A Note to Readers: The Decision to Publish Diplomatic Documents

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/world/29editornote.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=the%20decision%20to%20publish%20diplomatic%20documents&st=cse

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 8:32 AM
Subject: re: A Note to Readers: The Decision to Publish Diplomatic Documents
To: letters@nytimes.com


To the Editor:

     We welcome Mr. Keller's defense of Americans' "right to know what is being done in their name".  How else is the electorate to make meaningful decisions?  We therefore look forwards--in this brave new world of tell-all journalism--to his account of why he suppressed the news of warrantless wiretapping of American citizens  until after the presidential election of 2004.  Surely the electorate has an interest in its own Fourth Amendment guarantees, no less than in the snarky repartee between foreign heads of state? 

   We're all ears.

Barry Levine

Our Constitutional Court

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/23/opinion/23tues3.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=our%20constitutional%20court&st=cse

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 8:50 AM
Subject: re: Our Constitutional Court
To: letters@nytimes.com


To the Editor:

    In 2008, the Roberts court ruled that our ratified treaties--the supreme law in the land--do not trump Texas state law. In that ruling (Medellin v. Texas), the Supreme Court came unmoored from the Supreme Law. By directly denying the plain text of the Constitution of the United States, the Supreme Court moved from interpreting the Law to gutting it.  Nothing the Supreme Court has done since then should surprise us; they're making it up at will.

Barry Levine

Nations That Debate Coal Use Export It to Feed China’s Need

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/22/world/asia/22fossil.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Booming%20China%20coal&st=cse

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 10:38 AM
Subject: re: Nations That Debate Coal Use Export It to Feed China’s Need
To: letters@nytimes.com


To the Editor:

   The world as we know it--the world in which dinosaurs and mammoths and humans evolved--was made possible in the Carboniferous era. Between about 350million and 290million years ago, gigatons of carbon were pulled out of the atmosphere by photosynthetic plants and sequestered ultimately as coal.  This raised the pH of our oceans and changed the climate of the planet.  With the Industrial Revolution, we began to undo this, pumping carbon from the fossil pool into our atmosphere. If we continue on this course, we will create a new, warmer more acidic world. Interesting life-forms will probably evolve to inhabit it, but humans are unlikely to survive to meet them.

Barry Levine

The Empty Earmarks Pledge

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/opinion/17wed1.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Empty%20Earmarks%20Pledge&st=cse

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 9:26 AM
Subject: re: The Empty Earmarks Pledge
To: letters@nytimes.com


To the Editor:

   This newspaper persists in underestimating the pernicious effect of congressional earmarks.  The cost of such earmarks is vastly larger than the sum of their facevalues. Whole bills that should never have passed have become law because an opposing vote was co-opted with an earmark. This is no side-show.  This is the main business of Congress in carrying out the business of the People.  We have local governments to handle local issues; U.S. senators need to be legislating and voting for the benefit of the nation, not for scraps of porkbarrel to reward their donors.

Barry Levine

Somali Pirates Free British Couple for Ransom After More Than a Year in Captivity

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/15/world/africa/15pirates.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=pirates&st=cse

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 9:21 AM
Subject: re: Somali Pirates Free British Couple for Ransom After More Than a Year in Captivity
To: letters@nytimes.com


To the Editor:

   Your tale of piracy chilled my blood. If Somalis now command magic ships capable of "sail[ing] to Xarardheere, a pirate den in central Somalia", will they pop up in my backyard next? A moment's research set my heart at ease. Xarardheere is just 13miles from the coast, and there is moorage for a conventional pirate boat at El Ghan, without invoking flying ships. Your article might have said as much.

Barry Levine

Barack Obama, Phone Home

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/opinion/07rich.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=barack%20obama%20phone%20home&st=cse

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Sun, Nov 7, 2010 at 8:54 AM
Subject: re: Barack Obama, Phone Home
To: letters@nytimes.com


To the Editor:

   Two years ago, Americans voted for Change. We looked to the Professor of Law to bring us the Rule of Law; instead he has delivered the primacy of Politics. Refusing to look backwards, he has blinded Justice to evidence of torture, of war profiteering and of invasions of privacy.  History will credit president Obama with extending health care to millions who had been excluded, but it was accomplished by routing a large and growing fraction of our nations economy through the hands of the Insurance Industry that we mistrust.

   In 2010, Americans voted for Change, again.  President Obama would do well to consider that we mean it.

Barry Levine

Antibiotics Research Subsidies Weighed by U.S.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/06/health/policy/06germ.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=U.S.%20considers%20subsidies%20to%20develop%20mew%20antibiotics&st=cse

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine <levinebar@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 7:11 PM
Subject: re: Antibiotics Research Subsidies Weighed by U.S.
To: letters@nytimes.com


To the Editor:

    The threat of pathogens resistant to all known antibiotics is a real and present danger to us all. The remedies proposed by congressman Gingrey and by David Brennan cannot suffice to stop it.  If the U.S. FDA were presented a miraculous new antibiotic today that worked against all known resistant pathogens, it would approve it only for last-line defense after other antibiotics had failed first. That's the responsible thing to do. Alas, that is such a small indication that the drug company could never make back the cost of R&D in the U.S. market at any credible price point even if you were to triple the length of patent exclusivity.  By then, sales outside the authority of the U.S. FDA would have long since driven the evolution of new organisms, resistant even to this new drug.  This is not a problem that our profit-driven drug industry can fix. If someone-government or private--doesn't step and and fund this work outright, we and our children will blunder into a dark new world in which a trivial infection--or mere childbirth--could prove fatal about twenty percent of the time, just as it did before the advent of "miracle drugs".

Barry Levine

War Reconstruction Fraud Draws Big Fines

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/06/world/asia/06contractor.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=war%20reconstruction%20fraud%20draws%20big%20fines&st=cse

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 7:51 AM
Subject: re: War Reconstruction Fraud Draws Big Fines
To: letters@nytimes.com

To the Editor:

   After this fractious election season, the nation needs a non-partisan cause to pull us all together. Let’s hang prosecute some war profiteers. Everyone hates waste in government.  And any politician who would intercede for donors who give our sons and daughters in the Armed Services less potable water, less food, less chance to come home alive than we have paid for—let’s hang replace him while we’re at it.

Barry Levine

Major Technical Difficulties

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/03/opinion/03wed1.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=major%20technical%20difficulties&st=cse

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 10:26 AM
Subject: re: Major Technical Difficulties
To: letters@nytimes.com


To the Editor:

   While the 2008 amendment to the FISA statute did give "retroactive legal cover to more than five years of the [Bush] administration's illegal spying", that immunity is from civil suits only.    Attorney General Holder still has the power and the responsibility to prosecute these crimes.  Until our Department of Justice takes this responsibility seriously, Americans would be foolish to give the FBI any more tools to spy on us. Rather, until the telecoms are prosecuted for their known crimes, Americans will seek ever more ways to evade the FBI's criminal intrusions.

Barry Levine