LETTERS

LITTLE ROCK — Or should that be clinicking?

Things are looking up for the Hogs now that the coaches have been "cliniced."

The Sports section has hit a new intellectual high with the recent story, "Coaches retreat to hone methods," in which we learn about "clinicing." Coach John Smith stated, "Any time you can get together like this [at a resort at Branson, Mo.,] and go sit down, it basically turns into clinicing each other. We give you the real clinic stuff instead of the stuff you take to clinics."

If University of Arkansas professors could teach and talk with such simplicity, and under resort conditions at least part time, interspersing clinicing with the dull lecture/note-taking system, we might have an almost perfect graduation rate.

Learning away from interruptions and phones at a resort sounds like a lot more fun, as do the golfing and jet ski riding. Possibly some revenueing from the new lottery millions could support long-distance clinicing, and maybe the UA athletic department could chip in and take some credit for an increase in educational excellence. Up with education and go Hogs!

I had other ideas but am hungry and must go kitchening.

JERRY DAVID KAHLER Little Rock

U.S. must go own way

Paraphrasing Teddy Kennedy, citizens are entitled to the fundamental right of health care. Politicians with the same basic outlook over the last 233 years have developed programs that failed; for example, Social Security. I have paid into it since it started. I now receive about $1,300 a month, but pay in $187 every month. How long do I have to live to break even?

Or how about Medicare? Did you know that the government tells the doctor what his value is after years of training and an inbred concern for the care of people? A procedure that I recently had was worth $512 to the doctor. The government said his value was only $183.39. Just think what Barack Obama will think it is worth after he gets control of it.

Do those who support the Obama plans really think that our country became the strongest by following the other countries of the world? We became the strongest because of religion, tradition, responsibility and self-reliance. If you continue to support Obama and the left wing of the Democratic Party, you will no longer have the country of America. You will have a socialist copy and it won't be strong.

BARRETT A. METZLER Bearden

Illumination welcomed

As you illustrated in your excellent editorial, apparently the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives doesn't think much of me or my kind.

I thought you had to work in the tobacco, pharmaceutical or defense industry for you and your colleagues to get labeled collectively as a source of evil and immorality in the world. And here I was thinking that by working for a large health insurance company, I helped insulate our customers from the financial risk of catastrophic illness or injury. I sure am glad the honorable member from San Francisco disabused me of that misconception.

Sure does make a fellow proud, right up there with being a button man for one of the New York mob families or maybe dealing dope to school kids. I haven't had such a warm and fuzzy feeling since I was wearing my U.S. Army uniform and was spat upon and called a fascist by some teen-age junkie in the Berlin train station decades ago.

OTIS YOUNG Cabot

IOUs aren't an option

Health insurance for all is a marvelous plan, but in April the government will not receive the windfall it has in the past because 10 percent of all the population is no longer employed, and that number might rise.

Others who were paying lots of money in taxes because of numbers on paper provided by stockbrokers no longer have those big numbers to pay taxes on. Economists say it will take seven to 10 years for the stock market to bounce back. Isn't that where most super wealthy people put a lot of their money? How many of them no longer make the magic number, 250,000, 350,000?

We are told they will pay the most for the coming health care plan. Newly unemployed people in that group in their $2 million homes are just as broke as a Joe whose home is worth $100,000. How can the rest of us pick up the slack of all the people who are broke or nearly so because they lost their jobs, who are losing their homes, who lost retirements, who lost investments, who are becoming homeless?

I think of the old saying that went something like "How California goes, so goes the nation." But regular citizens can't pay their bills with IOUs. Can the rest of us pay our bills and everyone else's health care?

ELIZABETH CHRISTIE Fayetteville

Give credit where due

Sports editor Wally Hall was too quick to point out that the superhorse Rachel Alexandra trained and won two stakes races at Oaklawn Park, the so-called winter training ground for Triple Crown horses. He gives all the kudos to Oaklawnand failed to provide the complete story.

The fact is that this filly started racing at Churchill Downs in Kentucky, where she finished sixth in her first race but won in her second outing. She was entered next in a graded stakes at Churchill and finished second. She then ran on a synthetic surface at Keeneland and won. She followed that up with a second and a win at Churchill. Indeed, that's a total of six races in the state of Kentucky.

Her first race at Oaklawn was the Martha Washington Stakes, which she won by over eight lengths, followed by a win in the Fair Grounds Oaks in Louisiana, followed by a win back at Oaklawn in the Fantasy Stakes.

Wally also gives a lot of credit to her current trainer, Steve Asmussen. Don't get me wrong, Asmussen is one of the best around. However, originally it was Hal R. Wiggins who trained this horse for its first nine races (six wins, two seconds and one out-of-the-money finish).

On another note, if Rachel is truly a superhorse and her owners want her to go down in history as one of the best ever, she should go out west and race in the Breeders' Cup at Santa Anita and attempt to beat the best, including the undefeated Zenyatta. What a race that would be if the owners could just get over their paranoia of synthetic tracks.

