Mountain Views News          Saturday, May 23, 2015

15

OPINION

Mountain Views-News Saturday, May 23, 2015 

HOWARD Hays As I See It

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Howard Hays

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Dr. Tina Paul

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Tina Paul

Mary Carney

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Deanne Davis

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Renee Quenell

Ben Show

Sean Kayden

Marc Garlett


“Once you become predictable, no one’s interested anymore.”

 - Chet Atkins

Stuff happens. And when it does, reactions can be depressingly 
predictable.

 There was the tragic Amtrak derailment in Pennsylvania. We 
know the proximate cause; a train going twice the 50 mph speed 
limit around a curve. We know what could have prevented it; the 
implementation of Positive Train Control technology, which would 
slow or stop the train in such situations regardless of any engineer 
incapacity.

 Congress passed the Rail Safety Improvement Act in 2008, which mandated Positive Train 
Control on most major lines by the end of 2015. Rail companies so far have spent $5 billion on 
the project, but according to the Association of American Railroads they need $5 billion more 
to finish the job. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimated it would take $10 billion 
just to bring track, tunnels, bridges and other rail infrastructure up to a “state of good repair” in 
the Northeast Corridor to handle increased freight and passenger traffic. (Amtrak’s ridership 
doubled between 2000 and 2012.)

 Though still short of needs, President Obama proposed increasing Amtrak funding for 
infrastructure and maintenance from $1.4 billion to $2.5 billion. Predictably, the reaction of 
Congressional Republicans was to instead cut it down to $1.1 billion. As for safety concerns, just 
weeks ago Senate Republicans filed a bill to put off that deadline for implementing Positive Train 
Control from 2015 to 2020.

 With mass shootings, a predictable NRA-stoked reaction is not fear of the violence itself 
but fear it might bring renewed efforts to regulate guns. Republicans in the Texas legislature 
predictably made clear the killing of nine and wounding of 18 in the shootout between motorcycle 
gangs in Waco would have no effect on legislation permitting open carry of handguns in public or 
allowing concealed carry on college campuses.

 State and federal authorities warned that motorcycle gang members have now been given 
orders to shoot and kill police. Though a report shows more than half the cases of police shot and 
killed in 2013 involved a shooter not licensed to carry a gun, the bill in the Texas House would 
prohibit police officers from asking a person found with a gun whether or not they’re licensed to 
carry it.

 The big news locally is the L.A. City Council having given preliminary approval to a $15.00 
minimum wage by 2020. The reaction has been warnings of business closings and masses of low-
wage workers forced into outright unemployment. There’s also the specter of creeping socialism 
and big government trampling the free market.

 This reaction was easily predictable, as we’ve been hearing variations of it since the minimum 
wage was first established as part of the New Deal’s Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938 (which 
also established the forty-hour workweek, eight-hour workday, time-and-a-half for overtime and 
restrictions on child labor).

 The predictable reaction to most statistical analyses is questioning cause-and-effect 
relationships, but the figures for last year are clear: from January through June, the rate of job 
growth in the 13 states that raised their minimum wage at the beginning of the year was greater 
than that of the 37 states that didn’t. Figures from a year ago showed Washington State, with the 
nation’s highest minimum wage, also with the highest growth rate in small businesses. On a local 
level, the cities coming in one-two with the highest minimum wages, San Francisco and Seattle, 
also came in one-two in growth of small businesses. While minimum wage opponents predicted 
restaurants would suffer the most, in both cities they’ve provided one of the strongest areas of 
growth.

 With our federal minimum wage representing 38% of median income as of 2011, it remains 
one of the lowest among developed countries. Though last raised in 2009, adjusted for inflation 
it’s as if minimum-wage workers haven’t gotten a raise in over seventeen years. In arguing for an 
increase in the federal minimum wage to $10.10, U.S. Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez points out 
that in 2014 it would’ve taken two million full-time minimum-wage workers to earn as much as 
Wall Street handed out in bonuses that year ($28.5 billion).

 It’s predictable we won’t hear much reaction at all to a study that came out of UC Berkeley 
Center for Labor Research and Education last month, titled “The High Public Cost of Low 
Wages”. It details how those most reliant on government largesse are the corporations depending 
on taxpayers to fork over $152.8 billion annually to subsidize their low-wage workers.

 The study points out that from 2003 to 2013, while corporate profits and incomes for the 
wealthiest soared, incomes for 70% of us either stayed flat or sank. Much of this was due to 
keeping workers on non-livable wages, with cuts or outright elimination of health and other 
employment benefits, while relying on taxpayers to help these workers make ends meet with 
programs like Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance, Earned Income Tax Credit, food stamps, 
etc.

