"Card-Headed," Kenny Be, December 22
Kenny Be's holiday greeting cards in the last issue were laugh-out-loud funny. And the cover with Kenny in a Christmas sweater was creative genius! I love it when Westword "needles" the powers-that-be.
Dawn Solomon
Denver
"Dust-Up!," Patricia Calhoun, December 22
I cannot believe that anyone thinks it's a smart idea to build near Rocky Flats. Plutonium lasts forever — or at least has a half-life of 24,000 years — but the memories of developers don't reach further back than yesterday.
Jeri Riley
Boulder
Patricia Calhoun writes that "that decision paves the way for the Jefferson Parkway, a proposed four-lane toll road that would go through that right-of-way, finishing the metro beltway that's been the subject of a down-and-dirty fight for decades."
It would not complete the beltway. It stops short at both ends, neither reaching C-470 nor the NW Parkway. It is a highway from Nowhere to Nowhere (or, to be less theatric, from Highway 128 to Highway 93). If we are going to take those environmental risks and most likely make suburban sprawl worse, it seems fair that those in favor of the Jefferson Parkway know what they are actually getting.
William Fickas
Lakewood
A toll road? So it will be an empty eyesore like E-470, but one that will need a separate pay system.
Lance Newcomb
Federal Heights
"Tilting at Windmills," Kelsey Whipple, December 8
This Corey Donahue is as clueless as Don Quixote; small surprise he's found his mentor. Who in the Occupy Wall Street movement has even heard of the following?
The Glass-Steagall Act or GSA (FDR, 1933), sometimes called the Banking Act of 1933, was repealed in 1999 under President Clinton. It outlawed improper banking activity and drove a safety wedge between investment banks and commercial banks. The 1933 law was supplanted by the Graham-Leach-Bliley Act, which might be termed the "Banking Open-Season Act."
Also under Clinton: The Financial Services Modernization Act, in 1999, and the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, in 2000. Together this legislation made possible the still-over-600-trillion-dollars of "derivatives" floating around out there that nearly brought the world's economy to a grinding halt in 2008 (and ever since)...not to mention commercial bankers acting like gamblers.
Want to protest something? Protest our Congress. Occupy Wall Street (only); march everywhere else. Demand an end to lobbyists, and pork-barrel politics, and influence peddling, and mandate term limits. Reregulate the financial industry...and — oh — prepare for a rainy day! No matter how you cut it, we've all been had!
Gene W. Edwards
Colorado Springs
How naive to think that they could cease
Injustice in our world,
By joining hands in songs of peace,
With protest signs unfurled.
Then they dared presume to pitch a tent
Before the Capitol dome of gold,
Where power brokers pay the rent
And democracy's bought and sold.
So the police arrived with pepper spray
To douse their First Amendment rights,
Lest they drive the tourist trade away
Of cash-in-hand suburbanites.
Praise be to Mammon's hypocrites
And their new puppet without shame.
Big money's whore on the Colfax crown does sit,
And Hancock is his name.
Jeremiah M. Attridge
Denver
