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Letters: Community needs not understood

Parks & Rec seeking big fees for little ones

The proposed increase in fees for Parks & Recreation programs is inappropriate and reflects a lack of understanding of community needs.

These fees would unfairly affect those who most need the programs and can least afford it. Little children. Schoolkids. You’re adding a huge burden to young, often struggling parents.

The increases are incomprehensibly large, especially where service to children is concerned. There seems to be a prejudice against children, especially those of hardworking parents.

The Parks & Rec Board has put this fee proposal out for public consideration almost in complete secrecy, with less than five days to respond. This is not how citizens expect their public organizations to behave.

Parks & Rec claims this change is spurred by changes in child care regulations. Those proposed changes are not imminent; the governor suspended any new rule-making as of Jan. 29, so there is no reason to change the charges at this time.

It seems someone looked at the tremendous success of the TOTS and After School programs and saw dollar signs.

It is wrong to take advantage of vulnerable young families by increasing the cost of their programs by hundreds of dollars. With only five days for public comment! Shame!

Betsy Beard

In state of discontent, Obama disunites U.S.

Re the apology tour: Is it humanly possible for the man to stand up for America just once?

He bows and capitulates and agrees with every slander and libel thrown at the U.S. and its citizens by the world’s most heinous creeps, and then adds some of his own insults.

Sunday, his top aide described the tea parties and participants as “unhealthy” for the country.

We’ve never had a president who so despised the country that elected him. I would say “his country,” but then I would have to mention a Muslim state.

William Hurt

Green Valley

Firings, appointments set no prez precedent

I must respectfully disagree with Joan Safier, retired teacher, who feels that Republicans downplayed “the politically motivated firings of U.S. attorneys,” yet have reservations about confirming the appointment of Eric Holder for U.S. attorney general (Dec. 26 letter, “Hold-up of Holder appt. a Republican diversion”).

I was U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California for almost eight years, under Presidents Nixon, Ford and (for several months) Carter.

As a Republican appointee, federal law required that I be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. After President Carter was in office, I was asked to resign to make way for his choice of U.S. attorney and did so graciously, knowing that, by law, a U.S. attorney serves at the pleasure of the president and that no better reason need exist for being replaced than that a new president understandably wants his own choice in the office.

U.S. attorneys are rarely left in office under a new administration; in those rare cases when they are not replaced, it is because the new president is comfortable with the holdover.

On the other hand, it is the responsibility of the Senate to “advise and consent” (or withhold consent) to a president with respect to his appointments to key positions.

In the case of President Obama’s choice of Erik Holder, the senators have an obligation to inquire of an appointee about any of their concerns.

Senate Republicans were not attempting to “obstruct” anyone or anything in the Holder confirmation hearings, and the much-heralded firings of certain U.S. attorneys serving under President Bush was a “tempest in a teapot,” created for political purposes by certain Democrats.

James L. Browning Jr.

retired judge, U.S. attorney

Oro Valley

Greenhouse gas claims unfit for bated breath

Now that the EPA has included carbon dioxide as a health threat along with five other greenhouse gases, are we not supposed to exhale?

Will exercising be taxed due to increased outputs?

Over the 10 years I have accumulated research reports on global warming, I have yet to see a single graph that shows carbon dioxide driving world temperatures.

Even the graph Al Gore portrayed in his incredibly inaccurate movie shows carbon dioxide levels rise and fall in response to global temperatures, not the other way around.

Worried about CO2 rising to 450 parts per million? CO2 was at that level in the 1800s.

The Permian period 270 million years ago, when the reptiles and most life on Earth died out, was the last time CO2 has been this low.

The temperature of the Earth is normally higher than it is now, and crocodiles swam in the Arctic! And what about the primary greenhouse gas, water vapor, which makes up 98.5 percent of all greenhouse gas? This wasn’t even on their list!

Peter Wangsness

Benson

Clear air on how greed puts brakes on alt fuel

I live out in the open – 65 miles from Phoenix. The air we breathe is a lot cleaner than in the big city.

But we are behind 50-plus years for alternative fuels.

If it were not for the ongoing greed and profit motive by the investors with the auto industry and the oil barons, we would not be in this mess. Paper people, put out the real truth.

G. Barriga

Florence

Citizen Online Archive, 2006-2009

This archive contains all the stories that appeared on the Tucson Citizen's website from mid-2006 to June 1, 2009.

In 2010, a power surge fried a server that contained all of videos linked to dozens of stories in this archive. Also, a server that contained all of the databases for dozens of stories was accidentally erased, so all of those links are broken as well. However, all of the text and photos that accompanied some stories have been preserved.

For all of the stories that were archived by the Tucson Citizen newspaper's library in a digital archive between 1993 and 2009, go to Morgue Part 2

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