Letters to the editor MUST be accompanied by your daytime and evening phone numbers for verification purposes. Letters without phone numbers cannot be considered for publication. Letters must include first and last names. Short letters have a better chance of being selected for publication. We do not publish anonymous letters.


Sink your teeth

into this reality

Celebrity worship was in full bloom with former Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker’s recent appearance at Franklin Mills mall, as admiring young girls and women showed up in droves to stand in line for a chance to come face to face with the actress hawking her new clothing line called Bitten.
Her clever ad slogan is Get Bitten. Given her character on the cable TV series, the erotic innuendo is about as subtle as a ton of bricks. Can anyone seriously doubt that the multitudes of Parker’s fans will not only buy up her line of clothes, but also buy into the casual Cosmo girl mentality that the show unrealistically held up as chic, sophisticated and desirable?
It probably says a lot about the values of today’s female youth, even though many parents would prefer to bury their heads in the sand and pretend otherwise.
Ronald Smith
Morrell Park



God bless the

folks at NORC

In July, when we had a storm and tree branches fell on our lawn and flowers, I was lucky to have the telephone number of the Rhawnhurst NORC office, which helps seniors in dire need.
A couple days later, they came and removed all the branches. What a good job they did!
We are blessed to have such a wonderful organization in our neighborhood to help us seniors with all the problems around the house that we cannot do ourselves anymore.
Thank you and may God bless your work.
Hilde Crank
Fox Chase
Editor’s note: Rhawnhurst NORC’s phone number is 215-728-1330



Smile, you’re on

cash-cow camera!

As we have said all along, Philadelphia’s red light cameras were the foot in the door for photo radar, where the real money is.
Philadelphia City Council has begun deliberation on adding photo radar to Roosevelt Boulevard. Surprise, surprise, the red light cameras have built-in photo radar capability.
Do you smell a rat? I sure do. It’s the smell of money squeezed from reasonable and prudent safe drivers who are victimized by bureaucrats who make the wrong highway safety decisions instead of having licensed, trained, and experienced highway safety engineers make the right, i.e. safe, decisions, like they did in the good old days.
Fixing dangerous intersections doesn’t generate any money. Ticket cameras generate big, big money. At $100 a ticket, second-rate municipal governments want them. At $50,000 per unit, camera makers want to sell them. For billions in surcharges, after points are added to the "parking-like-tickets," the auto insurers, who are backers of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, want them on highways everywhere.
Timing the lights on the Boulevard to 40 mph will end the "speeding," but won’t make any money for the city, the camera makers, and the insurers, so it is no wonder that they want the Boulevard to remain hazardous. Fixing the problem won’t let them steal money from motorists.
Even if you don’t live in Philadelphia, this is still your problem. If the camera interests win here, you can bet your bippy Pennsylvania highways and intersections will be strung with so many cameras you will think you are in Hollywood.
But there is no popcorn with these pictures: just another tax disguised as highway safety.
Tom McCarey
National Motorists Association

• • •

State Reps. John Perzel, George Kenney and their cronies have to be stopped from all the unfairness that the traffic camera lights are creating.
In Pennsylvania if you run a red light the fine is so many dollars and three points on your driving record. Most if not all car insurance companies check your driving record to see how much potential risk there is if they insure you.
My understanding is these Boulevard lights are not recording the drivers (only the license plates) who are in violation of the state driving laws. They are simply fund-raising for the Philadelphia Parking Authority (PPA), which is better known as the "Republican patronage haven."
Perzel and Co. sold the cameras on safety and fines without points for the violators. Maybe that is good for the violators.
The good Pennsylvania drivers who do not run red lights, etc., are paying too much in car insurance premiums because the insurance risk is not being appropriately spread to the violators. The violators could be paying the same or less in car insurance premiums than the good drivers because their violations are not being properly accounted for in Harrisburg.
If these guys were really worried for our safety, then they would be putting those proposed Boulevard speed cameras on I-95, where the minimum speed to survive is above the legal limit of 55 mph.
State Rep. James Roebuck is proposing a "legislative audit" on the PPA to find out why it hasn’t provided the hundreds of millions of dollars that Perzel promised the school district when he took it over in 2001. Does that spell trouble for you, John?
Mayer Krain
Modena Park



Hey, Hillary, who was

the better half?

