AOL Journal-land’s resident cartoonist, Dan Wheeler, has left the building.

Apparently someone found his comic strip, “Bobo Puppyhead,” offensive enough to raise a red flag to AOL. His comic strip, if you have never seen it, consisted of dialog and themes that were of an adult nature…but as far as I ever saw, the kind of “adult nature” that would have warranted a PG-13 rating if he was making a motion picture in today’s society. I never saw any sign of nudity, even when sex was being depicted. The title of this entry, “Two Circles, a Square and a Triangle,” pretty much describes the way in which his characters were depicted. How offensive can that possibly get?

Apparently, offensive enough. Dan says that he received a letter from AOL’s Terms of Service people notifying him that this would be his one and only warning. AOL deleted the “offensive content” — which seems to have amounted to all of the strips — from his FTP space, effectively removing all graphics from his journal.

Here again, we come to the realization that AOL Journal-Land is desperately in need of a rating system for its journals. I stumble across journals on an almost daily basis that use the “f” word in every sentence. I saw a journal the other day that consisted of a handfull of entries and each one featured a nude picture!! But a comic strip apparently was “offensive” enough to get a journal throttled?

And what of the title of Dan’s journal? When I have linked him previously, there is a certain word in his title that I have never published here. I’ve never written the word in question nor have I ever spoken it. I never intend to. I wish the word in question didn’t exist. But I respect someone else’s right to use it when he feels that it is appropriate in context, even if I might have phrased things differently. In this context, the word is used to imply cynicism that I understand and appreciate…I get his point and I’m not offended. But it’s odd to me that if they thought any part of his journal needed to be “edited,” they’d pick on his graphics and not remove that word from the title while they were at it. It’s just more proof of how vague standards of decency can be.

I truly don’t mean to pick on AOL’s editors, though I’m sure others will. I do see both sides of this issue. I understand that AOL has its own set of problems. They are dealing with standards of decency that can’t be spelled out specifically because there is no such thing as a common standard of decency to start with: what is offensive to some is tame to others. What one person finds to be “crossing the line” is light fare to someone else. AOL is forced to respond to complaints (and I can only assume that someone complained about one of these strips) to satisfy its customers. They feel that the customer is best served when he cannot access content that might be offensive, yet they have virtually no way to spell out before the fact every possible action that could constitute “offensive content” until someone gets offended. They want to maintain a family-friendly atmosphere, yet what that means to some is radically different than what it means to others. To put it another way, they’re between a rock and a hard place.

Dan has since opened up a new journal over at Blogspot. I’m just sorry to see a well-written, honest, intelligent and humorous journal leave our community.

It seems to me there is a potential lesson here that I hope won’t be ignored.

AOL’s Journal Editors should consider adding a new option to its journaling software that will allow those journal writers who want to deal with adult topics to classify their journals as such, preventing those who sign on under children’s accounts from being able to access the journal and requiring an extra click of an “OK” for adult accounts to access, or a blanket acceptance that journals with a “mature” rating may contain objectionable content and the would-be reader accepts this fact. If you offer someone a chance to avoid a journal they might find offensive or the option to continue on to it with the understanding that it could contain such themes, I don’t see how they can complain at that point.

I don’t mean this rating as an excuse to show nudity or “X-rated” content. But I do think that adults should be able to have adult conversations with other adults in adult terms. The adjective “adult” must not always mean “dirty,” after all.

Good luck, Dan. We’ll miss you around these parts.

The frame from a Bobo Puppyhead strip is used by permission.

To play, you can either answer the questions in a comment here, or put the answers in an entry on your journal…but either way, leave a link to your journal so that everyone else can visit! Enjoy!

1. What was the last thing you lied about?

6. READER’S CHOICE QUESTION #20 from Danielle: Have you ever found a journal that interested you so much, you read all the way back to the beginning? If so, how many? If you’d like to share, whose journal and why?

They say that two heads are better than one. Next week’s Reader’s Choice question is unusual in that two different people, within less than 24 hours of each other, asked almost exactly the same basic question. Each one was framed a little differently, but they both come to the same basic idea.


MY ANSWERS:
1. My income. I signed up for an online service and it asked some basic demographic information. One of the questions was “Range of Income.” Since there was no “I prefer not to answer” response, and since my income is of no importance to my use of their free service, I “under-reported” substantially, in the hopes that they will think I’m too poor to buy anything they might otherwise try to sell me. (That wouldn’t be that far from the truth, anyway!)

