Ed Rollins

* In “Ed Rollins: Hired Gun or Loose Cannon?” (Aug. 5), on Ed Rollins’ book, we are given a perfect picture of the campaign manager as hired gun.

Rollins offers his feelings: Michael Huffington, candidate for senator, was “such a complete cipher he gave empty suits a bad name”; if Ross Perot had been elected president, “his government would have been a managerial disaster.”

We should all thank Rollins for this information, and be thankful that these people were not elected to office. But Rollins was hard at work trying his best to achieve successful campaigns for these undeserving (his opinion) candidates!

WILFRED COUZIN

Laguna Niguel

* I want to thank The Times for providing me a moment of epiphany, one of those lightning bolts in which a single insight elucidates that which was hitherto a mystery.

The mystery: What Arianna Huffington means to convey in calling her New Age think tank the “Center for Effective Compassion.”

The insight: Rollins’ recollection of how Mrs. Huffington tried to resolve a dispute with him by putting him up at the Four Seasons Hotel in Newport Beach, inquiring as to the state of his marriage, and offering to provide him “company.”

While in this instance Mrs. Huffington’s compassion was apparently not as effective as she might have wished, one can at least now comprehend her peculiar turn of phrase. I wonder, however, whether “effective” compassion should really be considered a New Age concept, since it seems to invoke something far older even than politics.

But what a great name for an escort service.

JACK BLUM

Alhambra