Dear Editor:

On behalf of the Boothbay Region Garden Club, I want to invite everyone to the Festival of Trees at the Boothbay Opera House on Friday, November 30 (noon to 6 p.m.), Saturday, December 1 (9 a.m. to 6 p.m.), and Sunday, December 2 (noon to 5). Admission is free!

Members of the Garden Club have been working hard all year to create unique Christmas decorations, homemade treats, and home accessories.

There will be many decorated trees, some of which have been sponsored by area businesses, churches, and civic organizations. Festival-goers can bid on these trees in a silent auction. A highlight is a spectacular theme tree done by a garden club committee which will be raffled. Children will find a place to create their own gingerbread house and grandparents can buy the kits to do later!

This is the fourth year we have participated in the Harbor Lights Festival with our Festival of Trees. Every year we have heard from many people that it was a wonderful way to begin the holiday season. The proceeds from this festival fund our ongoing projects such as civic beautification, activities at St. Andrew's Village and for youth, and our scholarship program.

We will greatly appreciate your participation and support! Best wishes for a joyous holiday season.

Judy Reynolds, President

Dear Editor:

Your recent editorial warning readers that proposals to ensure all Americans adequate health care would ruin our excellent health care system with the inefficiencies, etc. of 'government run' programs left me feeling as if I had fallen into a time warp. Since the late 1960s there has been a bipartisan consensus that outsourcing federal government programs to the private sector would achieve better service at lower cost. Setting aside the merits of that opinion, the result is that the vast majority of government funded programs are, in fact, run by private enterprise. The important role that Blackwater is playing on behalf of our citizens in Iraq is only the tip of the iceberg.

As a result of the bipartisan supported federal policy of outsourcing to the private sector, private sector businesses 'run' taxpayer funded programs under federal contracts amounting to $146.7 billion (2005, or most recent data). In 2005 only 28 percent of those contracts were awarded by 'full and open competition,' which means that more than two thirds of private industry contractors set the terms of their contracts. Any of us can see which private sector companies and corporations actually 'run' federal programs, and at what cost to taxpayers, at www.fedspending.org , the non-partisan website maintained by 'OMB Watch.' A little time spent at this website will reveal how thoroughly outsourcing to the private sector has permeated taxpayer funded federal government programs.

As for the deficiencies of Medicare 'reform' mentioned in your editorial, those deficiencies were written into the Medicare Reform Act by members of congress at the behest of private sector health insurance, private sector hospital, and private sector pharmaceutical industries, who are among the biggest donors to political candidates of both parties.

Those provisions were written into the law to make it more difficult for you and I to compare the costs of medical procedures, hospital care, and medicines so that we could intelligently exercise the 'choice' that universal health care would supposedly deny us. (The 'denial of choice' claim is also bogus; ask any beneficiary of the Federal Employees Health Insurance program, which is actually run by private sector health insurers, and provides complete health insurance to President Bush and his family, the rest of White House officials and staff, members of Congress, and the federal judiciary.)

So why do political candidates keep waving the horror of 'government run' programs in our faces whenever we want to ensure that the constitutional 'right to life' includes affordable health care for everyone? Probably because it diverts our attention from the private sector corporate interests that are really calling the nation's health policy tune.

Sylvia Kraemer

Newcastle

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Those who have force on loan from fate count on it too much and are destroyed - Simone Weil