6. There have actually been several that have impressed me to the point that I wanted to go back to the beginning. The most recent of these is Jesse’s.

There are two primary schools of thought when it comes to plotting your novel. One of them is that you should do a painstaking outline before you write chapter one, and in it you should include every major event in your novel, down to specific scenes you envision. “You wouldn’t plan a road trip,” the experts claim, “without picking up a map so you know exactly how to get there.” There’s a lot of validity in that line of reasoning, I suppose. But I’m not sure that the comparison between a novel and a road trip is a completely valid one to begin with.

The other school of thought is that you should have a good understanding of your characters, hopefully a good idea of where your story is going or will end up, but that you should let your characters “tell their story” as the story unfolds. In other words, you should let the plot flow more freely as you type and hope that in the end the whole thing ends up where you intended or, if possible, somewhere better than you had ever imagined. To adapt this strategy to the road trip metaphor, it’s like wanting to drive from Sacramento to the coast (since you love the beach), only to end up parking your car in Maui. (Yeah, I know, that would be a road trip worth writing about!)

I suspect that most writers fall somewhere in the middle. I think I do. As I mentioned earlier in my piece about writing school, I was forced to prepare a plot summary for my novel. What I’ve ended up writing, about 110 pages into it, has already varied from that summary. I haven’t bothered to rewrite the summary because I’m not sure I’ve finished making changes to it. My plots require a bit of internal simmering before I can commit to them. I like to ponder the twists and turns and consider the pros and cons, as well as better routes to get there. Even then, I’m not particularly meticulous when it comes to writing down the game plan. I’m not sure that I wouldn’t become bored telling the story if I’ve already told it in short form in an outline.

That leaves me curious, though, about how the rest of you plot out your stories. Do you do an outline at all? If so, do you use a classic outline form or more of a narrative summary? How long is your outline/summary? Do you break it up by chapter, or acts, or even individual characters? Do you plan outhow many page numbers certain chapters or portions of the book will be? Do you even plan out how many pages your finished manuscript will be?

If you’re really bold, I’d love to see a sample of it: without giving away your story, pick a random chapter and give me an example of how you’ve outlined that specific chapter (or, if you prefer, craft a sample of an imaginary chapter that shows your method, if you have one): don’t worry that the plot won’t make sense — of course it won’t, because it’s a short passage taken out of context — we won’t know who the characters are or what they’re doing, and that’s okay.

I think it might be helpful to see how others are mapping out their storyline. Perhaps your strategy might work for someone else; if you don’t have a strategy at all, perhaps even that will make the rest of us wavering between one or the other feel like our situation isn’t that hopeless after all.

The early outline I found, when it was still the plan, went something like this for a single chapter:

CHAPTER FIVE
Mark packs his car, heads to town: he’s not completely sure why he’s going, and is beginning to think the mysterious woman is a complete crackpot. He nearly wrecks on his way there when he encounters another driver who tries to run him off the road. When his car stops, the driver rolls up next to him and he sees that that it’s a ghost who disappears (along with the car) in front of him.

There’s nothing elaborate in the kind of thing I do. Occasionally, if I know of a specific line I want a character to hear or say, an image I want them to see or a sound or smell I want them to make note of, I’ll write it down just so I won’t forget. I almost never write any exchanges of dialog, unless I hear a snippet of conversation in my head that’s too good to pass up.

As for this scene, I’m hoping the end result will be a chilling, tense scene. I’m fairly pleased with the first draft of that chapter, but there’s a problem or two that I need to fix before I’m ready to pick up where I left off writing completely new material. Did I mention that revising early parts of the manuscript before I’ve finished later parts really drives me crazy? Yeah, I thought I did.

When was the last time you used an apostrophe? Do you recall? Do you remember why you used it?

We all make grammar mistakes. There are occasionally old entries that I edit months later to remove grammar problems or misspelled words. Call me anal-retentive when it comes to grammar and typos.

In that spirit, I hope you will forgive me for mentioning the proper way to use apostrophes. I regularly stumble across incorrect usage of them. When I read other people’s writing, there are certain mistakes that leap off the page at me, and apostrophe errors fall into that category.