CHRIS THOMAS McALLISTER Hot Springs

Politics as usual created lottery 'mess '

There seems to be a lot of angst in the state and in the editorial room about the coming lottery. I voted for the lottery and will be happy to have the state profit from it. I don't think it is a cruel tax on the poor any more than are cigarettes or booze or any other free choice that people make. That is part of freedom.

The fact that our state politicians made their usual mess of the start-up by their normal good-ole-boy tactics does not make the lottery or Lt. Gov. Bill Halter the villain here. Lotteries operate in many states. If there is a lack of funds that get to the intended benefactors, then it is the politicians who corrupted the system, not the system.

I went to one of the meetings Halter had about the lottery and expressed my approval of his idea before the vote. I told him my only reservation was how the politicians would try to direct the money away from his goals. That may indeed happen.

Things like taxing groceries, double dip retirements and giving jobs or tax breaks to friends and relatives support our state's quality rankings, near last by most tests. So if the lottery withstands Arkansas politics, at least some money will get to the intended goals. Meanwhile, I will reserve my contempt for politics as usual in the Natural State, not Halter or the lottery.

JACK BULLARD Hot Springs Village

Complaining justified

In a radio interview on July 31, Gary Dilts, senior vice president of global automotive operations at J.D. Power, stated that incremental auto sales generated by the Cash for Clunkers program is 40,000 units. In other words, J.D. Power estimates that the program has generated 40,000 sales of automobiles that otherwise would not have taken place.

And what did we, the taxpayers, pay for that bump in sales? How about $1 billion, or $25,000 per additional sale? If that wasn't disgusting enough, the really scary part is that this program is held up as the poster child of the stimulus package. If this is typical of the stimulus, then we're in worse trouble than we realize.

One hundred trillion dollars in government debt and entitlement commitments and counting. A deficit of 12 percent of Gross Domestic Product. Nobody reads the bills before voting on them. Our children and grandchildren are being sold into wage slavery for the rest of their lives. Is it any wonder that common people are showing up en masse right now, despite the state-controlled media blackout, at town hall meetings to scold their congressmen and senators?

DENNIS LITHGOW Jacksonville

Organic produce is best

A July 2009 review published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that 55 studies conducted since 1958 fail to show a significant difference in the amounts of eight of 11 nutrients in organic vs. conventional food.

The news media reversed the meaning of this finding to leap to the conclusion that industrially produced food is as nutritious as organic. Even putting aside the toxins that adulterate industrial food, the conclusion that organic is not more nutritious belies common sense. Nutrition comes from the soil. Industrial agriculture depletes soil. Organic agriculture makes the soil richer. Soil degraded through industrial farming produces less nutritious food. Soil enriched through organic farming produces more nutritious food.

In North America, industrial farming practices reportedly have depleted 85 percent of farmland mineral content. Every 28 years, one inch of topsoil is lost to industrial farming. Of 13 major nutrients in fruits and vegetables tracked by the U.S. Department of Agriculture from 1950-99, six showed noticeable declines. In contract, organic farming can produce six inches of topsoil in as little as 50 years. The Organic Center found that 97 studies conducted since 1980 show that organic food contains on average a 25 percent higher concentration of 11 nutrients than conventional food.

As organic farming becomes more established, it will become increasingly clear that there is no more efficient and sustainable way to restore and improve the nutrition of farm products than to enrich the health of the soil through organic farming.

PERRY AMBROSE Searcy

iPublic option extolled

In the debate over health insurance reform, the anti-reform crowd likes to treat government-provided, socialized medicine as some sort of crazy foreign idea that does not and could not work. But it's not foreign and it does work. Here in America, we call it Medicare.

Surveys are performed regularly asking Americans how happy they are with their health care provider. Medicare always polls better. In a recent Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems study, respondents were asked if they always got the care they needed; 71 percent of those covered by Medicare said yes compared to only 50 percent of those covered by private health care.

Think about how striking these results are. Medicare insures the elderly, who are much more demanding of the system. And Medicare must take everyone who qualifies. Private insurers can, and routinely do, refuse the sickest patients. And because private insurance covers a younger crowd, many of them have little to no interaction with the health care system and so no reason to rate it poorly.

That's three factors strongly influencing things in private insurance's favor. And yet Medicare comes out resoundingly on top. Oh, and Medicare is exceptionally more efficient; that is, it wastes less money. A public option plan, like most Democrats want, would essentially allow younger people like me to buy into Medicare. I'd take it in a heartbeat over the insurance I have now.

MICHAEL ROETZEL

Little Rock

No time for telephones

I have called Lt. Gov. Bill Halter's office three times in the past few weeks and sent one e-mail asking for his thoughts on the way the Arkansas lottery is being handled. I have yet to received a response.

Folks in his office have told me to call the lottery office. I think that is real interesting that the lieutenant governor does not have time to talk to a citizen of Arkansas. One guy said Arkansas had 3 million folks and Halter couldn't talk to folks individually. He certainly had time for folks when he was trying to get the lottery passed, and he certainly has had time to go to Baltimore to the National Lieutenant Governors Association, but he doesn't have time to talk to an Arkansan?

Shame on Halter. Remember the next time he is on the ballot that he is one politician who doesn't have time to talk to Arkansas people.

LANCE CLICK

Little Rock