Help ’em out

The Post-Crescent in Wisconsin has a problem and they’ve written an editorial about it.

Letters to the editor, a staple of The Post-Crescent’s Views pages, are a way to take the political and social temperature of the Valley. A well-written letter allows readers to ponder different points of view, perhaps made more poignant because the author is someone you might know. At best, they should offer a full spectrum of beliefs and topics.

Recently, though, as the race for president heats up, we’ve been dealing with this quandary: How can we balance the perspectives and topics of our letters when many of our submissions have been coming only from one side?

We’ve been getting more letters critical of President Bush than those that support him. We’re not sure why, nor do we want to guess. But in today’s increasingly polarized political environment, we would prefer our offering to put forward a better sense of balance.

Since we depend upon you, our readers, to supply our letters, that goal can be difficult. We can’t run letters that we don’t have.

Finally, a myth to dispel: We don’t give our letters any sort of political litmus test to determine if they make it into print. If that were so, we wouldn’t run letters that take swings at who we are and what we print.

If you would like to help us “balance” things out, send us a letter, make a call or punch out an e-mail. Read the handy box at the bottom of the page for more information. We’d love to hear from you.

Link from various blogs, but primarily Jesus’ General.

[Update: The Campaign Desk has more recent developments.]

Mari Sandoz…

was born on this date in 1896. The Writer’s Almanac tells us:

It’s the birthday of Mari Sandoz, born near Hay Springs, Nebraska (1896). She wrote realistic books about pioneers and Indians, including The Buffalo Hunters (1954), The Battle of the Little Bighorn (1966) and Crazy Horse (1942), a biography of the Sioux Indian chief.

She grew up in rural Nebraska, and she had a hard childhood. She quit school after the eighth grade, and spent most of her time helping out with farm and household chores. Her fingers became crooked from holding a hoe for hours at a time, and she suffered from cramps in her arms her entire life. When she was thirteen, she and her brother spent a day digging their cattle out of a blizzard snowdrift, and it left her blind in one eye.

Her father would host soldiers, traders, Indians, and miners from the Black Hills; and she would stay up late at night listening to them tell stories about the West. She became obsessed with the people and places of the Old West, and she decided she wanted to write about them. She went to the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, and a dean there allowed her to take classes even though she didn’t have a high school diploma. She weighed about seventy-five pounds, wore old country clothes, and lived on the tea, sugar, and crackers that she got for free at the dining hall. She would spend hours reading old newspapers in the basement of the State Historical Society, collecting research for the books she was planning to write.

In 1933, Sandoz went back home to live with her mother on the family farm. She had written a manuscript for a book about her father, but it wasn’t accepted by any of the publishers she had sent it to. She had sold a few articles to newspapers and magazines, but not enough to make any real money. She was thirty-seven years old, it was the middle of the Depression, she was malnourished and suffering from migraines, and so she decided give up writing. She burnt her manuscripts and settled in with her mother.

But just a year later, she got word that a publisher had decided to publish the book about her father, Old Jules (1935). It became a Book-of-the-Month club selection and a bestseller, and it allowed Sandoz to go on to write many more books about frontier life.

Remember that you can hear Garrison Keillor narrate each day’s Writer’s Almanac on public radio or on-line.

Irving Berlin…

was born on this date in 1888. The following is from the Irving Berlin Music Company web pages

Born Israel Beilin in a Russian Jewish shtetl in 1888, he died as Irving Berlin in his adopted homeland of New York, New York, USA, in 1989. Songwriter, performer, theatre owner, music publisher, soldier and patriot, he defined Jerome Kern’s famous maxim: “Irving Berlin has no place in American music. He is American music.” Berlin wrote over 1200 songs, including “White Christmas,” “Easter Parade,” “Always,” “Blue Skies,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” and “God Bless America.” He wrote the scores to more than a dozen Broadway musicals, including Annie Get Your Gun, and provided songs for dozens of Hollywood movie musicals. Among his many awards and accolades were the Academy Award for “White Christmas,” a Congressional Gold Medal, a special Tony Award and commemoration on a 2002 U.S. postage stamp.

The Library of Congress has a page on the composition of God Bless America.

The one-armed bandit goes video

Gary Rivlin has a fascinating and informative article about slot machines in The New York Times Magazine. It’s well worth your time if you’re interested in gambling. More so if you are a victim of it.

Some factoids from the article:

“In its 14-year lifetime, ‘Madden N.F.L. Football,’ from Electronic Arts, has made roughly $1 billion, making it one of the most successful home video games ever produced. ‘Wheel of Fortune,’ [the slot machine] by contrast, takes in more than a billion dollars each year.”

“[Slot machines] gross more annually than McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King and Starbucks combined.”

