ABA on Williams

Your editorial, "Is Alex Williams Fit To Be a Judge?" (May 16), was very instructive, pithy and timely. My answer to your editorial query is unreservedly and unequivocally yes; Alex Williams is supremely fit to be a federal judge.

I have known Mr. Williams for over 20 years . . . I, too, believe now that he is superbly qualified to serve as a member of the federal judiciary in terms of his judicial temperament, variegated and demanding experiences as an attorney in private practice and later state's attorney for Prince George's County, and his excellent academic credentials . . .

It is totally inexplicable and incomprehensible to me as to why the American Bar Association (ABA) should be in a position to determine what candidates for federal judgeships are considered through the ABA's antediluvian, esoteric and extra-legal rating process (viz., Highly Qualified, Qualified, Not Qualified).

There is, in fact, no constitutional basis for the ABA serving as a gatekeeper or an arbiter for nominees for federal judgeships.

It is my earnest hope, regardless to the eventual rating of the ABA, that Sen. Paul Sarbanes will remain firm and sedulous in support of Mr. Williams . . .

The Senate Judiciary Committee, as prescribed by the Constitution, under the legal principle of "advise and consent," is the proper forum to ascertain the fitness and qualifications of Mr. Williams for a federal judgeship.

The ABA is an onus and anachronism which needs to be jettisoned forthwith in the selection of our nation's judges.

Samuel L. Banks

Baltimore

Vicious Attacks

For many years, Americans have elected presidents and then soon started denigrating them, vilifying them, making jokes about them and lowering them in polls concerning their performance.

Now we have reached a new low. The constant attacks upon President Clinton are the most vicious that I can recall.

The millions of voters who believed that President Bush deserved to be re-elected are gleefully doing their best to tear down his successor.

Apparently they haven't considered the backlash they are inviting. If the next president should be a conservative Republican, that chief executive will get pounded from the election day onward, with no letup.

Where will all this end? Will the American people elect presidents and then run them out of town, one after another?

The consequences to our country and our system of government would be disastrous.

The sooner people stop the vicious attacks, the better for the future of the United States.

Carleton W. Brown

Elkton

Wrong Message

Over the past seven days, the media (print, audio and video) havebeen inundated with references to charges arising out of a baseball- related hazing incident at McDonough School and the actions and counter-actions of various parents.

At the same time the McDonough tennis team swept all six singles championships in the Maryland Interscholastic Athletic Association A Conference tournament for the second year in a row. Until last year, this sweep had never happened, not even once.

The event was reported in three short paragraphs on page 12 of your sports section. This disparity in news coverage says a lot about how we grown-ups set examples and send messages to our youth.

We are clearly in a position to impact their thoughts and consistently fail to exercise the positive influence we collectively posses.

The next time we complain about the kids today, we should stop and think how effectively we grown-ups are discharging our responsibility of leadership by bombarding them with negative stimuli through our distorted application of the power to persuade.

John B. Colvin

Baltimore

Letter Criteria

I never cease to be amazed by the clever Sun editors. Just recently, your editorial told us to ignore any accusations by Paula Jones because, after all, her motives are suspect.

So we should not concern ourselves that Mr. Clinton has often been accused of abusing his powerful position as governor of Arkansas to satisfy his sexual urges.

Yet the next Sunday it was okay for The Sun to print a letter in which Michael Kernan claimed that he has positive proof of sexual misconduct in office by then Vice President George Bush.

Is The Sun building a case that Mr. Clinton's infidelity is the norm for the White House? How clever of The Sun to trot out an "expert" to do its dirty work. I am sure that many readers would like to know just what are the criteria used by The Sun to print letters to the editor.

I always assumed that The Sun printed letters which "best" represent a number of letters written to the editor.

But this must not be the case, as I seriously doubt that a lot of experts wrote to The Sun editors having knowledge that the majority of the U.S. presidents were philanderers.

