Why Women Shouldn't Vote

So the local conservative weekly rag, The Alabama Gazette, printed the below Op-Ed (it's a must read):



Here's my exchange with the paper about it:

From:
To: alabamagazette@yahoo.com
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2011 4:27 PM
Subject: re: "The People's Voice: In God We Trust," July 8

To the editor:

You should be ashamed for publishing Ed Jone's misogynist diatribe ("In God We Trust," July 8). His claim that women are uninformed voters, that they are swayed by the looks of candidates and not their policies, that their votes have harmed our nation, and thus, giving women the right to vote was a mistake, is offense, unpatriotic, and anti-American.

If there is anyone who is an uniformed fool, it's Jones. In his column he repeatedly says that The Twentieth Amendment established womens suffrage. The Twentieth Amendment is the "lame duck" amendment. The Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote.

The "Gazette" owes its readers an apology.

-Seth

-----

On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 5:35 PM, Loretta Grant <alabamagazette@yahoo.com> wrote:

Seth,

Thank you for your response! Response is what I want from our readers!

'This is a "think" for yourself publication. If only we would all stand up

for our beliefs and issues that just "make up mad".
We are the "People's Voice" and YOU are a thinking reader.

I am a woman. I read this, and knowing Ed as I do, I know he simply thinks

men and women are just made different. I agree! We do think about issues

differently. I am a free thinking woman or I would not own this newspaper.

This did not offend me. I did not completely agree with his slant on the

women voting issues, but it does make us examine ourselves to

find out what makes us vote for a particular person. Most people go to the

polls and "don't have a clue", or are told how to vote! Think...think...think.

Be more informed! That's the point!

Thank you again. Please keep reading The Alabama Gazette and feel free

to comment at any time!

Loretta Grant

Publisher/Managing Editor

From:

To: Loretta Grant <alabamagazette@yahoo.com>
Sent: Monday, July 18, 2011 9:34 AM
Subject: Re: "The People's Voice: In God We Trust," REPLY

- Hide quoted text -

Mrs. Grant:

You may know Ed, but I'm guessing most of your readers, including me, don't. All we have to go by is his printed word, and that tells a very different story than the man you may know personally.

I'm also curious that you have no comment on the fact that he repeatedly named the wrong amendment (and that fact checkers did not pick this up).

Respectfully,

-Seth

---

Seth,

I will print this email out for him. He does not personally operate a computer.

Thanks for your comments!

Loretta Grant

Seaside, FL

This past weekend I went to Seaside, FL where The Truman Show was filmed.



Seaside is a master-planned community designed to be an idealized 1950s beech community.



Despite the extremely high level of kitsch, the town is pretty cool -- I'd vacation there.

Seaside is quite compact (there's very little space between homes), it's modeled to be a garden city with trees and brush all over the place, the architecture is diverse and interesting, and it's all very self-contained with lots of retail and restaurants in the town center.







With the exception of going to the supermarket, while there you could park your car and never have to drive -- everything you would need is in walking distance.



(Sand paths like this cut through the blocks so that people can walk from their homes to the beach in bare feet.)

There is one major flaw with the design of the town. Virtually none of the homes have parking on the property line (e.g. a garage or parking space). As a result, all of the streets are lined with cars, and they screw up the picturesque look of the town.



It's either a major oversight, or they grossly underestimated how many cars per home there would be. This website implies that the on-street parking provides a buffer between the street and sidewalk. While this is done in places like NYC -- it goes sidewalk, bike lane, parking, traffic lane, so that the parked cars protect the bike lane from traffic -- unlike NYC, people aren't zooming down the streets of Seaside at 40 mph. Most people were driving slower than I walk.

One other planning mistake was that they didn't put in bike lanes -- and lots of people bike around town.

More pictures:



On the way to Seaside I drove by this mega condo, Emerald Grande:



It's an interesting contrast to Seaside. Both have the same goal of being a self-contained vacation community -- it has its own mall, restaurants, marina -- but its design philosophy is part of our mall culture -- the building is pretty much a stationary cruise ship.



I can understand why some people will like that, but its huge size means it's always going to be congested with people.

The biggest difference between it and Seaside is that there is no where to walk -- walking is a major component of Seaside experience.

I also think buying a unit in a condo like this is a bad investment. Eventually someone is going to build a newer, glitzy condo tower, and next thing you know, you own a unit in a second rate building.

Finally, I spotted this disaster waiting to happen:



This putz is going to get someone killed. What does he think those clam shell type looking things everyone has on their car roofs is for?