In any language, baseball is a unifier
Thank you for the article by Carroll Rogers reminding us that Cubans are people very much like us in their love of “béisbol” (“On this field, ‘bol’ is more than a game,” Sports, Feb. 13.
John Hollender, Atlanta
Catholic leaders guilty of selective outrage
As a “cradle Catholic,” I was awaiting Mike Luckovich’s take on Catholics and oral contraceptives and applaud him for cutting to the end of the argument (Opinion, Feb. 10).
In two panels, he exposed the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church. I did not see this type of outcry by Catholic leaders on other social issues (pedophile priests, enhanced interrogation or Medicaid de-funding.
Steve Shearer, Canton
Let’s make campaigns shorter and cheaper
For two years leading up to our election, a small army of presidential wannabes spend billions of dollars calling each other (and the incumbent) names.
When the final candidates are selected, they will spend hundreds of millions calling names and making promises to get elected. The only benefit is the money the media makes from all the debates and commercials.
In Canada, presidential campaigning is limited to a fixed period with a fixed dollar amount.
Why can’t we set a fixed period with a fixed dollar amount and let the electorate determine the results based on how the candidates present their beliefs, ideas and plans for what is best for the country?
Set all primaries within a brief period midyear. Get rid of the PACs, negative ads and meaningless debates and polls.
Then and only then might we find people with the intelligence, integrity, experience and ability to run this country — without destroying it for partisan or personal reasons.
Harris Gottlieb, Dunwoody
Obama eases the mess inherited from Bush
President Obama’s decision to lower the over-the-top U.S. embassy presence in Baghdad is a welcome act of sanity regarding an otherwise monumental embarrassment.
This grandly expensive memorial to U.S. pre-eminence is a metaphor for much that was wrong with the conduct of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld during the Iraqi occupation, which featured a string of bad decisions (e.g., encouraging chaos by dismantling civilian policing at the onset and spending untold millions to feed a reconstruction frenzy that was largely an exercise in misjudgment, incompetence and theft). It is reminiscent of the behavior of every empire that has succumbed to hubris.
It’s no surprise that the Iraqis still don’t like us.
Bob Eberwein, Atlanta