New York Sen. and socialist Hillary Clinton said she was proud of her husband’s accomplishments while he was in the White House. She must have been referring to his sexual accomplishments with six different females.
William E. Staudt
Fox Chase



Gun ownership helps

reduce homicide

In a recent letter to the editor (Philly’s violence is all about soft gun laws, Aug. 2), the author claims that "European countries, which have strict gun laws [...] have one-tenth the deaths because of gun violence."
The spring 2007 issue of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy by criminologists Don Kates (American constitutional lawyer) and Gary Mauser (Canadian professor) contains an extensive study entitled Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide?
In their painstaking research, the authors compared 18 European nations: nine with the highest ownership of firearms per household, and nine with the lowest. Their conclusion: "the first group, with triple the rate of gun ownership, had one-third the homicide rate of the second group." In Russia — where firearms had been under police-state control for decades — the authors found an exceedingly violent society: "Russian murder increased so drastically that by the early 1990s the Russian rate was three times higher than that of the United States. Between 1998-2004, Russian murder rates were nearly four times higher than American rates."
The authors go on: "Moreover, there is not insubstantial evidence that in the United States widespread gun availability has helped reduce murder and other violent crime rates." They cite National Institute of Justice surveys among prison inmates, showing that for many of them "the fear that a victim might be armed deterred them from confrontation crimes. The felons most frightened [...] were those from states with the greatest relative number of privately owned handguns. Conversely, robbery is highest in states that most restrict gun ownership."
The authors do not claim that firearm ownership is the cause of low crime rates. However, they conclude that "the long-term macrocosmic evidence is that gun ownership spread widely throughout societies consistently correlates with stable or declining murder rates. Whether causative or not, the consistent international pattern is that more guns equal less murder and other violent crime."
The study is available at http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf
Leo Iwaskiw
Somerton



No quick answers

to the gun problem

In response to the letters regarding the problem of gun violence, my opinion is that people are looking for a quick answer without really thinking about the issue.
Changing the gun laws is only going to change the type or number of guns being purchased legally by honest citizens. Someone who is purchasing a gun for the purpose of crime does not care if they are doing so legally.
Do you honestly think that someone who would use a gun for crime would be worried about buying a gun that has been ruled illegal or they have already bought their quota of guns for the month?
Let’s be real here. And for that matter, do you think criminals buy their guns from legitimate gun stores? Are you even familiar with our current gun laws or are you just making assumptions based on what you see on TV?
The fact is that in order to purchase a gun legally you have to pass a criminal background check. It is done instantly over the phone and the store cannot legally sell you a gun if you do not pass.
So how are teenagers and criminals getting their hands on guns? They are buying them illegally on the street. So why don’t we focus on the real issue, which is people who sell guns illegally? Why not write new legislation with stricter penalties for people who are found guilty of selling stolen guns and for "straw" purchasers who use their clean criminal record to buy a legal gun for someone with a criminal record? That sounds like a way to fight the problem of illegal guns without infringing on the rights of honest citizens.
And what about looking at the real reasons this crime is occurring? A person doesn’t get a gun in their hand and immediately decide to commit a crime.
Guns are just a tool that criminals use to achieve their goals of crime and violence. Why don’t we, as a community, focus on fixing the social problems that lead people to commit crime? Let’s work on trying to end poverty, reducing the massive amounts of unemployment, and improve our education system. A person with a good education and a good job is much less likely to commit a crime.
Another factor driving the increase in crime is the lack of people coming forward to the authorities with information. Why not work on making people feel like they can give anonymous information about a crime and feel comfortable that their identity will not be revealed, which could lead to retaliation? If someone knows they can commit a criminal act in broad daylight and no one will give the police any information about it, violent crimes become much easier to commit.
And finally, we need to educate the children of the city about the effects of crime and gun violence. This needs to be done early and consistently. It should be taught in the schools. Let the kids meet the families of victims and hear their tragic stories. Let them meet people who have served time in prison for gun violence and have now moved their lives in a more positive direction. Kids need to see more positive examples in our society. If we can get to kids early and let them see the results of crime before they commit it, I think it would get a lot more kids on the right path.
I agree that gun violence is a tremendous problem in our city. However, making new gun control laws is just a fast and easy way for people to feel like they are doing something without addressing the real issues. Big problems require big answers.
Let’s stop fighting about guns so that we can all work together on issues we can agree on. The future of our city depends on it.
Jerry Jackson
Holmesburg



