limited government

In your coverage of the "Kill this bill" rally at the U.S. Capitol, you quote Democratic National Committee spokesman Hari Sevugan castigating the conservative demonstrators for their "extreme right-wing, rigid ideological agenda that has Americans leaving the Republican Party in droves." It would be helpful if extreme left-wing ideologues would not sacrifice language to rhetoric.

If total government represents the extreme left wing, then no government (anarchy) is the opposite extreme. So these conservatives are actually middle-of-the-roaders who favor the principle of limited government, as did the founders who set us on course to become the envy of the world.

Furthermore, principles are not the same thing as ideology. If they were, it must be supposed that the Ten Commandments are nothing more than the Ten Suggestions. And finally, many of the people who have abandoned the Republican Party feel that it has abandoned them in its drift leftward.

This deliberate and demagogic deconstruction of definitions only serves to confuse the unwary.

Robert S. Keith

Philadelphia

b28keith@hotmail.com

With tax cuts

comes more poverty

In the ongoing local tax/revenue policy debates, it was quite refreshing and welcome to see Councilman Bill Green's Nov. 3 commentary "Tax-rate tinkering won't work," where he answers the supply-side ideologues of the recent Task Force on Tax Policy to point out that along with the marginal, local tax cuts has come a significant increase in the local poverty rate in Philadelphia.

Academic and civic cheerleaders of tax cuts, including your Editorial Board, conveniently ignore the fact that these tax cuts not only fail to ameliorate poverty, but likely worsen it, by bleeding away local revenues from programs that create a better educated and skilled workforce that can lessen poverty.

Jonathan M. Stein

General counsel

Community Legal Services Inc.

Philadelphia

jstein@clsphila.org

Misleading caption on Afghanistan item

The article "Afghan women need help to sustain their fragile gains" by Trudy Rubin on Sunday had a misleading caption under the photograph of Suraya Pakzad, who runs a shelter for abused women.