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Of the many faults of modern media, the one that does the most damage is the perceived need for there to be competition, whether there is or not, and that there must be "winners" and "losers" in the competition. This is driven by the need to sell papers or gain ratings. The recent workings of our government involving funding the war in Iraq is a case in point.

To be fair, there were elements of competition in this issue, but this trumpeting in the press of how Bush "won" and the Democrats "lost" in the final version of the bill is way off the mark. Going into this process, it was widely understood, even by the press, that the Democrats didn't have the proverbial snowball's chance in hell of getting a bill with deadlines and milestones signed by President Bush.

The purpose was to force dialogue at high levels about issues ignored for too many years, and to start shining some light on what the Bush administration has been doing for the past six years. If there must be a winner and loser in this, the loser was clearly business-as-usual by the Bush administration, and the winners were, for the first time in many years, the American people. (It was) a small, but necessary, step toward bringing America back to sanity.

In response to the May 27 article "More rentals requiring 'crime-free' leases."

I was appalled after reading the article about the Tucson Police Department pressuring landlords into joining a program to evict persons accused of crimes from their apartments.

The entire program seems Draconian in the extreme. The presumption of innocence is thrown out the window. The mere accusation by the police is enough to trigger eviction. Indeed, the evicted person need not even be accused. Under this Nazi-like program, having a houseguest accused of some wrongful act three or even five miles from the apartment is enough to trigger gleeful demands by the police that eviction proceedings be instituted.

On this Memorial Day, it is truly despicable to think of the men and women putting their lives on the line in the name of freedom in Iraq, while here in sunny Tucson the Star applauds the police for taking it away. When did it become business as usual to shred the Bill of Rights? I urge all property owners to shun this totalitarian attack on our liberty. Perhaps the police officer cheerleading this program could be moved to arrest the drug dealer in the parking lot, rather than use his presence to coerce private business owners into punishing the merely accused.

The headline on the front page of the May 27 Green Valley News and Sun was "Agents Seize a Ton of Pot." They didn't seize it at the border; they seized it almost 30 miles into our country on Interstate 19. A ton of marijuana in bags, visible when the back doors of the tractor-trailer rig were opened, obviously came across the actual border.

Why wasn't it detected at the actual border? The article stated that it was discovered at the mobile checkpoint on I-19 that the Border Patrol wants to replace with a permanent one, and made it sound as if this was a good reason to make this checkpoint permanent at a cost of billions of dollars of taxpayers' money.

Why didn't drug-sniffing dogs detect it when it came across the border? Why wasn't the truck's cargo checked when it went through the border? Why wasn't it detected until after it had traveled 30 miles into our country? Why are we giving up thousands of square miles of our country and not protecting thousands of U.S. citizens by not securing our actual border?

And most importantly, why doesn't this country legalize marijuana and tax it so they can concentrate on terrorists and the bad drugs and bad guys. Alcohol and tobacco have both caused more deaths and destruction in this country than marijuana, and they are legal.