A last minute provision slipped into the Senate's version of health care reform unfairly penalizes the construction industry and must be removed during House and Senate reconciliation efforts. All other small businesses are given exemptions from mandatory coverage if they employ less than 50 people. The last minute amendment separates construction from other small businesses and lowers the exemption to five employees.

Many local general contractors have fewer than five employees and would be exempt, but many of their subcontractors have over five and will be especially hard hit. Many of those trades are some of the lowest paid and labor-intensive, such as concrete, roofing, drywalling, stucco and plaster. Many of these businesses will simply cease to exist, if they can actually recover from the Great Construction Depression we are in. Please contact our congressional delegation and insist construction businesses be treated like all other small businesses in America.



David Coulson's Dec. 22 letter, "More than health care rides on bill," wherein he accuses Sen. Jeff Bingaman of fascism and of being in the pocket of corporations such as Exxon and Kellogg's, is a good example the hysterical, exaggerated, nonsensical rhetoric that both the left and the right have been using for about eight months now. It is completely disingenuous and adds nothing at all to the national debate on health and health care. Instead, it uses inflammatory language and hyperbole in lieu of thoughtful argument to incite and anger people about nonexistent bogeymen.

Does Coulson have even a scrap of evidence suggesting Jeff Bingaman has "cronies" at Kellogg's, Exxon and Aetna? Of course not. No such evidence exists. Is the United States Senate really full of fascists? Of course not.

To even suggest so is an insult to our World War II veterans who fought the real thing in the 1940s. The debate on health care reform has devolved into a disturbing cacophony of thoughtless shrieking in this country. Words like fascist, socialist, and tyranny are now regularly thrown about with mindless abandon.



It's time to wake up! Santa Fe is under assault. Let's review some the headlines in the past week: gang fight at a middle school; Capital High dropout rate 55 percent, Santa Fe High 40 percent; robberies increase city-wide; and four young adults get probation in burglary ring.

This all sounds so depressingly familiar. When will we break this cycle? When will the citizens of Santa Fe begin to hold parents, schools, judges and politicians accountable for the enormous damage to the businesses and homeowners in this community from armed robberies, home invasions, drugs, and gang violence by young people? Santa Fe suffers from parental neglect, dysfunctional public schools, soft judges and weak politicians. Perhaps a new mayor will speak up and not just appoint another task force to study the problems.



Regarding "Clean energy research; we're not alone": Your Dec. 20 editorial, in my view, made several misstatements about nuclear power, and you whistled right past other seismic problems with this unforgiving technology. To imply its negligible CO2 emissions equal "clean" ignores how dirty this dinosaur is, when the whole beast is viewed from tail to teeth.

This "clean" technology takes a huge health toll on uranium workers (mining, milling, processing) and this "clean" technology produces wastes that include plutonium, the stuff of terrorists' dreams.

Further, this "clean" technology can grow in the U.S. only if taxpayers assume the financial risk; Wall Street is still holding its nose. See the new Bulletin of Atomic Scientists' 2009 world nuclear industry status report for a reality check that concludes that there will be some new nuclear power plants built in the future, "but in aggregate, the data indicate that nuclear power's influence will continue to dwindle across the globe ..."