Letters to the Editor
Lobelia
Published Letters: 222 Editor's Choice: 6
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Something Useful
[Read the article: Barack Obama is a Muslim, and other stories]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]How about some samples of people's best "rebuttal emails"? Maybe there's already a compendium of them in Sent boxes here. There are great writers, possessed of facts and sense, throughout the Letters.
If you have such an email and want to post it for anyone to borrow, we could all have a file of them to pull from and forward to people in our lives. Urging them to forward them, too.
Let's be antibodies.
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A Square Foot's Pretty Local
[Read the article: Is local food really miles better?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]All the more reason to consider, if you have even a scrap of sun (yard or patio), doing a Square Foot Garden raised bed to grow some of your own vegetables.
It's simple. It's amazingly productive. It's delicious. It's fun. It involves NO transportation.
Get the book, Square Foot Gardening, &/or check out www.squarefootgardening.com. And for a more sophisticated view, read about Fritz Haeg's work, Edible Estates.
The common sense solution is so often overlooked.
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Pardon a naive suggestion
[Read the article: Time magazine uncritically prints Nancy Pelosi's "justifications" for the FISA "compromise"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I am sure I'm missing a lot of necessary knowledge.
But I was just wondering, what if everybody abandoned the big telecoms for Skype? (I've tried it. Works great.)
Would it make an economic impact?
Would it be a good form of protest?
Please educate me.
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Hi Thalia
[Read the article: Is local food really miles better?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's in my FRONT yard in a suburb. Quite shocking to the neighbors at first. (Google Fritz Haeg...oh do.)
I introduce people to my cabbages. I tell them everything has a name. One woman I assumed I had nothing in common with (conservative, Presbyterian) told me she'd bring over a bottle of wine and we'd sit in the garden and make friends with them all. (I'm biding my time to tell her there's no local ordinance against a couple of hens. I'll put them in the back though. Next year. And share the eggs.)
A whiff of purple basil (wow) wins them over, and the space-saving watermelon that's heading toward the sidewalk will soon grab them by the ankles and they'll have to say hello.
BTW, I am an overworked (FT job) lazy bad gardener with a bad back. The Square Foot Garden doesn't give a hoot. It's growing like crazy. Approximately 5 minutes a day is all it takes to tend it. It's cute, friendly, fun, delicious, easy and joyful.
We put in rain barrels too. Out there watering it with rainwater. To wash my car I'll drive it onto the grass on a hot day and have at it with safe soap. Now I want a scooter.
People with patios or balconies can do it too. You can do a tabletop version on 2 sawhorses. It's a box of dirt. The trick is the dirt: a third peat moss, a third vermiculite, a third blended compost. No weeds. Plants get drunk and grow. Veggies and fruits are starting to look prettier than flowers.
I'm going to plant blueberries down by the sidewalk. Easy picking reach for walkers. I'll put out a little sign.
I get really excited about my tiny-scale reexamination of the need to shop. I still shop for things. But there is SOOOOOOOOOOO much room in our lives for doing more w/less. One example is that food doesn't have to be so complicated.
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@Allie
[Read the article: Is local food really miles better?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Kudzu was imported from Japan to control highway bank erosion. (When nobody thought much about letting local ecosystems be what they are.) Then it ate the South.
When I worked for a publisher of gardening books, they did research on kudzu and found it is quite high in protein. What a neat solution, eh?
You can eat the leaves, cook the roots, make jelly, etc. It's a great plant. They have goats and llamas eating it up in Tennessee, but generally they're after it with herbicides. Sigh.
Ironic that the Forest Service is trying to find a biological control for kudzu. Maybe that'll eat the North!
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George Bush...
[Read the article: Keith Olbermann: Then and now]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...is speaking at the naturalization ceremony at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home, on July 4th.
It's been suggested that a whole lot of people attend with IMPEACH tshirts... I suppose it'd be best to have them in tote bags or under regular shirts, to doff once the speech is underway.
Or, simply a huge crowd that turns their backs on him might be nice too.
It's a pretty intimate space.
Kind of hard to imagine him stumbling through a speech right outside Jefferson's library window...
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Monsiuer...Celerybop?
[Read the article: Keith Olbermann's reply and Obama's secret plan to protect the rule of law]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I am the last to twig but if it's true...
so happy to think of you in your garden.
And leg all healed?
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Edit for Glenn
[Read the article: The parade of "shrill, unserious extremists" on display at today's impeachment hearings]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Hi Glenn:
I think you left out "accountable" in:
Yesterday, Jane Hamsher spoke with Bruce Fein on BloggingheadsTV about why the Democrats have, in general, failed to hold the Bush administration for their multiple crimes....
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Thank you for working so hard to make them accountable and also, through your courage and persistence, making US accountable for making them accountable.
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Thank you, Joseph Romm
[Read the article: Why we never need to build another polluting power plant]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I hope your message appears in every possible outlet. Please consider offering it to the wire services. Please plug it everywhere.
And Salon, thank you for running this piece. Please give this author his rights so he can send this story everywhere.
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Makes me cuckoo
[Read the article: A blogosphere of their own]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...that this article appears in Broadsheet, headed up by a retro graphic broad who's spent too much time in the ladies' room. And the pink is as grating as ever.
Oh, the irony.