The Courier-Journal du lieu suivant : Louisville, Kentucky • Page 8

Associate Editors BRYAN WOOLLEY ADELE VINCENT JOHN HART DAVID V. HAWPE HUGH HAYNIE, Cartoonist BARRY BINGHAM JR. Editor and Publisher ROBERT T. BARNARD Editorial Page Editor FRIDAY, JULY 7. 1972.

FOUNDED 1826. 1 It IALS Technicalities In Vietnam, ii no I I otnn rrj tl I cirCC lllcll is not funny mine safety "Ah-ha! Welcome again to the lair of ild Illue Yonder ANOTHER 1EWPOIJST A chaotic Supreme Court decree Another in an occasional series of editorials, reprin'cd from other vers-papers, that differ from our point of victv. WARS SELDOM SEEM to be fought for the reasons stated. So we doubt that many Americans were much surprised by the fresh evidence the other day that we've been robbing our national treasury and national spirit all these years for purposes that include propping up a totalitarian regime in Saigon. The new development, of course, was the way in which the pro-government members of South Vietnam's Senate having been thwarted by the democratic process waited until the opposition had gone home, then called a meeting.

It was after the 10 p.m. curfew when they voted to give President Thieu dictatorial powers over their nation's defense and economy for the next six months. In theory, the act will be but in the' dictator's captive courts. The man who ran second to President Thieu in the latter's 1967 election, and who has been in prison ever since for advocating a coalition government as a step toward peace, could doubtless tell us all about those courts if anyone could get close enough to ask. What was it that Secretary of State Rusk said, when Senator Fulbright pressed hinfTor an explanation of what we were doing in Southeast Asia? It went" like this: "The South Vietnamese must believe that they and we are fighting for something worth great sacrifice.

It is not enough to fight against something. All the people still able to make this choice in South Vietnam must know that the long struggle is worth their suffering and personal tragedies. They must know that by this hard course their future will be better than their past." Toll has been staggering Since 1965, the war has killed 325,000 South Vietnamese civilians and 128,000 South Vietnamese soldiers. More than 725,000 South Vietnamese civilians and 321,000 South Vietnamese soldiers have been wounded. And some five million South Vietnamese have been homeless at one time or another.

These are part of the production cost for that little farce staged by President Thieu's supporters in the Senate a recurring act they like to call democracy in action. President JVixon in his press conference two days later that he will not dishonor the 54,000 Americans who have died, and the 294,000 Americans who have been wounded, by turning South Vietnam over to the enemy. "The only thing we have not done," he said in defending American negotiating policy, "is to do what the Communists have asked, and that is to impose a Communist government on the people of South Vietnam against their will." Instead, we have imposed a different kind of totalitarian regime. One which says it's on our side. The American people have been told that we are fighting for the right of the South Vietnamese to democratic self-determination.

But the only thing the South Vietnamese are able to determine for themselves is how they will bear their suffering. SENATOR SOAPER savs: WE HEAR OF a new conglomerate which is thriving financially. Since nobody can figure out what it manufactures there's no way to control the price. Politicians follow the script in saying they are not interested in the vice presidency. However, a lot of people hold jobs that don't interest them.

When a car gets off to a squealing, jack-rabbit start you can be pretty sure daddy is still buying the tires. 1 1 -4, iittn imoidtWuWiiasi imimii id Mine inspector gathers a roof sample with profits, except when the mine inspectors are in sight. In our judgment, the best approach would be for the bureau to continue receiving and evaluating operators' legitimate complaints, and reworking the regulations which are' faulty; while at the same time avoiding, through appeals, the possibility of an enforcement lapse while the whole set of regulations is being reissued through the time-consuming procedures called for in the law. I'ooldraging by Mines Bureau Such an approach would be fair to all concerned, and would be focused on the bureau's most important function: protection of the nation's miners. In retrospect, it's clear that the Bureau of Mines perhaps because of its traditional pro-operator bias failed to take seriously enough, 27 months ago, the Virginia court decision that voided its penalty schedules.

The bureau hadn't bothered to send a lawyer from its staff to aid the U.S. Attorney handling the case. When the ruling was issued, it declined to join in an appeal. And it did not try to restrict the effect of the ruling to the Virginia district involved, but rather concluded that it applied nationwide. Too much is at stake to make such an untested assumption with respect to Judge Hermansdorfer's ruling, especially since the dispute is not over the validity of the regulations themselves, but the manner in which they were adopted.

