LTE - You Win Some, You Lose Some

They call them "letters to the editor" for a reason.  

Sometimes they're too long, sometimes they're not well written, and sometimes - despite containing exactly the right words in exactly the right order - there's just not room to print 'em.

I've come to appreciate over the years that editing is an art form, and many of my letters to the editor have been surgically parsed to retain their meaning, and my punchy, prose style.  Other times, they've been trimmed with a weed whacker, such as below.  

This is what got printed....

....And this is what I wrote:

Regarding "Sales tax ruling could be reversed" (Monday Business), Chris Tomlinson explains in admirable detail the problem of Internet retailers that rip off states and localities for the sales taxes that all conventional retailers in those states must pay. with the largest villain by far being Amazon.com.  Amazon.com and thousands of businesses like it have exploited a loophole caused by the failure of our courts to treat all retailers equally, creating not just an unfair bounty for these on line retailers, but allowing them to use that advantage to destroy their brick-and-mortar competition.

The problem is, we need to stop looking at this as a regulatory issue, and start treating it like a crime.  If any other company based in Amazon.com's home state of Washington were to engage in an Internet scam that specifically sought to destroy Texas businesses and defraud the State of Texas of hundreds of millions in revenue every year, the Texas Rangers would be all over it, as would the appropriate law enforcement agencies of the federal government, and all governed by existing federal law governing interstate commerce.

And you need to target not just the companies in those states, but the states that abet the fraud by hosting the scam.  There should be no safe haven for Internet fraud, however much you might want not want to offend Amazon.com, or the greedy politicians of Washington state. 

LTE - Risky Proposal

Regarding “Texans hope to spur earmark revival” (Page A15, Wednesday), as a lifelong “small government” type, in the past 50 years, I literally never saw a government spending program that was not abused, and the term “pork” rolled easily off the lips of politicians. And then came the tea party movement in 2009. That small government movement finally gave Republicans some backbone, and as the article points out, the worst form of pork — the earmark — was banned in 2011.

Now Texas Republicans like U.S. Rep. John Culberson want to bring them back, allegedly for the limited purpose of funding more hurricane relief. What nonsense.

If Congress allows one form of earmark, it will soon allow all earmarks. Culberson and those others have to know this, so if they wish to lose the support of the tea parties — otherwise known as the Republican base — then by all means, pursue earmarks.

Pete Smith, Cypress