Letters to the editor: Green debacle

Letter to the Editor

Green debacle

The first big news was that Solyndra, a maker of $6 solar panels and recipient of $535 million from the Department of Energy, folded because China makes them for $2. Can you imagine the Chinese government allowing this to happen in their country?

Then Evergreen Solar Inc., which received only $5.3 million, folded, and now Ener1, which received $118 million, elects Chapter 11, and that's just a few that have folded recently.

All of this is essentially at taxpayer expense. Do you suppose the stimulus program administered by the DOE and touted by the administration to create jobs and become an energy source cheaper than fossil fuel is ready for prime time?

William Carr

Plant City

A GOP deficit

The Republican pundits tend to have selective memory. And they hope we all have short memories. All you hear from GOP candidates is how President Obama has raised the national debt during his three years in office. A Tampa Tribune article on Sept. 10, 2011, was headlined "GOP sticks to deficit-heavy plan."

A 2003 picture shows President George W. Bush and Republican congressional leaders celebrating the signing into law of the Medicare prescription drug benefit, which has unfunded future costs that exceed $7 trillion.

Seems they have forgotten that during the Bush years they were starting unfunded wars and programs they now claim are all the fault of the Democrats. I feel the media are falling down on their job of keeping these pundits from rewriting history. They need to be reminded that they had a vice president who said "deficits don't matter" and a president who spent like he believed it.

We are all entitled to our own opinions but not our own facts.

Gerald A. Cerveny Sr.

Tampa

Hydrogen cars

President George W. Bush promised in his 2000 election to have America's cars using hydrogen to get off our dependency on foreign oil. Eleven years later?

Electric motors are more than 300 percent more efficient than gas motors; that is a fact. Yet you still have idiots saying that electric cars just transfer the fuel over to the power companies. Yes, that's true, but it would be a third of what we have to spend for gas. That is called science. Maybe one obligation to be a politician should be that they have to pass science classes.

Van De Steeg

Pinellas Park

Twilight Zone

Are we living in the Twilight Zone? How disturbing to read that Canada is now looking to China as its primary customer for its vast amounts of oil. All this while our gasoline prices continue to rise.

Higher oil and gas prices mean an even higher cost of living and most likely even higher unemployment. What are our leaders thinking? No one wants to have oil spills, but precautions can and should be taken in order to avail ourselves of the many benefits Canada's pipeline would provide us.

Alaska's pipeline generated many high-paying jobs, and like the gold rushes of previous generations, people went north to seek out new lives and take advantage of the boom. Perhaps it's time to start a law-abiding occupy movement in order to clearly communicate that we're not ready to turn down the pipeline jobs and petroleum, much less send them to China. Or have we entered the Twilight Zone after all?

Vincent Murphy

Tampa

Voting rights

Regarding Tribune reporter Mike Salinero's article "State senators slighted voters," published on Jan. 28, I submit another view.

It seems that the article was sympathetic to the decision reached by the two Democratic senators, Dick Durbin and Bill Nelson.

Imagine what a surprise it was that they condemned Florida's Republican Legislature for trying to keep elections free from fraud and corruption.

Did it occur to the Trib to offer any rebuttal as to why the Democratic senators are against the enactment of voter registration reform?

Time and time again, no matter the severity, voter fraud has reared its head in elections across the United States.

Salinero might have taken the time to convey that voting is a right and privilege in this country. Nowhere does this right say that a voter doesn't have to reasonably identify themselves with specific data that would confirm their registration.

If a person has the willingness to vote, that person should without reservation. We in this country have made it so that if it is a small burden or inconvenience for a voter, the government should step in. Entitlements end at the curtain of the voting booth.

Gary Butt

Madeira Beach

Scott's bizarre comparison

Gov. Rick Scott's vague comparison of free-market capitalists to the victims of Nazi persecution is one of the more bizarre and stupefying comments to come out of the mouth of this self-styled expert on the utilization of the Fifth Amendment when testifying about the "capitalist" practices of his former company, Columbia/HCA, one of the country's largest health care businesses.

Scott seems to think that there is some anonymous "they" who pick on "free market" businessmen. In the first place, there is not now, nor has there ever been, a free market that has not been controlled, driven and buffeted by any number of forces, not the least of which is unbridled greed.

Perhaps Scott thought he was being picked on by the government investigators who deposed him about some of the questionable practices of his brainchild company.

It is ironic that Scott should have cited pastor Martin Niemoller's blunt assessment of his own failure to speak out against the Nazis, especially when one reads Scott's obtuse and disingenuous testimony, which perhaps out-Clintoned Bill Clinton's famous statement about what the meaning of "is" is.

A true Scott paraphrase of Niemoller would go something like this: "I did not speak out for the communists, socialists, trade unionists or Jews, not because I was none of these but because I did not understand what the phrase 'came for' means, when one says that the Nazis 'came for' them."

Tommy Moore

Riverview