Health-care obligation destroying post office

Editor:

Since the Postal Reform Act in 1970, the U.S. Postal Service receives no tax dollars.

Ron Bloom, who analyzed General Motors to help them avoid bankruptcy, was hired to analyze the Postal Service. His findings state if they continue on the same path, they will go under in 10 years! This is mainly due to: loss in first-class mail and the $5.5 billion retiree health-care pre-funding law passed in 2006, which requires 75 years' funding be prepaid over 10 years. No other federal agency or private company has this burden.

If the Postal Service goes to five-day delivery, they will lose the exclusive right to use your mailbox and all mail security will be gone. At this time, 90 percent of America's medicine is delivered by mail, six days a week. A large number of businesses depend on six-day delivery to conduct their business.

If privatized, who will want to deliver to our rural areas where there is less profit? Rep. Darrell Issa's short-term bill or Rep. Paul Ryan's plan will destroy the world's best postal service!

Please contact your representatives and senators in Washington and ask them to support long-term bills - HR 1351, HR 1262, HR 3591 and S 1853.

Terry Guthrie

Nitro

Helpful businessman suffering unjustly

Editor:

I met with someone I consider a friend recently, a friend because he has always been there for the family in times of need, but I hadn't seen him in over 10 years, as I had moved away shortly after my husband passed away, where he once again was there for us.

I was aware of the fact that this person was put through some very trying times because the state of West Virginia and the county of Kanawha came down on him very hard for something he did trying once again to help someone in need. He did make a mistake, but did not steal or cheat anyone, as he was said to have done.

The gentleman I am referring to is Billy Surratt, the owner of Elk Funeral Home on Pennsylvania Avenue in Charleston. His business has suffered because of the negative publicity, but he is still open for services for anyone that has the need and the comfort of a very caring and helpful man. He takes his business seriously. As I said before, he is there to help any and all families when they need the comfort and understanding they most need.

Mr. Surratt deserves for both sides of his story to be told and he needs for people to know he is, as he has always been, an honest and caring and dependable businessman. Thank you.

Dottie Bonar

Dunbar

What if MLK had lived to run for president?

Editor:

What if Martin Luther King Jr. had not been assassinated? What if he had lived? One particularly intriguing scenario raises the possibility of his going into politics, perhaps even running for president.

Let us come up with one particularly tantalizing possibility:

In 1976, Dr. King decides to run for president as an independent. He does not trust former Gov. Jimmy Carter of Georgia, one of the leading Democratic contenders. And Carter plays into Dr. King's hands with his incautious (not bigoted) statement about "ethnic purity" in promising not to use federal power to break up neighborhoods inhabited by any one religious, racial, ethnic or nationality group. After that, the King candidacy takes off among Southern blacks, many of them only recently enfranchised, and Carter's popularity grows among Southern whites.

For much of the summer and fall of 1976, the Gallup polls consistently showed Carter running far better against the incumbent Republican President Gerald Ford than he actually did on Election Day, Nov. 2, 1976. This was true both nationally and in the South.

With the black vote already securely in Carter's corner, that can only mean that Carter would have had to receive a majority of the white vote in more Southern states than he actually did. As we all know, Carter won a majority of whites in his home state of Georgia, plus Tennessee and Arkansas. (We consider Kentucky a border state.) Ford carried a majority of white voters in all other Southern states.

Now here is where we begin to ask the questions. In what other Southern states did Carter have a chance of winning a majority of white voters against Ford? (I would say North Carolina for sure.)

If Dr. King is in the picture and his strength among Southern blacks holds, does Carter come across as the "Southern white" candidate in opposition to Dr. King, the "black" candidate, and President Ford the "Yankee-Lincoln" candidate? How does the 1976 electoral map look in the South then?

William R. Brown

South Charleston