Erosia

LEO welcomes letters that are brief (250 words max) and thoughtful. Ad hominem attacks will be ignored, and we need your name and a daytime phone number. Send snail mail to EROSIA, 640 S. Fourth St., Louisville, Ky. 40202. Fax to 895-9779 or e-mail to [email protected]. We may edit for length, grammar and clarity.

Clarification
Last week’s story about the comparison between the Restore 64 project and 8664 quoted Shawn Dikes, the project manager for Restore 64, about how the two ideas are not worthy of comparison. Dikes’ firm, Parsons Brinckherhoff Quade & Douglas, is design consultant for the East End bridge. While this has no bearing on Dikes’ contribution to last week’s story, LEO would like to point it out nonetheless, as 8664 and the Bridges Project are related.

No Fairness in Coverage
Despite what you may have seen on WHAS-TV’s Friday night newscast, the Kentuckiana Gay Pride Parade was more than just a traffic nuisance. WHAS’s coverage began with footage of a drag queen and the sound of an unseen horn blaring. They went on to lament how many streets had to be closed to accommodate the event, and gave the impression that it was an unnecessary inconvenience given that parts of I-64 were closed for construction at the same time. What I saw at the parade was quite a bit different. I saw people, including many families, enjoying music and decorative floats and members of our community (Louisville, I mean) showing support for their friends and family members. I recall only one intersection where people had to wait, and while a few of them were indeed blaring their horns annoyingly, most were dancing in their seats to the music coming from the passing Fairness Campaign float. People were laughing and having a good time, and the police did a better job of traffic control than I’ve ever seen them do before. I guess WHAS was trying to cover the parade in a way that didn’t offend any viewers with conservative leanings, but in the process they missed a great opportunity to show our city at its best.
Jonathan Smith, Louisville

Kentucky Fried Stereotypes
Frankly, I find it VERY embarrassing and sad that this $27 million tribute to nonsensical, delusional and backward thinking is here in the state of Kentucky (regarding LEO’s “What a sham(e)” article on the Creation Museum in the June 13 issue). “God please protect me from your followers” indeed!
On an inspiring note, to read that “atheists, agnostics, other non-believers, clergy and Christians” got together in protest of this ... and I use the term loosely ... “museum” ... gives me hope that maybe things aren’t all bad.
Hope they have a hard time keeping the lights on ... amen!
Tony W. Vaughn, Louisville

Grannies on the Loose
Thank you for last week’s feature story about Mrs. Trainer’s capture (LEO, June 6). After all, we can’t have menacing grandmothers on the loose terrorizing families — we’d never be able to attract good jobs or good arenas here.
And it appears the Blackwater sensitivity training really paid off — otherwise sheriff’s deputies/Metro police could have really clobbered the frisky granny. Then they’d really have some ’splainin’ to do.
Bottom line: It’s better to fight those anti-empire types down on our waterfront so we don’t have to fight them in our community garden in Schnitzelburg. God bless America and all of our freedoms, eh?
Mark McKinley, Louisville


It’s Our Fault
Last Thursday, I was eating lunch at the downtown Skyline Chili and reading Jim Welp’s article about the proposed ordinance to ban trans fats in the city when I noticed a gentleman near me eating his own lunch. I remembered him quite well because of his massive size (at least 400 lbs.) and also because of his lunch order: two large 3-way chili spaghetti dishes. My order was a 4-way without the cheese. He finished his two dishes before I finished my one.
Later that night, curiosity got the best of me, so I decided to check the nutrition content of our respective dishes on Skyline’s Web site. My dish contained 24 grams of fat. While that is certainly not “healthy,” it certainly beats a burger and fries combo at most fast-food restaurants. On the other hand, a large 3-way chili contains 64 grams of fat per dish, so my fellow diner devoured a whopping 128 grams of fat during his lunch. The real problem with that fellow’s lunch, though, was not just the quality of his food order but rather the quantity. He could have well been sitting there eating two full plates of steamed broccoli and he still would have left that restaurant a pound or two heavier than how he entered it.
And that’s when I realized that a ban against trans fats would really serve no purpose. People who are prone to being overweight simply like to eat. Banning one food product would simply mean they would eat more of others. We cannot legislate away self-destructive behaviors. After all, it was not the guns that killed the students at Columbine or Virginia Tech but rather the shooters who used them. It was not the airplanes that brought down the WTC towers but rather the cowardly terrorists who flew them. It is not the cigarettes that cause lung cancer but rather the people who smoke them. And it is not the fatty foods that cause obesity and disease but rather the people who devour them.
Rick Robbins, Sellersburg

Letting Us Down
Once again, U.S. Senators Bunning, Lugar and McConnell have let the citizens of Kentuckiana down by showing that party politics is more important to them than principle.
Instead of joining a bipartisan (45 Democrats, seven Republicans and one Independent) effort to say that Alberto “I don’t recall” Gonzales is unfit to lead the Justice Department, they voted for the status quo with 34 of their obsequious Republican colleagues (plus Independent Joe Lieberman) in order to successfully kill a no-confidence resolution. The ethical and possibly even legal lapses, not to mention questionable judgment, of Attorney General Gonzales are well documented, yet that apparently wasn’t enough for them to side with the rule of law over the political crony who is supposed to uphold it. Granted, the no-confidence resolution carried no official weight, but it would have sent a strong message from Congress — the representatives of the people — that the politicization of the DOJ will not be tolerated.
It sure would be refreshing to have senators who, on behalf of their constituents, are committed to reining in the many abuses of the Bush administration rather than being political lapdogs the president can routinely count on to toe the party line despite overwhelming public dissatisfaction with his disastrous agenda.
John Sodrel, New Albany