My "Letter To The Editor" last week, June 20 has the wrong Churches for 2 fine Ministers. Reverend Jim Rouse is the Pastor of First United Church Of Christ in Susquehanna, Pa. and the Reverend Carl Batzel is the Pastor of Lanesboro Community Church in Lanesboro, Pa. Please thank these Reverends for their great Ministries to Jesus and their Congregations! I apologize for the error I wrote last week.

Sincerely,

Bruce Moorhead

Susquehanna, Pa.

As school districts struggle to balance budgets in this time of reduced state support for public education, I am writing in support of a bill: House Bill 2364. This bill would revise the existing flawed funding formula for charter and cyber charter schools. As it currently stands local taxpayers are overpaying for services provided by these schools and this bill would adjust the formula in several important areas.

A critical change is that HB 2364 does away with the pension “double dip.” Under the current charter school funding formula, a school district’s retirement costs are figured into the payments it makes to a charter or cyber charter school. The catch is that these schools also receive reimbursement from the state for a minimum of 50% of its retirement costs, giving charter schools a “double dip” of pension reimbursement – once from the Commonwealth and once from school district taxpayers. Correcting this anomaly would save taxpayers half a billion dollars within five years.

A second needed change is special education costs. Local district taxpayers are required to pay the costs of special education students who are enrolled in cyber and cyber charter schools. Under the formula in current law this cost is more than double the amount districts pay for their own special education students. The district average across the state is more than $18,000 per student per year. The Montrose Area School District’s cost per special education student is currently $18,913. HB 2364 would cap the special education amount at the actual cost of service provided if less than the formula reimbursement.

The state’s current charter school funding formula is costing taxpayers hundreds of millions in additional tax dollars each year. Our projected cost for next year is $545,072. Almost all funding for charter and cyber charter schools is currently provided by local school districts, placing a significant financial burden on districts’ resources. The revision of the funding formula is overdue, and the changes under HB 2364 are needed now.

Sincerely,

Michael F. Ognosky

Superintendent of Schools

Montrose Area School District

Twice last week*, the 700 Club featured authors who'd written books excoriating Liberalism. Yet again. And I wondered, what does this have to do with religion? Answer: Nothing. Hating Liberals is their religion.

Talk radio has a stable of personalities who each spend three hours a day doing nothing but spewing venom toward Liberals (or more accurately, toward a defamatory Strawman version of them). Ann Coulter has literally demonized Liberals, to the delight of the Right.

The drumbeat is incessant. Even Germany up to the Nazi takeover did not focus such consistent rancor toward Jews. It makes me wonder what Right-wingers would do to Liberals if they ever got the monopoly of power they crave. Such well-prepared soil must eventually produce poison fruit.

Liberals have long been the scapegoat of choice for a horde of twisted individuals who have trouble adapting to the modern world, who find change upsetting, and who need someone to hate. It's a sick need and they're allowed to indulge it. Since they can no longer express their distaste for ethnic minorities or even gays, taking it all out on the Liberals who've championed their rights makes it all good. All the while, they cherish the conceit that they're the essence of Americanism, though America was founded by Liberals on liberal Enlightenment ideals. That's an assertion that would certainly astonish them.

Labels these days are so murky as to be almost useless, so let's define our terms clearly. A conservative is someone who wants to keep things as they are. He's suspicious of change and resists it. But he's not really the problem-- the reactionary is. A reactionary is someone who resents all developments going back twenty, fifty, even a hundred or more years, and wants to undo them. He yearns to go back to an imaginary ideal past. (Ideal to him, anyway.) As such, he is not a conservative, although reactionaries falsely embrace the conservative label.

When America was founded - by Liberals - the conservative position was monarchy. It's the tried and true, what we've always known. The Founding Fathers, in implementing a Constitutional Republic with a Bill of Rights, were doing something that had not been done before. So it was not a conservative thing at all. Especially given the Enlightenment values that lay at the heart of it. Conservatives of the time were skeptical of the experiment, and resentful of the disjunction between religion and government. Some of them moved to New Brunswick, where they'd still have the British crown over them.

Conservatives who remained made Thomas Paine a pariah, and denounced Jefferson as "a howling atheist". The right-wing media of the time mongered in character assassination and hate the way talk radio, wingnut websites, and right-wing publishers do today. Christian Broadcasting and the FOX News Network see fit to promote the top haters from these, and it's right to call them out on it. It's not new, it's not news, and it's not religious. So why are they?