These days they’re used incorrectly more often than correctly, it seems. I don’t really expect anyone to change their writing style just for me…but when you write, you should always be correct unless you have a specific reason for being non-grammatical.

What’s the proper way to use an apostrophe?

RULE #1: Apostrophes are used to show possessives:

Susan’s car
The dog’s toy
St. Patrick’s Day

RULE #2: Apostrophes are used in contractions to indicate missing letters:

Don’t
Can’t
Y’all

SNAG #1: There are two cases when those two rules cause confusion:

Whose vs. Who’s
Its vs. It’s

For a pronoun, an apostrophe must mean a contraction.

Who’s = WHO IS
It’s = IT IS

If you say, “The dog lost it’s toy,” you’re really saying, “The dog lost it is toy.”

RULE #3: Apostrophes are not used to make words plural!

Remember that rule, please. The following sentences, typical of what I see every day, are all incorrect:

WRONG: My two brother’s get on my nerves.
WRONG: I got three telephone call’s in ten minutes.
WRONG: I returned my book’s to the library.

Drop the apostrophes! All you need is the “s” at the end.

Even for abbreviations or numbers, you do not need apostrophes!

CORRECT: In the 1990s, the movement found a new following.
CORRECT: The B-52s were shown at the aviation exhibit.
CORRECT: He earned two BAs in college.

SNAG #2: There are only two occasions in which you can get away with an apostrophe to make something plural.

When you are dealing with abbreviations that use only lower case letters, or when you’re dealing with an abbreviation that uses upper case letters but ends with an “s:”

CORRECT: Mind your p’s and q’s.
CORRECT: The ship sent out three SOS’s before it sank.

I promise that I won’t complain if you use the dreaded apostrophe incorrectly, although I can’t promise the same of your copyeditor. In all honestly, none of the “What if…” member journals prompted this little tirade. (That’s a good sign, right?)

We writers are supposed to write. We’re also supposed to read. And we must juggle both along with jobs, meals, friends, family, and the unexpected surprises that come up along the way.

I am amazed by people who can sit quietly and read an entire book in one sitting. I would have a nervous breakdown if I tried to do so. I wish I could, but I can’t sit still that long, no matter how enthralled I am with what I’m reading. I have to get up at some point and walk around…do something else…process what I’ve taken in so far.

Maybe it’s a function of my writer’s mind, but I find myself somehow needing a break at times to ponder not only the words on the page, but how the sentence structure, pace and style come together to make me feel one way or another. I try not to allow myself to “guess” what’s coming from a writer’s point of view. Sometimes, I see foreshadowing and know where it’s going. Other times I see it and am pleasantly surprised when the author goes other than the expected route. Occasionally, what I think is foreshadowing isn’t at all.

But at the end of a novel, I like to think back to those twists and turns and how the author did (or didn’t) pull them off. It’s like a writing lesson for free.

I’m a painfully slow reader. If I get through a chapter a day, I’m doing something extraordinary. If I get through three chapters a week, I’m doing something above average. Most of the time, I’m afraid, I have the book I’m currently working on nearby, with the best of intentions. I want to read it. Really, I do. But there’s something always coming up that takes me away from it.

I will confess that I listen to audiobooks quite often. When possible, I read a book and listen to the audio version at the same time. I like experiencing the same story two different ways: one through the eyes of a reader who must make up every facet of the story in his imagination, and the other through the ears of a listener who is hearing the same words. It’s interesting to me how the same sentences,when read by me and then spoken by someone else, have subtle differences in the way my mind processes them.

My favorite author, as you probably already know, is Dean Koontz. I’m sorry to say that I didn’t finish most of the books I was “required” to read in school. I never enjoyed reading that much, especially when I didn’t get to choose my own selection. I found a paperback copy of “Lightning“ once, and would read it after I finished my homework in study hall. I realized, about halfway through the book, that I was actually hooked! It was full of twists, and each time I thought I had it figured out, it went a different way! And the pacing of the book was somehow just what my reader’s mind had been looking for but not finding from other writers.

It wasn’t Koontz who got me interested in writing, because I was writing long before I ever picked up that copy of “Lightning.” But it was Koontz who got me interested in reading again…and it was also Koontz who made me realize that it’s perfectly possible to find a book out there that tells a story in a way that can make you keep coming back to the book rather than putting it aside. I’m still grateful for that.

