LETTERS

Drought. Politics. The irreversible damage visited on society by Our Big Fat Obnoxious Culture. None of these topics has the staying power of Hilary Duff fandom and its way with words. The following arrived in response to previous letters pages, which have included barely readable attacks from Duffers outraged by a bad review of Hilary's latest movie:

are you aware that the hillary duff fan letter you highlighted is not meant to have spelling or grammar, its e-mail lingo which is another language all on its own.

I am not a fan, just commenting on your responce which is not correct!

you stand corrected!

Editor's note: Actually, I sit unconvinced. The informality of e-mail is no reason to indulge your laziness, my friend, nor toss aside every standard. Between friends, sure; in a letter to the editor, no.

This arrived in response to last week's Editor's Note by Scott Dickensheets, shedding crocodile tears over the election (for once!) of George W. Bush:

Although I do have MANY specific objections to Bush, your comment about president as CEO was especially unflattering, as I'm sure you meant it to be.

What remains especially discomforting to to me is that democracy has been hijacked by BOTH the "major" parties, and no groundswell of support for any third party is as yet detectable. As a noteworthy example to the rest of the states, Colorado had no less than 10 candidates for president on its ballot.

Sometimes a candidate can do the right thing, even if for the wrong reason. As a one-note Johnny, Bush at least made tax cuts the foremost issue, except that EVERYBODY deserves to pay lower taxes.

If Kerry could have just gotten above the mythical "class" suppositon of a corelation between worth and pay, he might have run a much tighter offense, making it all the less likely for Bush to play "centerfield" even as he played the entire "defense" on the exceptionally deep, precisely because every pitch was a potential Home Run.

Even Bush did NOT embrace the Law of Reciprocity as the purest reason for a tax cut. MOST politicians are simply too greedy to acknowledge that the sheer number of taxpayers should lead to far lower taxes. In a nation of 300 million, there is no reason why federal taxes should be measured to more than the 11th decimal spot.

Neither did Kerry press the obvious that LIFE is more than business, even for the most severely work-addicted. That liberal and conservative are NOT automatically opposites, even if Bush is too narrowly focused to see it.

What we REALLY need is a candidate that can embrace the best of the "Republican" and "Democratic" issues, since they never really debate each other anymore, and present an even larger picture where government is much more than merely providing the more obvious services and shortsightedly collecting an excessive return on that investment.

I hope I can be that candidate.

Editor's note: Oof! Your confusing sports metaphor aside, I was with you, John, right up until that sucker punch of a last sentence. You really rattled my kidney with that one! And that name—how many ballots can accommodate that?

The presidential election is over, and a conservative Texas oilman beat a liberal Massachusetts senator. We're told this is the way it went because we're at war, but it was Joe Brown of the Nevada Republican National Committee who said it best when he indicated the Democrats would have won if they had a better candidate. Good point, but what remains unsaid is that if the Republicans had a better candidate going against Kerry, they could have won by the greatest landslide in history. The American people were given such miserable choices because candidates are coming off assembly lines run by political machines who do not have the bipartisan interests of the republic at heart. This is what's tearing us apart, and if our nation's handlers don't adequately address the issue four years from now, our way of life is doomed.

The North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) pact of 1993 contained a little-known provision mandating that, by the year 2000, our nation's southern border must be opened wide to all trucks entering from Mexico.

In June 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court, backed by the Bush administration, ordered the opening of all roads to Mexico's trucks.

The flood of trucks now expected to cross the border means that there is no way U.S. inspectors can possibly check the cargoes in all of these vehicles. We are left with questions about what those cargoes might contain. Illegal immigrants? Weapons? Terrorists? Drugs?

U.S. border officials no longer have the capability of guaranteeing that vehicles entering our nation are free of dangerous contraband. NAFTA has produced many harmful consequences but the bottom line is that it isn't mainly about trade, or even about borders. It's about our nation's independence. Moreover, the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) threatens consequences even more harmful than what has been produced by the 1993 NAFTA pact.

Congressmen and senators must say "No!" to the FTAA when it comes before them in 2005.

The following is in response to an old letter in which a reader named Pam aired some unflattering opinions of the, er, economically disadvantaged:

I read your letter, Pam, "I'm highly unsympathetic to your sympathy for parasitic street urchins" with great interest. It must be nice to live in your picture-perfect, somewhat limited world. At one point in my life, I was probably your neighbor down the street, in the same rose-colored place. Like you my eyes, ears and heart was surrounded by your white picket fence, perfect-paying job and unlittered street. I, too, looked through "holier than thou" eyes that saw those unwanted ghost roaming our perfect city and stared right through them. With disgust and a why can't they just lock all of you up and throw the key away attitude. My life has now lead me to the heart of this "disgusting" world. I guess you would put me in your "parasitic street urchins" group. In this world, there is no bright, sunny, get up, pour your cup of coffee and dress perfect for work morning. You fight the darkness, helplessness, struggle, no one gives a ----, and hope you make it through the day. You fight the defeated mind you must deal with every day. But one point I must agree upon with you. They should segregate you from us until you learn to judge not and how to pray for those less fortunate.

For my digital imaging class we had to design a new magazine cover, and of course I chose to design a new one for my periodical of preference, Las Vegas Weekly.

We're supposed to use Photoshop primarily, but I like to go out of my way to go above and beyond the call of duty, so I decided to use this opportunity to work on my first Illustrator project (design) in addition to my 2nd Photoshop project (design) and merge the two together. I wanted to design a corn husk with a bud growing out of the middle instead of corn (for the "Amsterdam in Vegas" headline), and I wanted Bush and Kerry to appear as American Gothic with a twist (Bush smokin' a joint). I spent the first two hours of this project designing the corn husk's shape & texture, which you can barely even see because of the way I used it, and the other 6 hours straight (all day yesterday with no breaks in between) designing the presidential candidates in Illustrator. I learned how to use the pen tool in the Typography class I'm taking (this quarter) last week. Once I learned how to use it, there was no stopping me. I could've designed more and I would have to make up for the resolution loss on the cornfield and the center collar pendant on Bush's cute wardrobe, but I was short on time so I worked with what I had. The print came out so freakin' clean I'm keeping it for my (about to start a) portfolio.

Thanks for inspiring me, Ben. You're the man and some day I'll be just like you.