Letters

Insider Thanks

I wanted to tell you what a terrific job Joe Deegan did on the Republican Party (“Troublemakers Unlisted,” “City Lights,” July 10). I am a member of the Central Committee, and everything that was written in there was the truth. And I want to say, thank you, number one, for printing it, and let’s hear some more about the Raw Story and Tony Krvaric. Thank you very much for your excellent work and article in this week’s paper.

Name Withheld

Yep

Re “The Jamul Incident” (“Unforgettable,” July 10). Great story. So much detail. Very enjoyable.

Shirley Burke
via email

Set This Story Free

Kudos to Stephen Dobyns for writing such a fascinating and informative article about the “tricking of the brain” for amputees (“She Told Me My Arm Was Gone,” Cover Story, July 10). This is an article that should be sent to news papers all across America and be picked up by the wire services rather than just staying in a free but prestigious San Diego publi cation.

Name Withheld
via email

Cozy With Drag Queens

Your mention in “City Lights” of the departure of Jerry Sanders PR man Fred Sainz to take a well-paying position at the Denver, Colorado–based Gill Foundation is intriguing (“Breaking News,” July 10). While his abrasive style with our town’s media was a factor in his exiting, it’s also true that Sainz had been too cozy with a certain notorious drag queen and gossip columnist known for his militancy.

Last summer, for instance, Sainz’s pal led a rowdy demonstration at the downtown Horton Plaza’s unveiling of a statue of former San Diego mayor Pete Wilson. Their bullhorns and jeering got so loud, the melee drowned out the speeches given by Sanders and other prominent Republicans in honor of Wilson. Sainz’s militant friend was there to protest the former mayor’s “horrific” treatment of gays when Wilson was mayor — when the drag queen was getting busted for being a Balboa Park prostitute. Sainz was blamed for this and later denounced by various local talk radio hosts for not exercising proper crowd control.

In his latest column, the drag queen praises his fellow “Latino brother” and credits Sainz for taking “bullets” directed at his boss, Jerry Sanders, and calls Sainz the mayor’s “No. 1 aide and friend.” Sainz and his lover, Tiny Tim Tipton, apparently are off to Denver to fight for gay marriage in California.

John Primavera
via email

Quotables

The July 3 “Sporting Box” column had a lot of quotes on patriotism. But there are a lot more that could be considered sacrilegious. So here are a few.

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” — Samuel Johnson.

“Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched” — Guy de Maupassant.

“Patriotism is the passion of fools and the most foolish of passions” — Arthur Schopenhauer.

“You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race” — George Bernard Shaw.

“It is lamentable that to be a good patriot we must become the enemy of the rest of mankind” — Voltaire.

Melvin Shapiro
Hillcrest

Alec Baldwin Wannabes

It was refreshing to read in Barbarella’s “Daddy’s Girls” (“Diary of a Diva,” July 3) that there are a few fathers left whose primary mission in life was a healthy parenting relationship with their children.

Nowadays, too many “prodigal fathers” spend their time trying, much later in the child’s life, various forms of pandering to get back involved with them: i.e., alcohol, bribes, and bad-mouthing the ex-spouse (their mother).

These Alec Baldwin wan na bes like to loudly blame their defective parenting on the ex-wife, rather than the obsessive, hypercritical, philandering behavior that drove the child, mother, and previous spouse away in the first place.

Of course, the fact that, as the child was growing up, the prodigal father obsessed about the child’s weight, dress, diet (just like he did Mom) and shared every tidbit of the divorce with them to try to tarnish the mother, that behavior had nothing to do with the child’s subsequent psychological issues.

Now that the child is older, having trouble in school, self-medicating (using inhalants, smoking pot, and drinking every day), the pandering takes the form of looking the other way and enabling the self-abuse.

For example, one prodigal father decided to show how much he thought of his teenage daughter’s soccer play by taking her to a local restaurant, buying her a margarita, and because he had drunk three margaritas himself, had the underage, inebriated daughter chauffer him home.

Name Withheld
via email

The Unruly Can Go

Can you please clear something up for me? If I was kicked out of an establishment such as Vons for bad behavior (loud, drunk, obnoxious) and was told not to come back and did, then wouldn’t I be violating a trespassing law? I see signs in many retail businesses that say, “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.” Isn’t this the same thing as Barona kicking out patrons they don’t wish to see anymore (“Get Out, Stay Out,” “City Lights,” July 3)? I understand you are linking this to the tribes limiting their sizes so as to increase dollars to members they deem worthy, but as far as unruly patrons go, I don’t see a problem with it.

Matt
via email