The Baytown Sun (Baytown, Tex.), Vol. 89, No. 203, Ed. 1 Wednesday, July 22, 2009 Page: 4 of 16
This newspaper is part of the collection entitled: The Baytown Sun and was provided to The Portal to Texas History by the Sterling Municipal Library.
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—
OPINION
4A
THE BAY’IDWN SUN
Healthcare
anniversary
))
fl
'J
L
A
Two hours of my life, bytlie minute
LETTERS TO I HE EDITOR
SEE LETTERS • PAGE gA
is a good,
not a right
Luke Hales is the assistant managing
editor far The Baytown Sun.
up to 250 words and guest
columns of up to 500 words.
Guest columns should include
a photo of the writer.
LUKE
HALES
MISS YOUR PAPER?
You should receive your
Baytown Sun by 6 a.m. Monday
through Saturday and by 8 a.m.
Sunday If you do not receive
your paper on time, call (281)
425-8066 by 9 a.m. to ensure
redelivery.
Dr. Ron Paul is the leading
spokesman in Washington for limited
constitutional government, low taxes,
and free markets.
REP. DR.
RON PAUL
—Elbert Hubbard
American author (1856-1915)
Luke Hales
Assistant Managing Editor
M.A. Bengtson
Community member
Dave Rogers
Sports Editor
f
1
Sun reserves the right to
refuse to publish any submis-
sion.
Send signed letters to:
Dave Mathews, The Baytown
Sun, P.O. Box 90, Baytown, TX
77522; fax them to (281) 427-
1880 or send an e-mail to
sunnews@baytownsun.com.
Items featured on this page
are the views of the persons
identified with each submission
and do not necessarily reflect
the views of The Baytown Sun
or its advertisers.
I RED HAKIAHN
Publisher l.meriiii*
l<l,-,O.|T4
jSaptoton £un
1301 Memorial Drive, P.O. Box 90
Baytown, Texas 77522
Main: (281) 422-8302
Newsroom: (281) 425-8017
Retail: (281) 425-8036
Classified: (281)425-8008
Circulation: (281) 425-8066
Fax:(281)427-1880
.E-mail: sunnews@baytownsun.com
Web site: www.baytownsun.com
The Baytown Sun, 46180 is published
daily by The Baytown Sun, 1301
Memorial Drive, PO Box 90, Baytown
Texas 77522. Periodicals postage paid
at Baytown, Tx.
State
Rick Perry.
Governor
800-252 9600
Fax: 512-463-
1849
Ted Poe.
Dist2Rep.
866-425-6565
866-447-0242
wwwhouse.
goupoe
Ron Paul,
Dst. 14 Rep.
• 202-225-2831
979-230-0000
www.house.
gov haul
Gene Green.
Dist. 29 Rep.
202-2251688
713-330-0761
281-420-0502
www.house.
gowgreen
How to reach us
Clifton E. “Cliff” Clements,
Publisher'
cliff.clements@baytownsun.com
Dave Mathews
Managing Editor
dave.mathews@baytownsun.com
Sandy Denson, Business Mgr.
sandydenson@baytownsun.com
Joshua Hart, Circulation Manager
joshua.hart@baytownsun.com
Gordon Gallatin,
Advertising Director
gordon.galatin@baytownsun.com
NEWSROOM
sunnews@baytownsun.com
THEY SAID IT
“The love we give away is the
only love we keep.”
DROUGHT
Apollo Il’s
four-decade
We publish only original
v-ditl' tai material addressed to The
\Y RITE. H) U S Baytown Sun bearing the
The Sun welcomes letters of writer’s signature. An address
and phone number not for
publication should be included.
All letters and guest columns
are subject to editing, and the
/W
t'Jp
Federal
Barack Obama
Pnesdent
202-456-tm onno.,™
presnen®’
whtehousagcv . .
JoeBkten,
Vice President
202-4562324
Fax:202-456-2461
vice.president(®
wfitehouse-gcV
Kay Baley
Hutchison.
Senator
202-224-5922
713663-3456
Fax:202-224-0776
Fax:713-209-3459
hutcftsortsenate.
gcvbmaihtm -
John Cornyn
Senator
202-224-2934
713-572-3357
Fax:202-228-2856
Fax:713-572-3777
comynsenate.g
wtontact/ndex
.html
M9
7®
The puppy now has a companion.
/ My teddy bear the one from when 1
was a baby — has joined our party. We
just found out how far the teddy bear
can fly when hurled across the room.
The answer? All the way across the
room.
