To The Editor:

Brian's great piece on Michigan's sell out to Corporate financial power and political privilege was much needed and appreciated. Perhaps our fair-lady-- faint-hearted governor does not realize what she did. I will never vote again for her, and she knows this.

My best to THE FREE PRESS. May you long continue the good fight and endure the subversive corporate pressures of the dark side of our corrupted Capitalism.

"Sir . . . sir."

Need has a tone of voice that's hard to ignore, as badly as I might want to. It pierced my purposeful hurry this night. I had stopped at the store after work and was carrying two plastic bags of groceries - milk, OJ, cottage cheese - which were cutting into my hands. My briefcase was slung awkwardly over my shoulder and I felt tired, stressed, put upon.

Words can hardly convey how little I wanted to turn around just then and find out who was summoning me.

I live in Chicago, a city with lots of dark corners, a city of want spilling up from the margins. The want is perpetual, as much a part of the cityscape as Lake Michigan - always there, sometimes roiled up, sometimes dangerous. I resist it with a weary heart, having no clue what my relationship to it ought to be.

I turned around. A woman was standing in front of an apartment building about half a block behind me. I walked back to her, lugging my groceries and briefcase. She was skinny, scrawny, with a scraped-raw look to her face and terror in her eyes, which instantly made me forget about the weight of my own life.

AUSTIN, Texas -- It's nice to know that the investigative reporter Jack Anderson is still under investigation, although seriously dead.

Anderson died last year, and for 19 years before his death he suffered from Parkinson's disease and was increasingly less active as a reporter. Now that he's safely deceased, the Federal Bureau of Investigation wants to go through nearly 200 boxes of his files to see if there are any classified documents in there. If it's classified, they want it back -- even though Anderson was in the habit of printing anything he ever got that was of any interest.

This is apparently part of the Great Bush Reclassification Project, in which government information that has previously been declassified and offered for public consumption is now being reclassified as secret so nobody can find out about it. Those who saw government documents between declassification and reclassification are just going to have to forget what they saw. That, or some Man in Black will be sent around to zap your memory with a little thingamajig.

While children continue to die twenty years after the Chernobyl catastrophe, an out-of-touch (and often corrupt) fringe advocates a "rebirth" for the failed technology that is killing them.

These pro-nuke die-hards seem unable to face the solution to both global warming and our economic future: the exploding revolution in renewable energy and efficiency. Their last-gasp attempt to revive the dead reactor dinosaur may be the last barrier to a truly green-powered planet.

The 1986 explosion at the reactor outside Kiev was the world's worst industrial disaster. It spewed at least 200 times more radiation than the bombing of Hiroshima. It's a fitting tombstone for the most expensive technological failure in human history.

Chernobyl happened exactly 20 years ago. But it is 49 since the first commercial reactor opened at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, in 1957.

That day the nuke makers said it was "only a matter of time" before private insurers would protect the public from a Chernobyl or Three Mile Island-style accident, both of which they said were "impossible."

"There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity."~~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If it weren't so dangerously sad, the media gyrations to deflect attention from the sordid mess defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld has made in Iraq would be amusing. But efforts to hide the truth are futile because Rumsfeld is literally surrounded by "stars" -- retired general officers speaking publicly about the fatal mistakes Rumsfeld made in his mad dash to "sweep everything up" and dash blindly off to war.

CNN and the Boston Globe say there are six officers, Fox News says "a handful," the New York Times says seven, the Christian Science Monitor plays it safe with "several," and Rumsfeld himself laughs it off with "two or three out of thousands."

There seems to be eight so far -- Gen. Eric Shinseki, former Army Chief of Staff, was cut off at the knees a year before his retirement for testifying under oath during a Senate hearing a month before the assault on Iraq that it would take "several hundred thousand" troops to quell ethnic tensions that could lead to an insurgency.