Letters to the editor

Look, up in the sky ...

The comics are mostly silly, but one recently really irked me. "Pearls Before Swine" made fun of, no, derided, the general public who believes there may be space visitors, calling them "Kooky Person."

My dear departed mother and my family and neighbors saw a UFO in 1953 on Labor Day. My mother had gone to the backyard to hang dish towels to dry. Seeing many fluffy clouds, she looked up to see if it might rain. Between two of these clouds she saw a saucer-shaped object just sitting there. My family came out to see what she was looking at, and then the neighbors across the alley did as well. They all watched as lights suddenly flashed on the object's right side, and it moved slowly under the clouds on the left.

My husband and I were on the road back from Minnesota, and when we arrived they told us about this extraordinary sight. I asked my mother if she reported it, and she emphatically said "No!" She didn't want any notoriety or defamation from anyone.

ANITA KNIGHT

St. Petersburg

Reform machine

I consider the approach to health care reform taken by Congress to be the "Rube Goldberg" approach. Rube Goldberg was known for creating complex machines to perform simple tasks. Purdue University holds an annual competition for schools to compete in producing these machines. The game "Mousetrap" is based on this principle.

I think the health care bills deserve an honorary Rube Goldberg award for making reform so complex that even Congress is not sure what is going to happen. It doesn't take 2,000 pages of legalese to make change. Goldberg would be proud of the current Congress and its proposed health care reform machine.

JIM NELSON

Tampa

Argument full of holes

Ruth Marcus' Nov. 30 column, "The power of the individual mandate," tries to make the case that Congress can require individuals to purchase health insurance. She claims Congress has this authority under the interstate commerce clause. A transaction between me and my local doctor is not "interstate commerce."

Also, since we are not able to purchase health insurance across state lines, insurance is not interstate commerce, either.

The 10th Amendment states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." The members of Congress pushing this legislation are simply ignoring the Constitution.

"We The People" have never delegated to the federal government the power to manage our health care.

SCOTT CUTLER

Lithia

A fair tax

I have no problem with Hillsborough County raising the sales tax or even the state doing so. I do not want to have a state income tax, and a sales tax is the easiest and fairest way to generate income. Everyone - rich and poor - pays sales tax. There is no free ride.

We all want nice roads, etc., but complain when we have to pay for it.

Raise it, and let all residents pay - not just some.

CAROL BUCKINGHAM

Tampa

Let Tampa fund it

Regarding "Five reasons to say no to an eighth cent," Other Views, Nov. 28:

Reason 6: Solutions being offered to aid south Hillsborough County's transportation needs are sadly lacking compared to the contribution citizens will be forced to make through this proposed tax.

If the board of county commissioners was truly interested in the entirety of unincorporated Hillsborough, they should concentrate on north-south transportation and leave the city of Tampa to fund its own internal transportation network.

FRED JACOBSEN

Apollo Beach