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• Civic toolkit
Contact your elected officials and keep up-to-date on advocacy, education and civic concerns.
• Civic toolkit
YOUR VOICE
From The Reader
"Your Voice" features longer and distinctively personal commentary from readers on topics that don't seem to fit in a letter to the editor. Try to limit submissions to about 600 words.
Send proposed articles to chief editorial writer Patrick O'Callahan, The News Tribune, PO Box 11000, Tacoma, Wash. 98411 (or e-mail Patrick O'Callahan). Articles may be edited and republished in any format by The News Tribune.
"Your Voice" features longer and distinctively personal commentary from readers on topics that don't seem to fit in a letter to the editor. Try to limit submissions to about 600 words.
Send proposed articles to chief editorial writer Patrick O'Callahan, The News Tribune, PO Box 11000, Tacoma, Wash. 98411 (or e-mail Patrick O'Callahan). Articles may be edited and republished in any format by The News Tribune.
The temperature was close to zero Monday as I left the house to buy Sarah Palin’s memoir, “Going Rogue: An American Life.” The book was almost impossible to find in Anchorage before its official release Tuesday. The salesman who finally sold me one asked me to promise I wouldn’t reveal his identity if he sold me a pre-publication copy.
Sarah Palin has a talent for reinvention. Since her first campaign in 1992, she’s gone through a wardrobe full of political personas. Study her career and you count no less than five identities: Sarah the culture warrior, Sarah the watchdog, Sarah the reformer, Sarah the veep and now, Sarah the celebrity.
I would like to preface this by saying that I believe I am a good American. I pay my taxes. I wave when somebody lets me in a lane during rush hour. I’ll even take an old lady’s cart back to the store on my way in to shop.
We’ve all heard the myths by now. Reforming health care will mean the end of Medicare. It’s socialized medicine, too expensive and will lead to rationed care. And who could forget: Government death panels are eagerly awaiting their chance to judge grandma’s worth and somehow determine who lives and who dies.
A recent News Tribune editorial (11-12) questioned the need for a lengthy police funeral pro-cession.
Some events so impact us that they are etched in our memory with a time stamp of what we were doing at the time we heard the news. President Kennedy’s assassination, the Challenger disaster, Princess Diana’s death and the 9/11 terrorist attacks come to mind.
One of the odd benefits of enduring difficult times is that the public, which may have taken good times for granted, turns its attention to troubled institutions. Although the Port of Tacoma remains the jewel of Pierce County’s economy, it’s seen its share of problems – and it will benefit from the attention.
‘We’re going to talk about the policy of torture,” is what the radio producer said when she called me five years ago. “And you’ll have 10 minutes to defend your side.”
Jack Fagan, Mike Fagan and I co-sponsored Initiative 1033 and worked hard for the past year advocating for it because we firmly believe in its policies and thought a lot of citizens supported it too.
Once again, state voters – this time in Maine, hardly a conservative stronghold – have voted down same-sex marriage. Leaving what she thought would be a victory party after last week’s balloting, an emotional Cecelia Burnett said, “I don’t understand what the fear is, why people are so afraid of this change.”
Our loss on Referendum 71 last week was made certain by three failures on our part:
Today we honor the service and sacrifice of our nation’s veterans. It is a day of remembrance, but also for reflection.
There’s a group of men and women who are not household names. They are American veterans.
Now in my mid-20s, I have spent good parts of my education in the upper Midwest, Southern California and the East Coast. I have learned something about the virtues and vices of the various regions, and I have learned to love the country for its people and its central idea: that all of us are created equal, that all of us can pursue our American Dream.
BERLIN – Peter and Angela Hofmann aren’t a typical German couple. For one thing, they met online, a rarity in this techno-wary country.
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© Copyright 2009 Tacoma News, Inc. A subsidiary of The McClatchy Company
1950 South State Street, Tacoma, Washington 98405 253-597-8742
© Copyright 2009 Tacoma News, Inc. A subsidiary of The McClatchy Company