Letters to the Editor
Amity
Published Letters: 1113 Editor's Choice: 106
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Traditional
[Read the article: Southwest: Skimpy fares to match your miniskirt!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Herb Kelleher got rich marketing his airline with irreverent cornball slogans and unapologetic, swaggering Texas hustle. He knew, as does Gary Kelly, that most people hear lifeless, formulaic corporate apologies and either tune them out or assume they're insincere, and that reflects poorly on the image of a company that tries to put a human face on its business.
So they make some lame jokes at their own expense, and cut their fares (or at least make it appear that that's why they're cutting their fares). They probably believe that their passengers will see it as more sincere than any amount of traditional carefully-worded, boiler-plate apologia from the legal department, and I think they're probably right in believing that.
As to whether their passengers are fools to see it that way, I guess that begs the question — who falls for the usual crap that comes out of corporate PR?
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Girlfriends are just boyfriends
[Read the article: Should I tell my new man that I used to date women?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm not sure I agree with Cary here. There are some relationships where you tell about your past loves and some where you don't. Which category a given relationship falls into depends on the people involved. It's not a question of being "honest" versus "dishonest." We never tell our lovers or our spouses everything that has ever happened to us — if nothing else, there simply isn't enough time in our romantic lives to spend it all rehashing every moment of where we've been.
My feeling is that if this is the kind of guy to whom Confused would relate her history with men, and who would expect it of her in a spirit of discovery and understanding — then yes, that includes her history with women, too. But if their love affair is one of those that's about here and now, if their romantic pasts are water under the bridge and their excavation has no place in the present, then how is it somehow more honest to treat the girlfriends any differently from the boyfriends?
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All hat ...
[Read the article: Texans turn against Bush's war]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Of course military families in Texas have paid a heavy price. Isn't that what the families of soldiers have been prepared to do for all history? What they didn't want to do was pay the price and lose. I don't care what these Texans, supposedly so plain-spoken and pragmatic, say to their interviewers. It isn't the second redeployments that's made them start having doubts — or the third, or immigration, or any of that.
It's losing. It's seeing the endless burning of Iraq, hearing from their returning heroes about the absurdity of the occupation, realizing that the neat, sterile, triumphant victory that we were supposed to achieve has turned into a bloodbath.
The war in Iraq was supposed to be like a winning football game. Cheer the home team, boo the opposition, shout down the calls you don't like, and go home drunk and victorious with maybe a little mud on your boys' uniforms. Now the reality sinks in that wars don't work that way, and this one least of all. These ribbon-wearing troops-supporting military families, ironically of any of us, are having the hardest time with the lesson of what it means to sacrifice for Washington.
Instead they'd rather get out of taking their licks by groping around for some external cause, some defining point at which it all went sour. They'll grab for any two-bit rationale that will let them avoid admitting that all along their man "W" was all hat and no cowboy.
One Molly Ivins is worth a dozen of these hillbillies. A hundred.
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When is a Senate majority not a majority?
[Read the article: When winning is still losing]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]When is a Senate majority not a majority? When it's a coalition, that's when.
The Democrat-led coalition in the Senate holds 51 seats. If Reid pushes for rules changes or other forms of filibuster-busting that would lead directly to the end of the American catastrophe in Iraq, Lieberman will ditch the coalition and Reid's rules changes become his last act as majority leader. One vote, one afternoon, and poof, there goes any chance for liberals in Congress to accomplish anything for another year and a half.
(Some die-hards out there won't care — better to lose, lose it all they say, and stay pure. How's that been working out for you so far, guys?)
If you really want to change the situation, you either have to get rid of a Republican Senator from a Democratic-controlled state, or convince one to switch parties — or wait until 2008. It would have been easier, of course, to have kept Bush out of office in the first place, but you know .. purity is a bitch.