Letters to the editor for Thursday, May 22

I'm a retired deputy executive editor of the Post-Standard, the daily newspaper in Syracuse, N.Y. In my career I often uttered this lament: "Journalists with numbers are like children with loaded guns."

Your front-page headline on the Star Tribune poll in Minnesota's U.S. Senate race ("Good news for Coleman, bad for Franken," May 19) proves nothing has changed in my first year out of the business. The story reported this result in a head-to-head match: incumbent Republican Norm Coleman 51 percent, DFL challenger Al Franken 44. But you also reported the poll's margin of error to be 3.5 percentage points. That means, if your poll is accurate, the race is a statistical dead heat.

I don't know think that's such bad news for Franken. Or such good news for Coleman.

TIMOTHY D. BUNN, MARCELLUS, N.Y.

Thanks but no thanks Nick Coleman plugs Jesse Ventura for the U.S. Senate (column, May 19)? Does Coleman not remember that this is the state that gave the world a governor who wanted to be resurrected as a size "double D" brassiere? Who assured us with all the grave dignity resident in a famous TV wrestler that religion is a crutch?

Norm Coleman may not be my idea of the perfect senator, but he did go after that collectivist knot of feckless fatheads known as the United Nations and their corrupt food-for-oil deal. That's at least serious work.

Nick Coleman needs to stop treating politics like a subject in some stupid class he's forced to take. This is about our lives! Our choices for Senate are a comedian who thinks like a communist and a U.S. senator who actually thinks. Adding a washed-up wrestler/actor who thinks he's a comedian/governor is not a serious improvement.

Let Franken come clean A recent Minnesota Poll suggests that Al Franken's tax issues may have caused him to lose ground in his quest for a U.S. Senate seat. That voters may have reservations about Franken as a result of these issues is hardly surprising.

One need not accept a person's word as conclusive when there are independent means to verify whether the person is telling the truth. Yet that is exactly what Franken has asked the voters to do with respect to his claim that his failure to pay more than $50,000 in taxes in 17 states was the result of his accountant's mistakes.

Franken claims that he left it to his accountant, Allen Chanzis, to prepare his tax returns for 2003 through 2006, and that Chanzis botched the job. Franken has released information regarding his tax liability for those years, but has failed to release his tax returns.

As one schooled in law but not accounting, I must admit I find it hard to believe that a New York certified public accountant was unaware that a person living in one state must pay income taxes in other states in which he or she earns income. It seems even more implausible given that Chanzis, according to his firm's website, has more than 20 years' experience, and specializes in the representation of clients in the entertainment industry, including touring actors and musicians.

Be that as it may, there is a simple way to resolve the issue. Let the accountant speak. If Chanzis was given the proper information and direction, and simply failed to prepare the appropriate returns, he can verify that for us quite easily.

GREGG J. CAVANAGH, MAPLE GROVE

A common mistake Al Franken's tax issue has been bantered about without the real truth ever being fully explained. The fact is Al Franken did pay all of his taxes. He just didn't dole it out to the correct states.

Why did this happen? Well, the same thing is actually happening to many people throughout the United States. Here's an example: My husband works for only one company but it often sends him to work for other companies in other states. It seems logical to the average person that he would pay all the taxes on the money he's earned to the state in which he lives. But in reality each of those states has paid part of his salary to his company and now he has to claim that with each state. Confusing? Imagine trying to understand the different tax tables and laws from different states!

If someone doesn't make it clear to you from the beginning that you have to follow this process it is really easy to assume you are doing everything correctly. This is what happened to Al Franken. He made money in many different states but paid all of the taxes to only one state. He didn't commit fraud. He made a very common mistake.

How do you make sure this doesn't happen? You pay an accountant to do your taxes. Therefore, the only person, or people, who should be getting blasted are Franken's accountant (who should be fired) and the people around the candidate who should have known better. This is a tax mistake made by so many people and yet the Republican Party is so afraid of Al Franken running against Norm Coleman that they dug this up to try to smear him.

I'm struck by parallels between the effort to establish a "no-touch" policy at Armatage Elementary and the effort to pilot "Welcoming Schools" at Hale Elementary, where I have a child. In each case:

• Why did parents get no information about the "problem" before administrators implemented an overzealous policy/curriculum?

• Why are parents who question the policy/curriculum being labeled? At Armatage, they are said to be "anti-safety" and at Hale they're called homophobic bigots.

• Why go after a gnat with a sledgehammer? The strict no-touch policy is ridiculous on its face. It's likewise ridiculous to portray "Welcoming Schools" as "comprehensive." It focuses almost exclusively on LGBT families. I'm not anti-LGBT. I simply oppose this curriculum, especially when it targets very young students (K-4).

• The principals announce the implementation of a firm and complete policy/curriculum, only to back off without acknowledging or taking responsibility for their errors.

MATTHEW KNOPP, MINNEAPOLIS

Since the funds for our stimulus checks are essentially borrowed from our children, I suggest putting them into savings accounts for our children and grandchildren.