Your editorial on May 8 entitled, ''From here to June'' outlined the Beacon Journal's reasons for Hillary Clinton to stay in the race, the main reason being that, ''Hillary Clinton deserves an opportunity to play out the primary string.'' Why, because her name is Clinton? Is she somehow entitled to special treatment?

If the purpose of the primaries is to have the voters decide who they want to be their candidate, then Barack Obama has clearly shown that he is the candidate preferred by the majority of voters in the Democratic Party.

He has won more contests, has more pledged delegates, has the lead in the popular vote and has gained the support of more superdelegates. He has done this within the rules set forth by the Democratic Party, without trying to change the rules or create artificial means of determining the nominee, as Clinton has tried to do and still does to this day.

Obama is the better candidate, the stronger candidate, and can beat John McCain in the general election. Barack Obama has beaten the most established, most entrenched, the most powerful brand name in the nation in Hillary Clinton. For you to say Clinton has made Obama a stronger candidate takes away from the fact that in order for him to beat Clinton he had to outwork, raise more money and have a better message. Meaning he was the stronger candidate.

One of the measures of the support candidates have for their message is the amount of money raised. Clinton has lent her campaign $11.4 million over the past few months to make up for the shortfall in fundraising, while Obama has raised over $42 million.

For all of those people who say that they will vote for John McCain if Clinton is not the nominee, let me give you a few reasons why that may not be a good idea: Roe v. Wade, the war in Iraq, jobs and gas prices.

What Hillary Clinton supporters need to be asking themselves is how a candidate who was considered for over a year to be the overwhelming favorite to win her party's nomination for president could lose to a junior senator from Illinois so badly and still believe that she could win the presidency in November?
Richard Thompson
Akron

Signs, signs,
everywhere a sign

The American Civil Liberties Union claims that election sign fees are a violation of our guaranteed freedom of speech. In the cases of Silver Lake and Bath Township, they have a genuine reason for concern. Silver Lake Law Director Bob Heydorn mentioned that there are few requests for signs in the village, residents don't ''allow'' signs out of concern about property values, and village residents care more about their properties than in who is running for election.

Not everyone can be as concerned about presidential elections as others. However, these people are reducing First Amendment rights to issues of aesthetics. In this case, as in every case, the rights of the individual should take clear precedence over the comfort of the majority. This principle is the reason for the freedom of speech guarantee. Silver Lake and Bath residents are not to be protected from the free speech of others; rather, the free speech of those ''others'' is to be protected from the lawmaking powers of Silver Lake and Bath.

By charging fees and creating size/time restrictions for election sign postings, these people are restricting freedom of speech. By restricting freedom of speech out of concern for property values and aesthetics, these residents and lawmakers are literally putting prices on the rights of their neighbors and fellow citizens.
Ryan Konn
Stow

Eco-warriors
should chill out

The hissing sound you hear is the deflating of the puffed-up, man-made global warming balloon. Here are some of the things that have punctured it.

In spite of attempts to downplay the news, word is leaking out the temperature of the Earth is actually cooling. Perhaps you noticed a touch of this yourself. But more generally, four agencies that track the Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc. in California) report that the planet cooled by about 0.7 degree Celsius in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back where we were in 1930.

Then there's the worldwide rush to built coal-fired power plants. According to the New York Times, new coal plants are going up almost weekly in India and China, and none of these plants are designed to be retrofitted to capture carbon emissions — if such a technologically can ever be developed.

And enlightened Europe is turning to coal, too. The continent is slated to bring about 50 new coal-fired plants on line in the next five years. Italy, for instance, is expected to increase its reliance on coal energy from today's 15 percent to 33 percent. This would not be happening if the decision makers really believed in man-made global warming and its dire consequences.

Then there's Russia. Vladimir Putin's top environmental policy adviser, Vsevolod Gavrilov, announced that ''We don't plan to limit the use of fuel for our industries. . . . Energy must not be a barrier to our comfort. Our emerging middle class demands lots of energy and it is our job to ensure a comfortable supply.''

But it gets much worse for the eco-warriors. Based on three recent scientific studies, the evidence is now overwhelming that China leads the U.S. as the world's top producer of carbon dioxide. Add to this the seldom reported fact that the U.S. consumes a portion of its carbon emissions via our great forests whereas China is barren and does very little natural recapture.

Yet, in spite of this, eco-extremists like Al Gore still refuse to include developing countries like China, India and Brazil in any of their proposed mandates to reduce carbon emissions. So what explanation? It's that the true goal behind the global warming is to advance socialism by tying the U.S. up in eco-regulations and higher taxes. This is done to shift more power away from individuals and toward big government, and from the U.S. to international government agencies like the United Nations.

Because the science is mounting up against them, the eco-hysterics will soon drop the term ''global warming'' and will instead substitute ''climate change'' so as not to derail their project.
Peter Skurkiss
Stow