Eliminating COLAs threatens future for federal retirees

From The Dallas Morning News

It hurts to be reminded of how far America still has to go to deal with the racism that remains so much a part of our national experience. This time the reminder came over a weekend full of protests and counterprotests at the University of Virginia, where a series of clashes was touched off by white nationalists and others who rallied there Friday night under a call to “unite the right.”

It ended in tragedy the next day when a driver, apparently shouting racist slogans, drove into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one and injuring many others. The victims had gathered Saturday to stand up to protesters who use Charlottesville’s long connection to Robert E. Lee, the general who led the armies of the Confederacy in a war that ended 152 years ago, as a rallying cry for whites.

President Donald Trump on Monday decried the “racist violence” in Virginia and said that the Department of Justice had opened a civil rights investigation into what happened there. “Anyone who acted criminally in this weekend’s racist violence, you will be held accountable,” Trump said.

The statement helps. But it would have helped more had he not on Saturday ducked the opportunity to condemn the groups behind the “egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence” and not added the words “on many sides” in what bestowed a false equivalency to the protests and the counterprotests.

By Monday, Trump was willing to condemn hate groups, including the KKK and white nationalists. It was a welcome move from a president who has been strangely reluctant to acknowledge the role those groups have played in his political ascendancy.

What the president could have also acknowledged is that heartbreak in Charlottesville began long before things turned violent. It began with the hate that brought the white men and women, many of them so young, to the campus in the first place.

How it is that in 2017, a rally to “unite the right” would use race as its rallying cry? Surely the far right is not so spiritually bankrupt, so devoid of good ideas, as to have only the color of one’s skin available as a means for unity?

How is it that so many of the Friday night protesters, the ones with torches, were so young? More than 60 years after Rosa Parks made her stand by staying in her Montgomery bus seat, we are still reminded that racism persists, like a calcified tumor we’re unable to cut away.

Still, despite this pain, it’s important to remember that the Friday night protesters with their torches did not speak for America. They did not speak for white people, or for conservatives. Or for the South. As the large counterprotests showed, they did not even speak for Charlottesville.

This past weekend, we were reminded how far we have to go as a nation. But we must not let it blind us to how far we’ve come, either.

AJim Powell of Young Harris fter two days of mounting criticism for his failure to condemn white supremacists after Saturday’s Charlottesville tragedy, Donald Trump attempted damage control on Monday. “Racism is evil and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to what we hold dear as Americans,” he said in a surprise statement at the White House after first touting some economic news.

He did not take questions. No ad-libbing to risk rolling back the point.

Trump’s initial reaction Saturday decried hate in general but did not call out the white supremacists and Ku Klux Klan participating in the march. A young woman was killed and others injured when a man with neo-Nazi ties plowed his car into a crowd of peaceful protesters. Others were hurt in skirmishes with belligerent marchers.

The march ostensibly was to protest the city’s decision to remove a Robert E. Lee statue. The real agenda was, in the words of former KKK leader David Duke, to be a “turning point” in the movement to help people like him “fulfill the promises of Donald Trump.”

Trump has no trouble calling out the Islamic State or al-Qaida by name when they slaughter innocents. After an immigrant murdered Kate Steinle on a San Francisco pier, Trump used the crime to attack all immigrants here illegally.

The Charlottesville melee presented Trump with the opportunity to finally separate himself from the racist elements of his base. He whiffed. The Monday statement would have been fine as his first reaction. But read from a teleprompter just hours after trashing a critic on Twitter, and lacking any acknowledgment that he could have been clearer originally, it does not erase the initial impression.

Fortunately, more Republican leaders are stepping up to differentiate themselves from their president.

Critics such as Sens. Jeff Flake and Marco Rubio have amped up the rhetoric. But others who have been Trump stalwarts — Sens. Orrin Hatch and Cory Gardner, for example — joined them over the weekend. Vice President Mike Pence, while defending Trump’s original statement, himself emphatically called out the racist groups by name.

Could this finally be what galvanizes the Republican Party to take back its good name? After eight years with a stated mission of blocking Barack Obama, and with no significant legislation six months after winning the presidency, could the GOP actually get back to governing?

It is possible. In the House, a bipartisan group is discussing immigration reform. Senators of both parties are discussing how to solve the problems of Obamacare instead of taking insurance away from 20 million Americans.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan still are Trump acolytes. But the more GOP members stand on principle and speak up, the sooner the supposed leaders will have to follow them.

As a federal retiree who has served our country for over 38 years, I am deeply concerned with a provision in the president’s budget which would eliminate cost-ofliving adjustments for current and future federal retirees. I ask that my Representative and Senators oppose any proposals that would reduce COLAs for federal retirees. To eliminate or reduce the COLAs for federal retirees would have a detrimental effect on the lives of many, many federal retirees residing in Northwest Georgia.

