The Baytown Sun (Baytown, Tex.), Vol. 85, No. 225, Ed. 1 Saturday, June 24, 2006 Page: 4 of 16
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OPINION
J
THE BAYTOWN SUN
Saturday, June 24,2006
4A
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
U.S. Views
■
I
jr
&
label lies
ft
J.
Gore, global wanning scare
— St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times
moreover, he invariably opts for the worst-
ADVERTISING
r\
David Bloom
Managing Editor
Jane Howard Lee
retired Reporter
Danielle Lynch
‘News Editor
;en asso-
ciated with this particular fright syndrome.
WRITE TO US
The Sun welcomes letters of up
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WILLIAM
RUSHER
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W &un
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Murrie G. Kinney Jr.
Dayton
FRED HARTMAN
Publisher Emeritus
1950-1974
■
b C
b
HOW TO REACH US
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Government officials
State
Rick Perry,
Governor
1-800-843-5789
David Dewhurst,
Lt. Governor
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Attorney General
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Jerry Patterson,
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1-800-835-5832
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Dist. 4 Sen.
281-296-0023
EDITORIAL BOARD
Wanda Gamer Cash
Editor/Publishei
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retired Managing Editor
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Dist. 128 Rep.
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To find out who rep-
resents you, visit
www.capitol.state.tx.
us/tyi/Tyi-htm
? J A
■ 1 -
FCC fines
More than two years after Janet Jackson’s infa-
mous “wardrobe i
to raise fines corisit_________
air indecent programming. However tempting the
tact maybe, it won’t settle the matter.
The Federal Communications Commission is
charged with determining decency standards on
behalf of the public, which owns all television
and radio broadcast frequencies. Cable and satel-
lite programming are not tied to those restric-
tions. While fines should be increased when
broadcasters flagrantly violate decency codes, a
congressional and FCC crackdown can have a
chilling effect. Common sense shouldn’t be taken
out of the process.
Following the public outrage over the Jackson
incident during the half-time show of the Super
Bowl, the FCC has been levying more fines
against broadcasters. In fact, FCC’s fines jumped
from $440,000 in 2003 to almost $8 million in
2004 after the Super Bowl incident, the
" Associated Press reports.
The FCC needs to show such flexibility.
Considering the context of the “offense” will
become even more imperative if, as expected,
President Bush signs into law a bill passed by
Congress that would empower the FCC to fine
broadcasters up to $325,000 for each violation.
The current fine is $32,500. The networks are
doing a better job of running advisories and
parental guidelines that explain when some of
the material could be found objectionable.
Still, defining “offensive material” is not
always easy in an evolving society with diverse
points of view. Blindly slapping heavy fines on
any perceived broadcast transgression simply
isn’t the answer. The FCC should have the power
of heavy fines in its arsenal, but it also has to
show good judgment on when to use it.
— The Poughkeepsie (N.Y.) Journal
of Venice froze solid during the medieval
Little Ice Age, and Greenland was verdant
enough, during a warm spell, to earn its
(currently) wildly inappropriate name. Over
longer geological periods, the Arctic has
sported palm trees (no polar bears then!)
and the latitude of Connecticut was under a
mile-thick layer of ice. Just now, according
to Dr. Singer, we are seeing a warming
trend of about one-tenth of a degree centi-
grade per decade, or roughly a degree per
century.
There is nothing we can do about this,
and no reason why we should try — let
alone spend hundreds of billions of dollars
trifling with titanic forces we can’t even
comprehend.
a '
&
V
to 300 words and guest columns of
up to 500 words. Guest columns
should include a photo of the
writer. We publish only original
material addressed to The Baytown
Sun bearing the 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 Sun
reserves the right to refuse to pub-
lish any submission.
Send signed letters to: Wanda
Garner Cash or David Bloom, The
Baytown Sun, P.O. Box 90,
Baytown, 77522; fax them to (281)
427-1880 or e-mail sunnews@bay-
townsun.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.
For seven years the Food and Drug
Administration has known that many sunscreen
labels mislead consumers into thinking they are
being fully protected against cancer-causing sun
tays. And while skin cancer cases continue to
ipcjease, the FDA’s lack of urgency about forcing
gome truth-in-labeling changes has to end.
