Thursday, August 07, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Letters

They love us in West Chester

Thank you for your review [CDVS, July 31]. It's a nice little piece on The Who's contributions .

Regarding Roger's voice, I agree it hasn't aged nearly as well Pete's guitar sound or John's evolution on bass, but then again, we'd all agree that screaming for hours as the frontman of the former World's Loudest Rock Band would probably kill our voices as well. The lower voice parts work better, such as "You Better You Bet."

Again, thanks for the review.

--Heath Eddy,

West Chester, Pa.

Bush policies harm national park system

Recently, a report card was released that highlights the Bush administration's failure to protect our precious national parks. The National Parks Conservation Association's detailed assessment illustrates the administration's pervasive pattern of damaging national park policies over the past 2 1/2 years, including the decision to roll back the Clean Air Act, which threatens visitor enjoyment of the parks as well as their health and harms the plants and wild animals that live in these special places, and a top-down mandate to privatize up to 70 percent of all positions in the already understaffed National Park Service, which will undermine park protection, the experience of park visitors and efforts to diversify the Park Service work force.

This is a failure to fulfill the Bush administration's promise to eliminate the maintenance and construction backlog. In addition, the administration has not yet adequately addressed insufficient park operating budgets. We now have many national parks falling apart because of lack of funds and understaffing.

The use of the provision in the antiquated 1866 Mining Law, Revised Statute 2477, to encourage county and state governments to claim everything from wheelbarrow ruts and streambeds as roads and pave our national parks is a disaster.

The president and the secretary of the Interior are charged with protecting our national park system. This adminstration has not met its commitment and in fact has pushed through policies that threaten nearly every facet of park protection. In essence, the Bush administration has in 2 1/2 years done more harm to our national parks than any other time in our nation's history.

--John Marchese

Yes, we do need public education

Perhaps it was in the interest of saving space but Mr. Gillen used clearly questionable statistics in his letter ["Do We Really Need Public Education?" July 31]. He also asked some rather peculiar questions.

In 2000, Nevada rated 44th with a 60 percent graduation rate, while New York rated 39th with a 64 percent graduation rate. First of all, given New York's thousands of times larger public school population, the increase from 60 percent to 64 percent graduation rate is many millions of time more spectacular than the raw 64 percent might seem. Anyone can check this easily in reference to baseball and any other sport. In any given year at least one NFL team could go 14-2 or perhaps even 15-1, but major league baseball teams playing 10 times as many games rarely break 110 wins and 116 is as many as any MLB team has EVER won. The bigger the sample size, the more persistently 50 percent emerges as an incontrovertible measure of statistical reliability.

Secondly, there is a very real climate factor: ALL of New York is farther north than ALL of Nevada, consequently because quality of life absolutely declines with temperature, for New York to have a higher graduation rate than Nevada does speak so absolutely well of its teachers.

Government takes on all the tasks that are too complicated for even the most specialized of businesses. Education is the most complex of endeavors. Business cannot handle a service that is, in and of itself, an inescapable debt.

--John E. M. D'Aura