The gigantic dolphin (Anyone
remember the gigantic dolphin? The
one that hogs the covers?) is now on my
keyboard. Keeping with tradition, he is
There is now a puppy on my head, a
dolphin peering over the screen of my
laptop, a teddy bear on my stomach,
and a child laughing uncontrollably
next to me.
My son assures me
the teddy bear is
okay. The puppy,
however, is trembling
on the pillow, afraid
he’s next. I will
assure the puppy that
he will not face the
same treatment as the
teddy bear.
Hang on.
We just had a massive search and
rescue mission. The puppy fell off the
bed. He is back on the bed, and all is
well in the kingdom once more.
Now my son is off the bed. He
wants me to rescue him.
It’s amazing how fast a 3-year-old
can climb on the bed when you’re
coining up to tickle him. Quite agile,
this one.
I have a puppy on my head. My kid
put it there. He has put it on my head
... what... like 16 times already? He
thinks it s hilarious.
It’s a good thing it’s not real. It’s a
stuffed puppy that he hasn't paid much
attention to until pretty recently. Like
about 10 minutes ago,
Make that 17 times on the head.
Now the puppy is helping me write
this column. It has taken me 5 minutes
to write this sentence because the
puppy thinks we needed some random
numbers here.
My boy just told me that the puppy
wants to bounce on me. Okay. then.
Hang on.
Dolphin, teddy bear and puppy are all
now resting peacefully on the floor
watching a movie. The boy and his dad
are in the bed, cuddling and also watch-
ing the movie. Dad is finishing his col-
umn.
Who could ask for anything more?
The dolphin just asked for some
Transformers fruit snacks. Guess he got
hungry, what with all that puppy riding
and all.
T
11
u
Now there is a puppy riding a dolphin
on the floor. There is a toddler pushing
the dolphin. The teddy bear is wraune,
watching the action unfold? 1 wonder
what will happen next? The suspense is
killing me. And also, presumably, the
teddy bear.
... Ah, yes. The dolphin is now riding
the puppy. This should end well.
"We came in peace for all mankind."
That’s how the plaque reads that astro-
nauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin
left when they walked on the moon July
20. 1969.
Yes, they were the first moonwalkers,
taking those first, amazing lunar steps 14
years before pop star Michael Jackson
transformed the term into a dance step.
They rode whiz-bang gadgetry, revolu-
tionary science and their own skill and
guts all the way to another celestial body
not in a video game on a screen, but a
very real 23X.X55 miles away from Earth
Forty years after that riveting event,
167 mill ion Americans (more than hal f
the nation's population) know Armstrong.
Aldrin and their colleague Michael
Collins only as names in a history book,
having been born after the momentous
Apollo I I flight. Even the newest crop of
astronauts apparently recalls more about
the shuttle Challenger’s 19X6 explosion
than about the U.S.s greatest achievement
in space exploration
But millions still remember first hear-
ing those crackling words. "Houston.
Tranquility base here. The Eagle has
landed."
On that historic day. almost a billion
people watched the grainy footage on TV
as Armstrong placed his left boot on the
moon’s surface w ith the immortal words,
"That’s one small step for a man. one
giant leap for mankind"
An additional 10 men have stepped on
the moon, shuttle astronauts have space-
walked to fix the Hubble telescope and
interplanetary exploration craft have cap-
tured pictures on Mars. But none of those
accomplishments has captivated the pub-
lic imagination as widely as the first
moon landing.
Apollo 1 Is safe completion answered
the challenge President John F. Kennedy
had issued May 25. 1961. It took a
national commitment ofS24 billion and
400,000 workers to make it happen. Ed
Bradley reported on CBS’s 60 Minutes in
a rare interview w ith Armstrong in 2007.
But it was a race against the Soviet Union
that the United States wanted to w in
NASA's talking about returning to the
moon by 2020. but taxpayers will have to
be persuaded lhat the expense is justified
and feasible. It'll take will and imagina-
tion to accomplish, the kind of imagina-
tion that got us there in the first place.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
He is staring at me. It’s making me
uncomfortable.
The puppy is no longer on my key-
board. He has been replaced by a tod-
dler’s head. Might I add, my son is quite
proficient at typing with his nose.
Hang on.
Okay, the boy has decided to cuddle
with me instead of blocking my view.
That’s very thoughtful of him.
However, the puppy is on my stom-
ach staring at me again.
I was just forced to kiss the puppy.
Repeatedly.
This puppy has absolutely no man-
ners. 1 need to take him to stuffed
puppy obedience school.
