Football Time

Frank Murtaugh’s cover story (September 3rd issue) on the U of M
football Tigers was entitled “Are You Ready for Some Football?” I know
I was. And so were the 50,000 excited fans crowded into Liberty Bowl
Memorial Stadium last Sunday. We were all psyched and very ready. We
even had beer!

But after watching Ole Miss administer a 45-14 drubbing to the
Tigers, I think I can safely say the only people who weren’t “ready for
some football” were the guys in blue uniforms and particularly their
coaching staff.

Steve Lambert

Memphis

Obama’s School Speech

President Obama is at it again! Now he wants to spread his left-wing
socialism to our children. I mean, asking kids to study hard and take
their education seriously? To use all the gifts that they have been
blessed with? To work for a better tomorrow? How dare he!

Not once in his speech does Obama mention the value of X-boxes,
video games, iPods, or DVD players in your SUV. No, he wants parents to
encourage their children to read books and goes so far as to ask
parents to read to their kids. What would happen to America if parents
and school children took him seriously? The results could be
disastrous.

Obama expects parents to know what movies their kids watch. I bet he
thinks some cartoons are a bad influence and he probably hates the
movie Fight Club.

Yes, our lefty president wants kids to read and study, to become the
next generation of doctors, engineers, thinkers, and leaders. Why, the
next thing Obama will insist on is parents stop dropping their kids off
at a mall or movie theater and start interacting with them.

Jack Bishop

Cordova

In the Corridor

I’d offer one small addition to Bruce VanWyngarden’s excellent
column (Editor’s Note, September 3rd issue) about why city life is so
agreeable in the Poplar Corridor. There are some longtime residents who
prefer the presumed “safety” of neighborhoods which rarely seem to
appear in the “crime watch” graphic in the Sunday Commercial
Appeal.

Of course, the perceived safety is not a universally held opinion.
My home on North Highland hardly ever gets trick-or-treaters on
Halloween, maybe because of the busy vehicular traffic, when side
streets to our north and south get bunches of little kids (some with
mothers). That’s a huge difference from the crowds of youngsters and
teens we used to get when we lived on University near Rhodes College.
Our very positive view of life in Memphis hasn’t changed much. We walk
during the day and sometimes evenings in our neighborhood without
looking over our shoulders much.

As somebody smart (maybe a Flyer writer of the caliber of
Branston or Baker) once said, “Midtown is not so much a geographic
location as it is a state of mind.”

Lewis Nolan

Memphis

Trash Talk

I wonder if I’m the only one who’s noticed that the trash talk the
Democrats are now using against the Republicans sounds a lot like the
trash talk the Republicans used against the Democrats during the Bush
years, which sounded a lot like the trash talk the Democrats used
against the Republicans during the Clinton years, which sounded a lot
like the trash talk the Republicans used against the Democrats during
the Reagan/Bush years?

It seems to me that we have a bunch of children who don’t play well
with each other, who each want the toys the others have, and who all
need a time out.

Jacquelyn Stewart

Memphis

Health-Care Whistle-blower

Finally, a whistle-blower, an insider from the private health-care
industry spills the beans on industry-wide practices. Kudos to Wendell
Potter, a former head of communications at Humana and Cigna. Before a
Senate committee investigating the insurance industry, Potter pointed
to the ongoing practices that deny requests for expensive procedures
and the use of technicalities to cancel the policy of someone diagnosed
with cancer or some other expensive-to-care-for disease — this
after premiums had been paid for years.

Another trick of the trade is to raise premiums exorbitantly for
small businesses who are found to have an employee with a serious
illness.

Oh, what a tangled web of deceit the for-profit insurance industry
has woven around itself.

Ron Lowe

Nevada City, California