Letters to the edtor for Monday, Dec. 8

With the unveiling of Minnesota's budget deficit, the battle is on for how to come up with $5.2 billion. Conservatives want spending cuts, and liberals want tax increases. There's an easy compromise.

Conservatives should admit that some tax increases are probably necessary right now because of the size of the deficit in relation to the size of the budget. We simply can't cut enough spending to balance the budget.

But liberals need to agree to make tax increases temporary. Everyone agrees that the source of the deficit is the recession we are in, and that eventually it will end. So the taxes we raise to balance the budget should end as well.

DAVE THUL, OWATONNA, MINN.

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When it comes time to face the people of Minnesota in a time of crisis, Gov. Tim Pawlenty snaps back to partisan politics.

Spending $1 trillion to ruin and then rebuild Iraq is OK from his point of view but it's not OK to rebuild the U.S. infrastructure.

You can't have it both ways: low taxes and high services. Minnesota needs to choose a direction -- either become a low-tax Mississippi or regain the high tax/high services years when we were under solid leadership like that of Govs. Wendell Anderson, Rudy Perpich and Arne Carlson.

LEW MORAN, MINNEAPOLIS

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Thanks, Gov. Pawlenty. We are now just the fourth healthiest state, with increased child poverty and less public health spending.

J.M. LIEN, GOLDEN VALLEY

BRENT OLSON, ORTONVILLE, MINN.

Ruth Marcus' Nov. 30 commentary on Michelle Obama is right on. It reminds me that women's choices are never easy as they relate to career and family.

We now live in a world in which most families need two incomes to survive. Yet, when the workday is over for the husband, the day is just beginning for the wife, who still bears the brunt of childrearing, cooking and cleaning.

The irony is that Barack Obama, the self-acclaimed bearer of "change we can believe in," acknowledges that when his own children arrived, it was his wife, not he, who made adjustments to her career.

The real issue here is when are men going to pick up the slack? Women cannot (and should not have to) do everything by themselves.

Barack Obama has been elected, so Charlie Quimby can finally bring himself to fly the American flag ("Welcome back, Old Glory," Dec. 3).

Quimby's shallow and solipsistic meditation on this decision reminds us that Thomas Paine's warning about "sunshine patriots" is as apt today as it was during the darkest days of the American Revolution.

PETER D. ABARBANEL, APPLE VALLEY

Regarding Jack Goldsmith's Dec. 1 commentary, "Tempest over tactics, timidity on terror": I am so weary of the bald claims that national security requires subverting the Constitution and violating the Geneva Conventions.

Even if this were true -- and it is unproven, even illogical -- is it worth the loss of our civil liberties, our moral standing in the world and our self respect? Goldsmith dismisses these concerns so casually.

Precisely. Violations of the law are subject to prosecution, and actions have consequences. I would have thought that this member in good standing at the Hoover Institution would be tough on crime. Just not these crimes, I guess. And this is one of the fine legal minds that was furnishing opinions to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney!

The Bush administration relied on those secret, self-referential legal opinions and executive orders to authorize their misdeeds. Goldsmith describes any new hesitancy by the CIA to commit such illegal acts as "skittishness," but that is just what the Constitution, the laws and the Geneva Conventions require. We should expect them to act with integrity, and respect for the law, and, yes, "skittishness," so that our Constitution, the soul of our system of justice, may be cherished and handed on to our children in good repair.