A lawsuit against five sunscreen manufacturers
argues that the product labels are misleading. The
sun protection factor, or SPF, is only a measure
of the sunbum-inducing and less harmful UVB
rays and not those that cause skin cancer, for
example. Some products even claim they provide
“broad-spectrum UVA/UVB protection,” for all
types of invisible ultraviolet rays, but that’s not
usually the case, health organizations say.
That’s not good news for beachgoers and any-
one working out in the... sun. The FDA ordered
sunscreen companies to remove absolute words
like “waterproof,” “all-day protection” and “sun-
block” from their labels in 1999. But the agency
— clearly losing sight of its priorities — never
enforced these revisions because the corporations
wanted to run more tests.
There is a need to move more quickly. The
American Cancer Society predicts that of the 1
million skin cancer cases each year, about 62,000
of them will be melanoma and that the disease
will claim about 10,700 lives. Misled by the
labels, sunscreen users may be assuming they are
.more well-protected from the sun’s harmful rays
than they are. And skin cancer cases will contin-
ue to rise until the truth is spelled out on the
labels.
Angle Pagel, Advertising Director
angie.pagel@baytownsun.com
direction, mankind’s puny efforts are capa-
ble of maintaining it within a degree or two
of its present level.
The truth is that the Earth’s temperature
polar bear).
The trouble is that all of
the statements in the last
paragraph above are sub-
ject to challenge, and in
several cases, are almost
certainly false. Among the
many systematic attacks
being waged against the
spurious case for global
warming, one of the dead-
liest and most effective is
... Just like Vietnam
I lived through the Vietnam War,
from start to finish! During the
Vietnam War, doves protested, especial-
ly the horrible things that was done by
"our soldiers," killing innocent women
and children.
In Iraq this week, the U.S. military
has brought charges against seven
Marines and one Navy corpsman for
pulling a male Iraq citizen, who was
handicapped, into the street from his
home, bound his hands and feet, and
shot and killed him for no apparent rea- •
son in the middle of the night. Also this
week, three soldiers were also charged
with murdering three men their unit
captured near Samarra last month.
Also, there is also an ongoing inves-
tigation from last November that a
Marine unit killed 24 civilians in
Haditha. This behavior by our military
for the things that happened 30 to 40
years ago in Vietnam to the innocent
babies and children cannot be allowed
to happen again. The citizens of the
United States protested this acts of
rogue soldiers back then, but now we
seem to turn our backs on these brutal
attacks on innocent Iraq citizens.
Why do we accept this behavior
against human rights in a foreign land
that we do not accept here by rogue
cops in our cities in the U.S.A.
Seems to me that we are again in
Vietnam and we have not learned from
our history. I think this gunfighter
mentality that I encounter has been
derived from the speeches our presi-
dent gives in his poor English gram- s
mar. Remember, if we do not learn
from our history, we make the same
mistakes.
of all such scare stories is “global warm-
ing.”
People are naturally prone to worry about I
dangers that are invisible: radioactivity, for
one spectacular example. The media know
this, and are forever trumpeting the discov-
ery of new perils to scare us with. Hardly a
week passes without someone announcing
that some familiar food or other useful sub-
stance has just been discovered to cause 1
cancer (though usually only when adminis-
tered in huge doses to mice). Dangers asso-
ciated with weather are special favorites
because they are usually so difficult to cope
with. In recent decades, we have been treat- a weekly report available on the Internet,
ed to alarmist reports about impending dis- called “The Week That Was” (TWTW). The
asters to be caused by nuclear winter, acid author is the formidable S. Fred Singer,
malfunction,” Congress is about
isiderably on broadcasters who
This is war...
I talked to my son Sgt. Nick
Marshall, about a Week ago and he told
me they were being fired at while on
convoy, on a regular basis. I asked him
if they shot back and he said “no”. I
asked why and he said all the ruckus
about Americans supposedly commit-
ting atrocities and murders has caused
military leadership to require all sol-
diers to write an exhaustive report on
why they fired their weapons ...before
they could call it a day.
He said many times they would run
for 10-12 hours in full battle gear, in
the intense heat with bullets bouncing
off their vehicles and everyone “just
hunkers down” and sweats it out.
When they finally get into a new US
compound they all just “let down and
no one wants to write reports”. He
said morale is very low because of this
and everyone still wants to believe they
are supported back in the states.
