Reagan: "Candidates are shying away from Fox"

Mike thinks that if you discover the game is rigged, you should not only stay in it, you're a coward if you walk away, nyah nyah. Did he have a previous career as a carney barker? I dunno. Blindingly stupid stuff.

Originally "Profiles in Cowardice" from Thursday, carried more or less verbatim with a couple of edits to stamp out the evil passive voice and make the piece look up-to-date.

Editorial: "Mass transit may not break the bank"

Sorry, unnamed Courier editor, Cindy Barks already turned this story in, and she wrote it better. What works is to consider stating an opinion before sitting down to write an opinion piece.

I know, it's as hard for you to admit you've been wrong all along as it's been for the Queen Bee, perhaps harder, since you've devoted so much ink to trashing the concept and the people who've advocated it for so many years. There's opportunity here, though, if you don't dawdle too long, to get out in front of the issue and help make it happen.

Letters: The hits just keep on comin'

Five short ones today: Lou Harris agrees with me that it was evil, Dorothy Williamson wonders what the parking garage is for if not this, Bill Sonsin warns that our Congresscritter isn't convicted yet (well, not much), Glen Brose nails the tried-and-true method we can expect to see used here to kill off bus service, and non-scientific type Don Wallace thinks Terry Lovell should get another 99 climate-crisis-deniers together and smack down Al Gore. (Here's a clue, Don: he can't.)

A1: "Surgery forces Brownlow to miss marathon"

This is a nice little love-letter for the former supervisor, perfectly suited to a very-small-town paper. I'm sure there are some people out there who think of GB fondly and long for a return to his reign as king of the Supes. No one should have to deal with cancer, particularly with our horrible health-care system. Not sure why it's page-one material, though.

Which reminds me, we heard awhile ago that Bob Bell was getting surgery, but not whether he got better.

More coming

Check back in a few hours for more, we're recording the show early today.

A1: "Death penalty trial is on track"

The death penalty can always be expected to cause a certain amount of breathless drama, and I wonder whether this was a factor in Mirsada Buric's court-beat story. The coverage is fine, I just tripped over the lead and fell flat on my face.

"The David Aggas trial scheduled for summer appears on track, unless the state settles his death penalty case stemming from ...."

On first read I took this to mean that if the state settles a death-penalty case, a trial of the same person on a different matter will not go forward -- which makes no sense. In this situation the writer's (or editor's) knowledge of what s/he means to say allows ambiguity to slip in. If I read it with extra emphasis on "settles," I can hear the intended meaning. The editor could have cleared this up quite simply:

"The death-penalty trial of David Aggas appears on track for summer unless the state settles his case, which stems from ...."

A1: "City looks to beef up recycling"

This story by Cindy Barks puzzles me. We have a contract with a company to take our recyclables at cost to us of $30 per ton. We put that contract out for a new bid and the same company wins it at $10 per ton. There's no indication in the story of whether the specification in the contract has changed. Excuse my cynicism, but it's difficult to believe that the company is giving up two-thirds of its revenue on this deal without some balancing factor.

When they removed glass bins around town, requiring us to take our glass to the transfer station instead, City staff created a recent history of arbitrarily cutting back on recycling services without public input. In covering this story, answering a couple of basic questions would either inform the reader of what we'll be giving up in the deal or assure us that we're not.

There's a cute juxtaposition of this story with a an evocative photo by Jo Keener showing PV residents dealing with tons of trash. Page-one irony, perhaps?