The annual COLA provides protections against inflation, but even the current calculation is inadequate because it understates the impact of health care spending, yielding lower annual COLAs. Reducing or eliminating my COLA further threatens my health and financial security.

This proposal would diminish the value of my hardearned annuity by allowing inflation to erode the benefit over the course of my retirement. With the cost of goods and medical care on the rise, I will not sit back and allow this attack to gain a foothold. Duke Borchardt

Rome

The recent letter regarding the Hoyt Property presents a rational and reasonable explanation why the Hoyt family should not be prevented from converting this site into an attractive, taxable residence of which all Romans could be proud.

We would urge the HPC to reconsider in favor of the Hoyt family. Cathy and David Dohrmann

Rome

President Trump predicts that the entire 2,000 miles of wall he envisions separating our nation from Mexico will cost $10 billion. Senator McConnell estimates the wall will cost between $12 and $15 billion. Homeland Security estimates $21.6 billion.

The President’s budget, which is before Congress now, earmarks $1.6 billion dollars for the construction of 76 miles of his wall in the Rio Grande Valley in California, about 3 percent of the total wall. This $1.6 billion section expands and replaces 14 miles of wall

Email letters to the editor to romenewstribune@RN-T.com or submit them to the Rome News-Tribune, 305 E. Sixth Ave., Rome, GA 30162. already in place near San Diego. If that cost proves accurate with no overruns, the actual cost of 2,000 miles is likely closer to $50 billion dollars.

We will be paying for this, not Mexico. Mexico insists it will not pay. President Trump now merely asks the president of Mexico to stop stating publicly that Mexico will not pay for the wall until he secures funding from Congress.

Gen. John Kelly, former director of Homeland Security, now Chief of Staff, has stated that a wall will do nothing to prevent tunnels or airplanes or drones. A wall is a splashy visible symbol, but is no more effective at its job than a 5-year-old Norton security update. Current technology, like sensors with infrared, radar, camera arrays on solar-powered towers placed at intervals, are much cheaper and much less environmentally destructive. The patrols monitoring the border prefer the tower strategy.

The 2,000 miles of wall is a waste of our money, but the President, U.S. House and Senate press ahead, preferring the optics of the wall to a more viable result. Shame on them. M.L. McCorkle

Rome

Don Rusaw is an acquaintance and generally reasonable; however, he is wrong about the SPLOST. He says he won’t support another SPLOST until it has funding for road work to eliminate traffic snarls. If Don wants to see traffic snarls he should go to Atlanta, not quibble about petty traffic in Rome.

The SPLOST is a special purpose tax for projects benefiting the entirety of the community. SPLOSTs were never intended to fund the design, engineering and construction of roads. That function is left for the governmental authority of cities and counties under general taxation powers and collaboration with state and federal agencies through transportation grants. I suspect that Don has never ridden a city bus, walked to work or bicycled to any business, social or retail event, all

AAdam Zyglis, The Buffalo News of which aid in tempering traffic. In the proposed SPLOST, there is funding for projects in Cave Spring, Texas Valley, city streetscapes, and betterment of riverways and trails, along with funds to assist law enforcement, the judicial system, parks and recreation, and firefighters.

Unlike Rusaw, I will vote for SPLOST because SPLOSTs benefit each and every citizen of Rome and Floyd County. To generalize that one will not vote for a tax package because it fails to contain funding for a particular self-interest seems to me shortsighted. I hope that you will join me in voting for all Floyd Countians, who will certainly benefit from the SPLOST.

And by the way, David Newby is a maestro in orchestrating SPLOST committees and we should all be grateful to him as he has led the way in facilitating hundreds of millions of dollars in quality-of-life improvements for Floyd County. Mark M.J. Webb

Rome t last the global warming fraud has been exposed. Investigative journalist Jennifer Marohasy caught Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology erasing record-breaking cold temperatures from its data records.

BOM was happy to announce it whenever Australia’s temperatures hit record-breaking highs. However, when the temperatures went below a certain point the BOM either deleted them as if they had never been, or it entered them into its records at higher temperatures than actually recorded.

Against the principles of true science, it refused to allow its data to be audited independently, or to discuss why or how it makes its temperature adjustments.

The disturbing thing to me is that the same is in the U.S., where organizations such as NASA and NOAA have also been caught making adjustments to their own temperature data sets.

It sure would help if this scandal would be widely reported by our mainstream media. If it were, maybe we would worry less about global warming and stop wasting billions of dollars on a manufactured problem. Wayne Niederhuth

Rome