Current Affairs

We have a letter to the editor in tonight's paper from James Loomis, who seems to understand what's at stake in the war against terror and some of the things we need to start doing about it.

No wonder it's so scary thinking about confronting North Korea. They've got the smartest guy in the world as a leader (and loved by all his people), and we've got George Bush, who was barely able to get better college grades than John ("I served in Vietnam") Kerry.

Are we to now put reporters in the "we can dish it out, but we can't take it" camp? Helen Thomas certainly seems to belong there.

No offense to Donald Trump. but wouldn't be a lot cheaper just to move it instead of renovating it? I bet France would just love to have it.

I know you probably think traffic here is just awful at times. But, really, count your blessings.

Since I seem to be in the middle of a mean streak this morning anyway . . .

. . . Could I please have a Jane Fonda exception to the First Amendment? Go ahead and violate her constitutional rights; just shut her up. On second thought, let's have the treason trial that's 30 years late, and put her in prison where she belongs. Unless we want her help to find Osama. Just give her a camera crew and point her to the east.

There's a term some of you may be familiar with -- "turf," as in "not real grassroots" -- that describes the efforts of interest groups to sway public opinion with a blitz of letters to the editor. The group will generate a form letter, which is sent to its own members or to various mailing lists, with the advice to copy the letter and send it to a newspaper with the name of a real person affixed. Some people are smart about it -- they change the wording in the form letter here and there and copy it onto their own stationery.

As a former member of the U.S. Army, my answer to this question posed in a USA Today headline is, "Oh, please, no, no, no, a thousand times no." There is a woman I'd like to see in that position -- she's the right person in the right place at the right time, I think -- but it sure ain't Hillary.

One of my fellow Knight Ridder editorialists, Mark Yost of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, is under fire from some of our colleagues for expressing an opinion that, to me, seems demonstrably true: that American press coverage of the war in Iraq is unfair and one-sided, focusing almost entirely on the negative and ignoring the positive things going on there. Why is this such a controversial observation?

Oh, man! The nanny-state busybodies just never stop. Now they want cigarette-style warning labels on soft drinks to let us know that overindulgence might lead to things like diabetes and decaying teeth. Well, duh. There are already so many labels warning about the dangers of so many things that few people pay any attention whatsoever to them.