Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/72958
6A Daily News – Tuesday, July 3, 2012 Opinion DAILYNEWS RED BLUFF TEHAMACOUNTY T H E V O I C E O F T E H A M A C O U N T Y S I N C E 1 8 8 5 Greg Stevens, Publisher gstevens@redbluffdailynews.com Chip Thompson, Editor editor@redbluffdailynews.com Editorial policy The Daily News opinion is expressed in the editorial. The opinions expressed in columns, letters and cartoons are those of the authors and artists. Letter policy The Daily News welcomes let- ters from its readers on timely topics of public interest. All let- ters must be signed and pro- vide the writer's home street address and home phone num- ber. Anonymous letters, open letters to others, pen names and petition-style letters will not be allowed. Letters should be typed and cannot exceed two double-spaced pages or 500 words. When several letters address the same issue, a cross section of those submit- ted will be considered for publi- cation. Letters will be edited. Letters are published at the discretion of the editor. 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How to reach us Main office: 527-2151 Classified: 527-2151 Circulation: 527-2151 News tips: 527-2153 Sports: 527-2153 Obituaries: 527-2151 Photo: 527-2153 On the Web www.redbluffdailynews.com Fax Newsroom: 527-9251 Classified: 527-5774 Retail Adv.: 527-5774 Legal Adv.: 527-5774 Business Office: 527-3719 Address 545 Diamond Ave. Red Bluff, CA 96080, or P.O. Box 220 Red Bluff, CA 96080 Tea Party thanks ots want to thank the communi- ty for supporting the Constitu- tional Sheriffs event held at the fairgrounds on June 23. It was a huge success and Editor: The Tehama Tea Party Patri- uary 2012 timeframe, not a sin- gle veteran can call the new facility home. And, frankly, no one can say for sure exactly when the doors will officially open for business. Isa Baca, Admissions Coor- now we all have to support our sheriff in protecting our rights and getting our forests back and protecting our water rights. The next sheriffs meeting is at Crescent City on July 14 at 2 p.m. at the fairgrounds. Every- one is invited to come. June Cooper, Red Bluff Reexamine Veteran Home In spite of efforts to secure required operating funds, the newly built veterans' home in Redding remains unoccupied. Although completed in the Jan- staffing Editor: dinator-Veterans Homes Divi- sion, California Department of Veterans Affairs (CDVA) recently advised that "…until the fiscal situation of the state is corrected it is hard to provide a specific date when the home will be opening for residents to move in…" While our elected leaders try to sort this mess out in Sacra- mento, the new $88 million, 150-room facility sits empty. The only exception is a cadre of CDVA folks on-site charged with maintaining the facility. According to Baca, the home has ten authorized positions in 2011-2012, including a deputy administrator. Baca points out that "…the cost of maintaining the home in its empty state is $119,000 a month, which includes salary and benefits for the employees and electricity, water and utili- ties…" That's roughly $1.43 million per year. Citing "confidential- ity issues", Baca advised he was not at liberty to release per- sonnel information on the ten employees, including their positions, grades, respon- sibilities and salaries. What strikes me odd is the need for ten state employees to babysit a facility that's in moth- ball status. Heck, since it's a brand new facility and not being fully utilized, there should be few, if any, major maintenance problems. Any problems that do develop ought to be covered by builder and product warranties. Several other local area orga- nizations were surveyed to see how many maintenance folks were employed, with the fol- lowing results: Regency Place Senior Apartments (80 apart- Your Turn ments/8 years old) – 1; The Seasons at Anderson (78 apart- ments/1 year old) – 1; Ander- son School District – 8; and Shasta Regional Medical Center – 8. Unlike the veter- ans' home, all are open for business and serving customers. Unlike the veterans' home, all are occupied facilities. veterans' home, all appear to be taking care of their mainte- nance needs with fewer person- nel. Unlike the reexamine its veterans' home staffing levels, current and future. When fully opera- tional, the cost of running the home is estimated to be $26-28 million with a 236-person staff. With these kinds of numbers, Dare I say, CDVA needs to one wonders if we'll ever be able to afford our long sought after Redding veterans' home. Pete Stiglich, Cottonwood Your officials STATE ASSEMBLYMAN — Jim Nielsen (R) State Capitol Bldg., Room 6031 Sacramento, CA 95814 (916) 319-2002; Fax (916) 319-2102 STATE SENATOR — Doug LaMalfa (R) State Capitol Bldg., Room 3070 Sacramento, CA 95814 (916) 651-4004; Fax (916) 445-7750 GOVERNOR — Jerry Brown, State Capitol Bldg., Sacramento, CA 95814; (916) 445-2841; Fax (916) 558-3160; E-mail: gover- nor@governor.ca.gov. U.S. REPRESENTATIVE — Wally Herger (R), 2595 Cean- othus Ave., Ste. 182, Chico, CA 95973; 893-8363. U.S.SENATORS — Dianne Feinstein (D), One Post Street, Suite 2450, San Francisco, CA 94104; (415) 393-0707. Fax (415) 393-0710. Barbara Boxer (D), 1700 Montgomery St., Suite 240, San Francisco, CA 94111; (510) 286-8537. Fax (202) 224- 0454. Freedom, liberty: Assaulted and cherished Commentary Approaching the most sacred of national holidays, at least if you hold the creation and con- tinued existence of the United States of America to be divinely ordained as I