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Dear Neighbor:
Interim day was the usual flood of information. I’ll try to capture the more interesting parts for you.
In the morning we met as a group of conservatives and had a chance to hear from Roy Spencer. Dr. Spencer is a climatologist that worked for NASA and is now at the University of Alabama, Hunstville. He was a peer with James Hansen at NASA but has come to quite a different conclusion about global warming and its causes. Actually, since hasn’t been warming for the past ten years, I should say global climate change and its causes. I won’t try to repeat what he had to say but you can look at his web site here.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/
He has a lot of good information that you will find useful in informing your opinion of global climate change and its causes. My take away from my discussion was that we need to continue to study and try to understand our climate and our effect on it. But, we don’t have a clear understanding of our effect on it and we have no assurance that some of the drastic policies being proposed will have a significant or even measurable effect on the climate. The bottom line is that we simply don’t know enough to justify the kinds of heavy-handed policies that are being proposed.
There were some other scientists there and one other web site of interest on the area of global climate change was:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/
This site is more of a blog that combines current news with analysis.
The first committee meeting of the day was Health and Human Services. The most interesting topic is the ongoing push for a more comprehensive sex education curriculum in our public schools. The chair of the committee, Senator Buttars, flew in a doctor by the name of Miriam Grossman to explain the problem with expanding the curriculum. I won’t go into detail here, but Planned Parenthood’s push is nothing about safe sex and everything about promoting and normalizing risky behavior. It was very compelling testimony and at the end of it we passed a motion to raise the bar for running those kinds of bills in the future.
After the meeting, I sat down with a representative from the University of Utah to discuss the coming shortage of doctors. This was in response to a question at the last town hall meeting. The explanation was quite lengthy, but the short answer is that we have been relying on Medicare to fund a significant part of a doctor’s education and that funding is drying up.
At our noon caucus, we had a discussion about pending legislation on forming an independent ethics committee. This is not the deeply flawed petition that is being circulated. This is a thoughtful attempt to create an ethics commission that can be relied on to give an unbiased review of an ethics complaint. As with any bill, there is still work to be done, but they have struck a nice balance between creating a commission that is open enough to not kill genuine complaints and unbiased enough to recognize and dismiss politically motivated complaints. The full bill should be presented to committee at the next interim meeting in November. I’ll send you a link to the full text of the bill then. For now, Representative Fowlke has written an excellent analysis of the ethics petition which you can look at here:
http://utahpolicy.com/featured_article/rep-lori-fowlke-analyzes-ethics-initiative
In the afternoon, we had Health System Reform Task Force. We heard that the exchange is doing well. I would encourage each of you to talk with your employers about getting on the exchange when it opens up to the general public next year. The web site is:
http://exchange.utah.gov/
We didn’t discuss what is going on at the national level regarding health care reform, but I ran across an interesting video about nationalized health care that you might want to see. Here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9GMKK_fWKg
In the evening, I had a town hall meeting. For the first half hour we had Utah Department of Transportation there to discuss the coming rebuild if I-15 that is already underway. Dal Hawks from UDOT had a lot of good information and the group had a lot of good questions. If any of you want to know more about the rebuild you can go to:
http://i15core.utah.gov/
If you have a question you can send an email to
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
or you can call 1-888-i15core (1-888-415-2673)
After the presentation, I took a few minutes to report on my talk with the University of Utah representative about the coming doctor shortage. After that I took questions on a wide variety of topics ranging all the way from mortgage defaults to energy independence. It was a great meeting and I was glad to have the chance talk over issues.
Thanks to those of you who made it all the way to the end of this letter. As a bonus for reading this far, here is an outstanding article by Walter Williams on the proper role of government. Enjoy.
http://www.hillsdale.edu/images/userImages/mvanderwei/Page_4221/ImprimisSept09.pdf
Thanks again for your desire to be involved and be informed.
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