Didn’t they learn in college how to do the job?

To the editor:

In response to your Wednesday story, "Consultant costs tallied":

Let's see if I have this correct: To be a teacher, one must graduate from a teacher college and obtain a license. At the teacher colleges, the incompetent instructors turn out poor teachers. The school district's unqualified administrators, assistants, deputies and various other taxpayer employees hire these poorly educated teachers. After investing tens of millions of dollars in teacher "in services" and curriculum development, we must now pay more tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to hire consultants to teach the administration how to tell the teacher to do the job she should have learned in college.

To make matters worse, the consultants they hire are quite often the same former administrators who previously needed consultants to tell them how to do their jobs. Karlene McCormick-Lee had the job of empowering schools to be autonomous. That probably did not work out well. What has she learned between the time she was on the payroll and when she became a consultant that's likely to revolutionize what she's trying to do?

With all the new theories and methods to teach school kids today, it is no wonder they are functional illiterates. Why not just return to the methods used before the mid-'60s that worked so well?

Robert Raider

HENDERSON

Political views

To the editor:

For more than seven years, ever since moving to Las Vegas, I've frequently enjoyed John L. Smith's columns. His unique perspective on the valley as a multi-generational native has helped me to appreciate this region, its history and uniqueness far removed from the Strip.

Mr. Smith's personal travails, with his daughter's cancer treatment and her ultimate triumph, kept me reading and praying. He is truly a gifted writer, even in those most difficult times.

But lately I'm finding less anticipation for his next column. He's more frequently writing about his political views and not about the character of our community.

I'm sure he would argue that politics makes up that character, which it does -- from a balanced perspective. But that is why we have the front page and news articles that we've come to expect the full story from. Political and social opinions (mostly one-sided) are to be expected, but in the editorial pages, which I read daily.

Perhaps, like other writers in the Review-Journal, Mr. Smith is eager to transition to meatier subjects such as social and political opinion. But if his socio/political columns are to continue, I hope he continues to write, but in the editorial pages ... of the Las Vegas Sun.

Tom Justin

LAS VEGAS

Science funding

To the editor:

In his Wednesday letter, Steven Scharff implies that the global warming opinions of MIT professor Richard Lindzen are tainted by the fact that he and his Annapolis Center have accepted funding from ExxonMobil and OPEC. One suspects that continued funding from these organizations would be highly dependent upon the results Mr. Lindzen obtains and publishes.

One wonders, however, why Mr. Scharff does not think supporters of anthropogenic global warming should be tarred with that same brush. What would happen to the funding of Phil Jones' Climate Research Unit if the group there started publishing results showing that global temperature increases in the past century are a result of natural variations in solar activity and changes in ocean circulation and are unrelated to human activity?

Would James Hansen's Goddard Institute for Space Studies continue to receive lavish funding from NASA if it were revealed that there is not a global warming crisis?

These laboratories, along with dozens of others around the world, have been the beneficiaries of billions of dollars of funding as a result of the perceived global warming "crisis." This funding has originated in a variety of government agencies that have seen their budgets, staff and influence grow enormously as a result of the perceived crisis. Wouldn't these individuals want to protect their source of funding and influence?

The CRU e-mails that have recently come to light indicate that this was exactly what was happening, and they reveal the researchers involved to be less objective scientists with overly zealous ideologies. And yet Mr. Scharff believes only Mr. Lindzen can be guilty of bias.

Finally, no thoughtful person denies that the Earth has warmed over the past century and a half. The debate -- and yes, there still is a debate -- is whether this temperature increase has been caused by human activity or whether it is a natural recovery from a period of abnormally low global temperatures that extended from the late 1300s until the middle of the 19th century. Mr. Scharff's citation of jellyfish catches in Japan and icebergs in the vicinity of New Zealand provides expected evidence for warmer average temperatures, but makes no compelling argument for their anthropogenic origins.

Jim Hodge

HENDERSON

Send him home

To the editor:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has finally stated in clear, unambiguous terms what he thinks of the majority of his constituents: that we are the sort of hate-mongering knuckle-draggers who would still prefer African-Americans in chains, or at least at the back of the bus, because we have the temerity to oppose his risky health care scheme.

It's time we send Sen. Reid home, not to Searchlight, but to the Ritz-Carlton in Georgetown, where he will never have to be embarrassed by his unwashed constituents again.

Dustin Dingman

LAS VEGAS