North American casinos took in $30 billion from slots in 2003 — an amount that dwarfs the $9 billion spent on movie tickets or the $10 billion on pornography in all commercial forms.

“[T]he machines’ ability to hook so deeply into a player’s cerebral cortex derives from one of the more powerful human feedback mechanisms, a phenomenon behavioral scientists call infrequent random reinforcement or “intermittent reward.”

The Google Terrrorist

From U.S. News:

It was the lead item on the government’s daily threat matrix one day last April. Don Emilio Fulci described by an FBI tipster as a reclusive but evil millionaire, had formed a terrorist group that was planning chemical attacks against London and Washington, D.C. That day even FBI director Robert Mueller was briefed on the Fulci matter. But as the day went on without incident, a White House staffer had a brainstorm: He Googled Fulci. His findings: Fulci is the crime boss in the popular video game Headhunter. “Stand down,” came the order from embarrassed national security types.

Link via Eschaton.

A hoax

Someone by the name of Steve Sailer commented on NewMexiKen’s entry Average IQ by state and how they voted in 2000. Mr. Sailer, who appears to have Googled to find all web sites that mention “average IQ by state,” seems very earnest. He not only wants to make certain we know the IQ thing was a hoax, but that furthermore Democrats are phonies for promoting data like this after “having constantly denounced IQ tests as meaningless, biased, and evil incarnate.”

Get a life Mr. Sailer. I think we all knew it was joke. As NewMexiKen said, how could you determine a state’s average IQ? Besides the chart was obviously wrong about New Mexico. I just thought it was a good excuse to tell the old Max Rafferty story.

Best line of the day, so far

From Wonkette (who is on a roll today):

And there’s apparently no state-level I.Q. data out there to begin with. That this hoax could get busted so easily itself suggests that the Dems are dim. After all, the real test of intentionally misleading data is that you’re able to base foreign policy on it.

A Strong Statement on Prisoner Abuse

From Wonkette:

America’s greatness is defined by the treatment of our enemies. And if we came to Iraq to install a regime, or just replace one authoritarian regime with another that’s not quite so bad, it’s not worth the sacrifice of over 700 American lives.

It’s kind of refreshing to see the Democrats finally take advantage of an issue where they can unapologetically take the high ground, really let loose on the president for the damage he’s done to the country’s standing in international circles and for how he’s hurt the causes of liberty and democracy in general. They might really turn the tide of the election. Oh, sorry. That’s a quote from John McCain.

Over at John Kerry ’04, they’re promoting Health Care Week.

Promontory Summit

Most people have heard about driving the Golden Spike at Promontory Point. The facts may be surprising. The Golden Spike Ceremony, which took place May 10, 1869, was held at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory, thirty-seven miles north of Promontory Point, and nobody ever attempted to “drive” a golden spike.

Read what really happened.

And the Continent was spanned with iron

From The New York Times, 135 years ago:

GreatEvent.jpgPromontory, Utah, Monday, May 10 — The long-looked-for moment has arrived. The construction of the Pacific Railroad is un fait accompli. The inhabitants of the Atlantic seaboard and the dwellers on the Pacific slopes are henceforth emphatically one people. Your correspondent is writing on Promontory Summit amid the deafening shouts of the multitude, with the tick, tick, of the telegraph close to his ear.

*****

Announcement in Washington of the Completion of the Road- Scene in the Telegraph Office

Special Dispatch to the New York Times

Washington, Monday, May 10 — The completion of the Pacific Railroad has monopolized public attention here to-day to the exclusion of everything else. The feeling is one of hearty rejoicing at the completion of this great work. There were no public observances, but the arrangements made by the telegraph company to announce the completion of the road simultaneously with the driving of the last spike were perfect. At 2:20 this afternoon, Washington time, all the telegraph offices in the country were notified by the Omaha telegraph office to be ready to receive the signals corresponding to the blows of the hammer that drove the last spike in the last rail that united New York and San Francisco with a band of iron. Accordingly Mr. Tinker, Manager of the Western Union Telegraph Office in this city, placed a magnetic bell-sounder in the public office of that Company, corner Fourteenth-street and the avenue, connected the same with the main lines, and notified the various offices that he was ready. New-Orleans instantly responded, the answer being read from the bell-taps. New-York did the same. At 2:27 P.M., Promontory Point, 2,400 miles west of Washington, said to the people congregated in the various telegraph offices:

“Almost ready. Hats off; prayer is being offered.”

A silence for the prayer ensued. At 2:40 the bell tapped again, and the office at the Point saPOSTID:

“We have got done praying. The spike is about to be presented.”

Chicago replied:

“We understand; all are ready in the East.”

Promontory Point: “All ready now; the spike will be driven. The signal will be three dots for the commencement of the blows.”

