WHERE’S MY MONEY?

I’m tired of John Eder’s posturing by waving around a $500,000 grant (see "Let’s Get Growing," May 27, by Sara Donnelly) to subsidize space for artists and would-be artists — the non-productive pretentious ones among us. I’m tired of reading their self-serving pleas for free rent. They are less deserving of subsidized rents than the non-artistic poor and homeless among us. Subsidizing space for artists will not only diminish the amount of space available for the low-income tenants, it will also drive up rents throughout the city. Low-income housing is more needed in Portland than art. The city doesn’t need another selfish group of people taking housing from the poor nor does it need another opportunistic politician waving money at a potential constituency like an animal trainer waves fish at a group of trained seals.

Michael Quick

Portland

I LIKE AL

If I may borrow an operatic coin, bravo to Al Diamon for highlighting the political shenanigans surrounding the base-closure process.

In his most recent column (see "Nine Reasons to Say Goodbye," May 27), Diamon, through sheer journalistic obligation, pointed out how former US Representative Tom Andrews, D-Maine, was the last — and maybe only — Maine politician to have the gumption to vote "yes" when it came to closing Loring Air Force Base. It cost Andrews a US Senate bid, yet he had the capacity to vote his conscience, unlike others who currently insist that the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard is the best at what it does.

In my own realm, I have tried recently to light a fire under two alleged Portland Press Herald writers to report on the inefficiency of the Kittery yard.

In the 1990s, I wrote no fewer than 18 articles about a government audit that disclosed the yard’s inefficiency and its predilection to high overhead, yet no one at the paper of record will touch it today. God forbid anyone raise the specter of a Maine military base’s failings. Rather, it is easier to print the claims of the state’s congressional delegation without comparing what those types say to the record of achievement — or lack thereof — in Kittery.

When I called the Press Herald’s Bill Nemitz recently to urge that he look into the yard’s historical inefficiencies, he told me it was "ancient history."

Some things never change, sad to say, despite PPH editor Jeannine Guttman’s oft-stated claims of a concerted campaign of journalistic urgency that was designed to resurrect that newspaper.

Ted Cohen,

Defrocked Press Herald scribe

South Portland