Eric R. Pierce

Reisterstown

McLean's Care

Instead of focusing on Jacqueline McLean's legal problems, M. Cristina Gutierrez . . . is going around like a lobbyist and official spokesperson, trying to drum up "compassion" among the city's citizenry to keep Ms. McLean even further medically insured with our tax money.

Ms. Gutierrez is "very concerned" that Ms. McLean remain in the lap of luxury while she gets private treatment for all the messes she has gotten herself into . . .

To "warn" us that the transferal of Ms. McLean to a state mental health facility is tantamount to killing her treatment for depression is an insult to the many people who work in those institutions to provide good mental health care for those who cannot afford the grandeur of Sheppard Pratt.

There is this mentality among the wealthy -- and ergo powerful -- that they could not endure the more ordinary care and treatment that the vast majority of us use.

Even when they obtained their fortunes and have blown it away, their political and hired contacts will work to obtain undue perks from the city coffers for them. It's enough to make me, for one, nauseous.

Georgia Corso

Baltimore

Feeling Safe

The attitudes and opinions expressed by Gregory P. Kane (Opinion * Commentary, May 2) were a horrifying example of what is happening to the social order of our country.

The premise which is put forth is that in order for any of us to feel safe, we must allow the government (whom most of us distrust anyway) to take away everyone's rights.

To follow this stupid analogy, we should just put everyone in America in jail. This of course is exactly what does happen when the government declares martial law. They incarcerate everyone order to control a few, telling the majority that they are doing it for their own good.

The worst part of this mindless thinking is in his comment that without the right to feel safe as you leave your home, "The freedom of speech or religion are meaningless, because you will be too terrified to leave your house to enjoy them."

Of course we all want to feel safe, but the feeling of safety is far from being safe.

The preservation our liberties, for which thousands have died after for saking their feelings of safety, is a principle for which Mr. Kane has shown absolutely no understanding.

This type of shallow self interest has no concern for anyone else nor the future of our nation. We sell our birthright to appease the interest of a good feelings day. When we are no longer willing to die for our rights, we have no conviction. Without conviction, we have no freedom at all.

There are better ways to handle violence in a simple little housing project in Chicago -- or in Baltimore -- without taking away everyone else's rights in the process.

It is just not conceivable that the law enforcement agencies in Chicago do not know who has the guns and who is distributing the drugs in that housing project.

Ask any cop on the beat in Baltimore. They know who the criminals are and they don't have to kick in doors of law abiding citizens to find them.

George Robertson

Hunt Valley

Horton on Bay

Thank you for Tom Horton's May 14 commentary about population growth as the top bay polluter.

As a science educator, I have continually pressed my students to recognize human population growth as a major concern not only for the bay, but for the entire planet.

But as they bring in current articles dealing with environmental issues, one after another, and none of them address this problem, I feel that they doubt the validity of my concern.

You can be sure that Mr. Horton's article was at the top of the recommended reading the following week.

Mary Beth Kircher

Baltimore

Avoiding Runoff

The farm lobby would like to convince the rest of us that the farmers in the bay area are doing their part to prevent soil runoff. All anyone has to do to see that this is far from true is to drive around and observe.

The casual observer will see fields that are being plowed and disked to within inches of ditches that drain directly into our creeks and rivers.

They will see large fields that slope toward drainage ditches, some for more than 1,000 feet, with no attempt to brake the runoff.

They will see large fields that run parallel to creeks and rivers that are planted within several feet of these waters.

This is not a complicated problem, nor is it expensive to correct. For the cost of just several percent of the land being worked, simple steps could be taken to prevent soil runoff.

Much of the land being farmed is not being farmed by the land owner, but is farmed by people who lease it. Many of these people don't have any incentive to protect the land and water, since their objective is to get as much profit as they can from the land.

Ultimately, it must be the land owner who is held responsible to see that reasonable steps are taken to prevent runoff.

