Be Baltimore
Why is it that the governor and Peter Angelos want to bring a National Football League franchise to Baltimore? Why should we, the taxpayers, be at the mercy of major league sports?
The Orioles are on strike. What do we have to show for it? The spanking new and now unused Oriole Park at Camden Yards.
Long before there was a major league Orioles, the Colts or the CFLs, there was a city. The name of the city was Baltimore.
Baltimore was well known for steamed crabs, hard-working people, the port. In short, we had our own identity and were respected for it.
The B&O; Railroad, Maryland Shipbuilding and Drydock, Crosse and Blackwell -- their products were well known throughout the country and the world. We used our resourcefulness and creativity to make a name for ourselves, making the most of what we had.
Unfortunately, we have become a wannabe city. We want to be like Chicago, Los Angeles and New York.
We have a subway that goes nowhere and a Light Rail system that brings criminals to the suburbs. And now our beloved governor wants to spend our tax dollars to make a name for himself.
Dare to be different, Baltimore. Instead of spending billions of taxpayers dollars to attract Disney and the NFL, we should put it back into our schools and our once stellar Enoch Pratt Free Library.
How ironic that Baltimore touts itself as "The City That Reads," yet there is little money for the Pratt, and our teachers have to dig deep into their pockets to keep the schools running.
Gomer Jones
Baltimore
Lafayette stop
When the subway was under construction in Baltimore, subway stops were assigned names in proximity to locations: Mondawmin and Lexington Market, for example.
The only location not in accordance was the site of the Lafayette Market, Upton.
This may not be the principal reason for the decline of the Lafayette Market, but many merchants anticipated an increase in business due to the subway station.
As city officials contemplate what to do with the market, one suggestion might be to give the proper name to the station stop, as the market is, hopefully, given a chance to again become a neighborhood market and not a carry-out mini-mall.
McNair Taylor
Baltimore
Benefits district
I am writing to urge everyone in Charles Village to vote "yes" for the Community Benefits District. For most people, the tax to support legislation will be less than 25 cents per day. For a couple of dimes a day, Charles Village residents will have a cleaner, safer and better place to live.
The residents and property owners have the final say in how the money for the benefits district is spent.
If you have any questions or opinions, call 889-7927 and find out when your block is having a meeting to discuss the issues.
Then go and have a voice in improving Charles Village.
Kraig Black
Baltimore
$232 million
Gubernatorial candidate Ellen Sauerbrey says she wants to provide tax support to private schools through a $2,000 per student tuition tax credit.
With 116,000 students in Maryland nonpublic schools, this plan would cost us an additional $232 million per year. How this would square with her promise of a huge tax cut is a real mystery.
Ms. Sauerbrey's tuition tax credit scheme would force Marylanders to pay for schools that, unlike our public schools, are not under public control and that practice forms of discrimination and indoctrination not allowed in public schools and incompatible with public funding.
She seems to have forgotten that we Marylanders voted twice in referenda in the 1970s to defeat plans to divert public funds to nonpublic schools, that a similar plan by Gov. William Donald Schaefer was defeated in the legislature less than two years ago, and that in states from coast to coast voters have consistently defeated all plans to divert tax aid to private schools. In the 1990s such schemes were defeated at the polls by 2 to 1 margins in California, Oregon and Colorado.
If Ms. Sauerbrey wants to be governor, she should abandon a radical plan that would wreck our public schools, increase spending by $232 million per year, undermine the religious liberty of all citizens and divide our kids at public expense along religious lines.
Edd Doerr
Silver Spring
The writer is executive director of Americans for Religious Liberty.
Mythical media liberalism
In recent months, your paper has published numerous essays by conservative columnists who incessantly whine about their never substantiated certainty as to the "obvious liberal bias" of .. the media.
Included in this is the rather bizarre, sweeping claim that liberals are responsible for virtually all social evils ranging from "Johnny preferring Nintendo to homework" (Mona Charen) to Cal Thomas' claim that liberals are to blame for the "Beavis and Butt-head" cartoon and adolescent mentality.
May I rhetorically ask those columnists whom they are trying to delude?
From 1968 to 1992, conservative Republican ideologues not only populated the White House for all but four years but went to great lengths to promulgate all brands of conservative "God-on-our-side" virtues ranging from the Nixon "law and order" to the Quayle "family values."
If these columnists would do a little objective counting, the actual score would indicate that the corporate-sponsored television networks are owned and run by multi-millionaires and corporations like General Electric, whose interests are, by definition, best served by conservative economic agendas. Also, their multi-media darling, Rush Limbaugh, is now televised or heard on nearly 1,000 outlets.
Who from the liberal side has even a fraction of media access to counter or correct Mr. Limbaugh's relentless misanthropisms and egregious factual distortions as he cunningly rabble-rouses his unsophisticated "cultural concrete" following?
The notion of a liberally biased media is a popular and convenient fictitious myth of the reactionary right.
Bill Canter
Lutherville
Uninsured get shafted by leaders
Well, I guess that's it. The 40 million Americans who have absolutely no health care coverage have been shafted again by our Congress and president. Not to mention those millions who are underinsured.
Instead of the complicated mish-mash that still keeps insurance corporate profits intact, the president might have shown some moxie and advocated the single-payer universal health care system.
Every advanced nation but ours has a national health care system. Some of them have been in place for more than a century. All of them provide health care for everyone; all spend less proportionally on health care than we do. And most of them have a healthier population than we do. Yet, when the "opinion makers" debate health care, the single-payer system is considered an unlikely alternative, even though it is the only system that has been tested in operation.
President Clinton and most of Congress drop the ball and advocate alternatives that have never been tested and have never succeeded anywhere. They advocate alternatives that don't provide universal coverage or would waste billions of dollars on private-sector paper shufflers. Who should make decisions on who gets health care? Profit seeking insurance corporations or the medical professionals?
The Canadian system offers universal access to health care and a simple single-payer structure, which saves millions in administrative costs. It also effectively controls technological acquisition and physician and hospital fees and offers universal coverage that does not change substantially or disappear when a person changes jobs or becomes unemployed. Each person has a primary care physician, every individual can obtain emergency care and no person or family is bankrupted by catastrophic illness.
It will take an organized grassroots effort by the American people to get single-payer in place since the insurance industry will spend big bucks to propagandize against it and keep our politicians' souls in their pockets.
Without the single-payer universal health care system, we jeopardize our future.
Gerald Ben Shargel
Reisterstown