Have you ever been tempted to enroll in one of those writing classes you’ve seen advertised? If you pick up one of the writing magazines, you’ll find countless ads for schools ready to help you turn your idea into a bestseller.

Beyond that outrageous claim, do you have any experiences that you’d like to share? (You don’t have to mention schools by name…just what you got out of it, or what you wished you had.)

I’ll start the ball rolling with my own experience. I signed up for a correspondence-style novel writing course. By the time all assignments were finished, I was supposed to have the first fifty or so pages of the novel, with a plot summary, character descriptions and a good direction of how I would start page 51. My instructor, I was assured, was to be a published novelist who is an expert in his field. He would give my manuscript and assignments plenty of personal attention.

It sounded pretty good to me.

Admittedly, the course did help a little. It did, at least, force me to draft short descriptions of the characters and prepare a two or three page summary of what the novel was going to be about. It did, therefore, help me focus at least some of the plot before I had a great deal written.

Along the way, though, I noticed something that raised red flags. I sent along one of the writing samples and when I got it back, my instructor marked up a section of it in red, complaining that within the same scene, I was giving the point of view of two different characters. Multiple POV is a no-no, he insisted. Sure, that makes sense. How silly of me!

This instructor was a published novelist, by the way, but he hadn’t published a novel of his own in quite a number of years. More recently, he had served as an editor of an anthology of short stories and had focused his attention on writing instruction. Nothing wrong with that, of course…he was still working in the field he loves. But as soon as the course began and I received the bio of the instructor, I started looking for his novel. As I recall, he’d only had one published, though I forget its name. The point is, after much searching, I was able to obtain a copy of this out-of-print novel, a psychological thriller. (That was good to hear, because that’s what I want to write.)

I read his novel on the side as I did my assignments. Then I came to the scene. The scene between the man and the woman he is supposedly holding captive. She is terrified: “What will he do to me? Will I ever see my family again?” He is terrified: “She thinks I’ve kidnapped her! How can I let her leave now?? She’ll tell everyone I’m a kidnapper and I was just trying to help her.” It was an interesting scene, because while neither spoke a word of dialog for a few moments, there was this radically different internal solliloquy going on within each of them.

Wait a second, I suddenly realized. One scene, two points of view! Something’s wrong here.

Needless to say, when I wrote the cover letter to my next assignment, I mentioned having found his book, and I even excepted two or three paragraphs from it in the letter to illustrate my point. I admitted that he was write to question my use of dual points of view in the same scene, and that having re-read the scene, I agreed that it didn’t work. But here in this scene, he broke the same rule yet the outcome was very different and added tension to the scene that he wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.

I assured him that I wasn’t simply asking, “If you did it, why can’t I?” I assured him that I liked the way he had used the effect, and I asked how a writer is supposed to know when it’s okay to break those “unbreakable” rules. I was hoping for insight.

When I got that assignment back, there was no mention of the question. He never read it. I was ticked…go figure. I contacted the head of the “school” and explained the situation. For the final assignment, they gave me a different instructor, who at least answered the questions I asked him in my cover letter and was more complementary than the first instructor had been. While his specialty wasn’t quite the same, he at least had published more than one novel of his own, and seemed to be more willing to spend time reading what I had to say.

I contacted the school again and asked if I could have this same instructor if I continued on to the next course. It was suggested that they would try their best, but that they couldn’t guarantee it. I have not taken a writing course since.

Like I said, there were some positive aspects of the experience, and given the chance to do a little more research on the instructor prior to the second assignment, I might take one again some day. But like all things, I suppose you must watch for “warning signs” that indicate that personalized attention isn’t exactly what you’re getting.

Anyone else have any writing instruction stories to tell, good or bad?

I started my AOL writing journal (whose contents have since been merged here) when I joined the writing group, “What if…,” started by Andreakingme of “Unhinged” fame. Andrea is trying to write her own novel, and she’s under a rather brutal deadline now to get the first draft done. You can read about the deadline and how it came to be here.

Meanwhile, members of the group, as their first assignments, have been asked to do two things.

First, we should take a writing quiz which seeks to determine what kind of writer we will be. I score in the next-to-highest category, and on the low end of that. It’s not a total surprise to me, because I disagree with a few of the questions as posed. There were a couple where my answer was a crapshoot at best: my reality fell dead in the middle of two answers. I could have chosen the “higher scoring” answer each time, but that didn’t seem right, either, so I picked as best I could.

