The real controversy regarding 9/11 is not who did it and why but how the 9/11 Commission reached its conclusions, having admitted to coerced confessions and not looking at all the scientific and forensic evidence made available to it. To this day the National Institute of Standards and Technology has been unwilling to make public for peer review its computer model and calculations of just how the World Trade Center collapsed.

The current televised debates have given anyone concerned much to consider. In the debate between Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren, this was certainly true, as it was in the debate between Paul Ryan and vice president Joe Biden and those between Barack Obama and former Gov. Mitt Romney.

When the Twin Towers fell to a bunch of Saudi Arabian terrorists piloting American passenger planes, our Republican administration, with the wisdom of a crazed hawk, decided to attack Iraq (not Saudi Arabia). Isn’t that like: you’re sitting at the a friendly bar and the guy to the right pours beer on your head, so you smile at him . . . then punch the guy to your left in the nose, blaming him for laughing (and having an imaginary gun in his pocket).

We may still believe we live in a democracy. We may still believe that the people we elect are chosen democratically. Most of us still have the right to vote. But money is buying this election.

A slight correction to your article on the history of the West Tisbury Library. When Professor Shaler proposed the idea of a public library in the fall of 1890, the Rev. Caleb Rotch canvassed the area residents for financial support. By December the Dukes County Library Association formed, Caleb Rotch as president, and until July 1892 the library was in the Dukes County Academy.

Driving over the bridge between North Tisbury and West Tisbury village, I keep thinking of the olden days when all vehicles, whether gasoline or horse driven, simply forded Mill Brook. Those were the days! But we must travel fast and don’t have the time (and luxury?) of the old-fashioned pleasure of fording, to say nothing of the damage it would inflict on our low-slung modern cars.