Letters to the editor

OPINION:

Taking exception

I write in response to Sen. Tom Coburn’s recent Op-Ed (“Time to end Metro’s gravy train,” Monday) concerning his opposition to Metro funding and the hold he placed on a bill to allow federal matching funds for Metro infrastructure improvements. I grew up and lived in Oklahoma my whole life until moving to the D.C. area in 2006 to become a civil servant. As a former constituent of Mr. Coburn, I must take issue with his analysis.

The senator criticizes the fact that Oklahomans help pay for the system that transports federal workers to their jobs. Without Metro, however, how would the vast majority of federal employees get to work? Who would process Oklahomans’ Social Security checks? Who would administer the federal aid to assist in the next natural disaster that strikes Oklahoma? How would the senator’s staff get to work to do the good work of his constituents?

Moreover, simply to throw average salaries around is not a fair comparison, completely ignoring the vast differences in the cost of living. I can say from personal experience that each of those $40,000 one is making in Oklahoma goes a lot further than the $90,000 a federal employee is making. So let’s take the disingenuous comparisons out of the picture. That is not the issue. Metro riders already pay a higher proportion of the costs of their transportation than riders in other major areas. Making them pay more is not the answer. The senator asks that local governments pay more — that is what the bill he is holding up requires! If he would release his hold, the local jurisdictions would match the federal government’s contribution. Then, perhaps, Metro would have the funds to stop playing catch-up with maintenance and could start doing preventative maintenance. As the senator should know as a physician, prevention is always better than treatment.

Now I don’t expect my argument to resonate with Mr. Coburn. I hope, however, that his 99 colleagues in the Senate will decide to be leaders and force the issue, providing the funds Metro needs to continue to get the federal work force where they need to be, and allow myself and others like me to continue to serve the American people.

TRAVIS R. CHAPMAN

Arlington

Return female crabs

Concerning the article “Governors request aid for watermen.” (Briefly, Metropolitan, Saturday): It may be better that the governors recommend that their respective legislatures reinstate the regulation that female crabs be returned to the water by the crab watermen. The markings under the crab make recognition easy. Understandably, this slows down the harvesting, but it is clear that the diminished crab population is more expensive to the industry than the added cost of female crab return.

KIR G. KAROUNA

Ellicott City, Md.

A response to Rev. Wright

I was shocked and saddened to hear my 80-year-old father say he thought the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. spoke the truth about America. (“Rhetorical rampage,” Commentary, May 1).

My dad is a great man. He was one of the first blacks to break the color barrier in the Baltimore City Fire Department, where he suffered segregation and humiliating treatment.

He won Firefighter of the Year two times. Married with four children, he worked full time and attended college. He is a doctor of theology. He authored a book and still pastors numerous churches. He truly believes in love and faith in God. My dad would never use Mr. Wright’s hate-filled rhetoric.

So how could my hero say he agreed with this nut case? It defies logic.

Then it dawned on me. Logic, reason or truth did not enter into the equation. Dad’s response to Mr. Wright was purely emotional. It is all about his deeply hurt feelings.

I remembered Dad telling me about an incident while serving in the Merchant Marines. Whites in Florida tried to hang him simply for getting off the ship. His fellow white seamen rescued him.

Racial progress in 2008 America makes Mr. Wright’s rant absurd. Dad’s response to his remarks is in essence a racial persecution flashback; similar to a hippie having an LSD flashback or a vet suffering a war flashback.

I suspect there are many black seniors, though loving and kind to all, still carry deep emotional scars from a bygone era.

So, while I am a proud black conservative Republican who loves his country and Dad, I will give him a pass. I respectfully forgive my Dad for being wrong about Mr. Wright.

LLOYD MARCUS

Baltimore

FDR and the Holocaust

Your report about Holocaust rescue hero Raoul Wallenberg (“Wallenberg data may solve puzzle,” Foreign, Monday) noted that he was a “secret emissary of the U.S. War Refugee Board,” an agency that was “created by President Roosevelt in an attempt to stem the annihilation of Europe’s Jews.”

While that statement is accurate, it tells only half the story. Roosevelt did indeed create the board but only after fighting tooth and nail to prevent it from being created. The initiative for the board’s establishment came from the rescue activists known as the Bergson Group, who in the autumn of 1943 persuaded members of Congress to introduce a resolution urging the president to create a government agency to save Jewish refugees from Hitler’s clutches. The Roosevelt administration lobbied against the resolution, arguing that nothing could be done to help the Jews until the war was over. The problem with that line of thinking, of course, was that there might not be any Jews left to save by the time the war ended.

In December 1943, the resolution unanimously passed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was headed for a vote in the full Senate. In the House, it was the subject of hearings that shed embarrassing light on the administration’s failure to take any meaningful steps to rescue Jewish refugees.

Meanwhile, Treasury Department officials had discovered that the State Department had been suppressing news of Nazi atrocities and blocking opportunities to rescue refugees (for fear that rescue would lead to pressure on the United States to take them in). Treasury staffer Josiah E. DuBois Jr. authored a blockbuster report, “The Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews,” documenting State’s actions.

Armed with the DuBois report and with the specter of imminent congressional action, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. approached Roosevelt in January 1944 and warned him that the rescue issue was about to explode into a nasty election-year scandal. It was only at that point, under strong pressure and in a last-ditch attempt to pre-empt Congress, that FDR established the War Refugee Board. The board played a key role in the rescue of more than 200,000 Jews during the last 15 months of the war. However, many more could have been saved if Roosevelt had cooperated with Congress and established the board earlier.

RAFAEL MEDOFF

Director

The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies

Washington

Price-fixing is a boondoggle

These “greedy oil company price manipulation” letters never cease to amaze me (“Oil companies stack the deck,” Tuesday).

Congress once again has ordered the Federal Trade Commission to go find price manipulation so they can hang the oil company CEOs.

Remember Katrina? Remember $3.50 gasoline? Congress, true to form, sent the FTC off on another price-gouging investigation. They could not find any. In fact, every time gas prices rise, Congress does the same thing and the FTC comes up short.

This tried and true technique by Congress ought to be seen as a diversionary tactic at this point, but considering Jay Stout’s letter, apparently not. If you want to see collusion, price-fixing, kickbacks, and vote-buying on a massive scale, all at public expense, you have to look no further than the current farm bill and last year’s ethanol boondoggle.

Let’s see, oil is approaching $124 a barrel on the commodities market, and, true to form, Congress is taking 51 cents per gallon out of taxpayer’s pockets to ply the pockets of big agriculture. But the taxpayer-consumer cost does not stop there.

Ethanol has to be trucked to the refineries for gasoline formulation because it has higher vapor pressure and is hygroscopic. It has one-third less energy than gasoline, and are you ready for this? it results in higher emission of so-called greenhouse gases nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds.

Finally, how do you like paying the latest food prices? Not only have consumers been taxed directly to pay off the Iowa ethanol lobby, but they get the second bill when they shop for food.

As far as greed is concerned, the oil companies can’t rise above the kneecaps of the farm lobby. But it makes no difference, Mr. Stout wants the government to nationalize the oil refineries and not to mention oil exploration. I hope he owns a bicycle. He is going to need it.

SAMUEL BURKEEN

Reston, Va.