Letters to the Editor 3/11

Dead Americans

While Fox News’ Sarah Palin was sharpening her standup comedy chops on NBC’s new Jay Leno show on March 2 by savaging President Barack Obama and the Democratic party for trying to push forward reasoned health care reform, 123 American citizens died that very day simply because they had no access to our health care system.

The same number of American citizens will die tomorrow for the same reason, according to a Harvard University study. And 123 more the day after that. About 3,750 American citizens die each and every month, month after month, for no good reason whatsoever, dying simply to satiate corporate greed.

If the health care lobbyists and their Republican “employees” in the United States Congress manage to derail health care reform this year, the number of dead Americans will inevitably increase exponentially while insurance companies continue to strip hundreds of thousands of American citizens of their policies in pursuit of ever-greater profits.

The United States ranks an utterly contemptible 37th in the world on quality health care for our citizens and the Republican party is determined to shove us to the bottom rank. Oh yeah, that’s real side-splitting stuff, Palin, fall-down-and-die funny, you betcha.

D. Duane Wall II

Cambria

Professionals, please

I’ve been watching Meg Whitman’s commercials in which she blames California’s problems on “professional politicians in Sacramento.”

It seems to me that part of the problem is that we don’t have any professionals there. Rather, we have a group of amateurish, incompetent ideologues who, thanks to term limits, are promptly replaced by another group of incompetents before they have a chance to become professional.

Tom Weiss

Paso Robles

It’s so simple

Hats off to Matt Kokkonen for his brilliant expose of the global warming hoax (“Warming data cooked,” March 7).

Now we realize that all we have to do to stop the melting of the polar ice caps and the Greenland ice sheets is to move the Cal Poly and Paso Robles weather stations. Why didn’t anyone think of this before?

Michael Costello

San Luis Obispo

Zen paradox

According to Matt Kokkonen, global warming is not a result of human activity because the temperature data backing this theory has been altered by human activity (“Warming data cooked,” March 7).

The ultimate, inherent paradox of this argument is worthy of a Zen koan. I applaud it with the sound of one hand clapping.

Tim Crowley

Morro Bay

Census doubling up

Just when you thought you’d heard it all, the census is sending out letters telling us to watch our mail because the census is going to send us a letter. On a side note: I have an idea how the census can save 50 percent on postage.

Shelby Rinck

Los Osos