My wife and I were caught in the police chase on Highway 8 in Cleburne County (as reported in your Jan. 9 paper). First, we faced fast approaching police vehicles. A little later, many police vehicles came flying by us chasing an SUV. About five miles down the road, the officers had apprehended the fleeing suspects.I am always happy when police do their job and today’s wild chase ended up safe for everyone, including the vehicles caught in the way of the chase. But it was very alarming and there were some close calls with the chase cars weaving in and out of traffic at a high rate of speed.
We had a close call and even the state patrol car coming down the middle of the road was scary. And there was a school bus ahead of us, too. There could have been a tragic ending!
High speed chases have been documented to cause horrific accidents. Come on, police services, do your job but don’t endanger everyone in your pursuit.
Charles W. Smith
Wedowee
PCB shipment
Seven million tons of overseas military PCBs to Pell City and nobody in Alabama was told? Secret EPA exception to law for DOD. What a wonderful designation the Department of Defense has given to East Alabama: Hazardous Waste Disposal Site for the World.And this is the group Chris Waddle and the lap dog reporters of The Star hold forth as the paragons of virtue and honesty in the face of overwrought, emotional idiot citizens.
I’m surprised the Pavlovian Star even mentioned the Pell City shipments, after all it makes the DOD look like a governmental outfit we can’t trust to tell us when they intend to poison our children’s hometowns again.
It also makes The Star look hypocritical.
C.K. Oxley
Anniston
The law and freedom
In the writer’s Jan. 13 letter “Constitution”, he rambles on in an attempt to justify Judge Moore’s holy rock by decrying his fears of losing the “freedoms the Constitution gave us” if we citizens fail to “understand our guaranteed right of ... posting the Ten Commandments anywhere we please.”The writer’s thinking here is wrong in so many ways.
First, the writer is clearly narcissistic in his belief that publicly posting the Decalogue somehow brings freedom. He cannot seem to recognize that the same “freedoms” that some Christians feel they receive by posting them are seen as stifling mental shackles to many others.
Why must Hindus, Buddhists, Wiccans, atheists, and all other peoples of our society have to be coerced by their own government to “Have no gods before Me” or “Keep the Sabbath holy”?
Secondly, the Decalogue demands that our economic structure be deemed morally untenable, as the coveting of other’s assets that is at the heart of our free market system is plainly condemned.
Finally, the writer considers Benjamin Franklin’s words from 1737 as “proof” that a “literal” reading of the Constitution helps us understand his claims. What?!? How do Franklin’s words from almost 40 years prior to the writing of the Constitution have anything to do with its literal wording? This brand of twisted logic is akin to accepting as the literal verbiage of a recent presidential speech his father’s off-hand ruminations from before the president was in high school.
The Constitution attempts to provide for religious freedom for all, not just for those that happen to share the writer’s religiosity. That is why the First Amendment has been correctly interpreted as a prohibition of public governmental endorsements of the (monotheistic) Ten Commandments.
Ried Crowe
Powder Springs, Ga.
