Letter to the Editor of Waterbury Paper and My Reply

State worker will say no to concessions

       Last year, state employees held off on our two-year salary increases and gave up seven furlough days with the payment withdrawals during the week of the specified days. Now Gov. Dannel P. Malloy wants us to do the same thing again while enduring the same tax increases everyone else in the state is facing. It's like a double whammy on us state employees.

       What happened to all the managers, making big money, who where going to be eliminated? Could it be they helped Gov. Malloy get elected and he can't get rid of them? In the emissions division alone we have two managers making more than $100,000 a year when the job easily can be performed by one. Campaign promises already broken!

        My union had better not bend to the pressure this time in givebacks. I will vote no.

Walter Bertotti

Naugatuck



Who will support government workers when rich are gone?


       This is in response to Walter Bertotti's Feb. 20 letter, "State worker will say no to concessions."
       I agree with him that there can be deep cuts made to state spending, other than employee compensation, and there should be (but what do you expect with a liberal Democrat in the governor's mansion?).
       I also have to say, and it has been proved, that the average state worker gets a much better pay and benefits package than does a worker in the private sector in a comparable job.
       I run a small business in Connecticut, and I am getting sick and tired of the state taking my taxes and giving them to people who live off the state. I work hard for my money, and now the state wants to take more of it, while the spending goes on nonstop.
      The day of reckoning is here. There "ain't no more money."
      If raising taxes and increased government spending were the answer to our economic woes, the Connecticut economy would be booming. Instead, we have people and businesses leaving the state, businesses closing and the tax base dwindling.
      Keep it up! Tax the "rich," increase income taxes, increase the sales tax, increase regulations and mandates, and pretty soon the only people left in Connecticut will be state workers and people on welfare.
Who will pay the taxes to provide for those people then?
      We recently finished a census in this country. Did Mr. Bertotti bother to take a look at why the results were what they were? The states that lost population were union-only states, with liberal Democratic governments, high taxes, high government spending and strict regulations. The states that gained population were conservative Republican "right to work" states with low taxes, lower government spending and less regulation.
      Even Mr. Bertotti should be able to figure out why that is happening. The gravy train is over!

Jon Quint
Woodbury

Hypocrisy - Alive and Well on the Left

      Remember back in 2009 during the discussions about Obamacare. The Tea party rallies, the Town hall meetings, that were characterized by the Media, the Democrats, Obama, and the Left (but I repeat myself), as mobs, Nazis, radicals, extremists, and racists. Those people had no right to rally against or question the government!!!!
      Fast forward to today. The Wisconsin Governor and the State legislature are about to pass legislation that would force most of the Public Employee Unions to give up their collective bargaining rights and contribute more to their pension and health care costs. There are now massive demonstrations of union members at Wisconsin's State capital in Madison. Those people are rallying against and questioning the government!!!! They are being supported by the Media, the Democrats, Obama, and the Left.
      Isn't hypocrisy great !

When America Was Proud as a Nation!

       I just finished spending a Sunday afternoon watching the Movie "Apollo 13". What a movie and what a time. The story of the third mission to land men on the moon and the subsequent oxygen tank explosion on the spacecraft and the desperate attempt to get the astronauts home safely (which we did). The Russians had launched Sputnik in October of 1957 and shocked the world, especially the United States. Suddenly, we were way behind the Russians in the "Space Race". Then on November 3, of the same year they launched Sputnik II with the dog "Laika" on board. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was created on October 1, 1958, almost a year later, with the simple preamble, "One law for the investigation of the problems of flight within and outside the Earth's atmosphere, and for other purposes", that preferenced the legislation.
       The United States scrambled to catch up with the Russians and the United States and the Soviet Union began a duel for control of the heavens, the so-called "Space Race” that consumed both nations for the next 11 years, ending only when American astronauts first set foot on the Moon on July 20, 1969. The US had several rockets blow up on the ground before we successfully launched our first satellite, Explorer I, on January 31, 1958 and Russia launched a man into space (Yuri Gagarin) well before the US did.
       The US eventually got the ball rolling after President Kennedy challenged America on September 12, 1962 to "put a man on the moon in this decade". We watched as the "Mercury" project got US astronauts (remember the names - Gus Grissom, Scott Carpenter, Deke Slayton, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Wally Schirra, and Alan Shepherd) into earth orbit, and then we moved on to the two man "Gemini" program, and finally the three man Apollo program. We watched as Apollo 8 Commander Frank Borman read from the book of "Genesis", as they orbited the moon on Christmas Eve 1968, and finally on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon. The Russians had given up attempting to put men on the moon.
        What a time that was! American ingenuity, science, and corporate manufacturing made huge leaps in technology. Huge advances in computer technology, flight science, Teflon, rocket design, and even "Tang" (The famous or infamous orange drink depending on your opinion) came out of our space program. That 10-12 year period showed what the United States was capable of when given a challenge.
        Where are we today? We currently have no manned space program, once the Space Shuttle flies it's final mission. In order to send astronauts to the international space station, the moon, or on to Mars, we will have hitch a ride with, guess who? Yep, Russia. Or maybe China, Japan  or India in the near future. Uncle Barack has turned NASA into an Agency researching "Climate Change" and reaching out to Muslim nations (for what?), and has canceled development of the Constellation rocket program. We have no manned space program currently under development. How far we have fallen!

