Letters
Letters to the editor, Dec. 30
TBO.com
Published: December 30, 2011
Some common sense pleasePublished: December 30, 2011
Don't I have to produce a photo ID if I travel through an airport?
Don't I have to produce a photo ID when asked by a store clerk on occasion when I use a credit card? Don't I have to show a photo ID when I obtain a drivers license?
So what's the big deal about producing a photo ID to vote? Could it be the Democrats are afraid they will lose votes because illegal aliens will not be able to vote? The U.S. Justice Department is striking down the requirement for voter ID in every state at the insistence of the administration.
In a recent interview on the Bill O'Reilly show, one of his guests, a PHD who was an educator argued with O'Reilly that requiring a photo ID was discriminatory and was in fact, racially motivated.
When asked by O'Reilly what form of identification she thought was appropriate, she said the voter could bring a phone bill, water bill or any other type of mail. Remember, this woman had a PHD and was an educator.
She may be teaching your children like so many other so called highly educated educators. I have no idea how this country got to this point or how to deal with these insane issues when our Justice Department, at the behest of the current administration, have control of our country.
We can only hope and pray that America will return to the days when fairness and common sense ruled.
Ron Dakin
Spring Hill
Mr. know it all
Mr know it all, Newt Gingrich, failed to follow the rules, (as he has done most of his political career) and didn't get on the ballot in Virginia an now he trying to blame the state.
He always cries when things don't go his way; he was like that when he was speaker of the house. He alone, thinks it was just him who made the changes while he was in the House before he was booted out by his own party.
This same man thinks we should put him in the White House; the only house he should be in is the old fashion outhouse.
I hope you who support him take a good look at what he really is; he's not for the good off our country, but just for his own benefit.
Bob Sulters
Spring Hill
Internet is full of opportunities
Ted Rall's Christmas Eve column about the difficulties of editorial cartoonists named several reasons for the decline of his profession, but I was struck by his negativity regarding the Internet: "...There's also the Internet. As happened across the world of print media, the web created more disruption than opportunity...Digitalization decimated the music business, savaged movies and is washing away book publishing. If the titans of multinational media conglomerates can't figure out how to stem the tide, individual cartoonists who make fun of the president don't stand a chance."
His attitude surprises me. Rall himself has taken full advantage of the possibilities of the web. He has a website, is listed in Wikipedia, and his Wikipedia article is linked to his Amazon page. He sells his books and advertises his speaking engagements on the web. So how can he claim that individual cartoonists don't have a chance?
In fact, the web provides opportunities for people who want to get around the corporations. Independent bands can sell their music direct to the public from their websites. Recently, a comedian produced his own Internet comedy special and earned more than a million dollars by selling directly to his web audience.
Writers can easily publish their work in ebooks. Small circulation magazines can sell on Kindle or Barnes and Noble Nook without the need to even produce printed versions. The Nook tablet and the Amazon Fire, along with the Kindle and Nook apps for other devices, now make it possible to subscribe to full color digital versions of magazines.
It's true that newspapers are a shrinking market for political cartoonists. But nothing stops cartoonists from banding together and publishing a weekly cartoon magazine for subscribers who have e-readers. At, say, 99 cents per issue and no printing costs, how could it not make money? The only real hurdle is marketing, as it is for indie bands and indie novelists.
Rall to the contrary, the Internet has opened up markets and opportunities: Streaming music, streaming movies and video, books downloaded to your e-reader in seconds. Multinational corporations aren't hurt by the Internet. It's a bonanza for them. And, it has opened up opportunities for writers and artists who want to go off on their own.
I would like to see more articles about the positive aspects of the Web and how to take advantage of them. Tips on opportunities, social media, and marketing would be a lot more helpful than Rall's bemoaning the loss of the cartoonist's market.
Dallas Dunlap
Brooksville
Support our nurses
The nurses of Oak Hill Hospital are knowledgeable, caring and hard working.
They are petitioning for more nurses to be hired to assure patient safety.
This effort should be supported by our community.
Your nurse is on the front line of your hospital care. Your physician may be the greatest ever known but in his/her absence your well being is entirely dependent upon the observation and assessment by your nurse.
The nurse is at your bedside, not your physician. Nurses alert physicians to changes or situations that require medical intervention and implement that intervention ordered.
Few people are cognizant of the responsibilities of today's nurse or the years of education necessary to become licensed as well as continued education to maintain that license. Also, many nurses have become certified in specialty areas such as OR, ER and ICU/CCU.
The acuity level of patients has dramatically increased in recent years. This means that patients in the hospital are sicker these days and as such they require more intense monitoring. In fact, many of the patients commonly seen on the general floors would have been ICU patients not long ago.
The technology of today cannot replace the skills of the clinical assessment made by your nurse at your bedside....ah, but there is the rub...many times your nurse can suddenly become extremely involved in the delivery of care for a patient in decline...the other nurses on the floor are equally busy with their patient load...and now you are feeling poorly.
