Kudos for your courageous editorial titled No Compassion (Friday, November 30) about the Republican debate which is merely a contest of who reigns as King of the Mean. Actually the compassionate conservative is like the Holy Roman Empire, which as Voltaire pointed out was neither Holy, Roman, nor an Empire.

First of all, no conservative is compassionate. President Bush’s high-minded statements about compassion and mercy are about as phony as a three dollar bill. Bush demonstrated his lack of compassion when he vetoed SCHIPS and aid for Iraqi veterans.
.
Nor are conservatives really very conservative in terms of tax dollars. An excellent example is the way we treat the homeless. As Andrew Gumbel pointed out in a recent edition of City Beat, it costs the tax payers $ 15,000 to $ 25,000 to rehabilitate a homeless person. If we’re lucky we’ll need to make this investment only once. Conservatives are totally against this form of wimpy, liberal mollycoddling. They opt for our current system of punishment, police sweeps and persecution which costs the tax payers $ 150,000 a year per each homeless person. Who is really more conservatives? Tax-and-spend Democrats who recognize the importance of prudent public investments? Or borrow-and-squander Republicans whose “tax-the-next generation” philosophy government simply ensures that we’ll pay a lot more when the bill is due?

The recent Republican party debate merely proves that the Republican party can’t decide whether to walk on two feet or four. As a voter, I’ll opt for a party that can walk like a man and stoop to help a child. (Isn’t that what true manhood is all about.)

Yours truly

William Joseph Miller

November 30 IRAQ WAR

Any one who thinks that Bush is winning the war in Iraq would do well to read the following two articles: Revenge is the spark behind a Somali Teen’s Militancy by Abukar Abardi and Islam is on the Rise in Repressed Tunisia by Jeffery Fleishman (November 30, 2007). After reading these articles, one realizes that our presence in Iraq is fueling an Al Qaeda revival, not ending it. If our presence in Iraq is fueling a rise in radical Islamofascism among the young in Tunisia, what do you think is going in Iraq? The longer the United States stays in Iraq, the more the current Iraqi government as an American puppet. Now that there is some degree of stability in Iraq, it’s time to start going home.

Forget the military bases; forget the secret oil deals with American oil companies. The sooner we let the Iraqi government operate independently, the better. And if that means kicking Blackwater out of Iraq - so be it. We need to recognize that the American military cannot solve our foreign policy problems. We need to concentrate on ways to reduce the appeal of radical Islam among the young of the Islamic world - things like education, union membership, jobs with decent wages, affordable health care, and a sustainable economy free from fossil fuels. Then and only then, can we hope to put Al Qaeda out of business.

Yours truly,

William Joseph Miller

P.S. It’s a shame more Americans can’t read German. If they did, they read an article in Der Spiegel which reports that Islamic fundamentalism is establishing a strategic bridgehead in Bosnia. In fact, there are about 400 mudjadeen in Bosnia whose true whereabouts are unknown. If that doesn’t frighten you, what will?

November 30 COSTS OF SUB=PRIME MESS

Kudos to Tracey Williams, the bartender at Taleo Mexican Grill in Irvine when she oberved that the loan agents of the now defunct New Century Financial Corporation were “ big drinkers and big spenders.” That explains everything about the sub-prime industry. Everyone was drunk.

Reality check. Where would a bartender like Tracey Williams, or a single-mom waitress with two kids at home and a dead beat divorced husband find a place to live - let a lone buy? The same applies to secretaries in loan offices, policemen, the checkers at Von’s or school teachers. If we apply the strict traditional rules of a 20% down, 30 year fixed mortgage which stipulates that the price of a home should be no more than 25 % of a person’s yearly salarh, none of these people would be able to buy a home anywhere in southern California. Neither would about 70 to 90% of the population. APR’s have simply encouraged too many people to a home they can’t really afford and they have encourage too many realtors to price property way beyond the realistic dictates of the market place.

Bush’s idea of freezing mortgage rates flies in the face of the free-market policies he espouses. Perhaps we should return to the “discipline of the market place.” no matter how painful that is. Also, we definitely need to put a permanent ban on APR’s. For years, various conservatives and libertarians have inveighed against all the stodgy, rules and regulations that the Roosevelt imposed upon the economy. These rules inhabited “economic freedom” and the advent of an “ownership society.” Now we are facing a recession or a depression, and now that many members of the ownership society are losing their homes and the equity they invested into those homes, we need to grow up and stop acting like a bunch of irresponsible teenagers at house party without chaperones. A lot of the stupid rules and regulations imposed by Roosevelt and Company weren’t so stupid after all.

Yours truly,

William Joseph Miller