Obamas wasteful during hard times
What is the total cost of Mrs. Obama's 20,000-mile African vacation to hobnob with national heroes like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu?
The Boeing 747 costs some $190,000 per hour to fly. Add Secret Service, numerous White House staffers, chefs, hairdressers and wardrobe managers plus daughters and grandma ad nauseam!
We are in a deep recession, unemployment 9 percent, deficit spending at obscene levels, and government debt near $15 trillion. While Nero fiddles, Rome burns, and Mr. Obama is flying another Boeing 747. Government spending is $105,000 every second, $6.3 million every minute, $380 million every hour!
Sen. Joe McCarthy was asked, "Do you have one shred of decency left in you?" I ask the Obamas that same question.
This profligate personal spending like the Obamas flying to New York for dinner, to Hawaii for golf, and taking a staff of 2,000 people to the recent London economic summit is disgraceful. How can the Obamas stand to look in their mirrors every morning?
JACK L. PARNELL
Collegedale
Smith good choice to lead our schools
I encourage our Hamilton County School Board to appoint Rick Smith as our new superintendent of schools.
I have worked for 12 years with Rick Smith on issues related to problematic acting-out students. At times, we have disagreed on how to deal with a particular student's behavior. However, Rick has always wanted what was best for that particular student and the school system as a whole. He is a man of integrity, wisdom and fairness and has demonstrated his competence in being a school system administrator. Rick Smith knows this community and this system, what is wrong about it and what is right about it.
We elected a school board that is compassionate about doing the right thing for the betterment of our public schools.
I encourage the Chamber of Commerce to bring business and industry and jobs to this community and stop trying to assert we need to do a national search for a new superintendent. The school board has attempted to look elsewhere for a superintendent, and seemingly that approach has failed.
Rick Smith knows this community and the strengths and weaknesses of every school and the central office.
Name Rick Smith the superintendent of Hamilton County Schools.
JOE SMITH
YMCA
Regional Director
'Scenic City' no longer applies
I wonder how much time was spent by our city fathers considering the unsightly power lines we now have running along and across our streets when negotiating their deal with EPB Fiber Optics. Those ugly big black lines with the uglier "thingamajigs" attached droop all along the roads, and I hope we don't hear any complaints from EPB or TVA when these power lines get twisted and tangled up after a storm.
Looks to me like "Scenic City" no longer applies to Chattanooga now that technology supersedes an attractive environment.
MARCIA BIGGS
Keep newspaper pages same size
I agree with a previous letter writer! Keep your newspaper pages the same size. Pages with full length ad columns only three inches wide, and any others less than full size, are unacceptable.
Dealing with all shapes and sizes of loose inserted advertisements is difficult enough.
Therefore, please keep your paper's pages uniform so all my household members can enjoy reading the news on full-size, controllable pages.
P.S. You have a fabulous paper!
JOY E. ADAMS
Corporations aren't people
Five members of the current U.S. Supreme Court should be impeached for deciding that corporations have the same rights as people.
Corporations are not people. It is a legal fiction to call them "persons." They are shells that do not bleed, sweat or suffer the consequences of bad behavior. They exist so that people behind the "corporate veil" can profit while escaping accountability for acts they orchestrate for the corporate entity.
If we are to remain a government of, by and for the people, corporations must be controlled, and not afforded all the rights given to people in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. For instance, freedom of speech properly belongs to living people, not soulless corporations. To hold otherwise allows our political process to be distorted by greed, callousness and irresponsibility.
KATHERINE FRAZIER
ZAMMIT
Sewanee, Tenn.
Military spending is out of line
When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, we were promised a "peace dividend," a reduction in military expenditures with a commensurate cut in taxes. This never really happened.
Clinton half-heartedly tried to cut the Pentagon budget but quickly realized he was up against a brick wall. Then George W. started his totally unnecessary Iraq war, and military spending skyrocketed again, this time off-budget so as to hide the real costs.
The Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein are gone now, and there are few real military threats anywhere in the world, yet our 2010 military budget of $687 billion was larger than that of the next 38 countries combined. We still maintain 737 military installations in 130 countries around the world, spreading us so thin we couldn't adequately respond to a major attack.
President Eisenhower warned against the military-industrial (congressional?) complex in his farewell address. This powerful lobby is committed to maintaining the highest possible level of military spending irrespective of realities.
Defense against terrorist organizations is more of an intelligence and special forces operation requiring less massive naval, ground and air forces and nuclear weapons. Isn't it time we reassessed our priorities and reduced this obscenely wasteful military spending?
GEORGE B. REED
Rossville, Ga.
Method of mulch disposal wasteful
I use quite a bit of mulch in the landscaping at my home. Wednesday, I stopped at the huge pile of mulch at the intersection of Brainerd and East Brainerd roads. I asked for a pickup load. I was told that I could not have any because FEMA required that all of it must be trucked to the Birchwood landfill and disposed of there.
This is a lose-lose situation. It costs us, the taxpayers, money to truck it to Birchwood, to bury it there and perhaps most importantly, it shortens the life of the landfill. When this site is full we will have a hard time finding a site for a new one. This requirement also wastes a valuable resource.
I cannot see any public benefit to such a provision in the FEMA grant. It seems that this is a way of maximizing the damage caused by the tornadoes. It is something so stupid that only a federal bureaucrat could think it up.
JOHN L. ODOM
Leaders' priorities need realigning
Our elected officials want to upgrade(?) the web page for Chattanooga. It looks like it ain't going to be cheap.
They also talked about (in the Times Free Press) stopping the mosquito-control spraying. I guess they think that it's more important to have a new web page than to let people get sick from the West Nile virus.
Typical politicians (local or Washington),
BOB STYTZER
East Ridge