[More illuminating emails from readers, on three separate topics but refreshingly solid on unreported or scantly reported matters:]

1) “Writing here in Storm Lake, Iowa, you'd never think anything was wrong with anything, yet our community is run by Tyson Fresh? Meats and they are fighting to keep a union out while recruiting 'fresh meat' from Los Angeles, Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico, and now, Sudanese from Omaha and Minnesota.
Our schools are more than 50 percent non-white.
No more small farms and those farms that exist, exist because Monsanto and ConAgra are pulling the strings
And yet...it's more important to worry and vote Republican because 'Johnny has gone for a soldier' and a couple of guys might want to get married ... to each other.
Wow! Is it this weird in Maryland? I seem to have left the planet for a decade only to return to something out a bad Made-for-TV movie.”

Regrettably, too many of our largest papers report labor issues – that is, issues involving most people who work – scantly if at all, and then compound misunderstanding by reporting them as labor union issues. The openness with which the GWBush administration is helping some of the nation’s richest men squeeze yet more out of the middle class and out of their own employees should have been reported as the shameful practice and policy it is. But only the New York Times, to its credit, even reported that Amtrak is being rifled by the railroad companies, which make the taxpayers foot the bill to settle lawsuits even when the issues at litigation were the companies’ fault rather than Amtrak’s. All this at a time when our Transportation Sec comes to us, of course, from the railroad industry. But then, the ties between some companies and this White House are even closer than mere cronyism:

2) “Vectorvest is a stock advisor service which lists daily 7500 American stocks ranking the by value, safety and timing "VST" I did not have to search for the stock in the universe of stocks. This stock in which you pointed out Bushes uncle, William T Bush holds a chairmanship was listed in very first place with a VST rating of 1.6. The next stock had a rating of 1.57. Certainly an interesting coincidence. I enjoyed your superb article . . . yes, Engineering Support Systems is the firm you were talking about and today Engineering support systems is again on top of the heap and gained better than 3 %.”

We have never before had a president start a war that his own relatives profited from, benefited from financially. And Mr. William Bush, GWBush’s uncle in St. Louis, joined the board of Engineered Support Systems only in 2000. Finally, the Los Angeles Times reported (accurately) that Mr. Bush has indeed cashed in many thousands worth of stock options in Engineered Support Systems this year. The company’s products, which it contracted to sell the taxpayers for many millions, included mobile units to deal with Saddam’s WMDs.

3) “Your report on your discussion with the unnamed White House staffer (Buzzflashhttp://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/03/10/con03173.html ) is sadly emblematic of the general behavior of this administration.  I worked on Capitol Hill throughout the 90s and during the height of the impeachment process and while there was a lot of tension and very high emotions, generally staffers behaved civilly and professionally amongst themselves.  The Bush White House is not merely secretive or arrogant; it has a certain unvarnished meanness to it.  They win without grace, they lose in a flurry of threats and accusations and they generally deport themselves like gangsters.  What a sad state of affairs we have come to when our highest offices are run by low men and staffed by goon squads.”