Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/550940
GregStevens,Publisher Chip Thompson, Editor EDITORIALBOARD How to have your say: Letters must be signed and provide the writer's home street address and home phone number. Anonymous letters, open letters to others, pen names and petition-style letters will not be allowed. Letters should be typed and no more than two double-spaced pages or 500words. When several letters address the same issue, a cross section will be published. Email: editor@ redbluffdailynews.com Fax: 530-527-9251 Mail to: P.O. Box 220, 545 Diamond Ave., Red Bluff, CA 96080 Facebook: Leave comments at FACEBOOK.COM/ RBDAILYNEWS Twitter: Follow and send tweets to @REDBLUFFNEWS By Jason Stanford What'sthebiggestdiffer- ence between the Planned Par- enthood videos and the sink- ing of the U.S. battleship Maine in 1898? Both hoaxes are being used as pretexts to war, but in the case of laying blame for sink- ing our battleship off the coast of Cuba, there actually was a sunken ship. On the other hand, Planned Parenthood is not selling dead baby parts on an illegal secondary market. That's fake. The truth hardly matters in either case. Whipped into a froth by nativist newspapers, Americans hungrily glommed onto the war slogan, "Remem- ber the Maine, to hell with Spain." It didn't matter, really, who sank our battleship. It seemed logical that Spain did it because tensions with that country were already high over Cuba. We didn't need to confirm evidence that seemed to suggest what we felt to be true. Maybe that was the point with the easily debunked and obviously edited videos that proved nothing more than Planned Parenthood execu- tives eat salad and drink wine. What we know now is noth- ing new: Sometimes Planned Parenthood clients donate fe- tal tissue for research, and Planned Parenthood gets reim- bursed for expenses. But those are just the facts, albeit eas- ily verifiable and widely avail- able ones. The truth is that this hidden video hoax is the sunken bat- tleship that loosed the Repub- licans dogs of war. Conservative pundit Erick Erickson compared Planned Parenthood Federation of America president Cecile Rich- ards to a Nazi, tweeting, "Re- solved: Cecile Richards is the closest we have come in Amer- ica to Josef Mengele." Rush Limbaugh also com- pared Planned Parenthood to Nazis for "advocating preg- nant women to go and have their babies' body parts har- vested." Texas Senator and presiden- tial candidate Ted Cruz called Planned Parenthood "a crim- inal enterprise that is com- mitting felonies, that is selling the body parts of unborn chil- dren" and demanded that Con- gress outlaw Planned Parent- hood from receiving Medicaid funding for medical services, a call joined by fellow sena- tor and presidential candidate Rand Paul. Majority Leader Mitch Mc- Connell has promised to fast- track a bill to defund Planned Parenthood, skipping the com- mittee process entirely so they can get right to the fist pound- ing and arm waving. The vote will inevitably fail, spurring talk of a government shut- down over defunding Planned Parenthood. Only Speaker John Boehner suggested that politicians were putting the defunding cart be- fore the congressional inves- tigation horse. This outraged Rep. Tim Huelskamp of Kan- sas, who said, "There is no ex- cuse when you have evidence like this, it's time to move for- ward." Except there is no evidence. Damn the facts, full speed ahead. Conservatives have been trying to defund Planned Par- enthood and to roll back ac- cess to abortion and birth con- trol for years now, but only since the 2010 Republican wave have they had any suc- cess. Since that watershed election, states have enacted 231 new laws restricting abor- tion, more than all the laws in the previous three decades combined. Yet abortion oppo- nents have only found success in the states. They haven't had as much success at the federal level because Planned Parent- hood is popular. A poll con- ducted after the first hidden camera video was released found that most Americans like Planned Parenthood, and only 38 percent support defunding Planned Parent- hood. The only people con- vinced by the hidden camera hoax are people who already didn't like Planned Parent- hood. I should disclose here that I used to work for Planned Parenthood and consider Richards a friend. If she's Jo- sef Mengele, I'm Joe DiMag- gio. In my experience, the people who work for Planned Parenthood would sooner vol- unteer for Cruz's presidential campaign than run an illegal black market in dead baby parts. They believe deeply in helping women obtain the health care services they need, and yes, that includes abortions. They are honest, well-intentioned people, and they help an extraordinary percentage of Americans. But those facts don't mat- ter to the politicians who are too busy trying too put them out of business to wait for in- vestigations to conclude to see if anything illegal actu- ally happened. Anti-abortion politicians are using these hoax videos as flimsy ex- cuses to defund Planned Par- enthood, and they don't care what you think about it. JasonStanfordisaregular contributor to the Austin American-Statesman, a Democratic consultant and a Truman National Security Project partner. You can email him at stanford@oppresearch. com and follow him on Twitter @JasStanford. Commentary Damn the facts, full speed ahead Cartoonist's take Some things are a little ob- scure, a little complex with a lot of moving parts, when it comes to the eco- nomic and em- ployment picture. For instance, we hear that there were x number of jobs created in a period of time; for those paying attention to the details, usually buried in an article, there's typically a re- vision to previously reported figures. I recall seeing, along with a recent report, that pre- vious months' job gains were reduced by 60,000. Moreover, the revisions always reduce the reported gains rather than in- crease them. Why would that be? Another shortcoming to the superficial reports of the macro-number of job gains is that it takes special ability to analyze Bureau of Labor Stan- dards (BLS) data and ferret out important details. Details can shed light on whether job gains were equally distributed or were perhaps selectively cre- ated in some states or areas in- stead of others. For instance, Texas, one of the left's favorite objects-of-hate for more rea- sons than space allows, created