Cartoonish depiction of council members is off base
Re: “Hypocritical council members are making the wrong choice,” Nov. 17
Barbara Hollingsworth is way off base when she complains that Montgomery County Council members don’t ride transit. To keep in touch with the public, elected officials need to go back and forth to community meetings all over the county. A car is the most efficient way to do that. Surely we shouldn’t be wasting taxpayers’ money on late night buses from Olney to Germantown. As a non-car-owner myself, I certainly use Zipcar rather than take a trip that would make me change buses two or three times. On the other hand, transit is much more efficient than cars for bringing large numbers of people to central destinations. Our council members do take Metro when they go into downtown D.C. And they have worked hard to create a good local bus system, for the most part spending our money sensibly by running buses where there is the most demand. Ms. Hollingsworth goes on to mock the Council for supporting growth around Metro stations even though they drive to work. This is an odd view of ethics. Does The Examiner think public officials should vote against anything that doesn’t benefit them personally? The new growth initiatives do not forbid anyone from using a car. Rather, they are creating new choices by paring back laws that make non-drivers pay for driving. Why should someone who takes Metro to work and walks to nearby stores be forced by law to pay for a $40,000 underground parking space? Why shouldn’t county residents have the option of living in a downtown designed for pedestrians? As individuals and as taxpayers, we face real choices that will spend real money. Your readers deserve serious analysis of those choices rather than cartoon images.
Ben Ross
President,
Action Committee for Transit
Examiner cartoon is off base, too
I was disappointed to see that the Nov. 16 edition of the
Washington Examiner included an offensive cartoon at the bottom of the editorial page. This cartoon depicts an evil banker with the federal government in his breast pocket. It clearly implies that Wall Street bankers control the federal government for their own profit. What’s offensive is the way that the evil banker is depicted: white, with a bald head, long face and a big ethnic nose. These are the same characteristics that Nazi Germany used in their 1930s propaganda to portray Jews as controlling the world. Including that cartoon, with its historical derogatory stereotypes, was irresponsible journalism.
Gary Dubrow
Bethesda
Cap and trade will save money in the long run
Many Republicans are predicting an increase in energy costs if we pass cap-and-trade legislation, but they are missing the big picture. As was seen with the 1990 Clean Air Act, which was predicted to cost $5.7 billion, it will save exponentially more than it will cost. Clean Air Act amendments used a cap-and-trade market system that cost just $1.6 billion to cut more than 4 million tons of sulfur dioxide. According to a 2003 EPA study, the savings in health care costs were as much as $70 billion – or $43 for every dollar spent on pollution abatement. With many scientists warning that climate change could accelerate and threaten the lives of billions of people unless we cap and reduce emissions very fast, the savings will likely be vastly greater with investments in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. People do not see the deaths in one dramatic event, and are not mobilized to action as happened with the September 11 attacks. But they are real, as is the threat of climate change to our national security that prompted the Pentagon, in a 2004 report, to call global warming a greater risk to national security than terrorism.
Chad Kister
Nelsonville, OH
