Don't cave into overpaid turnpike toll collectors
Even as a teenager, I can see that it is absolutely absurd that the state would even consider offering more to the striking turnpike workers.

Offering almost $40,000 per year, plus paid vacation and holidays and full medical, dental and health insurance is already much too generous.

In particular, this amount of compensation seems excessive for tollbooth workers, considering some schoolteachers make half as much money for performing a much harder job. It seems greedy for the tollbooth workers to think that this offer isn't generous enough, while people performing similar jobs in most other industries make minimum wage.

I think the turnpike commission should take this opportunity to convert the turnpike to a primarily E-ZPass system. If the commission provided a 25 percent discount on tolls for the first year, it would likely accelerate the conversion. Not only will the hassle of carrying cash and coins be eliminated, but the headache of waiting in lines at the entrances and exits will be eliminated. Plus, all of the money that was being wasted on overpaid workers can be used to lower fares and to maintain the road.

Finding temporary workers to fill in until the conversion is complete wouldn't be much of a problem. The state needs to act decisively in this matter; it must not cave in to meet the demands of the striking workers.

Reforming the turnpike would benefit every Pennsylvanian.

STEPHEN FRANKOLA
Wilkins

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Fire them all
Are you kidding me? $18.70 an hour and you want more? There are many people who would take $18.70 an hour, if not less, to take a ticket and make change.

I say fire them all, get rid of the union and hire new workers.

Unemployment is high enough that those jobs can be filled easily.

A. SMITH
Holiday Park

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Their duty
I certainly wasn't there when a brave U.S. Marine killed the Iraqi combatant who was feigning death on the floor of a mosque in Fallujah on Nov. 13, but I don't find anything morally wrong or questionable with his actions ("Hellish War," Nov. 22 editorial).

I'm a former U.S. Army officer in the 1st Infantry Division. I'd like your newspaper to know that the mission of infantry soldiers and Marines in combat is "to close with and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver." This Iraqi combatant was not surrendering to our soldiers. He was not waving a white flag, nor had he given up.

He was an enemy combatant whose position had been overrun by Americans. He was feigning death and he might very well have been armed or booby-trapped, hoping to kill even more U.S. soldiers. And so it became his great misfortune that awful day that it was his time to die on the battlefield.

All you liberals need to understand that this was good! The members of the American military have a duty to wage a ruthless, total war against these deadly insurgents. We train our soldiers to act exactly as this solder acted.

And, frankly, he should receive a medal for his bravery. Our soldiers and Marines are duty-bound to protect themselves and their brethren. They have a mission now to defeat this enemy and make Iraq safe for democracy. All your hand-wringing about the deaths of enemy combatants on the battlefield is sickening.

TOM HAYSON
Franklin Park

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Made his choices
Your bias is showing -- not that this is a bad thing on the editorial page. Your error is that you don't base your opinion on fact but on speculation. The error of fact that I think you make is in declaring the wounded Iraqi to be a prisoner ("Hellish War," Nov. 22 editorial).

The only source for that designation has been found among the pundits of the press. Sorry, folks, but you are not the authority on the status of enemy combatants. Uncounted American warriors have been killed and wounded by supposedly "dead or wounded" enemy who played possum to take just one more life.

If you were to survey any number of former soldiers, Marines or airmen who have done so, you might actually understand what happened in that room. This is a war zone, not the playground with level-field playing rules so that no one gets his delicate sensibilities bruised.

Had you ever followed the muzzle of your weapon into a room in a hot combat zone, you would have a very different perspective on the events. Rather than sit in judgment, you might spare some of your saccharine concern for the poor Marine who will bear the scars of this day (and many others) for the rest of his life. The Iraqi made his choices and received the consequences of them in Fallujah.

You might benefit by reading Teddy Roosevelt's essay "The Man in the Arena." It seems appropriate here.

JAMES C. YEARSLEY
Whitehall

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Render unto Caesar
The Republicans did a good job keeping the radical, flat-Earth, born-again people under wraps until after the election, meanwhile accepting their votes and money. But it is sad that now these extreme, zealous, narrow-minded "born agains" have come out of the woodwork after the November election was safely won.

The Religious Right is now bitterly attacking Sen. Rick Santorum for his support of Sen. Arlen Specter over Rep. Patrick Toomey in the Republican primary last spring. Mr. Toomey is a fervent supporter of laws which deny a woman's right to evacuate the inside of her own uterus! The religious fanatics have forgotten that Mr. Bush himself campaigned for and supported Sen. Specter in that primary.

Politicians should not legislate morality. They should "render unto Caesar" those things which are Caesar's. Only issues in the political sphere are properly addressed by the political structure. Personal morality belongs in the province of religious faith. It is not the appropriate concern of the U.S. president, the Congress or the Supreme Court.

ANDREW GERENYI, M.D.
Franklin Park

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Hunger forgotten
Your Oct. 20 news article "Anti-Hunger Activists Gather" by Ervin Dyer is most substantively descriptive of what is destructively occurring in the United States. Daily, 35 million residents of our country lack adequate food because they do not have the financial means to purchase the basic necessity of life. They simply do not have adequate employment earnings to provide that biological requirement. This is an absolute indictment of the negative political leadership of the Bush administration, and the Republican-controlled Congress.

In a multi-trillion-dollar economy, with a multi-trillion-dollar national debt, where is that sense of political responsibility that allowed a national hunger catastrophe to occur? A massive federal expenditure has been precipitated, and misdirected, in a senseless, irrational, useless war in Iraq.

A sense of the national priorities has ceased to exist in the policies of the Bush presidential administration and Republican Congress. The administration is not capable of adequately coping with the job. A vast change of public policy needs to occur in the Congress and a massive public opinion effort needs to present the seriousness of this national hunger problem to Congress. Where is the nation's sense of moral values?

HERB ROHALL
Steubenville, Ohio