Dear Editor: I would like to thank Lynn Brown for providing such a wonderful exposition and amplification of what has become of the "modern" Republican party. After containing the McCarthyites in the 50s and later the Birchers, the thinking conservative wing has apparently lost the reins to the party's reactionary right wing.

Brown's closing pretty much ticked all the boxes, but I was particularly impressed by her early reference to "Saul Alinsky tactics"--that was superb allegory. And who was Saul Alinsky? He was a community organizer in African-American communities. Here's Alinsky explaining why he helped organize black communities:

"Negroes were being lynched regularly in the South as the first stirrings of black opposition began to be felt, and many of the white civil rights organizers and labor agitators who had started to work with them were tarred and feathered, castrated-or killed. Most Southern politicians were members of the Ku Klux Klan and had no compunction about boasting of it."
-- Saul Alinsky

We should respect what it takes to get and keep the right to vote... something the modern Republican party has lost sight of.

Michael Cope