Wonderful as they may be, even nurses can only be in one place at a time. Of course your nurse calls for help, but how long will it be before others can respond? What might be the outcome of this delay? Common sense tells us that adjustment of the nurse to patient ratio will increase the quality of care.
Recently my husband was a patient at Oak Hill Hospital and subsequently had cardiac surgery. His care was excellent from the ER to the cardiac surgical unit, the OR and eventual discharge home. I cannot overstate the exceptional care he received.
Undoubtedly I am more critical than most because I am an RN and aware of the demands these nurses meet throughout their 12-hour shift. It is amazing that they continue to deliver superior quality care in spite of the weight of their burden. I fear we may lose many of these very special people due to "burn out" and what a situation that could become.
Please support their quest for the benefit of all.
Sandra T. Williams
Brooksville
Patton column off the mark
I was browsing through your archives before a holiday visit back to my parents' home in Spring Hill and was horrified to stumble upon a Doug Patton column titled "Penn State scandal another sign of our times" published on Nov. 16.
In the column, Patton singles out homosexuals and the American tolerance of them as the root cause of child molestation.
"Instead, consider the fact that almost every one of these types of cases involves men with boys," Patton writes of high-profile molestation accusations. "Yes, yes, I know, there is the occasional youngish female high school teacher having sex with one of her male students, or the sporadic scandal of the male teacher who takes his pregnant student to Planned Parenthood to abort the evidence of his molestation. But these are the anomalies that prove the rule. And they seem to inevitably be with the members of the opposite sex who are very nearly of age. They rarely seem to be with young children."
You're not serious, right? Hastily generalize much?
I realize that Mr. Patton's space is a forum for him to spout an opinion, and I am comfortable with his spot in the marketplace of ideas. It doesn't bother me if he wishes to justify his hatred of homosexuals with his backward views or some invented religious pretext. But as a newspaper, the Hernando Today has a duty to at least check the most rudimentary facts it publishes lest it become a piece of propaganda for one organization or another.
In fact, according to the Patton column in question, you may already be a part of the North America Man-Boy Love Association agenda that is apparently running rampant in America. I guess I hadn't heard of this widespread movement to support a fringe organization because I typically deal in facts and don't live in a bubble made of perpetual fear and insecurity over the fact that other people may live their lives in different ways than I do.
Had Patton actually done any research rather than give a blatant generalization to the allegations against former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky based on a few recent high-profile cases (that's called confirmation bias, folks) and the outdated Kinsey studies now used a curious examples of flawed yet seminal research in college psychology courses, he may have found something interesting: Child molestation has not been tied to homosexuality.
Real research has found that about one percent of reported molestations were found to have been committed by homosexuals (Carole Jenny et al. (1994). Are children at risk for sexual abuse by homosexuals? Pediatrics.) and that when the hetero- and homosexual men attracted to adult partners were tested, homosexual men were no more aroused by male children than heterosexual men were aroused by female children (Kurt Freund et al. (1989). Heterosexuality, homosexuality, and erotic age preference. Journal of Sex Research).
If you're skeptical of my approach to this and saw a flaw in the logic of that last point - that men attracted to adult partners were tested – hear me out on a final point. I promise it's a doozy.
Here's where Patton's fear-mongering theory falls apart. Child molesters who are what is referred to as fixated – or those who prefer only children – don't fall into a traditional sexuality classification.
Instead, they are attracted to victims for their age rather than their sex, a result of the offending adult's own arrested maturation. Even those who do have an easily classifiable adult sexual preference yet molest are very often found to have temporary regressed to the same state as those fixated subjects (Groth & Birnbaum, 1978, p. 176). What does that mean? Well, that you can't actually widely classify child molesters into the neat little cut-and-dry pockets Mr. Patton would have you believe all people should fit in because of their sexuality – whether you would label them hetero-, homo- or bisexual. Those definitions and preferences have little and often nothing to do with the victimization.
Finally, before you start pointing to those oft-quoted studies by psychologist Paul Cameron and the article "Homosexuality and Child Abuse," authored by Timothy J. Dailey for the laughably biased Family Research Council, look into their footnotes and do some reading of the original research. Those two articles are possibly the most referenced by conservative and religious anti-gay hate-mongers, and yet few of their proponents have realized – or chosen to accept – that the authors have grossly misquoted the cited original work and squeezed in many well-documented fallacies and errors in order to push a point of view.
Mr. Patton, if you don't want to open your mind, at least open a book or two.
And shame on you, Hernando Today. You have an obligation to your readers to check facts. Opinions and advocacy are fine when appropriately labeled, even if that includes hate speech against homosexuals. But facts aren't opinions, so don't let people like Mr. Patton wield them as such, creating them at will to justify their agendas.
Marcus Philpot
Seattle, Wash.