McCain’s fiscal plan and faith

Re “Contrarian candidate,” editorial, April 26

You applaud John McCain for not pandering to ordinary people but telling them hard truths about jobs and retraining. But McCain’s economic plan is still based on large tax cuts, mostly for big corporations. Why is it that promising help to ordinary people is pandering but giving aid to corporations is serious economic policy?

Perhaps you should remind McCain that this is a double standard. It’s time for him to tell the big players that they too need to adapt to the changing economy and that they too should stop counting on Washington to get them out of trouble.

As for the people who have lost their jobs, they don’t need to be told. They figured out a long time ago that their jobs are not coming back, and they are retraining every chance they get. But Wal-Mart jobs don’t bring a lot of bread to the table.

Perhaps it’s McCain who needs some retraining on the realities of the global economy.

Jean Lecuyer

Los Angeles

In your editorial, you characterize McCain as boldly preaching an unpopular message, but it’s the same old, tired, free-market deregulation dogma.

There’s nothing contrarian about it -- it’s the Bush line, which has put America in the terrible spot we’re in today.

Won’t you begin to assess this guy for what he really is? He’s no maverick; he’s a throwback, and more of the same poison that’s been killing America (and Americans, and Iraqis) for seven years.

Fred Sokolow

Santa Monica

According to McCain, government can’t create good and lasting jobs in the private sector.

All of the Internet, which now represents a significant factor in our economy, is traceable to the development of the ARPAnet by the Department of Defense. Most of the research that underpins drug development -- the part that is the most risky and least predictable -- is sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.

Siegfried Othmer

Woodland Hills

Since when is realizing a trade policy has failed and saying so labeled “pandering”?

Thank goodness a few politicians, such as Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, see that these policies have enriched corporations and a few individuals while devastating middle-class America and accelerating global warming.

Shouldn’t we question McCain’s support of globalization that enables human rights abuses, substandard wages, oppressive work conditions and total disregard to the environment?

Obama and Clinton are not pandering. Like good leaders, they are admitting that past policies haven’t worked and are suggesting a different course.

Chris Wolfe

Studio City

Re “McCain doesn’t put his faith out front,” April 26

It appears, to his credit, that McCain has tried to diplomatically sidestep repeated questions about his specific religious beliefs and how he would or wouldn’t apply them as president.

Nowhere in this front-page story is there any mention of one minor detail: the U.S. Constitution’s Article VI, Section 3, which forbids any religious test for public office.

Am I the only one who sees danger in this constant badgering of all the candidates by religious zealots who want to establish an American version of a Taliban-style society?

Mark OConnell

Irvine

How is it possible that The Times devoted an entire story to McCain’s faith without once mentioning Texas evangelist John Hagee?

Not a day passes without Obama being tarred by his association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, yet McCain gets a free pass on a televangelist who believes that the Catholic Church is the “the great whore,” that Jews are to blame for their own suffering and that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment against the people of New Orleans.

Obama at least had the decency to renounce his former pastor’s offensive diatribes. McCain unapologetically continues to embrace Hagee and his hateful messages.

Edward Brand

Valencia

I was a year behind Johnny McCain in junior high and at Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Va. Attendance at all the services mentioned in Saturday’s article on his faith were compulsory at that Episcopal boarding school.

Part of the school’s honor code was a provision that one was never to create a false impression. I hope that he didn’t give The Times’ reporter the impression that his attending those services was a matter of choice.

Ted Mollegen

Glastonbury, Conn.