Response to Express News article on Republicans blocking enforcement of efficient light bulb regulations

Saturday’s story “Critics call light idea dimwitted” made the interesting observation that the major manufacturers of light bulbs have already switched production to energy and cost efficient compact fluorescent bulbs. They were able to do so because the 2007 bill that calls for improved efficiency and performance provided regulatory certainty. Now Texas Republican Joe Barton who frequently screams about regulatory uncertainty being one of the reasons that the “job creators” aren’t creating jobs is crowing about his success at creating that very regulatory uncertainty.

This is typical Republican posturing and much of the cause for the gridlock in Washington that has prevented our federal government from taking the steps necessary to bring our moribund economy back to life. If the people of Texas really want the jobs picture to improve in the near future instead of experiencing a lost decade like Japan we’d better look at electing more Democrats to Congress as they at least seem to understand the big picture.

Reporting some facts and quoting each side isn't journalism

Friday’s edition included a story titled “GOP blocks Obama’s pick for watchdog” about the filibuster which prevents an up or down vote on the man nominated to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). While the story was as accurate as one could ask for it failed to tell the whole story in that once again Republicans including both of our Senators, Cornyn and Hutchison, voted to protect the 1% at the expense of the 99%.

Having mentioned in the story that the Republicans want to eliminate the position of director and replace it with a bi-partisan board you failed to examine the ramifications of such a move which would result in politicizing decisions and removing the teeth from the agency’s rule making and enforcement efforts.

Express News readers deserve more than he said, she said reporting. Real journalism would explain that it is the Republican agenda to overturn every bit of regulation that has been put in place to prevent another implosion of the banking system because it would impair the ability of a few Wall Street fat cats to continue to rake in multi-million dollar annual bonuses.

Express New's Gurwitz still getting it wrong

Sundays editorial by Jonathan Gurwitz shows he hasn’t gotten the memo that the Koch Brothers paid for a two year study by prominent physicist and global warming skeptic Richard Muller and he found, much to his surprise, that the 97% of climate scientists who’ve been warning us about it are correct, the earth is warming.

Muller went back to data recorded by Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and reviewed several other data sets as well as correcting for the heat island effects due to the growth of modern cities and still found that the planet is warming just like James E. Hansen of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration has been telling us for over a decade. Muller’s conclusion is “now we have confidence that the temperature rise that had previously been reported had been done without bias.”

Muller says he was spurred to action by the very “Climategate” emails Gurwitz mentions in the editorial as evidence that the big bad scientists are misleading us. Sadly Mr. Gurwitz fails to note that while those emails show that scientists can also be petty and vainglorious just like everyone else they do not reveal any evidence that the conclusions of those scientists are wrong.

The Associated Press also reports that Georgia Tech climate scientist Judith Curry worked with Muller on the project and she is quoted as saying of the study “results unambiguously show an increase in surface temperature since 1960.”

I suggest Mr. Gurwitz catch up on his reading.

Why spend $300,000 for insurance if we can simply choose to never need it?

A couple of weeks ago the Guadalupe County Commissioners Court voted to spend $300,000 of taxpayer money wastefully. Guadalupe County hasn’t had a death penalty case in over 30 years yet they approved an inter-local agreement with Lubbock County to provide public defenders in death penalty cases, essentially an insurance policy.

Guadalupe County need never have a death penalty case as the District Attorney can simply choose to ask for life in prison without the possibility of parole and save the people of this county the $300,000 insurance premium.

Whatever you think about the justifiability of the death penalty you should remember two things. It costs about four times as much to execute someone as it does to put them in prison for life due to the appeals and other legal fees. There’s every reason to believe that not only did Texas kill an innocent man when Cameron Todd Willingham was executed by lethal injection but as we now know there was no crime committed at all because the fire that killed his children was accidental and not arson.

Guadalupe County should never have a death penalty case and if we don’t then we have no reason to spend $300,000 of the citizen’s money. Call your County Commissioner and Judge Mike Wiggins and tell them how you feel.

Stopping online piracy or stifling the internet, you decide.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) recently introduced of the Stop Online Piracy Act in the US House of Representatives. It sounds great, at least it does until you actually read some of the provisions in it.

 Without ever appearing before a judge or setting foot in a courtroom the owner of copyrighted material could shut down any website's online advertising programs and block access to credit card payments. The police can’t search your house without a warrant from a judge but a company can stop you from earning a living just by filing a document with the Clerk of Court.

Under this ridiculously broad bill, you can be found in violation if the core functionality of your site "enables or facilitates" infringement. Bye bye YouTube, so long Flickr and Shutterfly or any website that allows users to post text, photos or video. That means this newspaper’s website too my friends. Heck the entire internet enables or facilitates infringement.

Is this really the road we want to be on, do we really want just anyone to be able to shutdown nearly any website on a whim?

Failure of the Super-Committee is an opportunity

The Super-Committee has failed in its duty to find $1 trillion in budget cuts over the next decade but that doesn’t mean we don’t still need to make those cuts. Congressman Cuellar has been open to cutting many areas of the budget but not the Pentagon budget which is perhaps the most bloated of all. Did you know that we spend more on our military than the next 17 nations combined? That’s China, France, the UK, Germany, Russia and a dozen others. The U.S. spends 43% of all the money spent on the military in the entire world.

Now I’m not talking about cutting military healthcare budgets and raising co-pays on our military retirees as has been proposed by some, I’m talking about real cuts in our weapons budgets for things like the troubled V22 Osprey that has failed to meet design goals over and over again. I’m talking about closing half of the over 800 overseas military bases we staff. If we bring those troops home where they will spend their paychecks in American stores and restaurants employing American people who pay American taxes we get twice the bang for the buck.

Guadalupe County and Bexar County are the home of many active duty and retired members of our military as well as their families. If the Pentagon budget isn’t cut those who have given the most to our country will be forced to give more and that isn’t right.

Bi-partishanship that's just nuts

In one of the most disgusting displays of bi-partisanship I’ve ever seen both Congressman Henry Cuellar and Senator John Cornyn are advocating for a balanced budget amendment. Both these highly educated gentlemen are lawyers and experienced legislators but obviously not economists.

Enshrining a balanced budget in our constitution would shackle our nation in times of disaster or war by preventing the federal government from spending on emergency needs without either immediately cutting spending elsewhere by the same amount thus cutting government services and putting government employees out of work or raising taxes precipitously to immediately offset that spending rather then spreading the payments out over time.

According to a blistering analysis of a Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA) by Macroeconomic Advisers, one of the nation’s preeminent private and non-partisan economic forecasting firms, if a constitutional balanced budget amendment had already been ratified and were now being enforced for fiscal year 2012, “the effect on the economy would be catastrophic,” Macroeconomic Advisers also concludes that under a balanced budget amendment, “recessions would be deeper and longer,” and uncertainty would be cast over the economy that could slow economic growth even in normal economic times.

In short Congressman Cuellar and Senator Cornyn should bone up on their economics before bring up this silly amendment ever again.