Eugene T. Rohe

Baltimore

Nancy Grasmick Just Doesn't Get It

Nancy Grasmick just doesn't get it. The attack on Susan Reimer by the state superintendent of schools (letters, May 7) is excellent evidence of what is wrong with Maryland's public school system.

In brief, Ms. Reimer had written a column questioning the usefulness of the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program (commonly known as the "MSPP tests").

Ms. Reimer had written from the point of view of a parent, asking whether the MSPP tests deserved the support of the public when the test is time-consuming, frustrating to students and teachers, interferes with daily instruction and does not produce any data usable to parents or teachers in planning for the instruction of individual children.

Dr. Grasmick attacked Ms. Reimer as if the columnist were an enemy of educational progress or the tool of someone else.

It is understandable that Dr. Grasmick is feeling defensive these days. The MSPP tests have been a public relations nightmare for her, as have the State Board of Education's efforts to shift local control of the schools to state bureaucrats.

The state takeover of schools and stripping teachers of their right to fair dismissal hearings have brought Dr. Grasmick and her staff under attack from many quarters.

MSPP has been fraught with difficulties since its inception, difficulties which are inherent in any attempt to use a prototype as if it were a finished product.

According to Dr. Grasmick's public statements, MSPP was designed to force changes in the curricula which would permit the implementation of a statewide statistical control model of management.

There was no public debate on the desirability of changing the locus of control of Maryland public education; rather, those who, like Ms. Reimer, questioned the purpose of the new program were labeled as inhibitors of progress.

There was often the suggestion, like that in Dr. Grasmick's attack on Ms. Reimer, that anyone who questioned MSPP did not believe that all children could become useful members of society.

It seems to me that Dr. Grasmick and her staff are begging the questions which citizens and parents such as Ms. Reimer raise.

It is fairly common knowledge that the test questions have often been inappropriate, frustrating students, teachers and parents; that the testing schedule is very disruptive in smaller schools; that administrators are tempted to manipulate attendance figures or participation by special education students to reduce the impact of absenteeism and slower students on school level results; that there are significant material costs which are added to the financial burdens of local school systems; and that the reported results are misunderstood by the media and the public.

It is less widely known that some of the test items in the past have favored schools that purchased textbooks from the test's commercial publisher, that the test has not been validated in any statistical sense; and that the only use of the "reconstitution" bylaw was based not on MSPP but on previously mandated functional tests.

Perhaps it is time for Dr. Grasmick to recognize that soon Maryland will have a new governor and a new education policy.

None of the announced candidates is supporting MSPP in its current anti-local control, disruptive, essentially useless from.

By this time next year we may be able to look back on MSPP as misguided and abandoned attempt to use questionable statistical methods to impose state control on local school boards through manipulating the curriculum.

Ms. Reimer's column, I hope, is the voice of a parent who will become part of a community chorus demanding the return of its schools from the educrats at the Maryland State Department of Education.

Robert L. Moore Jr., Ph.D

Baltimore

The writer is Specialist for Education Reform, Maryland State Teachers Association.

Free Events Continue at Johns Hopkins University

Jane Spencer (letter, May 11) expresses concern that the admission fee charged for a lecture at the Johns Hopkins University by historian David Eisenhower reflects a change in policy.

She worries that the university may have abandoned a commitment to sponsoring talks "open and free to all who were interested."

That is simply not true.

In some cases, it is necessary to charge for admission. But many lectures at Hopkins are free, regardless of what the university must pay the nationally and internationally known scholars, artists and public figures it brings to Baltimore.

Just during this academic year, the university offered Baltimoreans the opportunity to hear dozens of noted speakers without charge.

Included among them were David Halberstam, Patricia Ireland, A. R. Gurney, Ntozake Shange, John Waters, Ruth Westheimer, Benjamin Hooks, Dinesh D'Souza, Camille Paglia, Richard Wilbur and many members of our own faculty.

Dennis O'Shea

Baltimore

The writer is director of communications and public affairs at Johns Hopkins University.