To the Editor:

Mexican President Calderon and President Obama are working together on "comprehensive immigration reform", which is a euphemism for a federal state marriage. The US is the groom and Mexico is the bride, only thing this is a shotgun wedding and we never even kissed her.  Fact is we don't even want to get married, for one thing this marriage will never last and the divorce will be messy. Who will be paying alimony and child support and you know there's no prenuptial agreement so who will walk away with half.  I guess President Obama doesn't think wages are quite low enough yet or Social Security isn't quite insolvent enough and if President Calderon spent as much energy trying to fix his own country as he does trying to fix ours maybe the estimated 15 million of his citizens wouldn't be here illegally and might go back home. Personally I think Mexico should marry Brazil, now that's a match made in heaven.

To the Editor:

If our government were a deck of cards, and we threw that deck up in the air, it would fall back to earth in better order than what we now have, that sadly passes for government.  For a government to be this dysfunctional takes great effort. Politicians and bureaucrats work around the clock 24-7 to achieve this degree impotent incompetence. It's not just the President and the Congress or the Courts, it goes all the way to the State and Local Governments and their example is emulated by business large and small.  It all seems to be designed to run backwards, so that the simplest thing is almost impossible to get done, and if you manage somehow to get it done you will be so exhausted that it's totally impossible to change things. Thomas Jefferson wrote that when government becomes unresponsive to the need of the people "We the people have the right to alter or abolish it", so I bet we should just fold this dog hand we got here, shuffle a few times, cut and re-deal. 

To The Editor:

The disastrous blowout and fire spewing out unknown amounts of crude oil and natural gas into the Gulf of Mexico could very likely continue for months. As I used to work in the oil fields and know something about this subject, I would bet the eventual cause will be human error.  If the blowout preventer is damaged or improperly installed the only way to stop the flow is to drill a "kill well" to intersect the original well bore near the bottom of the hole and pump heavy drill mud into the well, filling it from the bottom up. The fact that these accidents happen over and over is due to the "Hell Fighter" mentality of the oil field.  If you look at the equipment used to drill today it is very similar to the rotary drilling done by those who drilled the Lucas Gusher over a hundred years ago.  The new technologies we have are tacked onto the old methods like dancing shoes on dinosaurs. Until we change how we drill and what we are trying to do to get the oil and gas to flow out of the formation these accidents will continue.  "Under Balanced Drilling" is the PC term for "Control Blowout Drilling" which is the alternative drilling philosophy we need to control these wells and redesign a safer more productive way we drill.