Reponse to TEA Party letter

Don Larsen’s letter on October 6, “Look at the Facts” is really quite funny since the facts are exactly what the TEA Party can’t seem to get straight. While Larsen says he wants to keep Medicare it is his TEA Party colleagues and the legislators they have elected, like Paul Ryan, who are determined to privatize the program which would be its death knell. A voucher is no guarantee an insurance company will cover your pre-existing conditions nor is it a guarantee that the insurance company won't raise your rates due to the cost of caring for you such that the voucher no longer covers the cost.

Larsen wants to talk about taxes and who doesn’t pay them, how about this fact, last year General Electric earned $5 billion in US profits alone and paid $0 in federal income taxes and Exxon/Mobil earned $15.1 billion in profits and paid 1% in federal income taxes. Now I ask you, who do you think isn’t paying their fair share?

Why shouldn't health insurance cover birth control if it covers Viagra?

Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn signed a letter to Dept. of Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius this week complaining about the department’s implementation of the Institute of Medicine's (IOM) recommendation to include birth control as a required part of health insurance.

The Senators say they are concerned "with the lack of due consideration given by [Sebelius] and your Department to the adverse impact that IOM's recommendations would have on our core constitutional value of religious liberty." The Senators stated that "[t]hough the IFRs' 'religious exemption' purports to protect religious organizations, health care professionals, and health care plans, it is clear that this protection falls well short of securing this constitutional right."

In other words because some fundamentalists feel there is a biblical prohibition on birth control in any form health insurance companies shouldn’t be required to cover it. Shouldn’t the logical extension of their argument be that if God wanted a man to procreate the man wouldn’t need Viagra therefore insurance shouldn’t cover it? Why haven’t we heard a tremendous uproar about prohibiting insurance from covering Viagra I wonder?

Response to letter attacking science via separation of church and state

In Jeremiah Arevalo’s recent letter regarding separation of church and state he claims a false equivalence between Jesus and Socrates among other misleading statements.

With regard to Socrates, no one makes fantastic suggestions that he was god incarnate, and Xenophon was a contemporary of Socrates so can speak as a primary source. The same can not be said for Matthew, Mark, Luke or John as the earliest of them lived 60+ years after Jesus’ death.

Nothing the teachers are purported to have said is explicitly anti-Christian though the claim about the authenticity of the biblical description of Goliath as a giant might be construed as a questioning the literal truth of the bible. This type of fact based discussion is nothing that I as a student in a Catholic high school didn’t hear from Brother Brendan or my other instructors.

Former State Board of Education Chair, Don McLeroy, would have had science teachers instruct our children that the earth is 6,000 years old because he believes every word of the bible is literally true. Surely the vast majority of us know that there is ample scientific evidence disproving such foolishness, the Pope certainly does.

I wonder if Mr. Arevalo also wants teachers to avoid other such scientific realities as evolution, global climate change and the very real possibility of life on other planets now that the Kepler spacecraft has identified 687 planets orbiting 474 stars.

Captain Obama has left the Mad Hatters of the TEA Party at the helm

Once again President Obama has caved to pressure by the Chamber of Commerce and TEA Party Republicans; this time over whether or not to update smog standards in order to the protect Americans from increasing incidents of asthma. This means that the same standards put in place by George W. Bush and believed to violate the Clean Air Act by Obama’s EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, will remain in place for another two years while Americans suffer.

The excuse is that requiring additional scrubbers on pollution generating industrial plants will be too expensive and cost jobs. Tell that to the 12,000 or so people who die from pollution induced asthma and other respiratory conditions. I’ve got news for the Chamber, going to the emergency room nearly unable to breathe is too expensive. Jobs would be created by updating these regulations as new equipment would have to be purchased and installed and it could all be paid for by the record profits that corporate America is racking up while it isn’t hiring new employees.

The Mad Hatters in the TEA Party would have you believe that freedom and deregulation are synonymous but the air we breathe is shared by us all and if government doesn’t regulate what can be dumped in it, our air may not be fit to breathe for much longer. So TEA Party members I have news for you too, air and water are shared by all and if that makes them socialist – get over it.

Another giant sucking sound as American jobs head to South Korea

The op-ed in Sunday’s paper by Antonio Garza offers an amazingly inverted argument for quick passage of three bilateral free-trade agreements. While in the same breath commenting on our current unemployment crisis he goes on to suggest that somehow opening our doors to even more cheap imports will help solve this problem. Of course he couches this in claims that we’ll actually be able to export more but that claim has been debunked for nearly twenty years.

Former presidential candidate Ross Perot once said of the North American Free Trade Agreement, listen for the "giant sucking sound" of American jobs heading south to Mexico should NAFTA be ratified. He’s been proven correct, Economic Policy Institute economist Robert Scott estimates that 682,900 U.S. jobs have been "lost or displaced" because of the agreement and the resulting trade deficit.

The Economic Policy Institute estimates that in the first seven years of the Korean agreement as many as 159,000 American jobs could be lost and the trade deficit could increase by $16.7 billion. While the pacts proposed with Columbia and Panama will of course have smaller effects they will nevertheless have negative consequences for employment in the U.S.

Were we actually competing with other countries on a level playing field meaning that all countries had similar labor and environmental regulations free trade might make sense. Since we won’t also have fair trade multi-national corporations will simply continue to outsource jobs as they seek “shareholder value” leaving more Americans unemployed.

Letter to the Express News responding to arguments against same sex partner benefits

Saturday’s letters included “A vote-getting ploy” in which Mr. Charest seems overwrought because unmarried same-sex couples will now be granted benefits that have previously only been granted to married heterosexual couples. He goes on and on about whether other unmarried couples will be granted similar benefits. Well there’s an excellent reason that this particular group of citizens is being singled out for “special privileges”, Texas unlike more enlightened states such as Iowa denies them the right to be married in the first place.

Given the tone of his letter I’d guess Mr. Charest is among those Christians who persist in cherry picking bible passages from the Old Testament which support their particular bigoted views. I suggest that in order to alleviate his theological concerns he open his mind to the entire set of Christ’s teachings in which I think he’ll find a more accepting and loving approach. On the governmental side if Charest is so concerned that these benefits are granted in return for votes; all he has to do is support state legislation providing marriage equality.

"Mom's" letter to the President on job creation

Dear Mr. President,

Having lived through the “Great Depression”, I’ll be 82 later this month, I can speak from experience that many of your esteemed advisers cannot. I am a child of an unemployed laborer who died prematurely of a heart attack and a disabled homemaker. I went to school often having eaten no breakfast and bringing nothing for lunch. I must tell you that while the current “Great Recession” is certainly not as bad as when I was growing up that is cold comfort for workers and their families who through no fault of their own have been without jobs for several years.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt has been my hero since I was old enough to say his name and I know from terrible experience that his policies are what saved my life and that of my sister and three brothers. The Herbert Hoover clones in Congress would have America cut spending and therefore cut more jobs, how can that possibly be the remedy for the lack of jobs we already suffer? Even Richard Nixon knew such actions were foolhardy for he said “We’re all Keynesians now.”

FDR recognized that the American people he loved were suffering under Hoover’s policies. I know that you too feel for the millions of Americans who are suffering today. I urge you to put aside the attempts at bi-partisanship which the party of Hoover apparently sees as weakness and proudly follow Roosevelt’s lead by putting Americans back to work building for our future.