OUR VIEWS

Think first

The latest example is this week's threat to fire State School Superintendent Ed Richardson if there is a massive layoff of teachers.

Now, nobody who knows the history of their relationship is going to mistake Siegelman and Richardson for bosom buddies. They don't see eye-to-eye on some education issues, and Richardson has managed to make a few missteps politically along the way.

However, the governor knows he cannot unilaterally fire the state school superintendent. That has to be done by a majority of the state Board of Education, an independently elected body on which the governor has only one vote out of nine.

Furthermore, the state superintendent doesn't lay off teachers. That is a decision for local superintendents and local school boards based on their assessment of the financial and demographic situations in their particular school systems.

Richardson's sin in Siegelman's eye is that the state superintendent believes and has openly said the state school budget is so financially precarious that some systems may not be able to afford pay raises and other state mandates without cutting back on personnel expenses. That means laying off people.

Much as the governor and legislators would like to think otherwise — and have voters think otherwise — the latest education budget is very dependent on what happens in the economy. If the recovery falters or is less robust than the budget assumes, proration could return.

Richardson would be negligent in his duty if he did not point out this possibility. And Siegelman's intemperate threat won't remove the possibility.

In the words of a younger generation, Governor, "Chill."

The shattered Dutch

Dutch voters have been deprived of a basic political right — the right to pass judgment on a candidate's character and platform at the polls.

Fortuyn campaigned on issues — particularly immigration and crime — that Europe's centrist politicians have been reluctant to address.

Those issues have become the province of politicians loosely grouped under the label of far-right nationalists, Fortuyn, Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, Joerg Haider in Austria.

But the actual threat to Europe, which tends to think of the far right in terms of the fascists' rise to power in the 1930s, seems exaggerated.

Le Pen got into the presidential runoff by a fluke and was crushed in the general election. The British National Party won a great total of three seats in recent nationwide local elections.

And Fortuyn shows that, in the Netherlands, at least, the question of what is "right-wing" can be complicated. Fortuyn, 54, was openly gay and flamboyant about it; he joked that he would carry a Margaret Thatcher-style handbag if he became prime minister. He favored same-sex marriages, euthanasia, legal soft drugs — all legal in the Netherlands — and his point was that culturally conservative Muslim immigrants were opposed.

He believed that immigrants who did not assimilate into Dutch culture were against such long-standing Dutch traditions as tolerance, open-mindedness and civility.

Those points of view got his self-named party 34 percent of the vote in the Rotterdam city elections and may have gotten him close to that in the national elections.

His assassination means that the Dutch will never find out.

Right now the Dutch are feeling that peculiar sense of relief that Americans have come to know: that, like the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and the attempts on George Wallace, Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, the killing appears to be the work of a lone nut.

Dutch political leaders have rightly decided to push on with the May 15 elections — election dates are more flexible in parlimentary systems than they are in this country.

As Americans have learned, the best response for the Dutch to this assault on their body politic is a ringing reaffirmation of their values as a free and democratic people.

OTHER VIEWS

Queen Elizabeth faces naked truth

By ARGUS HAMILTON
THE DAILY OKLAHOMAN

Queen Elizabeth was touring England by motorcade Tuesday when a streaker ran out of the crowd and sprinted naked in front of her limousine. It's just plain wrong. If God had wanted people to run around naked, he would have made us that way.

The Los Angeles Times reported comedian Will Ferrell is leaving the cast of Saturday Night Live after this year. A lot of people are relieved. His impression of George W. Bush is so good, the Christian Coalition suspects cloning.

Penthouse apologized for saying photos of a woman sitting topless at a beach were Anna Kournikova. The photographs were taken by a long-range camera. As much money as it makes for NASA, this is not an appropriate use for the Hubble Telescope.

Jimmy Carter will make a live, televised speech to the Cuban people Tuesday. He won't be paid. Considering the subsidy Congress gave to peanut farmers this week, he doesn't need to charge money for his speeches like the other presidents do.

Congress has voted to store nuclear waste just north of Las Vegas. The idea is loudly opposed. Nuclear radiation is risky, and in a town where every woman is tall, blonde and busty, nobody wants to run the risk of genetic mutations.

Donald Rumsfeld has canceled the Army Crusader cannon. It passed its field test with flying colors. This week, Congress took the prototype, stuffed it full of tax dollars and delivered a salvo that American farmers will never forget.

Wisconsin junior Luke Helder admitted setting pipe bombs in mailboxes across the Midwest. American college students make crummy terrorists. FBI agents simply followed a trail of empty beer cans across Interstate 80 right up to his motel door.

The Nativity Church standoff got sticky Wednesday when plans to exile 13 PLO terrorists hit a snag. Officials say no other country would take them in. Under the Bush Doctrine, if you harbor a terrorist, you're Don Rumsfeld's next applause line.

Argus Hamilton can be reached
at argusjokes@aol.com

YOUR VIEWS

Carter should stay away from Cuba

So what will Carter say to Castro after recovering from his deep reverie? Will he stammer a thanks to Castro for just releasing from jail Vladimiro Roca, after serving all but 70 days of a five-year sentence for daring to deliver a protest pamphlet to the Central Committee offices protesting the one-party political system? Will Jimmy tell Fidel that he is sorry that Uruguay just sponsored a U.N. resolution calling on Cuba to improve its human rights record? ... and that Mexico agreed?... or will he simply swoon before the president-for-life?

Castro blamed Third World poverty on a capitalist (vast right wing-type?) conspiracy at the recently concluded U.N. Development Conference in Mexico. This is what they do at such conferences. Never mind that Cuba has been under Castro's rule for 43 years — it was the embargo stupid! Putting their heads together at the conference, Castro and Carter each devised a plan.

Castro's plan is to bring to Cuba as many American dollars as possible to prop up his regime. He earned $2 billion from tourism last year without wide U.S. participation—or about half of Cuba's foreign revenue.

Carter, in his characteristic left-wing reverie, has decided that open trade and travel between Cuba and the United States will foster a real desire for freedom within Cuba. Then Cubans can ... what? ... vote for the opposition to Castro? But the opposition is mostly in jail, and Cuba has never had an election. Castro rules, he says, by popular demand; in what can only be called, if true, a great argument against democracy. And the touristas are rigidly segregated from the Cuban people while in the country. How are they to influence public opinion when they even have separate hospitals if they get sick? Very simply, there will most likely be no election in Cuba until Castro dies. That is one election Carter will probably miss.

And what about those common folk in Cuba? Foreign contractors pay Castro's government $9,500 a year for a Cuban worker. Would you call this exploiting the masses? Castro also wants our credit. He wants to buy goods on faith — backed up by U.S. taxpayer bailouts to commercial U.S. banks.

Jimmy Carter should stay home and build houses for the poor. Stay, Jimmy, stay!

William Fielder
706 Four Winds Pointe
Peachtree City, Ga.

Send a message

Joseph M. Jones
7009 Linda St.
Huntsville

Feed ignorant

I wonder if he has gotten away with it for most of his life, if he thinks our society will tolerate his judgment on creatures of this world (including the human species), of who is fit for parenting.

The animal species born homosexual make excellent parents. Human species are capable of the same.

We all could live in a peaceful loving world without judgements from leaders that feed the ignorant on matters that promote hate.

Pat Cleveland
111 Lake Joan Circle
Munford

Only fallout

Armond "Si" Simmons
104 Wadsworth Lane
Pell City

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