No Christmas wishes to clergy?

CivicSkinny’s Merry Christmas to more than 200 Iowans and not one clergy among them?  No sense in letting organized religion mess up a good holiday.

Mike Rowley
-Clive

GOP rewards banks for bad behavior

A reversal of taxpayer protections slipped into the recently passed $1.1 trillion spending bill bring to mind Albert Einstein’s famous quote, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Kansas Rep. Kevin Yoder was able to add a poison pill to that spending bill in the form of a rollback of 2010 bank regulations on derivatives. Recall, following the 2008 financial meltdown and bank bailout, taxpayers demanded Congress pass a ban preventing banks from gambling with FDIC guaranteed taxpayer money. Dodd-Frank specifically banned banks from using taxpayer-backed funds to make risky investments in derivatives. Yoder and his fellow Republicans, ignoring the lessons learned from the 2008 meltdown and taxpayer bailouts, literally let bank lobbyists rewrite the language to overturn this 2010 reform. President Obama and many Democrats raised objections to this blatant Republican gift to Wall Street, but the only alternative was to vote against the total bill, which would have resulted in shutting down the government. Get ready, this is just a preview. The new Republican majority is about to unfasten the seatbelts that keep taxpayers safe from the wild and reckless drivers taking the wheel.

Rick Smith
-Urbandale

Correction

In a letter to the editor in our Dec. 25 issue, reader Mike Rowley referenced a Des Moines Register story of the 50 most influential Democrats in Iowa.  Rowley wrote: “Only 1 (Michael Gartner) was older than 70 years of age, even though 11 percent of Iowans are older than 70 …” In actuality, Bill Knapp (88) and Tom Harkin (75) are older than 70, and Ruth Harkin and Tom Miller each is 70.