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salon.com > Letters Sept. 23, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/letters/1999/09/23/mac Letters to the Editor What's the real smell of Eau de Mac?? Plus: For damn sure Ken Starr has regrets; astonished agreement with Arianna. - - - - - - - - - - - - The "eau de Mac" is the smell of a Pentium being thoroughly and completely toasted. -- Jon F. Buckley Janelle Browne's article is off the mark. To expect an odorless environment when any new appliance/machine is first used is folly. Does she complain if her car has that "new car" smell? Does she complain when that new coffee maker smells plasticky? -- Dennis Prunkl Hollywood snares There is no possibility that PCs can mimic what television does, at least not at the present time. Computers simply lack the ease of use and reliability that characterize other consumer electronics devices. A huge percentage of our population is alienated by this medium. They have the good common sense to stay away from machines that cost as much as a 40-inch TV, are unreliable and viciously user-unfriendly, have a fraction of the product life of a TV (I've had my Sony Trinitron for 15 years) and that subject people to endless (and expensive) rounds of software and hardware "upgrades." PCs essentially evolved as office machines. They suffer from a design minimalism that is perhaps appropriate in a business setting -- if they are a bit frustrating or confusing to use, well, who cares about employees being frustrated, right? Certainly not American managers! Machines honed under these conditions make for poor home use and cannot be a substitute for a TV home entertainment center. If Hollywood wants to produce TV-type shows for home computer viewing and consumption, I wholeheartedly recommend that Hollywood and the phone companies wrest control of the shape and format of computers from the hardware and software crowd. PCs are not going to be a good delivery system for mass-market "couch potato" style viewing and entertainment unless everyone in the computer industry, from Bill Gates on down, is disciplined by people who have an interest in PCs being a means to something else -- and not ends in themselves. -- Leslie Farkas
Bringing 'em back alive I enjoyed the article on anesthesia, and felt it gave the public some comforting information. However, it is a serious omission to neglect to mention that anesthesiologists (physicians who specialize in giving anesthesia) are only half of the professionals who provide the anesthesia care discussed in the article. For over 100 years, certified registered nurse anesthetists (nurse practitioners with advanced training in anesthesia) have been giving safe and comfortable patient care, same as the M.D. anesthesiologists. We often train side by side, and do the same kinds of cases in adjacent operating rooms every day, with equally good outcomes. The frightening stories of deaths from anesthesia given outside the hospital are often from having anesthetic drugs given by individuals who are neither board-certified anesthesiologists nor CRNAs. -- John Evans, CRNA, Ph.D.
Regrets, he has a few If Ken Starr has any regrets, it's that his partisan witch-hunt didn't pay off. His wish that someone else had investigated l'affaire Lewinsky is not unlike Richard Nixon saying he wished he hadn't made tapes: If they'd handled their respective situations differently, maybe the constitutional subversions they attempted would have worked. And no power on earth can convince me that he's not timing his final report to do the most damage to Hillary's (expected) Senate campaign. Starr always has been and always will be a partisan first -- the only thing that could surprise me at this point is if the GOP in his home state don't try to run him for Senate when he finally wraps things up. -- Daniel J Sikorski Kenneth Starr's plea that he never meant to carry on a vendetta against President Clinton has a strong odor of hypocrisy. He conveniently overlooks the abuse and intimidation of a host of innocent witnesses by himself and his deputies; their leaks of grand jury information on at least 24 occasions; their use of Tripp's illegally obtained tapes and their secret collusion with the Paula Jones lawyers to put a sting on the president; their abrogation of attorney-client privilege; and Starr's pornographic report to Congress to egg on the Republicans to their totally partisan impeachment. History will record that Kenneth Starr spent five years and $50 million to parlay a sordid sex story into a reckless effort to bring down a popular Democratic president, and thus created a national nightmare. He deserves dismissal for cause, and retirement in public disgrace from his position as independent counsel. -- Morton Wachspress
Your article on Kenneth Starr was sleazy reading indeed. One point which was not emphasized enough during this whole mess was that Starr had never prosecuted a case in his life. Such incompetence and arrogance and what an example of what can happen when such unbridled power is placed in the hands of a few! -- Joanne C. Murray
Let them eat stock options -- Chuck Rostkowski