do, we would be well served as citizens to take some time to reflect on the great and hard won gift that we know as Independence Day. Rather than cast a backward look, I find my thoughts dwelling on not only the assaults on our freedom and liberty contained in the 2,400 pages of ObamaCare (Patient Protection and Afford- able Care Act, or PPACA or simply ACA), but also that our apparently encroached-upon, diminished freedoms, still draw people from all over the world to our shores. Admittedly, some immigrants come to partake of the benefits provided by taxpay- ers, and to which they should have no access if they have not used legal processes to gain entry. But most of those coming here simply wish to live, work, create enterprises and prosper in conditions freer by degrees than their countries of origin. So it can be said that even such unpopular laws as Oba- maCare have a mixed effect when seen from various per- spectives. On the one hand, pro- gressives and liberal advocates for government health care mandates waxed triumphant over, first, its passage by "any means necessary," and current- ly, that it is constitutional to the Supreme Court (SCOTUS). That it's never enjoyed majority approval, indeed quite the oppo- site, has never dissuaded liber- als from their faith that, once people get used to supposedly "free" benefits and features, resigned to living with the man- dates and taxes necessary to fund them, ObamaCare will come to be regarded similarly to Social Security and Medicare. The caveats are that voters overwhelmingly realize that those programs are not what they were sold as: Social Secu- rity was supposedly prepaid retirement insurance, not trans- fers from workers to retirees in a shell game of growing outlays and diminished workers, lead- ing inexorably to bankruptcy, massively higher taxes, slashed benefits or all of the above. Medicare was projected to cost about one tenth (1/10th) what it actually costs to, again, take from workers to fund retirees medical care, going bankrupt in a shorter time than Social Secu- rity. Indeed, ObamaCare's bud- getary black hole is growing by virtue of the Congressional Budget Office increasing the cost, disingenuously pegged at about $900 billion to fulfill the arbitrary "less-than-a-trillion- dollar" promise. A funny thing happened after a couple of years: the phoniness of using only seven years of expenses but a full ten years of taxes pro- duced massively higher CBO- scored total costs. Even then, the cruel hoax of relying on squeezing $500 billion of Medicare savings out of med- ical providers has become obvi- ous. which delivered the biggest electoral spanking to Democrats since, well, almost forever (about 1928, I think). Beltway media and leftist advocates (a redundancy) have bemoaned the Tea Party's blatant deter- mination to use the Republican Party to advance – shudder the thought – fiscal disci- pline, economic free- dom and Constitution- al liberty. These same news reporters and opinion writers apparently averted their gaze when all the actual socialists, including then-community orga- nizer and Illinois state senate candidate Don Polson The way I see it One other little caveat to the liberal narrative: After seeing Democrats run amok during the first two years of President Obama's term, a vast awakening took hold of the center-right majority of the electorate, most notably in the Tea Party move- ment, derided by supposedly superior, arrogant and conde- scending progressives, but Barack Obama (part of and endorsed by the socialist New Party) held conferences and for- mulated strategies to hide their socialist intentions and fold themselves into the Democratic Party. Hence, we have none other than Mr. Obama on the record wanting single-payer, socialized health care, back when few paid attention, and even describing ObamaCare as a transitional measure. One of his top people in the effort spoke glowingly of the British National Health Service, which places a monetary value on each additional year of life for the elderly, and has been exposed allowing hundred of thousands of those same elderly to expire on its watch. To Democrats: 1) Be careful what you wished for (from the Supreme Court), because you got it, and 2) You got what you want, now you've got to take majority relied on the govern- ment's lawyerly argument that by "penalty" they meant, "tax"; Democrats from Obama on down vehemently, and we now know falsely, denied it. The 21 or so individual taxes total at least $800 billion. Many of those taxes will indeed fall on "those making less than $200,000." Liars, liars, your collective pants are on fire. So, having been exposed as what comes with it. Like most conservatives, I would have pre- ferred that Chief Justice Roberts had simply agreed with the four conservatives – Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and Alito – and held the whole mess of ObamaCare pottage to be rotten. What Roberts sad- dled Democrats with is a reined-in Com- merce Clause, used by liberals for a cen- tury to rationalize anything the federal government, meaning an assertive President and agreeable Con- gress, wishes to foist on an unsuspecting citizenry. Likewise, the Necessary and Proper Clause. The the prevaricators that they are, Democrats may rue the day they won at SCOTUS, when a re- energized Tea Party movement keeps the House in Republican hands, elects President Romney and a Republican Senate Major- ity. Don Polson has called Red Bluff home since 1988. He can be reached by e-mail at donplsn@yahoo.com.