On the other hand, in terms of my work in TV, I’ve been a “published” writer — since my writing has been broadcast daily — for more than a decade. So, whether I’m “writer” material is a moot point. Whether I’m novelist material, well, we’ll just wait and see about that one.

The second part of the assignment is to describe what and why you want to write. The novel I’ve been working on has changed many times. The setting has changed, the staging of events has changed. The roles of the characters has changed. The latter, in fact, has changed more than anything else. My biggest challenge when I write isn’t in coming up with the basic story, but in dealing with the holes that develop as I go on. Some writers can just write around them and patch up the gaps later. I’m not that kind of writer. I like to make sure that the road is without car-sized potholes before I drive across it.

The novel I intend to write first (yes, I have a few ideas floating around in my head), involves a television reporter — because of that awful “write what you know” advice that causes writers more trouble than most are willing to admit. Over the course of the story, while battling a family crisis, he encounters a psychic, a vampire, and a story so amazing that none of his viewers would believe it if he told it. (I can be as cruel as fate sometimes!) At the moment, the roles of the characters are set in stone. Getting them to interact for a few hundred pages, solve a series of problems and grow from the experience of having done so is the current goal. I actually started this novel about seven years ago, but it’s been put aside a few times as I’ve stopped to redesign the basic plot.

I’m not one of those writers with a tight outline for everything I do. I’ve tried that on an earlier novel I actually completed back in college. The outline I came up with was so rigid that I even set “ideal” chapter lengths for each chapter along with a one or two-line synopsis of what happens within each chapter. As you can imagine, the priority eventually turned into trying to meet the chapter length quota I had set rather than developing the story. I was able to produce a novel that way…350 pages or so, as a matter of fact, but it was bad. I made a simple mistake that was so stupid that I had to finish the entire thing, set it aside and then look at it about a month later before it hit me over the head like a giant beach ball: I made the lead character so sympathetic that you had to pull for him, but had him fail. The secondary character was the one who really should have been the “hero” of the story. After all, if you’re going to sit through 350 pages, you want there to be something good happening, even if there’s a lot of pain and suffering to get there. Lesson learned.

As for the current novel I’m working on, I’d like to have it finished by next spring. That’s not really a goal, but it is at least a wish. There are a few reasons why I probably won’t, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to overcome them. At the moment, I’m contemplating reformatting the first couple of chapters, to shorten them a bit. When I read a novel, I appreciate short chapters. After getting about 110 pages in, I’ve realized that the first chapter is a lot longer than I would like. This may mean that I’ll have to renumber all of my chapters from the beginning, but I’m thinking it’s the way to go at the moment.

That’s pretty much the “what” part. As for the “why” part, I think it’s because I have a good story to tell, and deep down, I’d like to see whether I’m decent enough at writing to be able to tell it. I can remember in ninth grade writing a short story during gym class. (Actually, we’d finished the exercising or whatever it was we were doing, so we were waiting for lunch.)

Anyway, I sat in the gym writing as if I were in “the zone.” A friend of mine sat next to me, trying to peek over my shoulder. Finally, I gave her a few pages to read. A friend of hers came along and wanted to see what she was reading. Then another friend…and another. Within about ten minutes, I happened to glance around and see that there were about a dozen of my classmates seated all around me, and that as one of them would finish a page, he or she would pass it to the next one in line. Their interest in what I was writing sort of fed the writer. I wanted to write more to give them more to read. I guess it’s like the comedian who gets that big laugh from the audience…or the pianist who gets that standing ovation at the end of a concerto. I had been writing long before that, but that was the first time I had that large of an audience at one time. It was cool. Very cool, in fact.

Maybe I hope to get that kind of reaction again from something I write. I’m not holding my breath, mind you, but it might be a nice feeling if it comes.

You’ll notice a little graphic to the left with a weekly writing goal. I’m trying to go for ten pages a week, and I’m counting revised pages of previously-written material. After all, work on ten pages of completely new writing or improved writing is still better than work on none, right? If I stick to that goal, I will definitely be able to complete the novel by spring. That’s a big “if.” Then I’ll look for agents and/or publishers. (In other words, don’t worry about trying to plan a camp-out at Barnes & Noble for May, 2005!)

When it is finished, believe me, you’ll be among the first to know.