Happy days are not here

again for the Democrats

It struck me after a nap this evening. The Democrats will lose their bid for the White House in 2008.
While 70 percent of the public wants us out of Iraq, the lead candidates have already staked out positions of continued engagement with options to escalate with Iran and others who challenge our role as global authoritarian.
While support for comprehensive, universal health care is increasing daily, they are hedging to protect the interests of the insurance companies, which have given so much to fund our elections.
While immigrants, African-Americans and Moslems are being attacked along with basic constitutional rights of all of us, the Democrats are too timid to confront the issue. While Americans are dumbfounded by phenomenal deficits and crumbling infrastructure, the Democrats are voting to "stay the course."
The frustration of those who have voted Democrat in the past is palpable; and, months before the election season, their choice has already been curtailed. It is already clear who has mega-funding and who will be acknowledged by the media conglomerates as "credible" candidates.
The Democrats will lose the White House in 2008, and after the election, pundits will spin tales about how it could have happened.
Charles Sherrouse
Oxford Circle



Reps praised for voting

for energy measure

I would like to thank U.S. Reps. Robert Brady, Allyson Schwartz and Chaka Fattah for supporting an amendment to establish a national Renewable Electricity Standard (RES). The U.S. House of Representatives passed this important amendment as part of a broader national energy bill.
The passage of the RES along with the larger energy bill would take significant steps toward a cleaner and more secure energy future for Pennsylvania and the entire country. The RES requires that utilities generate 15 percent of their electricity from clean, renewable energy such as wind, solar, or biomass, or through energy efficiency savings by 2020.
We thank Reps. Brady, Schwartz and Fattah for standing up to massive opposition by utility company lobbyists, and joining a broad coalition of environmentalists, labor unions, farm groups, and clean energy developers to champion and pass this bipartisan legislation.
Michael Hankinson
PennEnvironment volunteer



Steven belongs

with his grandparents

I just finished reading your article about Steven and his grandparents, the Brasovankins.
It angers me that DHS and the courts should interfere with a loving family just because of age.
Unless there is something else going on that has not been noted to the public, I believe age should not play a part in deciding the living arrangements of this child.
Taking a 5-year-old away from people whom he knows and have loved and cared for him can have devastating effects on him.
I know my own grandchildren are very upset and usually exhibit a meltdown by the second day when their mother goes away for her job for two or three days and they get to talk to her at least twice every day she’s away.
A child needs to be around the people he trusts and depends on. A child needs to feel secure.
Removing him from the surroundings he is familiar with can cause psychological effects that will take a lifetime to heal (or maybe never).
DHS’ track record is less than pristine. They have been known to place children into foster homes that abuse children and have even caused the deaths of one or more children.
To me, it would make more sense to keep the child with the grandparents and have DHS monitor via home visits.
The courts are not better than DHS. Why postpone a hearing because of a vacation? I am certain, all parties involved knew well in advance the date of the hearing.
The judge only took into account the adults involved in the case and not the child. What did it matter to the judge if this child and his family had to remain in limbo a little longer?
At the end of the day, the judge went to his/her own home. The DHS person went on vacation. And the court-appointed child advocate ducked out so she could not be confronted by reporters.
Some child advocate. She went home to her home at the end of the day too.
Is DHS trying to improve their record by showing they care for this child by destroying a family unit?
Is DHS trying to improve their image by causing such aggravation to elderly grandparents trying to do the right thing for their grandchild?
Is DHS going to cause such aggravation that it takes it toll on the health of one or both of the grandparents until one or both die and then DHS can say, "See, we told you they were too old?"
As long as the grandparents are providing a safe, healthy home for a child they love, then, I believe DHS and the courts should stay out of this family’s business.
I have never before written in regard to a news article, but in my eyes, with the information presented, these people are being harassed only because of age, and someone had to say something.
Thanks for letting me get this off my mind and I hope more readers will write in to support this family unit.
This child should be home with his family immediately.
Rhoda Stein
Somerton

• • •

Me and my husband are going through the same thing the Brasovankins are going through. The same judge took our children away from us in December. She is really unfair in all her rulings and doesn’t listen to the facts of the case.
DHS is the other problem. They keep taking the wrong children away from the wrong families and not taking the children away from the real neglectful or abusive parents.
If DHS would start doing their jobs right, then families like us wouldn’t be going through all of this grief.
My children ask me every day, "Mommy, when are we coming home?" and it breaks my heart, because I don’t have an answer for them.
Pamela McCullough
Mayfair

Share your opinion by e-mail

Click here to return to this week's editorial . . .