Editorial

The thrust of The Sun's editorial and the approach of public officials for decades for improving Liberty Road and other secondary roads with aging retail areas has been to treat the problems as economic development issues ("Life on Liberty Road," May 23). The solutions have been to update failing areas with new buildings without dealing with the core problems. People need to be connected to their neighborhoods. Suburban Baltimore County communities were built around the love affair with the car. They became commuting communities.

As many eyes in the sports world focus on Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore Saturday for the 139th running of the Preakness Stakes, it's comforting to know Harford County still has a place in horse racing. Bel Air's Country Life Farm, as Dewey Fox reminded our readers with his fine piece about the Pons family's operation in The Aegis Wednesday, is carrying on the horse breeding tradition that spans the past eight decades or so, helped out of late by the farm's part ownership of Malibu Moon, one of the top stallions in the country, who started his stud career at Country Life and now stands in Kentucky.

For years I would carefully craft letters to the editor of the Sunpapers, feeling that the letters section was the appropriate place to have reasoned and civil discourse about the content of the paper. The process of having letters edited was at once frustrating and instructive. Sadly, today's paper mirrors the problems infecting much of the media, allowing a no holds barred, "democratic" approach in which equal weight is given to each opinion regardless of how ill informed the opinion is. While instructive at showing a "diversity" of opinion, the result turns the editorial page into a barroom brawl.

In this part of the country, the Ravens are white hot. All things NFL make people sit up and pay attention. For the most part, this area gets to see some of the best of the NFL - millionaire football players doing good things. That was the case last weekend when Ed Reed (and for those who don't know who he is, this probably isn't the editorial for you) and some of his teammates descended on Harford County. The Jarvis Appliance Ed Reed Flag Football Classic was one of the attractions of the seventh annual Race Against Abuse of Children Everywhere foundation's fundraiser.

Readers might conclude that they were well served by The Sun editorial page's 1971 endorsement of City Council President William Donald Schaefer for mayor. Perhaps less so by its lament that he was "not an inspiring leader" or its prediction that the city would soon "yearn for charisma" from the mayor's office. The Sun has published editorials, usually several a day, throughout almost its entire 175-year history. That adds up to a lot of opinions about the day's news, some of which look prophetic when viewed through the prism of history, others profoundly lamentable.

I stopped paying for The Sun years ago because of the one-sided liberal spin on virtually every page. But I receive the paper free a few days a week as a County Times subscriber, and every once in a while I read the editorials for a good chuckle. Thursday's edition did not disappoint; in fact it was a double chuckle. Gov. Martin O'Malley's tough budget? Give me a break ("A tough budget," Jan. 19). The only reason we have a gap between spending and revenue is that Democrats are addicted to spending.

Most of the opinions on The Sun's editorial page are things I disagree with, although I don't have to keep up good relations with the governor or the current president and administration. Every once in a while you do get it right, but I the believe your view on speed cameras not being pure revenue generators for the government is wrong. It would be nice to know who writes some of this drivel. Craig Garfield, Ellicott City

The Sun was incredibly forgiving in its recent editorial about Baltimore's scandalous water billing system ("Tax sale timeout," March 25), particularly since The Sun's own reporting has convincingly shown the Department of Public Works' incompetence and mendacity, its manipulation of citizens, and its outright fraudulent and systematic overbilling. People have even had their homes confiscated because of this system of incompetence and extortion, yet the mayor has had the audacity to assert that nothing can be done about this because to do so might damage the city's bond ratings.

The Baltimore Sun's editorial board seems to think Newt Gingrich's opposition to the ground zero mosque is a minority position ("Freedom and religion," editorial, Aug. 5). However, New Yorkers oppose the "Cordoba House" mosque by a whopping 61-26 percent. New York City residents are 56-33 percent against, suburban residents, 66-21 percent against, and up-staters are 64-21 percent against (Siena College survey). Surely, The Sun can't be suggesting that the majority of New Yorkers who live in a city with over 100 mosques, are, as they characterized the former Speaker, "anti-Muslim"?

The Sun's March 2 article "Driving patterns of the past create problems for today" and the March 6 editorial "Wrong way on mass transit," taken together, may have done more to confuse than inform readers on this issue.The article did an excellent job of explaining why highways and mass-transit systems are less capable of relieving the growing congestion on the highways. But the editorial seems to contradict the article, promoting expansion of mass transit despite the lack of funds and the inability of these services to meet the needs of commuters.

