Rushing into lawsuit
It seems the Central Arkansas Library System (CALS) Board signed a blank check and handed it over to the lawyers at their May 25 board meeting. Without the proposed lawsuit to review, a rush to file prompted a reckless and premature decision to move forward with a federal lawsuit. Given the credentials of board members around the table, this "trust the lawyers" and "we've discussed this enough" based decision making would be funny if it were not so reckless.
The kudzu-esque creep of purchases and promotion of library materials and programming that are so far removed from prevailing community standards and social mores by our local libraries is inexcusable. And the arrogance that taxpayers will continue to fund this nonsense is ... well ... arrogant. The board thinks that it is okay to just trust the lawyers? The public thought we could trust the librarians to provide appropriate materials and programming for our children and our communities with our dollars. How is that working out?
TERESA BELEW
Little Rock
When debt matters
Deficit Attention Disorder: A cartoon recently coined this variation on ADD in reference to Republicans' attention to the national debt: They pay attention to it when Democrats are in charge, but not when Republicans are in charge.
This would be funny if it weren't absolutely true.
During the Trump presidency, his generous tax breaks for large corporations and super-rich folks threw the federal debt spiraling out of control. In 2016, when Trump was elected president, the national debt was $19.573 trillion; in 2020, it was $27.748 trillion. To handle this mushrooming debt, Congress increased the debt ceiling three times on a bipartisan basis during the Trump administration.
The current debate over the debt ceiling should be a simple question of whether the USA will pay financial obligations already incurred. It should have nothing to do with what the Biden administration plans to do in the future, yet House Republicans have chosen to frame the debate in those terms. For example, they are evidently more amenable to raising the debt ceiling if Biden will agree to give up plans to have the IRS investigate high-level tax cheats.
By the time this letter is published, I hope the matter will be closed (for now) and the debt ceiling will have been raised, keeping our country from being a deadbeat nation.
Still, I doubt that the Deficit Attention Disorder will have been cured.
EARL BABBIE
Hot Springs Village
Reason to remember
Thank you, John McPherson of Searcy, for your guest column in Monday's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Your story about Mr. Yancey told about what it is all about.
JERRY BACH
Hot Springs Village
On Henry Kissinger
America is a generous country. In 1938 we took in a 15-year-old immigrant with a suitcase escaping Nazis Germany. He flourished in the safe soil of America, graduating Harvard with honors, writing books, becoming a professor, presidential adviser, then secretary of state.
He was soon knee-deep in enough assassinations, palace coups and regime changes to keep an action writer busy for a decade.
Mr. Kissinger's reward: Nobel Peace Prize (disputed), the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a Medal of Liberty and even a Bronze Star.
But China made him famous. He, Midas-like, made a communist tyrannical government specializing in religious suppression and late-term abortions look clean enough for American businesses' purposes. Cheap goods, increased profits and inflation kept in check; what's wrong with that? The shortsighted merchants lined up like gullible get-rich-quick suckers to buy and build factories in China. Kissinger opened the door to a Trojan horse that gutted American well-paying jobs, substituting plastic toys and tools with the lifetime expectancy of an insect.
Every year we discovered that we could buy a bigger, then bigger again, wall TV for half the price. No inflation here. But when the shelves were dusty without American-made products, competition ended.
Covid shut down China. American plants shuttered for years were unable to supply our own needs. Eventually container ships lined up to discharge our backlog of toothpicks and treasures. We waited, and the conflagration of inflation arrived along with the foreign cargo.
Don't worry, Mr. Kissinger didn't sacrifice his personal welfare by his many years of public service. He sat on more boards of A-listed corporations than Midas.
In fact, he led the land rush with a joint venture with the communist state-owned investment corporation.
You have repaid us well for our generosity, Mr. K.
DANNY HANCOCK
Lonoke