so many jobs that Jason Rus- sell titled a December 2014 ar- ticle, "Texas job growth out- paces rest of U.S. combined; the economic miracle in Texas continues." "Since the recession began in December 2007, 1.2 mil- lion net jobs have been created in Texas. Only 700,000 net jobs have been created in the other 49 states combined…To- tal non-farm employment has grown by 11.5 percent in Texas since December 2007. Employ- ment in the rest of the United States has grown only 0.6 per- cent. Until September 2014, to- tal employment growth in the rest of the United States since December 2007 was still neg- ative." North Dakota, with its fracking boom (natural gas ex- traction opposed by Dems), ac- tually exceeded Texas in jobs percentage increase although its size limited the number. How did our fair state of Cal- ifornia stack up? With an un- derwhelming 1.5 percent job growth, California trails Texas by ten percent, as of last De- cember. What is Texas doing right? First, they have no personal or corporate income tax, which are disincentives to work and business activity—keep- ing more of your own earn- ings has a remarkable correla- tion to wanting to earn more. Even with its "gross receipts" tax, the Tax Foundation's 2015 State Business Tax Climate In- dex says "Texas has the tenth best business tax climate in the U.S." They do have an maximum 8.15 percent sales tax, the 11th highest in the nation, but the Tax Foundation ranks the Texas average combined state and local rate of 8.05 percent at #12 while California's 8.44 percent is ranked at the 8th highest in the nation. So, with California's higher income, cor- porate and sales taxes, is it sur- prising that companies flee California for Texas or other lower tax states? That doesn't even touch on the regulatory burden in California. Busi- nesses, not government, create jobs; taxes kill, rather than cre- ate, jobs. In addition to lower min- imum wage laws and work- ers compensation regulations, Texas, as a right-to-work state, is "the freest labor market in the country," according to the Mercatus Center. "All these fac- tors explain why Texas was ranked number one in eco- nomic performance in 2014 by the American Legislative Ex- change Council." Bear in mind, also, that lib- eral anathema is reserved for any state that does not con- form to their doctrinaire high- tax-and-regulation, big govern- ment, strong public employee unions, public school monop- oly and anti-resource extrac- tion policies. They cherry- pick things that reinforce their jaded concept that un- less a state follows the "blue state model," they can't possi- bly have real economic accom- plishments or low unemploy- ment. Au contraire! This irrational aversion by liberal, nanny-state parti- sans also extends to a rabid re- sistance to how government programs designed to help workers can undermine em- ployment by enabling unem- ployment as a viable lifestyle. They're incapable of acknowl- edging how reducing such pro- grams can create a positive employment transition. It turns out that 2014 pro- vided a real-world experiment in the impact and results of ending an unemployment ben- efit. In "Study: 2014's Employ- ment Boom Almost Entirely Due to the Expiration of Un- employment Benefits Obama Wanted to Renew" (January 25), Patrick Brennan provides insightful analysis. Isn't it an article of faith that nothing can be better for workers and our economy than paying peo- ple not to work? I recall Nancy Pelosi saying so. In what has been an unde- niably weak jobs recovery (ref: previous columns), 2014 stood out for being a year of improve- ment. Emperor Obama misses no chance to talk and talk and credit his policies, with no real justification—just positing and asserting his spin. "But what if 2014's jobs boom is mostly thanks to the expiration of a program that the Obama administration and Democrats fervently pushed to renew? That's the finding of a new NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research) working paper from three economists— Marcus Hagedorn, Kurt Mit- man, and Iourii Manovskii— who contend that the ending of federally extended unem- ployment benefits across the country at the end of 2013 ex- plains much of the labor-mar- ket boom in 2014." Look it up by title for the explanations, the caveats and charts. Know this however: Democrats have, in knee-jerk fashion, for the duration of the recession and recovery, wailed and decried any ef- fort to cut back on extended unemployment. That expira- tion, beginning in 2014, also brought most state programs back to the traditional 26- week initial period. It's pretty plain to see that more unem- ployed found jobs and more employers did some hiring. Case closed. Don Polson has called Red Bluff home since 1988. He can be reached by e-mail at donplsn@yahoo.com. The way I see it Texas model; cutting jobless checks Sometimes Planned Parenthood clients donate fetal tissue for research, and Planned Parenthood gets reimbursed for expenses. But those are just the facts, albeit easily verifiable and widely available ones. StateandNational Assemblyman James Galla- gher, 2060 Talbert Drive, Ste. 110, Chico 95928, 530 895-4217, http://ad03.asmrc.org/ Senator Jim Nielsen, 2634 Forest Ave., Ste. 110, Chico 95928, 530 879-7424, senator. nielsen@senate.ca.gov Governor Jerry Brown, State Capital Building, Sacramento 95814, 916 445-2841, fax 916 558- 3160, governor@governor.ca.gov U.S. Representative Doug La- Malfa, 507 Cannon House Of- fice Building, Washington D.C. 20515, 202 225-3076 U.S. Senator Dianne Fein- stein, One Post St., Ste. 2450, San Francisco 94104, 415 393- 0707, fax 415 393-0710 U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, 1700 Montgomery St., San Fran- cisco 94111, 510 286-8537, fax 202 224-0454 Local Tehama County Supervisors, 527-4655 District 1, Steve Chamblin, Ext. 3015 District 2, Candy Carlson, Ext. 3014 District 3, Dennis Garton, Ext. 3017 District 4, Bob Williams, Ext. 3018 YOUR OFFICIALS Don Polson This irrational aversion by liberal, nanny- state partisans also extends to a rabid resistance to how government programs designed to help workers can undermine employment by enabling unemployment as a viable lifestyle. They're incapable of acknowledging how reducing such programs can create a positive employment transition. OPINION » redbluffdailynews.com Tuesday, August 4, 2015 » MORE AT FACEBOOK.COM/RBDAILYNEWS AND TWITTER.COM/REDBLUFFNEWS A6