Permission Granted

I think is was very gracious of the First Lady to give us her permission to "pig out" on Super Bowl Sunday, but now we have to get back to her "mandates" about what we should eat. This is America??

WASHINGTON (AP) — Michelle Obama concedes that the White House Super Bowl menu of bratwurst, kielbasa, cheeseburgers, deep-dish pizza and Buffalo wings didn't exactly fit with her campaign to get Americans to eat healthy and combat obesity. But the first lady says it's all about balance.
She said in an NBC "Today" show interview Wednesday that "if you have a day like Super Bowl Sunday, the next day, go back to balance" with vegetables and other healthy eating. She says she tells her children, "you can have birthday cake and everything else, have your vegetables and get your exercise."
It's important, Mrs. Obama said, for families not to think they can never indulge. "Life is about good food, at least in America," she says.

The Coming Ice Age?

      If you think real hard, back to elementary school, when you learned about the "hydrologic or water cycle" on "planet earth". Water is in constant movement. It flows in rivers, into lakes and oceans, and is evaporated from the same to fall again as rain and snow. Cold air holds much less water vapor than does warm air. That is why the western sides of mountain ranges are usually very wet and the eastern side very dry, because as the air climbs up the mountains it cools and loses moisture in the form of rain and snow. So it is dried out as it flows over the other side. The same applies to land masses that are reasonably flat to a lesser degree.
      Fast forward to today, in the era of "global warming" or "climate change". The planet is supposedly warming up. I don't think it is "human" caused, but is just a natural cycle, since for the last 2 1/2 million years we have been in an ice age cycle. We all know what kind of weather we are having here this winter, and Europe has been hammered with bitter cold and snow. Since the "scientists" tell us that during this past summer more of the Arctic ice cap has melted, with more open water, than ever before, I thought I would re post a portion of something I wrote back on November 30, 2009.
   

         "We are in an interglacial period right now, since the last continental glaciers finished receding about 10,000 years ago. Over the last 2 1/2 million years, the earth has had 5 glacial periods during which up to 30% of the continents were covered with glaciers up to a mile thick. Where did all that ice come from? When I was at the University of Connecticut, majoring in Geology back in the early 60's, we discussed a theory of the ice ages that still makes a whole lot of sense, and shows that what is going on today is natural and not caused by humans.
       About 2/1/2 million years ago, the continents arrived (continental drift) at their present locations. This set the stage for the start of the first ice age. At that time the Arctic ocean was open water. This allowed tremendous evaporation from the ocean that fell as snow across the continents. This eventually caused glaciers to start forming on the continents. All that snow and ice on the land caused a lot of sunlight to be reflected back into space causing the global temperature to drop causing global cooling and further glaciation. Eventually, the planet cooled to the point where the Arctic ocean froze. This cut off the evaporation that lead to the creation of the continental ice glaciers. With the influx of new snow cut off, the glaciers slowly started receding. As they receded, more land was exposed and not as much sunlight was reflected back into space, so the planet started warming again. Eventually, the glaciers disappeared as the planet warmed to the point that the Arctic ocean melted and became ice free again. The cycle started all over again, as it has five times, and will continue to do so until the continents realign themselves again. If the earth is warming, and the Arctic ocean is melting as the doomsayers would have you believe, then when it becomes ice-free again, I hope you have a big snow shovel, because we'll be headed into another ice age."