Your Letters: Tuesday

College Heights residents agree that the past weekend’s extended power outages, while inconvenient, had a bright side.

A wonderful sense of community was evident as friends and neighbors helped each other stay warm, move fallen tree limbs and relocate warming refrigerator and freezer contents.

Allegheny Power personnel, tree surgeons and State College Borough crews worked long hours to restore power, while borough manager Tom Fountaine kept residents informed of the progress being made and shelter services available.

To all who contributed, thank you.

Donna S. Queeney State College

The writer is president of the College Heights Association.

Desert cross harmless

I find it very difficult to believe that our major court would spend precious time and money to decide if a historic cross monument in the middle of the Mojave Desert must be removed.

I am a Christian, but every time I see the Star of David displayed or hear beautiful words from the Koran or from Buddha my heart is warmed.

To think that a single bitter and misguided individual can demand the U.S. Supreme Court’s attention in the so-called name of separation of church and state.

An excessive and overbearing government was the reason most of our ancestors came to America years ago. They were looking for freedom from this meddling of the government in the personal lives of citizens.

The Bible is right when it claims the cross is both “foolishness” and an “offense” to the creator-denier who is missing the God part of his brain.

Why does it engender such hate from certain people? Perhaps we should rewrite the entire history of our country from the time of Christopher Columbus’ first Mass in 1492.

Frank Burchfield Homer State College

Help Scouts help others

More than 1,000 Centre County families rely on the support they receive from food banks in their communities, and many members of those families are children.

Although the county seems to be faring better through this recession than much of the country, the need is great and the demand for food assistance is ever present. 2009 will mark the 20th year for the annual “Scouting for Food” food drive.

Beginning at 9 a.m. Oct. 24, Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts and Venturing Scouts of the Juniata Valley Council, Boy Scouts of America, will come into your neighborhood distributing collection bags and flyers announcing the food drive with a list of donation suggestions.

At 9 a.m. Oct. 31 the Scouts will be back to collect food donations that support the food banks and pantries in Bellefonte, Fillmore, Centre Hall, Howard/Beech Creek, Milesburg, Millheim, Spring Mills, Pleasant Gap, Port Matilda and State College.

Please help the Scouts to do their “good turn” for the residents of Centre County and help stock the shelves of the food banks for the upcoming holiday season.

Greg Day and Carol Day Bellefonte

The writers are Nittany District Scouting for Food co-chairs with the Juniata Valley Council, Boy Scouts of America.

He can keep Fox News

J.F. McGrail (Oct. 15 letter) is impressed by a statistic claiming Fox News has 28.6 percent of news viewers. He says we can keep all the rest of the networks.

By McGrail’s statistics it looks like we are keeping — viewing — the rest, with 71.4 percent of news viewers watching programming other than Fox. Thank goodness for that. And because Fox is the franchise news network of just one political party and one ideology, we should expect that they would have about 42 percent of the audience, since that’s roughly the extreme base of that party.

Those of us who care about news reporting that reflects intellect and integrity are thankful for the objective and truthful news reporting offered by those other networks that are scorned by McGrail: NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN and MSNBC. When compared with Fox, their reporting is insightful, incisive and honest. Choose carefully which network you watch, but beware of the Fox in sheep’s clothing.

Bill and Norma Hetrick State College

Wealth reform needed

In his column (Oct. 15), Joseph Filko implies that our two economic choices are socialism and unregulated free markets. He warns against forcing an income redistribution in the name of economic justice.

Perhaps Filko failed to notice that our government, by deregulating free markets and reducing taxes on the wealthy, has in the past few years effected a massive redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthy. I doubt if Filko or anyone else, if inventing a new economic system, would propose a system that placed 95 percent of the wealth in the hands of 5 percent of the population. But that is what we currently have in the United States.

The fact that such inequity is socially unjust, even un-American, may not be the most important point. The danger is that we are headed toward having a small class of super-wealthy, a small middle class and an enormous class of poor people. It is a recipe for revolt, if not revolution. It was not always this unequal. We need to have Congress reinstitute reasonable reforms to restore a fair and reasonable distribution of wealth.

Merrill Budlong State College

Lawsuit without merit

As I opened my paper last week, what did I find? Austin Scott suing the world. OK, maybe not the world but close enough.

Why is he suing? Because we as a county, a university and society have taken away his chance to make multi-millions in the NFL. Wow, multi-millions? Didn’t the Cleveland Browns decide not to sign Scott? I’m sure the GM of the Browns sat down with him and said, “Look Austin, you are an incredible football player and our team really needs you, but since you got into trouble in college we just can’t take that chance.

Michael Vick got the same treatment. Oh wait, Vick actually was convicted, served time and is still playing. I guess his talent was enough for the Eagles to overlook his reputation. How can someone think they lost multi-millions and now want everyone to pay — including the university that gave him one too many chances?

Bob Murphy Centre Hall

Partisanship continues?

She claims to want to be a nonpartisan mayor for State College. Yet Elizabeth Goreham pointedly supports three Democrats for Borough Council.

I assume she has judged the other candidates for council as unqualified. Perhaps the other candidates are just not in her political party. It does not appear that Goreham has changed from her history of partisanship. Can we expect a genuine change if elected?

Jeffrey R. Kern State College