Cuff Him, Murphy -- He’s Got an Almanac

Re “Almanacs Put on FBI Watch List,” Dec. 30: The latest public pronouncement from the Bush security team about the alleged danger of folks carrying almanacs is something straight out of a Rod Serling teleplay. Can you imagine being pulled over on a routine traffic stop on Wilshire Boulevard with the police officer radioing in that “we’ve got a suspicious driver with an almanac on his front seat.”

What next? U.S. citizens armed with National Geographic? Message to those in power: Stop scaring the American people with all these self-serving public pronouncements and instead pass on solid leads to appropriate law enforcement in apprehending terrorists who mean to do us real harm. But whatever you do, please don’t take my almanac.

Lon Landis

Los Angeles

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The FBI warning about almanacs and terrorists marks the final destruction of the FBI as a credible organization. The Bush administration has succeeded in transforming a once-proud and effective organization into a zoo of addled nitwits. Next we can look forward to warnings of the dangers contained in dictionaries.

Larry Maxcy

Yucca Valley

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Boy, do I feel safer! It’s about time we got these dangerous almanacs out of circulation. Next we need to arrest anyone using a phone book; they have numbers and addresses in them, including ways to contact government offices. Brrr! Of course, anyone buying a street map at a gas station is obviously suspect; if they don’t know where they’re going, they’re probably terrorists.

And face it, just getting lists of patrons isn’t enough. Let’s close the damn libraries and be done with it. Who knows what unholy information is being checked out willy-nilly by which unsavory characters? Schools? Absolutely! They are hotbeds of loose data that could be used for nefarious purposes, because terrorists often communicate by reading and writing (not to mention all those leftist liberal teachers leading kids to question the government). Home schooling worked for hundreds of years, no reason to stop now. As for the Internet? Don’t get me started.

Michael McConnohie

Burbank