City misdirecting sewer expenditures
Can someone please explain to me why our City Council is going ahead with paying $750,000 of our taxes for a golf course’s private stormwater system, while thousands of folks like myself live next to crumbling public ditches that hurt our resale value and present a sanitation and flood risk to our health?
The city refuses to fix the plugged, deteriorating ditch around my house, and has gone so far as to take me to court for the weeds growing up through it three times (all dismissed).
What do the stormwater sewers look like around your house?
Why are our taxes being shoveled into the city’s Regional Planning Agency and Neighborhood Services to provide services for developers and real estate moguls that should be maintaining our aging sewers?
Our government has deviated wildly from its duty to uphold public health and property from polluted standing water, plugged drains and flooding, especially by raising our taxes to provide more services for those with tax breaks.
LANA SUTTON
Know about nuclear risks
Valley residents are misinformed about the costs and risks of nuclear power. From mines to 100-year containment canisters, nuclear waste is a dangerous reality.
Nuclear power is not clean — it kills American workers. Compensation for illness and death from radiation exposure is paid to tens of thousands of Department of Energy workers.
Uranium produces 1 percent electricity and 99 percent nuclear waste. Radioactive releases move up the food chain, are cumulative, and are known to cause cell alterations and DNA mutations. There is no safe dose of radiation.
How can TVA justify unnecessary, short-term nuclear power against the terrible long-term risks for our valley?
Nuclear power is also expensive. Three bailouts in three decades socialize the risks with government liability and loan guarantees, and deny thousand-year costs of radioactive waste.
The U.S. lags behind the world in green energy. Germany produces 7.4 times more solar electricity than America, with far less land and a cloudy northern location.
We need a bold solar plan for the Tennessee Valley, and TVA should implement a 30 percent improvement in energy efficiency, bringing us jobs, not rate increases.
For more information, please visit our website at MATRR.org — Because It Matters.
GRETEL JOHNSTON
Mothers Against
Tennessee River
Radiation
Scottsboro, Ala.
Islamic Jihad wants to rule
The Islamic Jihad calls Israel “Little Satan” and the USA is “Big Satan,” and they are out to destroy us and our ally Israel.
The problem the USA, England, France, Spain, Italy and all of Europe have in general is that some people do not want to admit that the “Islamic Jihad” is out to destroy Israel and the USA and dominate the rest of the world.
To those who do not realize that the world is at war with the Islamic Jihad, I say, “Every person has the right to their own opinion. But no one has the right to be wrong in their facts.”
BILL LUJAN
Harrison
Let’s hope GOP is up to task
The unintended consequences of the 2010 midterm elections soon will be self-evident. The dissenters got their country back along with the most lobby-friendly politicians in Washington located at the center of a web of corporate cash and influence.
America’s priorities are unemployment, lost savings, home foreclosures and surviving the Bush recession. Yet, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell states that the GOP’s No. 1 priority is to ensure that President Obama is a one-term president.
When shopping in a china shop, if you break it, you own it. The Republicans broke everything, President Obama couldn’t fix everything quickly enough, and so the bull has been let back into the shop to wreak more havoc.
Newly elected Republican House members now face a cautionary moment. A paradigm shift in the political process dictates a rejection of the perpetuation of a hostile political environment.
The re-emergence of GOP political rhetoric addressing God, guns, gays and abortion is a distraction. Challenging their elitist political leadership, the new representatives must draft legislation that addresses America’s priorities and not the special interest groups that purchased their office.
One hopes that the common good of the nation prevails and they are up to the task.
JOHN HIGHT
Follow values, protect children
Recent Free Press editorials lambasting the DREAM Act have lacked compassion for the children affected and factual accuracy.
The act would allow children brought here at a young age to become legal residents. These children — including valedictorians, varsity sports stars and class presidents — are part of our communities, but lack basic rights and protections. They cannot get a driver’s license or job. They fear deportation to countries where many have no ties and don’t speak the language.
In this season of advent, have we forgotten that as an infant Jesus was forced to flee to a foreign country under threat of death? Does the Bible not call us to welcome foreigners? Do we not remember our own immigrant histories?
The Free Press claims the act would create unchecked immigration, protect criminals and mandate in-state tuition. However, according to the National Immigration Law Center (www.nilc.org), these claims are untrue. The act only helps those who can prove good moral character, graduate high school and go on to college or join the military. Criminals are excluded. States decide whether to offer in-state tuition.
Surely we can follow our highest values, protect these vulnerable children, and receive their gifts and talents in return.
STEVE & BARBARA
DERTHICK
Don’t underestimate power of alarmists
The United Nations global warming alarmists would cost the global economy trillions of dollars, thus promoting global poverty — even mass starvation — and destroy millions of jobs in the United States, while accomplishing nothing to benefit world climate.
President Obama is an accessory in imposing draconian carbon regulations on every business and family with the most extensive intervention government has ever undertaken. No longer will there be doubt that our children and grandchildren will become the first generation worse off than their parents. Enormous pressure will be exerted to divert billions of taxpayer dollars to third-world countries to help pay for carbon restrictions which will enact a global redistribution of wealth, the main objective.
Obama can affect this, ordering EPA into full scale enforcement of regulations under the Clean Air Act without a single vote from Congress.
The global warming zealots rest their arguments on alleged scientific consensus that in reality does not and never has existed. Leading scientists, skeptical of the Gore doomsday, can hopefully carry the day, but pressure from the public is critical. This is no time to underestimate the massive power of the global warming alarmists.
JOHN J. SPITTLER
Signal Mountain