He was on convoy a couple of miles
from where the soldiers were taken
hostage and they were directed by
satellite phone to stop and do a search
and recover/rescue, but upon calling
back to battalion, they were directed to
move out as soon as possible to keep
from becoming a target and complete
their mission.
As a Vietnam veteran, the loss of
every soldier/G.I. hurts my heart and
puts a shadow over my day, but by god
folks, we just can not as a country, pull
the rug out from under our guys and
gals in harms way and strap them with
so many rules of engagement that they
can’t even fight back. It really bums
my hide and I don,t think the answer is
to nuke the country or anything like
that either. We have got to quit playing
arm-chair quarterback on everything
that happens. We have military officers
for that and we need to let them do
their job.
We as Americans have to keep it
before us that we are at war and there
will be collateral damage in the way of
women, children and non-combatants.
I told my son before he left on his third
overseas tour (first enlistment and he’s
22 years old, Class of2002 RE Lee) to
NOT allow himself to be captured
knowing full well what I was saying.
He,s an advanced martial artist and a
real scrapper, but allowing these terror-
ists to capture you is only prolonging j
your very personal violent heinous
death sentence. Might as well go down
fighting and take as many as you can j
with you. This is not the streets of
Houston and cops against American
criminals with Constitutional rights;
this is war where after you shoot your
way into a room full of people trying to
kill you, you shoot each one of them
again to make sure they are dead.
Bert Marshall
Baytown
_____2 ' 1 author is the formidable S. Fred Singer,
rain and the ozone hole. But the Big Daddy professor emeritus of Environmental
’ ’’ ’ ’■ • “•• • . Sciences at the University of Virginia and
mg.” former director of the U.S. Weather Satellite
Al Gore, who had a, dangerous brush with Service. Each week, Singer summarizes or
the presidency in 2000, has long been asso- reprints the most recent studies debunking
.Lx. □ xi.:_ j—. global warming, with generous references
■i',l more information. In TWTW for
June 17. he demolishes Gore’s contentions,
one by one. ”*
The basic flaw in the argument for global
warming is its assumption that the Earth’s
_________________ surface temperature is a constant, and that,
Inconvenient Truth,” in which Gore himself if it threatens to vary in some inconvenient
presents what he chooses to regard as over- direction, mankind’s puny efforts are capa-
whelming evidence of the reality of the
fectly fair to wonder if this maneuver isn’t
own candidacy fo/the presidency in 2008. down- within historic memory, the canals
p..- ___ix : :___,x :x : i___. : nf Vpnicp frnyp solid rliirino thp mprlipval
fill blast in the propaganda war over the
issue of global warming — and must be
' ' • /' J:... '
Sunscreen
9________
cere in believing that global warming is a
real danger. But recently he has stepped
forth with a brand new campaign to sell the
American people on the peril. It is spear-
headed by a documentary film entitled “An
presents what he chooses to regard
danger. Given his political history, it is per-
fectly fair to wonder if this maneuver isn’t
simply, or primarily, a device to promote his is alwaYs changing to some extent, up or
c.,,„ onnc down. Within historic memorv. the canals
But, whether it is or not, it is also a power-
ful blast in the propaganda
treated as such.
Gore begins by insisting that the scientif-
ic argument over the truth of the matter is
over; climate scientists, he asserts, are vir-
tually unanimous in endorsing it. Among
the thousands of predictions on the subject,
case scenarios. The increase in the quantity
of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is
caused, to an important extent, by human
“pollution,” and this is the cause of a dan-
gerous increase in the planet’s surface tem-
perature. That, in turn, is causing glaciers,
and the great ice caps of Greenland and
Antarctica, to melt. This will inevitably
result in the disastrous flooding of coastal
areas all over the globe, and all sorts of
ecological upsets (e.g. the extinction of the
ciaiea wiifi mis particular rngni syndrome, givucu
and I have no doubt that he is perfectly sin- t0 still
_____ .2__xl__a __1______• _ 1__
one by one.
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Cash, Wanda Garner. The Baytown Sun (Baytown, Tex.), Vol. 85, No. 225, Ed. 1 Saturday, June 24, 2006, newspaper, June 24, 2006; Baytown, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1191915/m1/4/: accessed June 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Sterling Municipal Library.