 While these programs do help children, the elderly and disabled, 73% of their beneficiaries 
are members of working families. The Berkeley study shows the annual cost to taxpayers of 
subsidizing the low wages of this 73% to be $127.8 billion at the federal level and $26 billion for 
the states.

 It would be great to see one of these anti-big-government conservatives react to that Berkeley 
study by using it as an argument to raise the minimum wage in order to help working families 
become self-supporting and off the government dole. 

 That’s a reaction I predict we won’t see. 


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LEFT TURN/RIGHT TURN

SUSAN Brown

TINA Dupuy

THE BUSH YEARS: AN EXPLAINER

AN OPEN LETTER TO 

PRESIDENT OBAMA

 
This week in 
Nevada, Jeb Bush 
accidentally 
declared he’s 
running for 
president to 
reporters. He 
was supposed 
to say, “if I run” 
and instead said, 
“I’m running for 
president!”

 So now that it’s official, I feel it’s my duty to 
explain the Bush years to younger/amnesiac 
Americans who may not remember what life 
was like before Obama. For example, Fox News 
used to co-sign and coo over everything that 
came out of the Oval Office. True story. The 
party line at Fox News was that “libruls” were 
an evil plague and if George W. Bush could just 
get his way—the country would be better for it.

So we invaded Iraq preemptively. Because, we 
were told, we’d be greeted as liberators. And 
Saddam was behind 9/11. Also, we were told, 
it’d pay for itself, because, you see, there was 
oil and stuff there. And Iraq had weapons of 
mass destruction. And Fox News was totally 
on board with this. And Judith Miller was 
on board. And anyone who wasn’t, was a 
treasonous, flag-burning, queer, vegetarian 
environmentalist.

 On March 28, 2003—a week after the 
invasion of Iraq by US forces, the Fox News 
Ticker on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan read, 
“How do you keep a war protester in suspense? 
Ignore them.”

 “While young Americans are dying in 
the sands of Iraq and the mountains of 
Afghanistan,” said pseudo-Democratic 
Senator Zell Miller at the 2004 Republican 
National Convention. “Our nation is being 
torn apart and made weaker because of the 
Democrats’ manic obsession to bring down 
our commander in chief.” Basically, we 
preemptively put troops in harm’s way and 
since they’re now dying, anyone who opposes 
it hates America.

 And let’s not forget Dixie Chick Natalie 
Maines saying in London just before the 
invasion, “Just so you know, we’re on the good 
side with y’all. We do not want this war, this 
violence, and we’re ashamed that the president 
of the United States is from Texas.” They were 
boycotted, vilified, and their careers were 
ruined, becoming the personification of liberal 
traitors everywhere. In short: They were Dixie 
Chicked.

 President Bush commented on this 
phenomenon and said, “They shouldn’t have 
their feelings hurt just because some people 
don’t want to buy their records when they 
speak out.”

 Chilling? Yes. Other era peacenik villains 
were diplomat Joe Wilson, who had the 
audacity to challenge faulty intelligence on the 
pages of The New York Times. His wife, CIA 
covert operative Valerie Plame, was outed by 
Scooter Libby (read: Dick Cheney). Cindy 
Sheehan, a mother of a soldier who died in Iraq, 
was widely mocked for opposing the war. Even 
9/11 widows were “fair game” on Fox during 
the Bush years.

 See, Bush was not a compromiser. “Either 
you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” 
he told the country in 2001. He was not one to 
reach across the aisle. He was right and never 
apologized. All because god was in the White 
House. God talked to George W. Bush and told 
him to cut taxes for the wealthy and put two 
wars on credit cards. (During the Bush years, 
god’s alternative spelling was “The Heritage 
Foundation.”)

 Like his brother, Dubya was also a 
flubber. “Too many OB-GYNs aren’t able to 
practice their love with women all across this 
country.” Pro-Bush pundits’ full-time gig was 
interpreting for the rest of us what the hell the 
president was saying. And how he was really 
just a shoot-from-the-hip guy and not just a 
puppet for war profiteers (read: Dick Cheney).

 Jeb has repeatedly said George W. will be 
the person he listens to on Mideast issues. 
Jeb is going to get advice from the guy who 
destabilized the region, creating fertile ground 
for ISIS and yet has never regretted anything 
he’s ever “decided?!” What could go wrong?

 Jeb did a fawningly friendly interview with 
Fox News’ Megyn Kelly where he was asked if 
he would, knowing what we know now, invade 
Iraq. (A question, you’d think, he’d prepared 
for since the first day of the invasion.) He said 
he would. He’d do exactly as his brother did. 
Immediately, his pocket pundit Ana Navarro 
took to the airwaves to explain Jeb misheard 
the question.