For a moment the instrument was silent; then the hammer of the magnet tapped the bell. “One, two, three,” the signal; another pause of a few seconds, and the lightning came flashing eastward, vibrating over 2,400 miles between the junction of the two roads and Washington, and the blows of the hammer upon the spike were measured instantly in telegraphic accents on the bell here. At 2:47 P.M., Promontory Point gave the signal, “Done,” and the Continent was spanned with iron.

Soccer

NewMexiKen was busy Sunday joining 17,804 other fans to watch the U.S. Women’s National Team beat Mexico in soccer 3-0. The teams battled each other, 90-degree heat and the altitude to give us a good game. And it was truly exciting to see 32-year-old Mia Hamm, recently voted ESPN’s Best Female Athlete, score a goal, her 149th in international competition.

This week’s phenom

From Scott Ostler in the San Francisco Chronicle:

— Brooklyn high school guard Sebastian Telfair has opted for the NBA draft and signed a $15 million contract with Adidas. So he’s pretty much got the prom expenses covered.

— “I’m on Cloud 40 right now,” Telfair said, raising questions about what kind of education you get there at LeBron James High School.

Charlie Hustle

From Morning Briefing in the Los Angeles Times:

Always hustling: Pete Rose might never have been a very good con man.

At least that’s the implication from a story ESPN’s Joe Morgan told at a recent Texas Ranger luncheon.

According to the Dallas Morning News, Morgan said Rose had a paper route as a kid, and one day called the district manager, saying he’d been mugged and robbed. When Rose was asked how much he’d lost, he said, “Hold on a minute. Let me count it.”

Prolonging the shock of capture

From the Guardian:

The sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was not an invention of maverick guards, but part of a system of ill-treatment and degradation used by special forces soldiers that is now being disseminated among ordinary troops and contractors who do not know what they are doing, according to British military sources.

The techniques devised in the system, called R2I – resistance to interrogation – match the crude exploitation and abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad.

One former British special forces officer who returned last week from Iraq, saPOSTID: “It was clear from discussions with US private contractors in Iraq that the prison guards were using R2I techniques, but they didn’t know what they were doing.”

Link via Josh Marshall, who notes, “What’s now happening in Iraq is that the same methods are being passed down to untrained and unsupervised reservists; and the whole situation spirals out of control.”

Shawshank Redemption

The warden in Shawshank Redemption — the one who used Andy Dufresne but punished him anyway — is beginning to look like a good guy as wardens go.

See Mistreatment of Prisoners Is Called Routine in U.S. in Saturday’s New York Times.

The experts also point out that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.

Backward-mentum

That pandering jerk Lieberman couldn’t even get his syntax right yesterday:

“And those who murdered and burned and humiliated four Americans in Fallujah a while ago never received an apology from anybody.”

Water, water everywhere…

It seemed like a good use of time. Labor had begun, but was progressing slowly. No sense not getting some chores taken care of while we waited at home. Most worthwhile seemed the leaky toilet.

I can’t remember what I was thinking, but at some point I moved the toilet too far and ruptured the fresh water feed at the valve. Water was spraying everywhere and there was no way to turn it off. Well into labor or not, the expectant mother went rushing around outside looking for the main shutoff, and then the tool to turn its valve. I stayed with the toilet trying to stem the geyser with my hand or a towel or whatever. I think actually at one point we switched roles, but ultimately I was the better stopper and the one heavy with child had to get the water off, which she eventually did.

A lot of water can come out of a small pipe in ten minutes (it may have been longer). A lot of water. No matter, we needed more. So it was then — not too surprisingly given all that exercise — that the mother’s water broke.

This was around noon. The afternoon was spent cleaning up the mess and waiting for the landlord to come home that evening so he could repair the plumbing. (I’d done all the harm they’d let me do for one day.) The labor stalled and soon mother, grandmother and obstetrician were playing cards, while I waited for game seven of the NBA Championship to begin. You know the one, the classic where Willis Reed hobbled onto the court, hit his first two shots, psyched out the Lakers, and the Knicks won 113-99.

Or so I’ve heard, because I never saw the game. After lulling us into lethargy all afternoon, at about 6 PM the baby abruptly said “I’m ready” and within a few minutes — 34-years ago today — Jill was born — at home1 in a house that had no running water.

That baby is now a wonderful mother of two herself. And, honoring family tradition, her second was born in a hospital with no potable water thanks to last September’s Hurricane Isabel. That plumbing problem wasn’t my fault.

—–
1 Home delivery hadn’t been planned. The grandmother however, was an obstetrics nurse and the doctor was there as a courtesy to her. Given the baby’s sudden impatience, staying at home was just about imperative.