Regarding your article on Obama’s loss of donations due to failure to return calls, I’m not surprised (“When Obama failed to call, N.J. donors went to Clinton,” March 20). I live in Illinois, and some time after Obama was elected senator, I sent him at least four separate e-mails on topics of concern to me, over a period of about two months. I didn’t get a reply to any of them. I finally sent him a snail-mail indicating that I didn’t think ignoring constituents was a very good way to start. I received some canned reply and that was it. (Dick Durbin, on the other hand, always replies promptly.) Since then I have received only sporadic replies from Obama. I am still waiting for a reply to my last e-mail sent six weeks ago.

Roselle, Ill.

Gore’s contradictions on the environment

From Tom Cardone

(Regarding Brent Budowsky’s column, “Gore, a man on a mission,” March 20.) While I agree Al Gore should have been president, his whole new, Oscar-driven, save-our-earth-from global-warming persona seems to have a thin veneer.

Let’s see, Mr. Gore’s “Option 9” was appalling to environmentalists and applauded by big-money timber interests. Mr. Gore, it seems, at the time, thought that allowing the “harvesting” (raping, by some opinion) of old-growth forests for another 50 years was a good thing.

I think, if basic science serves, trees take CO2 from the air and release oxygen. Isn’t CO2 the “boogeyman” of global warming? Shouldn’t something that naturally takes it out of the air be good to keep around?

Other anomalies in his save-the-environment rhetoric are easy to find. But, hey, why let little contradictions deflate such a righteous quest by such a man of vision? He’s only the high-profile messenger.

And what about that mainstream research that shows that the sun is heating our whole solar system?

Trumbull, Conn. 

Wildlife refuges, BLM in need of more funding
 
From Daniel R. Patterson, planning commissioner, city of Tucson, Ariz.

The independent, non-partisan Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (peer.org) sent disturbing figures to Congress this month showing Bush administration chronic underfunding choking the life from National Wildlife Refuges, and Bureau of Land Management National Landscape Conservation System lands and waters.

With a combined 138 million acres nationwide, wildlife refuges and BLM conservation lands offer 40 percent more space than our 84 million acres of parks. …

BLM conservation lands — some still under difficult multiple-use management — get by far the lowest funding per visitor for maintenance, improvements, restoration and conservation. ...

Congress must provide direction and support for BLM and wildlife refuge conservation where there is little from the White House.

Tucson, Ariz.