To play you can either answer the questions in a comment here, or put the answers in an entry on your journal…but either way, leave a link to your journal so that everyone else can visit! (If possible, when you leave the link, please link to the actual entry. That saves me lots of time on the recaps!) Enjoy!

1. Last week’s first question was about the “Favorite Gadgets” item in the member profile. While we’re on the subject of gadgets, which gadget are you next most likely to buy?

6. READER’S CHOICE QUESTION #19 from looney4toonees: Regarding those true loves from last week’s edition, has anyone ever tried to find their lost love? (How did it go?)

Those of you who know me now understand the madness behind my method of doubling the Reader’s Choice questions for two weeks: the number of them finally matches the edition number of the “Saturday Six.” Eventually, I’ll do another edition in which all six questions come from you. I don’t know how I’ll ever get over that!

Next week, Danielle of “Everybody Knows” offers up the Reader’s Choice question. Have a question you’d like to see asked on an upcoming edition of the “Saturday Six?” Just click that white envelope icon in my “About Me” panel and E-mail it to me.

MY ANSWERS:
1. A DVD Recorder.

6. Never tried to find a “lost love,” but I do try to keep tabs on old friends.

Many of Bush’s critics (who happen to be, coincidentally, Kerry supporters), insist that Bush’s claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction are intentional lies. Since no weapons of mass destruction have been found, they say, and since Bush assured us they were there, this is proof that intentionally deceived the American people.

But if Iraq never had weapons of mass destruction, exactly when did the lying begin?

A news item in 2002 from a Glasgow newspaper reported the following information, which seems to show records of the earliest documented claims that Iraq had WMD it had obtained from the US and Great Britain:

“Reports by the US Senate’s committee on banking, housing and urban affairs, which oversees American exports policy, reveal that the US, under the successive administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Sr., sold materials including anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile fever germs and botulism to Iraq right up until March 1992, as well as germs similar to tuberculosis and pneumonia. Other bacteria sold included brucella melitensis, which damages major organs, and clostridium perfringens, which causes gas gangrene.

“Classified US Defense Department documents also seen by the Sunday Herald show that Britain sold Iraq the drug pralidoxine, an antidote to nerve gas, in March 1992, after the end of the Gulf war. Pralidoxine can be reverse engineered to create nerve gas.”
-Sunday Herald, Sept. 8, 2002

Notice that it said that these sales happened after the end of the Gulf War?

Well before that article, the Clinton years contained numerous references to Iraq’s alleged WMD program. Some examples:

“One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line.”
President Clinton, Feb. 4, 1998

“The UNSCOM inspectors believe that Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions, a small force of Scud-type missiles, and the capacity to restart quickly its production program and build many, many more weapons.

Now, against that background, let us remember the past here. It is against that background that we have repeatedly and unambiguously made clear our preference for a diplomatic solution . . .

But to be a genuine solution, and not simply one that glosses over the remaining problem, a diplomatic solution must include or meet a clear, immutable, reasonable, simple standard.

Iraq must agree and soon, to free, full, unfettered access to these sites anywhere in the country. There can be no dilution or diminishment of the integrity of the inspection system that UNSCOM has put in place.

Now those terms are nothing more or less than the essence of what he agreed to at the end of the Gulf War. The Security Council, many times since, has reiterated this standard. If he accepts them, force will not be necessary. If he refuses or continues to evade his obligations through more tactics of delay and deception, he and he alone will be to blame for the consequences.

Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction.

And some day, some way, I guarantee you, he’ll use the arsenal. And I think every one of you who’s really worked on this for any length of time believes that, too…

If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program. We want to seriously reduce his capacity to threaten his neighbors.

I am quite confident, from the briefing I have just received from our military leaders, that we can achieve the objective and secure our vital strategic interests.”
President Clinton, Speaking at the Pentagon, Feb. 17, 1998

“Iraq is a long way from [here], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.”
Madeline Albright, Feb 18, 1998

“[Saddam] will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.”
Sandy Berger, Clinton National Security Adviser, Feb, 18, 1998

Even after Clinton left office, one of Bush’s most outspoken critics, Al Gore, continued the claims of Iraq’s WMD threat:

“We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.”
Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002

“Iraq’s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.”
Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002

John Kerry, in at least three different occasions, referred to the threat:

“[W]e urge you, after consulting with Congress, and consistent with the U.S. Constitution and laws, to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq’s refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs.”
Letter to President Clinton, signed by Sens. Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, and others; Oct. 9, 1998

“I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force — if necessary — to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.”
Sen. John F. Kerry, Oct. 9, 2002

“We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence that Saddam Hussein has, and has had for a number of years, a developing capacity for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction. “[W]ithout question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime … He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation. And now he has continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction … So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real …
Sen. John F. Kerry, Jan. 23. 2003.