I bet that’s a pretty boring class.
Cap and trade
1 ask. would Representatives Gene
(ireen. Al (ireen and Shelia Jackson-Lee
raise their right hand and swear that they
read and understood the Cap and Trade
Bill before they voted on it? I can tell
you that the bill was run through without
proper debate and provisions inserted in
the middle of the night so that people
couldn’t see exactly what Was in the bill.
Its going to run businesses out of the
LLS. where they can compete.
Say it cost a company $100 to make a
w idget. They sell it tor S150. They take the
$50 profit and pay dividends to share hold-
ers for investing, they conduct research
The puppy is now sniffing me.
yk — — it. . L _ V u — a 142 *
my scent, even though he has made
pretty good friends with my skull.
It is becoming hard to write this col-
umn, as the puppy is now' sitting on my
keyboard. politely declined, as I have no idea how
He is staring at me. It’s making me t0 from a sippy cup
... And now my son is sitting on the
keyboard. Yup ... he’s staring at me.
Hang on.
.............
"CROP DUSTER"
Political philosopher Richard
Weaver famously and correctly stat-
ed that ideas have consequences.
Take for example ideas about rights
versus goods. Natural law states that
people have rights to life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness. A good is
something you work for and earn. It
might be a need, like food, but more
“goods” seem to be becoming
“rights” in our cul-
ture. and this has
troubling conse-
quences. It might
seem harmless
enough to decide
that people have a
right to things like
education, employ-
ment, housing or
healthcare. But if
we look a little fur-
ther into the conse-
quences, we can see that the work-
ings of the community and economy
are thrown wildly off balance when
people accept those ideas.
First of all, other people must pay
for things like healthcare. Those
people have bills to pay and families
to support, just as you do. If there is
a “right” to healthcare, you must
force the providers of those goods,
or others, to serve you.
Obviously, if healthcare providers
were suddenly considered outright
slaves to healthcare consumers, our
medical schools would quickly
empty. As the government continues
to convince us that healthcare is a
right instead of a good, it also very
generously agrees to step in as mid-
dle man. Politicians can be very
good at making it sound as if health-
care will be free for everybody.
Nothing could be further from the
truth. The administration doesn’t
want you to think too much about
how hospitals will be funded, or how
you will somehow get something for
nothing in the healthcare arena. We
are asked to just trust the politicians.
Somehow it will all work Out.
Universal Healthcare never quite
works out the way the people are led
to believe before implementing it.
Citizens in countries with national-
ized healthcare never would have
accepted this system had they known
upfront about the rationing of care
and the long lines.
As bureaucrats take over medicine,
1 costs go up and quality goes down
because doctors spend more and
more of their time on paperwork and
less time helping patients. As costs
skyrocket, as they always do when
inefficient bureaucrats take the reins,
government will need to confiscate
more and more mqney ft^m an
already foundering economy to
somehow pay the bills. As we have
seen many times, the more money
and power that government has, the
more power it will abuse. The
frightening aspect of all this is that
cutting costs, which they will
inevitably do, could very well mean
denying vital services. And since
participation will be mandatory, no
legal alternatives will be available.
The government will be paying the
bills, forcing doctors and hospitals to
dance more and more to the govern-
ment’s tune. Having to subject our
health to this bureaucratic insanity
and mismanagement is possibly the
biggest danger we face. The great
irony is that in turning the good of
healthcare into a right, your life and
liberty are put in jeopardy.
Instead of further removing
• healthcare from the market, we
should return to a true free market in
healthcare, one that empowers indi-
viduals, not bureaucrats, with control
of healthcare dollars. My bill HR
1495 the Comprehensive Healthcare
Reform Act provides tax credits and
medical savings accounts designed
to do just that.
staring at me.
The puppy is now sniffing me. I really hate that dolphin. Naturally,
Apparently he’s still not familiar with the boy really, really loves the dolphin.
™,. ™ .i u j Ikw tQ jypg w-th
out looking at the keys.
The boy just offered me some juice. I
EDITORIAL BOARD
Clifton E. •'CllfT’ Clements
Editor/Publisher
Dave Mathews
Managing Editor.
JayEshbach
Communitymember
Jim Finley
former Managing Editor
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Clements, Clifford E. The Baytown Sun (Baytown, Tex.), Vol. 89, No. 203, Ed. 1 Wednesday, July 22, 2009, newspaper, July 22, 2009; Baytown, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1192623/m1/4/?q=mission+rosario: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Sterling Municipal Library.