Providing books for sick children

I would like to thank our community for the wonderful support we have received. This time it was through the N.C. Literary Festival hosted by the UNC Chapel Hill Libraries this past weekend which collected over 600 books. People who attended the festival were asked to bring a book to donate to the Book Fairy.

The Book Fairy runs “Karl’s Books,” a program that collects and provides children’s books for the UNC Chapel Hill Pediatric Hematalogy/Oncology Department. The children treated in the clinic are invited to read the books in the clinic and take a book home when they leave.

In 2½ years the program has become a huge success. Our son, Karl Humphries, would be so pleased to know other kids are being provided with this wonderful form of escape. Karl was treated at this clinic for three years for a brainstem tumor and died in March 2007 at the age of 13. We do this in his memory.

If you would like to support our program, please send a tax deductible donation.

Make checks payable to: “Pediatric Hematology Oncology Fund”; Memo line — Book drive fund, Karl’s Books; Mail to: UNC Chapel Hill, Dept of Pediatrics Div Hem Onc, CB # 7236, Chapel Hill, N.C. 27599-7236. A tax receipt will be mailed to you, so be sure to include your current address.

KATHY HUMPHRIES

Durham

Unfair retirement

Do you think it would be fair to say that in 2010, an election year for one-third of the Senate and all of the House of Representatives, the taxpayers could be in charge? We get to vote! We need to show Washington “power of the people.”

I worked 38 years at my last employment, before that other short-term jobs. Now I’m on Social Security, and I’m afraid of what Obama is going to do to it.

Is it true the senators and congressmen and women do not pay into Social Security nor do they collect from it? I understand they gave themselves a special plan years ago. And this plan included great medical benefits. They voted for their own benefit plan. So when they retire, they continue to draw the same pay and benefits until they die. Except it may increase from time to time for cost of living adjustments. You and I pick up the tab for this plan. They have never put one little penny into it.

Now, Social Security recipients will not receive a cost of living increase in 2010 or 2011. Congress will, I’m sure.

If their golden-fleece retirement plan were pulled from the senators and congressmen and women and they were put into Social Security like the rest of us, I wonder how fast they would fix it!

CLAIRE HAYES BOYKIN

Durham

Rejecting lies

As a non-member of the mainstream media, I think I am in a better position to know what Americans are looking for or reject than an Obama-cheerleading newspaper.

We don’t object to a president being called a liar while in Congress giving the 100th-some speech in nine months. We reject a president who lies every time he speaks. His lies can be documented against written proposed laws that the Democrat Congress is trying to sneak by us. Obviously, you’re not interested in such documented proof.

Obama lies when he says “others” are against health care reform. He knows very well those who are against his health care plan are not against health care reform but against his “Obama-care,” reducing the quality of health care for those who have it and giving it to those who don’t. This socialistic plan, as documented by the CBO, will fail to provide health care to at least 17 million Americans.

I wonder how many people who don’t have health care have chosen instead to spend their money on cell phone plans, HD cable TV and high-speed Internet and spend extra money on gasoline driving a cool-looking SUV?

Obama admits again that if you don’t agree with him and his accomplices, then you’re not worth the trouble for them to seek bipartisanship. Obama the uniter? He’s more like Obama the divider. Thanks to him this country has never been so divided — just what this former community agitator wants.

ROBERT MEDRED

Hillsborough