This can be corrected if the Bureau of Mines will support an appeal of the decision, and use the interlude to move swiftly to correct the procedural irregularities that have brought so much uncertainty to those who mine coal. The men who work in American industry's most dangerous occupation have sufficient cause for apprehension without adding governmental sloppiness or lack of concern to their problems. Tliis is fun? fraternity everywhere suddenly finds itself much in demand to explain such curiosities as why Messrs. Fischer and Spassky can't, play all 24 games in a day or two and go home. This sudden (and doubtless transitory) interest has to be pleasing to those who spend their lifetime wondering why everyone doesn't love chess as they do.

After all, tests have shown it can be as physically taxing as a strenuous session of boxing or football; and everybody knows it's a strain on the brain. Which may explain why most people, especially in America, think it's a bore. At any rate, Mr. Fischer is our best; maybe as he likes to tell people in his humble way the best the game has ever seen. So we're stuck with him.

And if chess-players the world over do shed a tear or two at such greatness coming in such a spoiled, infantile, unreliable package, at least they can take cheer in the fact that for once their lonely pursuit is the talk of the town. Readers Views from the worker's pay and matched by his or her employer and turned over to the government as custodian. Actually any increase in this deduction is like getting a raise, because the employer is required to match the increase. What a pity this fund was not turned over to the banks and insurance companies of this country who would have put this money to work creating jobs and still would have paid better dividends lo its investors at half the present distribution cost. TL'RNKR GREGG 3813 St.

Gcrmainc St. Matthews, Ky. For hike-i-lealin curb In early May I wrote to this column mentioning the fact that our son's new bicycle was stolen. Someone walked or drove up to our home, went into the garage, and took the bicycle right off the premises. Well, that bicycle was replaced and now it, too, is gone.

On the night of July 2, two brand-new bicycles were taken; the locks were sawed off. This is just as aggravating to me as it is to my children, as we've had six bikes stolen in four years. First, a police report must be made: next, your insurance company must be notified. Soon an adjuster comes to your home and asks questions. A few weeks later a cheek is received for only thiee-fourths (or lcs of the price vou paid for the bike, leaving von to pay out of our oun pocket additional SCO or more to replace the bike you had before.

Why. oh why. isn't something done? Why aren't bicycles registered and licensed at a special bureau connected with the police departments? Ohio and many other states require it and that's good way for it to be done in Kentucky. How I V- I i 4 ltttr Rtadcrs' addreu. fSort topiu af taite and the right appearances IT WAS NOT particularly surprising that U.S.

District Judge H. David IJermansdorfer struck down the regulations promulgated under the Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 19ti9. These regulations were published and put into effect in one sweeping motion, with legal requirements for public comment brushed aside. What is surprising is that the U.S. Bureau 'of Mines has not corrected these procedural defects before now.

They have been boldly apparent since April 1970, when a U.S. District Court in Southwestern Virginia struck down the penalty schedules issued under the act for the same reasons cited by Judge IJermansdorfer in his ruling against the regulations. The Virginia ruling made a nightmare of enforcement during the nine months it took bureau to reissue the penalty schedules in compliance with required administrative procedures. To avoid that kind of delay in promul- gating new regulations, the bureau ought to Itake Judge Hermansdorfer's ruling through all available levels of appeal. It can properly plead that it had no choice except to ignore Hhe administrative niceties, since mine safety especially in the wake of the Farmington, W.

disaster that took 78 lives was an emergency situation. If such a plea succeeds, the nation's miners will be spared another period of enforcement chaos in which neither operators nor inspectors know which rules apply. Whx tiot rational approach The operators will claim that a matter of equity is involved and that they deserve to have their views aired. The fact, however, as former Interior Secretary Ilickel recalled this week, is that the bureau did invite industry and labor spokesmen to a series of conferences in June 1970, to discuss changes in the regulations which had been promulgated with such alacrity two months before. So they have been consulted, even if it came after the fact.

The operators also will claim that they have much to contribute on the subject of coal mine safety, on making life less risky for the miners. Almost any miner will put that argument in perspective, however, by observing that most operators seem concerned with safety only when it doesn't interfere Pawn to King CHESS-ENTHUSIASTS, who like orchid-growers, unicycle-riders and Thomas Hardy-readers learn early in life that they'll always be a lonely fraternity of misunderstood people, are entitled to shed a special tear these days for the bizarre behavior of their own Bobby Fischer. It may be, by the time this appears, that the last in a series of insults and ultimatums will have been compromised so that the en-jante terrible of American chess can finally begin his international showdown with Russia's aging (he's 35) Boris Spassky, the world champion. We hope so. As the combined Muhammad Ali, Bill Hartack, Howard Hughes and Dr.