In attacking Liberalism, the self-styled Patriots of the Right display an ignorance of both history and political philosophy. And in the level of hatred they willingly imbibe, they reveal themselves as unfit to claim the legacy of our Liberal Founders.

Sincerely,

Stephen Van Eck

Rushville, PA

The Nimitz class of super-carriers is not looking so super anymore. The aged fleet is to be retired and replaced by the Ford class of super-duper aircraft carriers. Nah. The Navy would never go with super-duper. Let's call them the CVN-21s.

At $13.5 billion a copy the nuclear-powered carriers are quite impressive. Steam cats replaced by electromagnetic launch systems, automation reducing crew size by several hundred, cutting-edge missiles, and a stealthier, svelte radar profile. Very impressive.

Also impressive is the fact that a truck driver literally, as we shall see, a truck driver could turn it in to 100,000 tons of radioactive wreckage littering the sea floor.

There was a time when aircraft carriers could and did decide the fate of nations. The battle of Midway was one such conflict.

Six months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1942, the American carriers, Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown, sailed into the south Pacific to do battle with their Japanese counterparts: Akagi, Kaga, Soryi, and Hiyu.

In the most decisive battle of WW II, all the Japanese carriers were sent to the bottom. The Rising Sun of Japan had begun to set. The tide of war had ebbed from the East and turned to the West.

Just as WW I battleships gave way to carriers in WW II, today, carriers are superseded by missiles and silent subs. Aircraft carriers, regardless of glorifying adjectives, updated electronics, and nifty innovations, are floating dinosaurs, relics of World War II.

Last April, the Russians made carriers obsolete. They unveiled a new version of a cruise missile delivery system. Four are packed into an ordinary shipping container, the kind stacked up by the tens of thousands at ports all over the world and carried by train or pulled by a tractor-trailer truck.

The missile container is indistinguishable from any that one sees daily on roads and highways except when it goes into launch mode. The truck driver pulls off to the side of the road and presses a button. The roof of the container with four missiles attached to it quickly rises to a vertical position. Another button is pushed and in rapid succession four missiles are launched.

The Russian missiles have both brawn, a 440 pound warhead, and brains. They are configured in two stages. The first is subsonic. But on its final leg to the target it switches to the second stage and goes supersonic. It is designed to defeat sophisticated defenses and countermeasures. To brawn and brains add endurance. These missiles can be launched from as far away as 220 miles.

Exactly how would a CVN-21 fair against a missile-launching truck driver? A similar encounter occurred in 1987. The USS Stark was patrolling the Persian Gulf during the Iraqi-Iranian war. The guided-missile frigate was attacked by an Iraqi jet. Two anti-ship Exocet missiles were fired from a distance of 20 miles.

The Stark's radar failed to detect the sea-skimming missiles. Both hit the target but only one exploded. The ship narrowly escaped being sunk. But the Exocet is as outdated as those shoebox-sized portable telephones of the '80s.

The strategy for the Russian cargo-container missiles is to launch them in swarms. Three or four trucks from disparate locations firing 16 missiles at one target, say a U.S. super carrier, which would be devastating. If only a few got through, the carrier would be disabled.

In effect, each missile is force-multiplied by tons of on-board aviation gas, missiles, and bombs. It wouldn't take much to ignite a chain reaction turning the flattop into a floating inferno.

Are the CVN-21s just over-sized targets? Is the future Navy to be an armada of inglorious cargo ships and sweaty troop transports?

What we can expect the Navy not to do is to write a letter to the Secretary of Defense explaining that carriers should be sent to the boneyard; they are outdated. What the Navy will do is what admirals like to do, build more, bigger, and classier, ships.

Construction started on the first CVN-21 in 2007 and is due to be completed in 2015. Then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced plans to build ten more to be completed by 2040.

But in less than three years a Russian cruise missile with a speed of 4,000 miles per hour - that's more than twice as fast as a rifle bullet---is scheduled to come into service. The real possibility is that the truck driver and his rack of mach-6 missiles could send the admiral and his antiquated $13.5 billion fortress to Davy Jones' locker.

Bet on the truck driver.

Sincerely,

Bob Scroggins

New Milford, PA