A race we must win
Dear editor:
Let's say a new restaurant opens. We all know what happens -- a flood of people will rush to check it out. For a few days, the restaurant down the street notices a drop in business. Unfortunately, the customers start to notice at the new place that the food isn't very good, and the service is worse. Pretty soon their parking lot is almost empty and the one down the street is full again. It's called competition and it doesn't matter if it's restaurants or some other business or service.
Here's some information you may not know I saw a little while back. In San Francisco, only 15% of Black kids are ready for high school vs. 71% for Asians. Only 28% are reading proficiently vs. 70% for Asians. In Chicago, from Illinoispolicy.org, 21,000 students in Chicago public schools are being left behind. A large percentage of students do not have basic competency in reading, math and science. In Baltimore, from the Daily Mail, parents are also upset because in 23 schools not one student understood basic math. It says parents blame the Democrat-led city's fraud and corruption.
You'll find similar statistics in NYC, Philadelphia and Atlanta. In Atlanta a few years ago, the scores were so bad the Democrat-run schools tried to cheat. On a standardized test in Atlanta a few years ago the teachers knew their students would fail. So the teachers gave the students the answers. They thought the people that sent the tests were stupid, but they knew something was up because all of a sudden, a school that had of history of failing grades were turning in As and Bs. Eleven teachers were convicted and sentenced to jail time. If you read George Will's article about Philly, you see it's not about raising the bar for the lowest children it's about dragging higher achievers down.
That's where LEARNS comes in. Something Doc and none of these liberals will get. Think competition. If your child is stuck in a lousy school, parents have a choice; they can move their child into a school that's performing at a higher level. Competition will make the bad schools clean up their act or they'll lose money to better schools.
We all know we are in a battle with China over the future. We can no longer squander our children in inferior schools. We must win the race or fall into second place. China will clean our clock if we can't compete. Xi and the Communist Chinese are licking their chops watching the terrible job we're doing educating our children in city after city across this country. It's a race we must win. Second place won't be any fun for our children's future. We can't afford to waste any more time on Democrats and their failing school systems.
Larry Bauer
Hot Springs Village
The GOP and guns
Dear editor:
According to the American Journal of Medicine, we have an average of 120 guns per 100 people, which is seven times higher than any other developed nation. Before President Reagan, we were the same as Canada.
Deaths by guns in U.S.: suicide is eight times higher; unintentional gun deaths 6.2 times higher; overall rate is 10 times higher. Ninety percent of all women murdered in 23 countries were in the U.S. and 91% of all children and fully 82% of all humans killed by guns were in the U.S.
A Gallup poll showed 57% of all Americans and 85% of Democrats want stricter gun control legislation, but Republicans, as usual, go in the opposite direction. In fact, it just came out that a Tennessee lawmaker said of the latest shooting that they will do nothing. They claim it's not guns, it's mental illness, but the U.S. does not have any more mental illness than anywhere else, but it would be nice if they would at least ban guns from the mentally ill, but don't. In fact, I heard that after this latest slaughter, some Republicans actually went to protect, not the children, but a gun store.
Not too long ago they actually reactivated the rights of abusive husbands to purchase guns. Are you kidding me? No wonder so many women die in this country, but then we're just females and not nearly as important as some yahoo's right to walk around with an AR-15 strapped to his back. The No. 1 cause of death of children is now guns, which replaced cars. Same for police, so it's no wonder the Uvalde police refused to go in to protect children because they feared the weapon, so I cannot imagine how terrified a young child was at seeing their friends torn apart by bullets. And what do Republicans do? Bow their heads and pray, and they better begin praying for their careers, not to mention their souls.
Judith Zitko
Hot Springs Village
Hard to support governor
Dear editor:
I am trying to be proud of Governor SHS because I love Hot Springs and I love Arkansas, but it has been hard.
She just doesn't seem interested in us or the lives we lead. Instead, she seems to live in some Oz where Tucker and Sean & Co. pull the strings and turn the wheels while Toto gets run over by a bus driven by flying monkeys and clowns.
She is too busy with bathrooms and vouchers and libraries. And I'm not so proud of our local legislative group either, for they vote in lockstep and approve what SHS sends them -- without any comment -- seemingly afraid of her just as national Republicans seem afraid of the former president.
I wonder if Governor SHS was too busy to notice that two people announced their wedding engagement at the recent St. Pat's parade. They were both women, but no one at the parade seemed to mind because everyone was busy loving their neighbors as they did themselves.
Ken Cook
Hot Springs
Old policies don't work
Dear editor:
Is this really happening? Are we really going to try old Republican policies that we know don't work?
My fellow Arkansans elected a proven liar and an enormously unqualified candidate for governor. She has no political experience except for lying to the American people for the biggest crook in our U.S. presidential history. Watching her bulldoze through her Neanderthal ideas like censoring books, discriminating against the LGBTQ community, leaving out the poor and underprivileged in public education, calling Joe Biden a "radical left demon." We all know who the demon was!
Now, she wants to build a mega-prison to the tune of over $400 million with 30,000 beds for inmates! History, statistics, simple common sense tells us this doesn't work! What if we put that same amount of resources into early childhood education? Job training and college prep classes? Equal housing programs that encourage our underprivileged Arkansans to purchase their first home? Target predatory lending that takes advantage of poor people? More mental health facilities to deal so many issues. We lost over 1 million fellow Americans to COVID-19, and now we are not supposed to mention the word?
This is why Arkansas is stuck, never moving forward. Dr. Chris Jones was such a better candidate, human being, businessman and scholar. He had the ideas to bring Arkansas out of the dark. I am not giving up on my state. I love this beautiful place I call home. But we have to do better. Old stale Republican ideas are only going to keep Arkansas down in the dirt.
Catherine Canu
Hot Springs