private lives of others based on their own “moral philosophy,” and who displays such hypocrisy. Mr. Dionne says that “liberals need to give the conservative hypocrites a break.” I say no way, when they give no breaks to so many others. I’m not saying we need to crucify them, as the conservatives did Bill Clinton. I’m saying there are lessons about humanity, tolerance, compassion and justice that these lawmakers need to learn, and that being exposed as a hypocrite is a powerful teacher.
Wayne Thrash, Denver
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E.J. Dionne said it just as I would have said it. A politician’s private life is none of our business. It’s their voting record that’s important. If they are doing what their constituents put them in office to do, then they should be allowed to be as human as the rest of us.
Charles Armantrout, Wheat Ridge
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Re: “Sex and the married senator,” July 17 Cal Thomas column.
So Cal Thomas, in discussing the case of adulterer Sen. David Vitter, laments man’s susceptibility to his “lower nature.” He then asks: “Is there anything sadder than a child who no longer sees his father as having good character, or a wife whose trust has been shattered?” Well, yes, sadly there is. It’s people like Cal Thomas and David Vitter routinely ignoring a biblical injunction and passing judgment on other people.
Philip Davis, Alamosa
The story behind the U.S. attorney scandal
Re: “Turning judges into policymakers should be big problem,” July 11 Al Knight column.
Al Knight opened his column by claiming that the U.S. attorney purge is a trivial matter and is all about embarrassing President Bush. I only wish the matter was that simple and benign.
Allegedly, the White House decided to fire some attorneys who dared investigate Republicans and others who refused to bring bogus charges against Democrats. Some U.S. attorneys were illegally pressured by Republican lawmakers to bring charges against Democrats in time to have an effect on the 2006 elections. To make matters worse, the attorney firings were facilitated by a little-known provision of the Patriot Act reauthorization that allowed the White House to bypass Senate confirmation while replacing the attorneys.
When the attorney firings came to light, the administration lied and said that the firings were performance-related. The attorneys’ performance reviews showed no such performance problems. When Congress asked for e-mail correspondence related to the firings, they found that the White House has been using separate Republican National Committee e-mail accounts, in violation of the Presidential Records Act. And the White House has been stonewalling Congress ever since.
It’s really a sad commentary that Al Knight doesn’t care about such corruption in government – at least not in a Republican government.
Lawrence Jones, Conifer
Reasons not to bury transit beneath Union Station
There are already sufficient reasons to not bury bus and rail transit at Denver Union Station or eject bus and light rail from the station site, as proposed in the current plan. The most important are cost, lack of capacity to grow with demand, and the convenience of transfers.
Recent Post articles suggest two more safety-related reasons. The first involves the ozone issue. The health effects of ozone and other street-level pollutants have been well-documented, yet the city of Denver insists that the tracks be buried, at a cost of more than $200 million, to accommodate a one-block extension of 18th Street in order to promote more automobile access into the Lower Downtown area – adjacent to a new pedestrian plaza outside the station and amid all the new and desired residential development. Altering a massive transit project at great cost to promote automobile infiltration is absolutely contrary to the purpose of FasTracks and transit development.
The second reason involves public safety in underground facilities. The federal government is possibly financing a study at the Transportation Technology Center in Pueblo to train emergency responders for the special circumstances involving tunnels and subways and the incidents that may occur in them, whether they be accidental or man-made, such as acts perpetrated by terrorists and other violence-prone individuals. Rapid evacuation, air quality, lighting and structural damage are all serious and complicating factors in underground facilities when compared to those on the surface.
And, of course, a through 18th Street is just one more convenient location to park a car bomb, as was recently demonstrated in London and Glasgow.
Yes, it is important to develop the Union Station property, but such development can occur over the surface tracks via “air rights.” Having both street-level and mezzanine-level access to the development could be far more cost- and energy-efficient, interesting and attractive when properly designed and executed. And safer!
Robert Brewster, Golden
Referendum C funding
Re: “Ref. C gets a ‘D’ in disclosure,” July 15 Diane Carman column.
Diane Carman says she feels “like such a sucker” for believing the Referendum C money would actually go to education. As I pointed out at the time, Ref. C wasn’t for the schools. Nor is it for the roads. Ms. Carman is still being suckered. All that Ref. C capital construction money is going to be swallowed by the prisons.
Welcome to the prisonocracy that the war on drugs built and that all those prisons-for-profit lobbyists at the Capitol strive to maintain. It’s a bipartisan conspiracy against the people of Colorado.
Next year, vote Libertarian.
Jack Woehr, Golden
Prince vs. record stores
I read with interest that UK record stores threatened Prince for giving away CDs in a promotion. I laughed out loud at Entertainment Retailers Association co-chairman Paul Quirk’s comment that “The artist formerly known as Prince should know that with behavior like this he will soon be the artist formerly available in record stores.”
Prince will be selling music long after those empty retail spaces formerly known as record stores are dim memories. The world recording industry has categorically fumbled the digital revolution. Its overwhelming greed, along with its failure to explore digital-rights management with songwriters and performers on a collaborative basis, has already doomed record stores to the cut-out bin.
Ray Ingraham, Boulder
The poor vs. the wealthy
The Sunday Denver Post of July 15 reports on page 5A that “Poor’s needs outpace rent aid; Federal cuts mean about 75% of those eligible don’t get housing help.” On the following page is the article “Return of the tycoons; Top families’ wealth flashes back to pre-WWI Gilded Age.”
Couldn’t these two articles have been published on the same page so that your readers could put one and one together more easily?
Arno Laesecke, Louisville
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