Strangelove of international chess, the brilliant Mr. Fischer owes it to himself and to his fans of two decades to battle for the crown he has always said he deserves. Win or lose, he has focused a lot of attention on an activity that normally stirs about as much interest as polo, and the chess Deplores end of child clinic To the Editor of The Courier-Journal: I was dismayed and concerned to read about the action to discontinue the Child Development Program and Traveling Clinic directed by Dr. Jo-Ann Sexton. It appears to many Kentuckians that it is Dr.

Jorge Deju who needs to be discontinued! Many of the people in my part of the stale (eastern) are not in a position from an educational standpoint to know what kind of medical service to seek, nor from whom to get it. Neither are many of them financially able to get to the areas where these special services may ho available. I would hope that an aroused citizenry would plead with Gov. Ford not to let an apparently selfish and vindictive person deprive the of this needed and greatly used service. WfoAave two practicing physicians in I wish Gov.

Ford would tell me or have Dr. Jorge Dcju tell me how these grossly overworked doctors can take on this additional service. I have suggested to the Governor that he send Dr. Jorge Deju to Eastern Kentucky. We can show him ome real medical needs.

It is incomprehensible to me that a governor would allow a worthwhile program such as this to be sold out. JEANETTE M. PALMER 818 Walnut Williamsburg. Kv. IVixon and Social Security Nixon accepted, without objections, a 90 per cent increase in salary a few months alter he took office.

The Senate and House tik similar rai-Cs, aiorii; with numerous other federal office holders. This was not inflationary. However. President Nixon through his stooges. Sen.

BrneU and Rep Byrnes, tried to block the 20 per tent Social Security increase on the grounds that it is inflationary. Social Security is not derived from tax money ti the president's salary. It is money deducted an ail a From Th St. In what is probably the most amazing, utterly confusing decision in generations, the United States Supreme Court declared yesterday the death penalty as now used in the United States violates the'. Constitution and 150 is 'outlawed.

But even the justices, who issued nine opinions, did not know the full meaning and scope of the muddled decree. They were sharply divide. The decision was 5 to 4, all members appointed by President Nixon dissenting. The opinions furnished a startlingly ambiguous array of views. About the only thing clear was that in the three cases on which they passed, one for murder and two for rapes, the death penalty was barred.

Apparently the door remains ajar for state legislatures to reinstate capital punishment under certain circumstances. Chief Justice Warren Burger, one of the dissenters, emphasized that the court majority, in setting aside the death penalty as "cruel and unusual punishment," gave state legislatures the "opportunity and indeed the responsibility to make a thorough re-evaluation of the entire subject of capital punishment." Burger declared he found it hard to understand how the Supreme Court could overturn the death penalty now, when it has been accepted since the founding of the nation. So do most Americans. He expressed great uncertainty over the significance of the ruling. It is as obvious as any reading of the federal Constitution on any subject, that framers did not intend by the Eighth Amendment to ban the death penalty, as legislated by states or federal government.

Capital punishment existed when the Constitution was written and has existed ever since. Only in the last five years during the worst crime scourge the nation has ever suffered has the death penalty been withheld while some 580 convicted felons, including 501 murderers, have not been executed awaiting a high court ruling. What will happen now to these death-row prisoners isn't remotely clear from the new court holding. Will they be retried? Resentenced if possible? Or freed? The court gave no indication. Probably the justices haven't any idea? The costly Vietnam War The welfare of the common people was the dream of our founding fathers who knew that the welfare of the people and the country is one and the same.

We are prone to think what political leaders do is impersonal and of no concern. Our political leaders are fighting a seven-year war which has cost the lives of 50.000 Americans and one million Asians at a cost reality of $400 billion. The civic-minded, decent citizens would have used the 30 billion tons of steel and explosives dropped on Indochina and made it into decent prisons to replace the crime-breeding animal cages we have. The S400 billion should been spent in improving our way of life instead of wreaking havoc on the land that furnishes a scant living for 40 million people, many of whom will die of starva tion unless the taxpayers pay for the honor of death and destruction of homes and lands by our niichty war machine. Clear-thinking Americans hide their faces when they see on television the murder of helpless human beings needlessly slaughtered to fulfill the dreams of hell-born idiots.