Reread that third quote from Kerry: “We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence….” He didn’t say that the Bush administration thought it was compelling evidence; he didn’t say he thought the intelligence community thought it was compelling; he said he thought it was compelling.

So I’m curious: Do those who are so certain that Bush intentionally lied, believe that any of these others who also insisted that Iraq had WMD engaged in the same lies as well? If not, how are we so sure that Bush’s story was an intentional deception, while the others’ stories were simply mistakes?

What is your criteria in this game of “Who do you trust?”

How seriously do you take weather reports? When a major storm is on the way, do you prepare, or do you wait to see which path the storm is taking?

When you see what amounts to a consistent direction, do you assume that the storm — a purely natural occurrence that man has no way to control — will continue in that exact path without any deviation?

My closest friends live in St. Petersburg, so I had been watching the storm closely when I learned it was headed their way. I got a call from my best friend yesterday. He also works in television, and he was at work through most of the drama as his station (along with all of the others) was keeping viewers informed as Hurricane Charley made landfall. They are fine.

Others, mostly further south, are not. Hurricane Charley is being blamed for at least 16 deaths in Florida where it devastated Punta Gorda and surrounding areas.

Charley’s path moved eastward at the last minute, but the focus on the Tampa/St. Petersburg area, many in the real path of the storm seemed to have been surprised by the change of direction. Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that meteorologists at the Hurricane Center are taking issue with that complaint: “We’re kind of surprised that people were caught by surprise,” said Meteorologist Robbie Berg.

The center had issued warnings from Tampa Bay to the Keys from the beginning. He says the media’s fixation with Tampa might have given people the wrong impression. Tampa was put under a mandatory evacuation order, and since it is the most populated area along the warning area, naturally it was going to get more attention in the coverage. But anyone in the warning area should have recognized the potential danger, no matter how much attention was being focused on Tampa; that’s why warnings are issued to begin with. “Everyone had ‘ample warning,’” Berg said. “It’s just unfortunate that certain people didn’t evacuate.”

Especially unfortunate is the belief that any location on the east side of the storm’s projected landfall would be safe; a hurricane’s strongest and most damaging winds are usually east of its eye.

I’ve never lived on the coast, primarily because I don’t want to live in a “hurricane zone.” But I’ve been through two major hurricanes — Hugo and Isabel — that were powerful enough to wreak havoc more than a hundred miles inland where I happened to be at the time. No matter what the media reported about conditions on the coast, I made sure I was prepared in case the storm continued in my path after making landfall. You just never know.

I don’t mean to sound harsh here, and I don’t mean to kick residents affected while they’re down; I am sympathetic to their plight. It is that plight that I hope will teach the rest of us that no matter how high-tech our forecasting tools may be, we’re still trying to second guess Mother Nature…and she, sooner or later, always wins.

There are already two active storms in the Atlantic poised to make their own marks. Danielle is now a category-two hurricane, but it is expected to dodge our continent completely. Earl, on the other hand, is a tropical storm that is expected to become a hurricane over the next 48 hours as it heads for the Yucatan Pennisula and southeast Texas.

It is already becoming a quite busy hurricane season.

The best any of us can do is to trust the reports, and more importantly, Mother Nature…at our own risk. Even when the skies are clear of clouds, there’s always some kind of storm right around the corner.

Another week, another set of questions…six, to be exact. And this week, there is a surprise: TWO Reader’s Choice Questions! To play you can either answer the questions in a comment here, or put the answers in an entry on your journal…but either way, leave a link to your journal so that everyone else can visit! Enjoy!

1. So no one likes that “Favorite Gadgets” question on AOL’s Member Profiles. What would you replace it with?

6. READER’S CHOICE QUESTION #17 from Nettie: Did you ever have a “true love” that got away……..and have you always regretted it?

