Mailbag:

Whereas Jamshed Dastur (“Time to honor what we fought for,” Mailbag, Sept. 23) castigates demonstrators at town hall meetings and “tea parties,” Jeanne Broadway (“God bless all our patriots who help us,” Mailbag, Sept. 24) lionizes them: “They are members of the Greatest Generation, young people aware of the impending loss of freedoms.”

The impender-in-chief, of course, is President Obama and his political agenda. Socialism writ large. Totalitarianism uber alles.

Because extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, the protesters (“God bless them”) are “today’s patriots.”

Contrast Broadway’s honorific with this Wikipedia definition: “The Greatest Generation is a term coined by journalist Tom Brokaw to describe the generation of Americans who grew up during the deprivation of the Great Depression, and then went on to fight in World War II, as well as those whose productivity within the war’s home front made a decisive material contribution to the war effort.”

It is altogether fitting and proper to honor these Americans as the Greatest Generation.

To do so for Broadway’s patriots is ludicrous.

Dick Lewis

Balboa

School district could possibly save more

The Sept. 12 Daily Pilot (“District boots 500 and saves millions”) reported that the Newport Mesa Unified School District saved $3.5 million by refusing to serve nonresidents who were U.S. citizens living outside the district. The district verified addresses by sending employees to check children’s addresses to ensure that they lived at the address on record.

The annual cost to educate a student, according to Jane Garland, the district’s child welfare and attendance director, is about $7,000, and the district has 22,000 students. Let’s take this one further, and let’s save $35 million. There are at least 5,000 illegal immigrants in the district. Doing the math, we come up with $7,000 times $5,000, or $35,000.

We refuse to educate U.S. citizens but give no thought to educating those who are here illegally. I know this is a sensitive subject and politically incorrect; however, we have to assign costs where they are incurred. The very least the district could do is count the illegal immigrants and try to bill back the federal government for the $7,000 per student, as the illegal immigrants are a result of federal government non-enforcement of immigration laws.

Joe DeCarlo

Newport Beach