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‘Big beautiful bill’ bad for PA

No one in PA-15 should be surprised to learn that GT voted for Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” No one who has followed GT’s voting record should be surprised to learn that, once again, he voted against the best interests of his constituents. No one should be surprised to learn that, once again, he voted in his own self-interests (remaining in the good graces of the GOP) instead of for what’s best for PA-15. I wonder if Republican voters will be surprised when they, their family members and/or neighbors lose SNAP and health care benefits—or when their small rural ...

Proposed chicken operation

I just finished reading The Deadliest Element – Phosphorus by Dan Eagan. In it he chronicles how many lakes and streams have been turned into algae filled with toxic waste by excess phosphorus. The primary culprit is unregulated runoff from large scale agriculture. This runoff is not covered by the clean water act. The huge chicken operation proposed in Muncy poses such a threat. It could turn Muncy Creek into a toxic dead zone. I understand they are proposing a lagoon to contain the waste. What is the outlet from this lagoon? The concern raised is how the huge water required is ...

Marx meets MAGA

Marx was a Marxist, of course, and he had a big revolutionary beard to prove it. But in his 1848 Communist Manifesto Marx excitedly wrote that a mere hundred years of the industrial revolution, which was invented in the West, had unleashed more productivity than all previous human history combined. And then Marx triumphantly celebrated how Western culture with its world-girdling economy was rendering obsolete all the other cultures of the world and sweeping them away, and then replacing them with the transformative wealth production methods and revolutionary social institutions of the ...

Bill a roadmap, not a roadblock

Recently, a writer wrote a missive criticizing me and several of my colleagues, published in the June 2 Sun-Gazette. He accuses us of standing in the way of renewable energy projects, pointing to Senate Bill 349, which I sponsored, as an example. According to him, this bill is an obstacle to solar development. Like many of his assertions, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Let’s start with the facts. Senate Bill 349 establishes decommissioning and financial requirements for solar generation projects. It does not block renewable energy – it provides clear, uniform rules to ...

Not for us

The Big, Beautiful Bill, passed by the House of Representatives, is beautiful only if you are very wealthy, not if you are a Senior Citizen, or if you are raising a family on an average income. The lowest earners will actually pay more in taxes. The CBO is a non-partisan entity that provides to Congress the impact of their proposed legislation, and they knew before they passed this bill that it would trigger half a trillion dollars in cuts to Medicare. They passed it anyway, with big tax cuts for billionaires, and easing regulations that affect them. The CBO projects that 8.7 million ...

Reality check

The letter in the May 30 edition of this paper gets it wrong when it says we have one political party. We have no effective parties at the national level. The Republican Party is not a political party; it is a rubber stamp for a narcissistic wanna-be-dictator who fancies himself king. They willing ceded their Constitutional responsibilities to “Advice and Consent” the president on nominations and to enact the laws and fund the programs and departments those laws create. Governing by “Executive Order”; overriding the voices and wishes of the citizens, has no place in a republic. ...