Letters: 4/27/17

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Protesters on oil rigs

I must wholeheartedly agree with the letter from Heather Miyazawa [Re: Letters, April 13] regarding “protesters” trying to interfere with oil rig operations!! My three brothers and I and my dad have about 100 years of oil field experience between us, and believe me — AN OIL RIG IS NO PLACE FOR THE UNTRAINED!!! There are a million different ways to get hurt or killed, so you protester-types, PLEASE keep your distance!!

N. E. Fourroux/via internet

The citizens are being heard

Boulder City Council deserves our thanks for its serious and considered approach to the latest Xcel offers at the Council meeting on April 17. The community of Boulder came out in numbers to show its support for the muni effort.

And the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) also heard the citizens, loud and clear.

At the April 19th PUC proceedings, Chairman Ackerman announced that he had watched the entire council meeting. The other commissioners indicated that they had also been following the meeting closely. They know how much we care about this.

Chairman Ackerman asked that the public think about this as being similar to a divorce proceeding, with the PUC serving as the body responsible for ensuring the fair division of utility assets. He emphasized that the PUC agrees that Boulder has a right to municipalize. He also:

• acknowledged that the citizens feel that the muni effort has taken an inordinate amount of time and now want to see results

• acknowledged the complexities of this case

• emphasized the PUC’s purpose as, “ensuring due process for all parties in the pursuit of safe, reliable, and effective electric service”

The discussions and decisions made after his remarks indicate that this commission wants to do the right thing, and that the citizens of Boulder are being heard. The commissioners want to move the process forward, and they want to find ways to help the public understand the process. I, for one, see this as a good thing. Regardless of how the Camera might choose to spin it, the citizens had a good day at the PUC. 

Amber Hess/Boulder

Is thinking such a problem?

We now have a man in the White House who doesn’t have to think or contemplate complexities while performing his duties. While at a nice dinner at Mar-a-Lago our common-man’s billionaire president decided to bomb Yemen which killed one American,  one child and an unknown number of militants… Shoots from the hip. All Trump picks for critical offices were hastily made to either pay off contributors or piss off  liberals… No thinking required. After gulping large tainted chunks of ideological hearsay from Breitbart news and Rush Limbaugh denying climate change, our gerrymanderd peoples choice for leader appointed Scott Pruitt to head the EPA because neither Pruitt nor Trump have any interest in scientific data or even looking out the window from Mar-a-Lago to witness the sea rising around the hotel foundation. I guess we should thank our federalist voting system that we have a non critical thinker in white house.

Here’s one for Tom Brown:

There was once an old man named Trump/Who did very well on the stump/But draining the swamp, though hailed with pomp, was soon left abandoned in junk

Tom Lopez/Longmont.

Degrade North Korea

President Trump has pointed out the strong linkage between China and North Korea, and he correctly assumes China can influence North Korea’s weapons development program. We must work with China on resolving this situation, and also on the Chinese encroachment in the South China Sea and the trade deficit imbalance.

   At this juncture, the North Korean nuclear missile program is of primary concern. China can bring pressure on North Korea to stop its development of these weapons systems by reducing its trade with North Korea.

   One area of trade that comes to mind is the large quantity of coal China imports from North Korea. It is estimated this amounts to 22 million tons per year, which is 40 percent of North Korea’s coal exports. A reduction in the importation of North Korean coal would significantly impact the North Korean economy, and could force it to change its position on arms development.

   The U.S. has large quantities of coal available for mining which could be sold to China, if cost effective, to fill its coal importation needs. This would help our trade imbalance with China, boost our coal mining industry, and put our coal miners back to work.

Donald Moskowitz/Londonderry, NH 

Trumps tax returns
can be examined

According to George K. Yin, a professor of Law and Taxation at the University of Virginia School of Law and Taxation in Charlottesville, a 1924 law, the result of conflict of interest concerns about the Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon and executive-branch officials involved in the Teapot Dome scandal, gives Congress the authority to examine Trump’s returns and reveal them to the public without the president’s consent.

Hello… Could/would someone, anyone in Congress please get going on this then? Gracias por eso. Always your political servant,

Grant D. Cyrus/Boulder

Governance

Governing America is not a job for simpletons. We are a large, diverse nation and issues of the economy, of foreign relations and of global climate change are complex and many-faceted and cannot be met by magical thinking.  Nor is it a job for absolutists. One size simply does not fit all.

Donald Trump has an avid and vocal fan base but his overall favorability rating is low (and will never match that of Barack Hussein Obama) and that of Congress ranks as abysmal, yet both he and the Republican leadership continue to present themselves and their narrow ideas as though they were exceptional and “know more than anybody.”  Unfortunately, in the immortal words of Gertrude Stein, “there is no there there.”

Robert Porath/Boulder

Two socially tone-deaf
GOP actions

The current administration’s attempts to improve business economics through relieving operating costs need to be challenged. Specifically, attempts to buzz-cut EPA regulations threaten our health and relaxing medical insurance pre-existing condition coverage is counterproductive.

With the EPA, there are certainly unnecessary regulations. However, asking industry to prioritize regulations to be removed will result in the most socially protective ones being eliminated. We who grew up before businesses were required to be environmentally conscious know this — business untethered will pollute the air we breathe, the water we drink and the ground we farm, all in the name of increased profit. EPA involvement is essential to preventing sewage and fertilizer runoff polluted rivers, black lung-like respiratory diseases, brown cloud and acid smog air pollution, leeched mining waste, and metal poisoning. Gutting the EPA’s ability to regulate and oversee will set our society back 50 years.

With health insurance, having an age-based premium increase is understandable, but eliminating the requirement that insurers provide regular coverage for people with pre-existing conditions will eventually have a large unanticipated impact. GOP proposals allow insurers to relegate people with pre-existing conditions into costly high risk pools, much as accident-prone drivers pay more for auto insurance.  With genomic research increasingly identifying genetic predispositions (e.g., BRCA1/BRCA2 variants associated with specific forms of cancer), a large population will be identified as predisposed to one or more medical conditions. Insurers will likely declare predisposition to be a pre-existing condition, resulting in a significant subset of healthy people forced to choose between higher costs or opting out.  Since one of the societal benefits of having general medical coverage is a healthier, more productive society, this is counterproductive.

This is becoming a broken record, but we need to call upon our elected officials to prevent this type of regressive government oversight from becoming reality.

Paul Atcheson/Longmont