Mail letters to Letters, Santa Fe Reporter, PO Box 2306, Santa Fe, NM 87504, deliver them to 132 E. Marcy St., fax them to 505-988-5348 or email them to the editor
For Horses
It drives me crazy when I read or hear about the Bureau of Land Management's refusal to take Madeleine Pickens' gracious offer of help concerning the wild horses of this country.
Here is a woman with the resources, the vision and the desire to take all 30,000 wild horses currently held in BLM pens and put them on a private sanctuary, which she will buy and pay for. The BLM, who has shown their incompetence in handling the wild horse population since the 1970s, obstinately refuses to work with Ms. Pickens in solving their problem. I don't get it.
I would think that the BLM would be grateful to a private citizen who was willing to take all those horses off their hands. Can someone explain to me why they don't give her free rein?
Kendel Dreyer
Santa Fe
Party Packs
Thank you for your article in the news section titled "Needle Points." I had no idea a program like this existed. Ms. [Sheilah] Galer and the Santa Fe Mountain Center's Harm Reduction Program are doing nothing but enabling the addicts and future addicts by handing out their "Party Packs."
What truly disturbed me was the final few paragraphs detailing how she hands needles out to children. I sincerely hope my tax money is not going to fund a program that is contributing to the drug abuse and deaths of New Mexico's children. Where are the parents of these children? Why does Ms. Galer not feel an ethical and moral compulsion not to help these kids. Giving drug paraphernalia to children is not helping them.
Call the Children, Youth and Families Department, the police, anyone. Ms. Galer concludes the article with a statement on how the children will "clean up" someday. Does she really believe that when she is handing out easy means to continue their addictions?
Jake Goldbogen
Santa Fe
Free Press freely
Until May of this year, I was the publisher of the New Mexico Free Press. The Free Press was not designed to be the right-leaning publication that became so reviled by some Santa Feans, or was it?
The idea to publish a weekly, community newspaper for local residents and businesses was mine. I am responsible for assembling the staff that produced the Free Press.
It is not my place to publicly discuss anyone's personality, character or political beliefs, but there are some things I would like all to know about the people who worked very hard to produce the paper each week.
The staff members of the Free Press were people across the political spectrum and our collective least-favorite section of our paper was ALWAYS the editorial section. The discussions, arguments and battles (nothing physical!) that took place in our offices each week would testify to this fact.
First and foremost, our goal was to cover the community-based stories about people and organizations that may have had trouble getting their news into print. Those people and organizations that came in contact with our staff members know that each and every member of the Free Press is a caring and genuinely nice person.
The articles, and especially the editorial content, that were printed in our paper are the crux of what became our dilemma. The staff of the Free Press NEVER wanted to be a political publication. We certainly did not want to be a politically slanted publication.
You might ask: If a publisher and all of his staff are opposed to certain articles and editorials, how in the world would the offensive content end up in print? The answer is, I was not the final word on some very key content decisions and neither was anyone on my staff.
Readers will have to draw their own conclusions as to why the Free Press died.
Speaking for myself, I am discouraged to say I have come to the belief that all of government, worldwide, is to blame for our troubles and the ultimate, real culprit lies deep within the dark bowels of the Fed-controlled financial world.
Scott Karlson
Santa Fe