We've long known, though we too frequently forget, that messages of few words can be potent. Every now and then, one of our correspondents sends us a letter that succinctly reminds us of that. A case in point is George Hipkin's letter at the bottom of this page. It delivers a powerful message. For many years on this page, there was a note limiting letter writers to 300 words along with the message that "shorter letters were invariably better read. " It was true years ago and it's true now, even though we occasionally need to be reminded of that.

As another athletic season draws to a close, concluding another academic year's in-conference varsity calendar, it's hard for some of us who pay attention to such things to get beyond pondering the tomfoolery that is how the championship team in the Upper Chesapeake Bay Athletic Conference is chosen. Known by the acronym UCBAC, a name that dances off the tongue like phlegmatic or hic cough, the conference includes the athletic teams from the public schools in Harford and Cecil counties.

It's very easy to be critical of government, to break out the cliches like "doing badly that which need not be done at all," and "I'm from the government; I'm here to help," but there are a number of necessary things that government does, does well and probably wouldn't get done if left to someone else. Vaccinations are a case in point. At the end of April and beginning of May, the Harford County Health Department ran a series of rabies vaccination clinics, and protected several hundred animals, and by extension, as many as several thousand people, from the threat of a deadly disease with a brutal fear factor.

The Town of Bel Air, and any other local government with zoning laws on the books, can regulate through those laws where apartment buildings, townhouses, single family houses and assisted care facilities go. Similarly, they can regulate where medical facilities such as doctors offices, professional centers and hospitals are built. Zoning laws were designed to protect land owners from being unreasonably burdened by potentially obnoxious uses of the land on neighboring properties.

Readers might conclude that they were well served by The Sun editorial page's 1971 endorsement of City Council President William Donald Schaefer for mayor. Perhaps less so by its lament that he was "not an inspiring leader" or its prediction that the city would soon "yearn for charisma" from the mayor's office. The Sun has published editorials, usually several a day, throughout almost its entire 175-year history. That adds up to a lot of opinions about the day's news, some of which look prophetic when viewed through the prism of history, others profoundly lamentable.

They twist and they turn. They break up communities. They sprawl across jurisdictional boundaries. And, in something akin to cellular mitosis, one has been divided into two entities that are miles apart. "They" are the state legislative districts newly mapped out in Baltimore County. If you look up "crazy quilt," in the dictionary, an accompanying picture of the map would clearly illustrate the term. The whole once-a-decade enterprise smacks of partisanship and back-room political horse-trading, eliciting a cynical shrug.

Your Feb. 23 editorial "Shall we pray or prey?" was offensive disrespectful of the clergy, inconsiderate of the great majority of people who are Christians and uncalled for.You criticized a prayer that you did not read, and made charges that are not true.My Feb. 13 prayer in Annapolis was in the tradition of Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Prayer Proclamation, adopted by the U.S. Senate, which called on Americans to "confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow," and plainly stated: "We have forgotten God. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God who made us."

Is the quaintness starting to get to you? There's something about Christmas, isn't there, that just brings to the fore a sugarcoated view of years gone by, with the present suffering by comparison. "Who but turns, when Christmas comes, to take a retrospective view of the past, and in doing so, how numerous are the happy scenes and blissful hours which rise in strength and beauty upon the scenery of the mind." The Sun said that, in its first Christmas editorial, back in 1837. Yes, even when the city and the paper were young, there was a sentimental tendency to look backward at this time of year.

Is The Sun's news department or its editorial staff aware that a former Democratic presidential candidate and vice presidential nominee, John Edwards, is being tried in criminal court in Greensboro, North Carolina for using campaign funds he raised to pay off the woman he was having an affair with and who bore his child? You must not, because The Sun has carried few (brief) stories and no editorials about it. Look it up. It's true. Did you just miss it? J. Shawn Alcarese, Towson

The muddle that is Maryland's budget future cleared a bit this week as the three most important people in cleaning up the mess edged closer to an agreement on how to do so. The mess, of course, was left by state lawmakers when they ended the 2012 legislative session April 9 without reaching an agreement on next year's budget. This week, Gov. Martin O'Malley, Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller and House Speaker Michael Busch emerged from a morning meeting to reveal the outline of a solution, one that would involve two special legislative sessions for lawmakers, one to deal with the budget, the other to consider expanding casino gambling in Maryland.