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The Wall Street Journal on June 21 published an informative article titled “The ‘Paralyzing’ Principle” about Cass Sunstein, wherein he suspects the Gulf oil spill has rehabilitated the thoroughly discredited theory known as the precautionary principle, which holds that government should attempt to prevent any risk regardless of cost involved, how minor the benefit and even without underestimating what the risks really are.

Developed in the late 1960s this theory served as the intellectual architecture of the Environmental Protection Agency, which is still required to eliminate certain environmental risks no matter how expensive or pointless the effort is.

This same mentality has caused President Obama to decree a moratorium on all new deep water drilling, shutting down dozens of Gulf and Alaskan projects. Tighter safety standards were jointly corporate and government products. Many coastal states now want offshore drilling banned permanently. The precautionary principle is back with a vengeance.



Cass Sunstein, the man most responsible for dismantling the precautionary principle, is now the regulatory czar in the Obama White House budget office. He has called the precautionary principle “incoherent” and “paralyzing” and said precautions cannot be taken against all risks simply because to redress any set of risks might produce risks of their own.

Mr. Sunstein’s insight is that there are risks on all sides of a question – doing nothing can be dangerous, but acting might be more dangerous – so the rational way to judge regulation is to quantify the costs and benefits.



Mr. Sunstein, rational is ideal for America, including its corporations and families. Offshore and onshore oil wells, wildernesses, monuments and parks that do, or might have, great benefit potential should be subjected to Cass Sunstein’s cost and benefit rigorous research of all components, including adequate applicable geologic, geophysical and geochemical exploration, but not before said component results are available for his research.

Obama’s six-month moratorium on deep water drilling for oil indicates that Sunstein was not then Obama’s regulatory czar, because cost and benefit research obviously was not done.

Dooley P. Wheeler

Rifle

I am a young voter who registered to vote a few years ago. When asked what party I was affiliated with I checked “unaffiliated.” Recently I had received a card in the mail telling me to pick a party. I did not return the card.

My husband is also a young voter who chose a party when he registered to vote. During the recent election for Garfield County Sheriff, he received a ballot in the mail. However all of the candidates for the opposite party of his affiliation were omitted. I did not receive my ballot.

Perhaps I am confused or misinformed but I thought we had the right to vote regardless of which political party we chose. If we are only allowed to vote right or left won’t the balance of our country be thrown off? If we are only black and white and not gray, won’t this create more division within our house? Our country is our home, and as Lincoln warned us all, “A house divided cannot stand alone.”

Leia Sober

Silt

Editor’s note: All voters are eligible to vote in the general election in November. The August election was a primary election, where party members select their candidates for the general election.

The project of the mosque is called the Cordova House, which may mean nothing to Americans, but to Muslims it means a lot.

Cordova is a city in the south of Spain where the Muslim army massacred countless people, then they converted their biggest church in Cordova and turned it into a Mosque. The objective here is to humiliate the defeated people and to establish the supremacy of Islam.

So if they build the mosque on the rubble of the World Trade Center that is a hint to Muslims that jihad is on the march and that Islam is advancing and conquering new territories.

Jeremy Heald

Rifle

While running for office, President Obama promised that if elected, he would get us off OPEC oil within 10 years.

The NAT GAS Act will create jobs, clean up the environment and improve our national security by providing tax incentives to organizations that operate fleets of vehicles that are fueled with imported oil to be replaced with vehicles that run on domestic natural gas.

Election Day will soon be here. Those who are running for office – be it open seats, incumbents or challengers – need to take a look at this legislation and make promises to reduce our need for OPEC oil a central part of their campaigns.

Sincerely,

Bill Dunn

Carbondale


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