May 15, 2008 09:07 pm
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Annexation vote not a surprise
Who is surprised that the Kokomo Common Council voted on first reading to pass the annexation ordinance? The council is made up of Democrats who will do anything the Democrat mayor asks.
This annexation is not new. The administration of Steve Daily tried the same thing, but lost the attempt. Those of us who lived in the area organized opposition to the annexation plan. When Bob Sargent became mayor, he pulled the annexation from consideration.
Each mayor blames the other one for the financial distress of the city. When Matt McKillip became mayor, he blamed the Trobaugh administration and raised property taxes. Now Greg Goodnight blames McKillip for the problems, only he cannot raise taxes, so he reverts to the only source of new revenue he can find and that is annexation of outlying areas of the county. If anyone believes that the annexation will be revenue neutral, they look at the world through rose-colored glasses. The annexation will be a big financial boon to the city. A mayor who will annex areas that do not result in a financial gain is not doing his job. Look at the Geist area. They are fighting annexation to the Town of Fishers. Fishers is looking to increase its tax base the same as Kokomo.
The idea that annexing this area will improve economic development is ridiculous. The problem is that no one in the previous administrations has made economic development a priority.
Annexation will give the city more money to spend on whatever pet projects are at this time. I have been a part of the business world long enough to know that a good accountant can make the books look as good or as bad as they need to in order to promote an idea.
Annexation is about money and nothing more. The Democrat philosophy of tax and spend is alive and well in Kokomo.
Bruce Keller, Kokomo
‘Warming crowd perpetrating hoax’
In my last letter on global warming, I predicted that in about five years that the elite media and politicians would be attacking “big food” because of the rising price of food, brought on by our “ever to the rescue” politicians demanding that we make more ethanol. Today I saw an article with the headline stating the food prices have risen faster in 2007 than in the last 17 years. The article had a lot of woe in it about the plight of the poor because of the rise in food costs.
We should note that the new term of use is no longer “global warming” but “global climate change.” This is because data is now available showing that global temperatures have not risen any since 1998. Other atmospheric scientists have become quite worried not about global cooling as it appears that we are beginning to enter into the down part of a 30-year cycle that the sun goes through.
Al Gore’s movie about global warming is filled with numbers of errors pointed out by such people as Richard Lindzen, who is the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Edward J. Wegman of George Mason University, who chaired a panel of statisticians who determined that the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only followed 17 of the 140 principles necessary to establish a scientific truth. Not surprising since the IPCC is a political body and not a scientific one.
The 700 scientists that Al Gore promotes as supporting the global warming theory contained only two who knew anything about atmospheric science. I am not an atmospheric scientist but my studies leading to a Ph.D. in physics have given me much knowledge about infrared and ultraviolet transmission and absorption in the gases in the atmosphere, i.e., the fundamentals governing the earth’s temperature. I can recognize very quickly a problem when astrophysicists report that the polar ice caps on Mars are melting and that we just might have a change in the sun’s activity. I don’t think there are any gas-guzzling SUVs there.
We must face the fact that the world energy needs are petroleum based and will be for a very long time. If we want to eliminate our dependence on foreign oil, we better start drilling off our coasts and in Alaska, and exploiting the huge deposits of oil shale in North Dakota and the tar sands in Canada. If we were to do this, North America would become the world’s greatest supplier of oil because these deposits are huge. Even at a significantly lower price for oil, these deposits are very viable. No alternative fuel can even approach the needs for energy at this time or even the near future. Even if cellulose produced ethanol becomes possible, we should even there be careful about the unintended consequences of denuding the earth of huge amounts of vegetation. The global warming crowd is perpetrating a hoax on us all. It is about control not about concern for mankind.
James D. Boyd, Ph.D, Galveston
Abusers shouldn’t get public help
The story about the four adults accused of abusing the two small children here in Kokomo was awful, to say the least.
Why is there not a law that if four adults who could work, but do not, and receive assistance that if they are involved in child abuse, there would never be assistance for them to be at home or anywhere that children are?
Makes since to us, no assistance.
Steve and Sondra Wolfe, Kokomo
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