"This is especially detrimental to the disadvantaged family."

Wrong question

Vote smart

Editor, The Times:

Columnist Ellen Goodman asks a question that represents just about everything wrong with voting in America today ["A tough call for black women," syndicated column, May 18]. "Will they be black while voting or female while voting?"

I hope they are neither. I hope they are smart while voting.

Black women (and the rest of us) should be voting for the candidate who best serves our country, not because of their color, religion, gender, age, or any other irrelevant category.

I vote for who might better balance a budget, or who might promote more peace in the world. Male, female, black, white? Who cares? I want a candidate with a vision of a sustainable future, not a father with a prominent last name. I want a president who is intelligent and thoughtful, not one who is white or from this church or that religion. Clinton or Obama? Democrat or Republican? Wrong questions.

The question should be: Who is going to take us through the next four-year term with dignity, vision, intelligence and capability? That is for whom black women and the rest of us should vote.

— Dan Travers, Seattle

Controlling TB

Invest here, abroad

King County is experiencing the resurgence of the wily tuberculosis germ that killed many in previous generations ["Foreign-born are hardest-hit as cases of TB soar in county," News, May 18].

Our ancestors died because they didn't have effective treatments and now the TB germ is adapting and resisting what had been effective drugs. First multiple drug resistant TB and now extremely drug resistant TB, which our Centers for Disease Control has called "virtually incurable," is being reported in the developing world and in the former Soviet Union.

Travel from endemic areas is easy and an infected and infective traveler is difficult to identify at our ports.

The prestigious New England Journal of Medicine recently reported that our investing in foreign TB control programs has as much as a 3 to 1 return on investment.

Analogous to our Homeland Security strategy of combating terrorism both at home and abroad, we need to urge our members of Congress to support both domestic TB control and global TB control.

— Dr. Larry Donohue, Seattle

True conservative test

He who does not sink

Regarding the GOP candidates and who is a true conservative, perhaps they should forgo the next round of debates. Have all the candidates walk on water instead. The candidate that does not sink may then cast the first stone.

— Cathy Aldrich, Shoreline

Not in the numbers

Everyday Math a problem

The Seattle Public Schools' adoption of Everyday Math will add to the program's awful reputation nationwide. Parents have had to supplement it with paid tutors and lots of intervention at home. This is especially detrimental to the disadvantaged family.

The district offers appeasement to those who want more basic skills instruction by adding the highly rated material of Singapore Math for 15 minutes a day, compared with 45 minutes of Everyday Math.

Teachers cannot proficiently develop a hybrid of these two very disparate curricula. It's like having 75 percent frosting and trying to insert 25 percent cake into it. The plan would be more likely to succeed if those time frames were Singapore Math 75 percent of the time (cake) and Everyday Math, 25 percent (frosting).

The cost of the Everyday Math materials alone will run around $2 million. Training costs will be increased in order to mix Singapore Math into the core lessons of Everyday Math. And the cost for this continuous training over a seven-year period (the lifespan of most program adoptions) ... ?

We must have more money to run our schools than we're told, when a multimillion-dollar program has to be supplemented in order for it to work.

— Nakonia (Niki) Hayes, Hewitt, Texas

Former principal of North Beach Elementary School, Seattle

Logic challenged

Who needs courts?

By Charles Krauthammer's logic ["Let the people untangle abortion," syndicated column, May 14], why bother having a Supreme Court, or any courts?

After all, we have laws passed by legislatures whose members are elected by citizens. That is rule by democracy. (Yet how ironic that the leader picked by the majority of voters in 2000 was displaced by the one picked by the Supreme Court?)

When the courts insert themselves into "democracy," they muck it up by picking apart those laws and, as Krauthammer put it, contaminating them with legalisms.

Perhaps Krauthammer prefers the glory days before Supreme Court intervention when a state could ban married couples from using birth control, and private sexual activity between two consenting adults of the same sex could land them in jail.

I don't much care what society, much less Krauthammer, believes I am owed. What I do care about are my rights as an American citizen and ensuring their protection from legislative attempts to curtail or dismantle them.

I care that my rights aren't violated by the blatant prejudice of voters or lawmakers, or by judges who don't believe the framers purposely crafted the Constitution so it could adapt to the scientific and social changes they knew this country was bound to realize.

— Christianne Noble Walker, Seattle

Highly obstructed vehicles

DOT ruins commute

I commute by bus from Bellevue to downtown Seattle each weekday. On May 16, I had to ask myself if I was nuts to bother.

A semi truck crashed near Rainier Avenue South, on Interstate 90 in the early morning commute hours. The regular I-90 lanes were blocked by this accident. So, what did the Washington State Department of Transportation do? They opened the HOV lanes to all traffic.

What did this do? We got a parking lot in the HOV lanes. I was one full hour late to work that day.

I see absolutely no reason to ever open the HOV lanes up to those who choose to drive single-occupant cars.

It's a slap in the face to all of us that go out of our way to try to help make less traffic, not more.

— Kristen A. Kuhn, Bellevue