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Do conservatives really want to starve children?

To the editor:

Reading Steve Sebelius’ breathless attack on the American Conservative Union immediately reminded me of Vice President Joe Biden (Sunday Review-Journal). And not in a good way.

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Mr. Sebelius took to the Review-Journal opinion pages last weekend to attack our organization, claiming that our hundreds of thousands of national members “don’t care if schoolchildren go hungry” because we had the temerity to recently grade every member of the Nevada Legislature on their fidelity to fiscal conservatism.

Vice President Biden recently made a similarly ridiculous charge against congressional conservatives who resisted President Obama’s latest tax increase, saying that such a refusal will directly lead to more rapes in America.

If you’re keeping score at home, Nevada conservatives, according to the line of thinking espoused by Mr. Biden and Mr. Sebelius, you want more women to be raped and more children to starve.

These unfair attacks on the nearly 50 percent of Americans who identify themselves as conservatives are regrettable for innumerable reasons. First, such rhetoric is bigoted by its very nature. Second, if they’d drop their caricatures of the nature of conservatism, they may someday realize that it’s their big government ideals which are the true drivers of institutional poverty.

Here’s hoping they’ll moderate their tone in the future when attacking Nevada and national conservatives who want to see our government do well by doing less — in the Silver State and across the nation.

Gregg Keller

Washington, D.C.

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The writer is executive director of the American Conservative Union, the nation’s oldest and largest grass-roots conservative organization.

Noble causes

To the editor:

I read Sunday’s column by Steve Sebelius (“Defenders of liberty?”) and would like to propose some additions to the programs he deems worthwhile.

First, Mr. Sebelius sarcastically slammed legislators for not supporting breakfast for children. I ask Mr. Sebelius, “Why stop there?” Let’s have the state of Nevada hire 100,000 new social workers who will be called “student home monitors.” They can stop in every child’s home at least once a week and make sure the kiddies are doing their homework, their parents aren’t drinking in front of them and nobody in the home is lighting up a cigarette.

If we’re going to inject ourselves into the parenting process, let’s do it full-throttle. It will cost us only about $5 billion a year, but we will be comforted by the thought that our kids are educated, fed well and not subjected to secondhand smoke.

Also, Mr. Sebelius talks about workplace safety laws. We all know there are many more people killed on our roadways than are killed at work. So let’s tell the car companies that only vehicles that have a 100 percent safety rate can be sold in Nevada. Supposedly, automobiles that are perfectly safe can be built and sold for as little as $200,000. By enacting this law, we will make the roads and streets of Nevada absolutely safe.

Of course, there will probably be two cars sold per year in the entire state, and the roads will slowly be reduced to bus traffic alone. No matter, road deaths will go to zero.

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All noble causes that Mr. Sebelius would certainly applaud — but, alas, we can’t afford.

Joe Schillmoeller

Las Vegas

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