 So he wouldn’t invade Iraq? Jeb later said he 
refused to answer the question because it was 
a hypothetical and “such hypotheticals were 
insensitive to the families of fallen soldiers in 
the war.”

 Sound familiar? It’s a re-run. A three-peat. 
As recent nonagenarian Yogi Berra once said, 
“It’s déjà vu all over again.”

 If George were a great president, it would 
bring up nostalgia for a storied time in 
American history. But he wasn’t. He was a 
brutish, dim-witted, anti-science, disastrous, 
short-sighted zealot who perverted patriotism 
to mean legal immunity. He tanked our 
economy and we’re still reeling from his foreign 
policy fiascos.

 We need him and anyone who refuses to 
learn from his mistakes to be in the country’s 
rear view, not on a ballot.

 Tina Dupuy is a nationally syndicated op-ed 
columnist, investigative journalist, award-winning 
writer, stand-up comic, on-air commentator and wedge 
issue fan. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.
com.


Dear President Obama, 

I write this letter in response to your 
May 12 visit to Georgetown University 
where, in a so-called religious setting, 
you urged conservatives and liberals 
to unify to fight poverty. Helping 
those in need is a cause that touches 
the heart of God, so I was a little encouraged 
until you took a potshot at 
Speaker of the House John Boehner 
and Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, 
insinuating they could care 
less about the plight of the poor.

Your insinuation was offensive, revealing 
that even in helping others 
you cannot help insulting your political 
opponents. And obviously, biting 
your tongue doesn’t work. What you 
really need is a change of heart. Until 
that happens, little else matters. 

At Georgetown, you claimed to be a 
“Christian” to propagate your socialistic 
agenda to fight poverty, then simultaneously 
sucker punched Christianity 
when you bragged about your support 
of abortion and same sex marriage. 
You’d be much more respected if you’d 
drop the whole “Christianity” thing 
and admit what you really believe. If 
you insist you are a true believer, then 
try the Bible. It’ll fundamentally transform 
your life when it fills you with 
the kind of hope and change that has 
nothing to do with government.

Truth is, the income inequality gap 
has widened over the past six years, 
pumping more taxpayer money out of 
wallets and into the bottomless pit of 
Washington. According to a January 7, 
2014 report in the Washington Times, 
the poverty level under your watch 
broke a 50-year record. Rail on income 
inequality all you wish, but “a record 
47 million Americans receiving food 
stamps, about 13 million more than 
when he [you] took office” is nothing 
to brag about. Maybe it’s time for your 
party to drop its income inequality 
obsession and join with conservatives 
to focus on policies which help every 
American reach their potential.

An honest glance at the red-swathed 
map after the 2014 midterm elections 
will help you see you’ve lost a massive 
amount of support from God-fearing, 
hard-working citizens who feel 
they’ve lost their voice and America 
has lost her way. At 
Georgetown, you 
seemed befuddled 
that you can’t gain 
the support you 
want from conservatives. 
Besides the 
fact that it’s impossible 
to get anything 
done when 
those around you are preoccupied 
with extinguishing the divisive brush 
fires you persistently ignite, it’s really 
quite simple. Cramming controversial 
things into bills which force people to 
choose between their religious beliefs 
and a particular regulation set you up 
for failure. You may find strained definition 
of law to pass a bill like Obamacare, 
but you lose the conscience of a 
nation and the support of good people. 

It seems that deep within you burns 
a bitterness toward those with whom 
you disagree, likely derived from 
spending too much time with certain 
friends, mentors and associates like 
Frank Marshall Davis, Bill Ayers and 
Pastor Jeremiah Wright. When we 
surround ourselves with that kind of 
negativity, little good follows. That, 
coupled with a core belief that America 
must pay reparation for past mistakes 
in perpetuity leads to the kind of 
anti-Americanism Pastor Wright espoused 
the first Sunday after the September 
11, 2001 terrorist attacks when 
he said, America should be damned, 
not blessed, getting what she deserved 
when her chickens came “home to 
roost.” 

With less than two years to go in your 
presidency (543 days, 17 hours and 
18 minutes to be exact, not that I’m 
counting), concerns about your legacy 
must surely keep you awake at night 
and reasonably disturbed between golf 
and basketball games. The self-avowed 
unifier turned out to be a disgruntled 
divider. With poverty rising and racial 
unrest at record levels, it might be 
prudent to avoid adding to your legacy 
as the first black president, the title of 
worst.

Susan Stamper Brown Susan’s is a recovering 
political pundit from Alaska, who does 
her best to make sense of current day events 
using her faith. E-mail Susan at: writestamper@
gmail.com.

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