If Americans wanted to take care of the poor they could simply redirect some of the taxes they use to prop up the governments of Israel, Egypt, South Korea and others for domestic issues. And meaningless pork military projects such as the Seawolf submarine and the F-22 fighter could be canceled and the money used to address poverty. More taxes aren't the answer. Americans already pay taxes nearly equivalent to "socialist" countries such as Canada. The money simply needs to be spent domestically. -- Brad Clawsie Arianna Huffington lambastes the Clinton administration's statements encouraging business expansion in blighted areas: "This is not about charity ... it's about investment. There's money to be made." As an alternative, she offers nothing but another giant tax break for charitable (religious) contributions and the same business tax and regulation breaks the Republican have pushed for decades (legalized sweatshops). What about the Clinton administration's role in raising the minimum wage, arguably the most important anti-poverty program since the Great Society? Where was Huffington during that debate? Probably screaming that a guaranteed living wage would destroy the American economy. Huffington also distorts statistics to turn the success of traditional anti-poverty efforts into failure; "In 1964, 36 million Americans lived in poverty. Thirty-five years and a War on Poverty later, 35.6 million Americans live in poverty." Thirty-five years ago, the population of the United States was substantially less than what it is today. With a huge increase in population, a real reduction in the absolute number of poor people is a huge victory. But the most disgusting theory Huffington advances is the idea that electing another callous conservative like Reagan or Bush Sr. will energize the coalition of anti-poverty groups into effective action. While more might have been written about the plight of the poor during Republican administrations, much less was done. The gap between haves and have-nots, which Huffington claims to care so much about, steadily expanded during the Reagan-Bush years. This expansion only slowed and slightly reversed during the Clinton administration, in spite of the best efforts of a savage Republican Congress. As Huffington apes Marie Antoinette's solution for the hungry poor with her call to "let them eat column inches," I can only hope her career as a pundit suffers the same fate as the former queen of France -- a public beheading and a pauper's grave. -- Ken Erfourth While I may burst into flames for saying this, I agree with Arianna Huffington. Our nation has forgotten the poor and has been pretending for years that they have vanished. I am saddened that it takes someone like Huffington to voice what every Democrat should have been hammering on for years. Social programs designed to help those in poverty and especially children in poverty have been bled dry over the last two decades. Instead we send our tax money so that crackpot defense contractors can develop multimillion-dollar weapons which will never work or even be built. The fat cats get richer and the poor get more so. Our legislators spend their time trying to white-out and amend the Constitution so that prayer can be required of our kids in school, where they learn about obviously erroneous creationist "theories." Our Congress is nothing but a collection of money-grubbing whores whose votes are for sale. -- Scott Raybern Arianna Huffington addresses the greatest problem our country now faces -- and the one least addressed by the press and candidates seeking the presidency. The widening gulf in income between the haves and the have-nots just isn't represented in unemployment statistics, which only point to employment in general terms and don't distinguish between a full-time, salaried employee and a struggling, uninsured part-timer. Frankly, these stats seem to serve the purposes of politicians, so that they might point to them as proof of our nation's burgeoning prosperity while neglecting the vast numbers of unemployed, partially employed and uninsured suffering under their watch. While temping two years ago, I worked with several single mothers who were paid so little at their primary jobs that they were forced to work second jobs to support their children. These women also juggled their work schedules so that when their smaller children were awake and at home, they would be, too. Often this entailed working all-night shifts, and staying up in order to see their children off to school before heading off to another job, after which they might get three hours of sleep before their children returned home in the early evening. So many working mothers are criticized for not raising their children properly, yet when they do everything humanly possible to be there for them, they're met with roadblock after roadblock, imposed not just by private employers, but also by the government: The women I'm speaking of had state-funded jobs. I've grown cynical and doubtful that the problems of a great many people in this country will ever be addressed by a presidential candidate. However, if a politician who could shatter my cynicism should come along, he or she would have my gratitude and my vote in a heartbeat. -- Jennifer C. Wise A Weicker/Huffington independent ticket in 2000? Nah -- America doesn't deserve it. -- Michael Goetz |
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