Roof leaks, so they give away $5 million?

To the editor:

While I can sympathize with wanting to keep our schools in top shape (“Aging schools slated for upgrades,” Wednesday Review-Journal), let me ask a question: Would $5 million help?

Look no further than our own Clark County School District. Did you know that in 2008 the district gave a $5 million donation to The Smith Center for the Performing Arts from its capital funds? It’s in The Smith Center program they hand out when you go to an event. The school district is listed as one of the “Founders” that gave $1 million or more, but in fact it was an astounding $5 million. One of the School Board members said it was to provide arts education opportunities to impoverished students through The Smith Center’s partnership with the Kennedy Center.

In your own life, you don’t donate lots of money to a charity while your own home needs a roof and a new air conditioner. They spend the money and they want us to suffer and pay higher property taxes to fund their mismanagement.

And now repairing the schools is not a good solution. We have to build new ones. Perhaps if we’d used that $5 million on repairs four years ago, we would not be needing new schools now.

CYNTHIA COLETTI

LAS VEGAS

The party’s over

To the editor:

Taxpayers in the Clark County School District have always been very accommodating, generous, and cooperative in supporting previous school construction requests. The party is over, now and for a long time into the future.

The past 20 to 30 years have seen the school administration grow without regard to the real needs of students and desires of parents and taxpayers. The district phone book is now some 60-plus pages with lists of administrators and their positions, rivaling the size of phone books in moderate-size American cities.

There’s been little belt-tightening. Tax-happy administrators have demonstrated more concern for wasteful programs and moronic ideas than attempts to conserve money to assure students in every classroom have an adequate textbook, paper, pencils and other equipment.

Money has gone to salaries, benefits and perks for administrators rather than ensuring that the district hires fully qualified and certified teachers for all the students and that class sizes remain manageable and reasonable.

VIRGIL A. SESTINI

LAS VEGAS

Denial is not a river

To the editor:

I opened the morning newspaper Thursday and thought you must have mixed up the front page with the Comics section.

“Voters feeling upbeat” was the headline. I wonder what bubble The Associated Press is living in. Vladimir Lenin once talked about “useful idiots.” As I look at our country, I think most of our “useful idiots” are in the mainstream press and academia.

The Middle East is on fire, the U.S. government is $16 trillion in debt, the Fed has just announced Quantitative Easing 3 (printing worthless money) with no limits on time or amount, the Chinese are demonstrating in front of our embassy chanting “Give us back our money,” we have more people on some form of government assistance than ever before, gasoline is at $4 a gallon with very low demand, and several major countries including Russia and China are pushing the world to get off the U.S. dollar for oil and other commodities.

Even though our government claims inflation is near zero, anyone who shops for food, fuel or energy knows inflation is at least 10 percent over the past year. It has been said that inflation is the cruelest of all taxes on people on fixed incomes and the poor.

I don’t think it will matter who’s elected as our next president. We’re going to be in for a tougher time than our parents and grandparents had during the Great Depression, and the 1 percent can’t save us even if we took all their money, because all their money would last only a few weeks the way our government is spending it.

People, get out of Fantasyland.

DAVID JARONIK

PAHRUMP

Liberal lies

To the editor:

Enough! Tell it like it is and don’t run the liberal AP lies (“Voters feeling upbeat,” Thursday Review-Journal).

$5 trillion in new federal debt; 12 percent-plus unemployment in Nevada; real estate market collapsed (values down more than 70 percent); unconstitutional health care mandate adding $2.4 trillion more in taxes and debt; companies laying off workers again; Sen. Harry Reid and the rest of the liberal pack, led by our faker in chief, closing coal plants; kickbacks to friends; unconstitutional use of executive power; breaching the war powers act; not arresting Attorney General Eric Holder for “Fast and Furious”; flooding of our economy with more money. (Remove Bernanke, eventually dissolving the Fed.)

Just look around our once great city and you will see empty homes, empty businesses, people on every street corner asking for money, Echelon construction stopped for four years. Fontainebleau Las Vegas is incomplete, the Harmon Hotel will be torn down. Empty single home lots, never to be built on. Can’t you just once tell the truth?

RICHARD STOTT

LAS VEGAS

Flatlines

To the editor:

Congratulations, Nevada. We just came in at a 6 percent decline in household income for the year, the worst in the nation. California is second-worst at 3.9 percent. Both are polling for President Barack Obama.

How ignorant are we? When will we learn to connect the dots? Do any of you Obama supporters recall that he advised Americans to not waste their money in Las Vegas? Does any of this resonate with the unaware, who are more interested in the Kardashians, hip-hop, “American Idol,” video games and addictive texting?

America’s only chance for survival is an informed electorate. Nevada is apparently in last place in this category, as well. If it gets any worse, the unions will have nobody employed to represent.

I think the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health should offer free scans to people endangering the future of the nation with their inability to understand what is at stake in this election. I know what they would find: nothing!

TOM NEAL

BOULDER CITY

Liquor is quicker

To the editor:

Letter-writer Greg McFarlane (Wednesday Review-Journal) states that vodka eye drops are an urban legend. It is not an urban legend. Mr. McFarlane doesn’t know that the high is much quicker due to the fast absorption into the bloodstream and you get a much bigger buzz. You need a smaller amount of liquor to go into a drunken stupor. And it’s easier to get drunk at work, school, etc., because no one would question clear eye drops.

LAURIE BRENNER

LAS VEGAS