W. WATKINS Liberty, Ky. Baseball in Louisville I was reading an editorial in The Sporting News on May 27 which said: "The Louisville Colonels are a baseball club with few friends. Their attendance is anemic: their park lease grants them nothing from concession security guards now shake down cu-tomer su-pected of smuggling beverages into the park, and local newspapers bury stones about the Coioncis far back in the spoils section. "The account of the Colonels' 1972 home opener made page 10 of one sports section.

Newspapers are under no compulsion to plug baseball (or horse racing). On the coEtrary, they are obligated to weigh the merits of the news and display- louls Glcb-Dmocrat One of the dissenters, Justice Harry Black-mun. said he "suspected" the decree would even knock out the death penalty for treason or assassination of a President. It is significant that only two of the justices who rendered the majority opinion, Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan, held that the Eighth Amendment bans capital punishment for all crimes in all circumstances. Justice William O.

Douglas, one of the most liberal members of the bench, observed in his majority opinion, it might be constitutional to make the death penalty mandatory for certain crimes if applicable to all subjects equally. Justice Byron White, also one of the majority in the presumptive outlawing of capital punishment, said, "I do not intimate that the death penalty is unconstitutional per se. or that there's no system of capital punishment that would comport with the Eighth Amendment." Obviously at least two, possibly more, of the majority did not intend to rule on the use of capital punishment under all conditions. They did not decide deliberately, certainly not lucidly, on the issue of constitutionality under the injunction of "cruel and inhuman punishment." Were the court or the nation to accept the Marshall-Brennan construction that all capital punishment is unconstitutional, the gates against wanton murder would be thrown wide. The worst criminals would chance capture, even imprisonment from which they might be released reasonably soon on parole.

The penitentiaries would be a slaughterhouse for guards, especially when life-termers are involved. Police could become clay pigeons. Treason would become a civil offense. The military would have to banish articles of war embracing death for traitorism during war. Organized crime would feel it had won another victory.

Justice Burger said of the majority decision, "The future of capital punishment in the country has been left in an uncertain The Supreme Court an obligation to remedy this chaotic decision and do it quickly. it accordingly. In Louisville, editorial judgment happens to relegate baseball about as far back on the sports pages as it can without falling out of the paper. The editors who put it there might be slightly presumptuous in deciding that baseball 'everywhere' is in trouble. "In the and Times on May 7, seven pages were devoted to the Derby before discovering that baseball did not shut down on Derby Day.

Doe that represent editorial judgment or the handiwork of a race track tout?" After reading this editorial. I wondered if "newspapers in Louisville seem eacer to preside at a baseball funeral." I also wonder if your paper cares if the Colonels win or lose, or if they stay here. The way it looks, your papers couldn't care less. DAVID SMITH 1312 Willow Avenue, Louisville Critical of court's ruling On June 23, in what must be some sort of record for legal technicalities, the Kentucky Court of Appeals restored to two men their drivers' licenses which had earlier been revoked. By their own admission, the men at the time of arrest had been too drunk to have been capable of refusing to take a blood-alcohol test.

The court found that therefore they are entitled to drive free and clear on our highways. By its action, the court stepped Into the same line as three other notorious individuals. First, the mother who threw the baby out with the bath water: second, the surgeon whose operation wa.s a -ucccss although the patient died: third, the phi-losopbfM- to who'ii an end justifies any means. HaJ I that day in that court been the attorney for cither the slate or the appc lian's. I would have found it difficult to conceal a new level of offense in jurisprudence, viz and to wit: First-degree, reverberating, consummate revolting, utter contempt of court.

ASHTON E. GORTON' 1817 Binuni, Lexington, Ky. lubmittcd for publication thould ddrd Vitwf, and mutt includt th writtr't tignatur end ExpriiK hot thown that th bttt-rvod Ittttrt mf (preferably kt than 200 wordt), and usually current general appeal. For the take el public interett, geed fairness te the greatest number, the editors reserve to condense or reject any letter and te limit Hie of frequent writers. many times more must I hear, "Mom, my bike's Bicycling is a great sport for children; it seems to be the "in" thing these days.

How else can an 11- or 12-year-old travel around, get lots of good siiil SI Stolen bikes, recovered by police exercise am! -ec all the I'tve'y parks and places of interest in this citv Perhaps omeone with understanding (and legislative poll) can do snmethin alsout this continuing nuisance. I wrote about fees fur bicycles seven years ao. 1 wrote again when our first bike was stolen six years ago. Now somebody please do something. Mrs.

STUART P. COHEN" 1609 Vivian Ln Louisvill).