Have a question you’d like to see asked on an upcoming edition of the “Saturday Six?” Just click that white envelope icon in my “About Me” panel and E-mail it to me.

MY ANSWERS:
1. I vote for a “Profiler’s Choice” question. Actually, I think the other lines pretty much sum up any information you’d casually give out on an online profile, and most people don’t fill out that much. If it were up to me, I’d take that “Gadgets” line and move it down below the line that is traditionally devoted to a link to your hometown profile. I’d then make that new line an automated link to your AOL profile. I’ve never been able to get HTML to work in a profile.

6. No true love, but plenty that got away. No specific ones that I regret.

There’s a new reason to hate Starbucks, say some mothers, and it has nothing to do with their coffee or their prices.

WJLA-TV in Washington, DC, reports that angry moms have been protesting stores there after a mother who decided to nurse her child inside a Maryland coffee shop was asked to either cover up or to nurse feed her baby in the ladies’ room.

Protestors claim that there is nothing shameful about breast feeding, that it is a perfectly natural thing. They claim that moms need to be able to live their lives outside of the home, and that sometimes means having to feed the baby. One of them wore a t-shirt to the protest which read, “Can you drink your latte in the bathroom?”

They also cite Maryland state law which allows for breast feeding in public. They have written letters and E-mail to Starbucks’ corporate office demanding that the stores comply with the law.

I’ve never been much of a Starbucks fan, but I’m on their side on this one. This is a ridiculous argument, as far as I’m concerned.

No one is saying that a mother should be ashamed of breast feeding. No one told the woman that she couldn’t breast feed in public. She was asked to cover herself. They make cloaks for that purpose. When my best friends had their first baby, it was explained to me that there are even pumps to extract milk for instances when breast feeding may not be possible.

There are alternatives here that could allow breast feeding to occur in public without offending other customers.

Of course breast feeding is a “natural” process. But so is the process that created the baby that needs to breast feed! I’d rather not see that happening out in the open in a coffee shop, either.

UPDATE: The first comment brings up a point I’d like to address, lest anyone think I’m being unfair to mothers. In the comment, Oceanmrc of “Midlife Matters” states:

“Most mothers nurse discreetly, without any need to “cover up.” It’s usually impossible to tell, unless you march right up to a woman and glare at her chest, whether her t-shirt is pulled up for a baby or not.”

Quite true. I am assuming that the mother who was asked to “cover up” wasn’t being discreet, otherwise it’s quite likely that no one would have noticed to begin with.

Oceanmrc continues:

“So have a chilled latte, or whatever it is people drink at Starbucks, and avert your eyes if you’re offended, folks.”

Many of the protestors have this same point of view. They’re not willing to back down from their position at all. This seems to me to be a little unreasonable.

I’m not saying that moms shouldn’t be able to breast feed in public. I just think that common social graces might suggest that being discreet wouldn’t be the end of the world. Why should I have to “avert” my eyes if I am supporting their right to breast feed? Why wouldn’t moms be willing to breast feed discreetly? Why can’t both sides find a compromise rather than forcing only one side to “deal with it?”

That’s all I’m saying.

Are terror alerts a politically-motivated ploy to raise the president’s approval rating? That’s a question many Democrats are asking these days.

Most of Bush’s opponents don’t want to discuss what they’d like to see the current administration to do about the threat of terror if it can’t be allowed to raise a terror alert when it finds information that suggests a possible target or timeframe.

So far, no one has been willing to go on record saying that there is no threat of terror. No one has been willing to go on record saying that terrorists aren’t plotting new ways to infiltrate the United States. And while many seem to have myriad problems with the Bush administration’s color coding, few seem to have a clearly better alternative.

The same site that tabulates projected Electoral Votes which I mentioned in my last essay provides a link to a plot of President Bush’s approval ratings. Terror alerts and the other notable events have been plotted along with ratings gathered over Bush’s presidency.

It is suggested that an incumbent president’s approval rating is the best predictor of his re-election; presidents with an approval rating below the 50% mark generally do not get re-elected. At this writing, Bush’s median approval rating appears to be around the 47% mark.

But the reason for producing this graph is two-fold: not only does its author hope to offer these numbers as proof that Bush will not get a second term, he also hopes to show that Bush is strategically using terror alerts to boost his sagging approval rating.

Do the facts support his claim? Let’s take a look.

First, he suggests that every time there is a “dip” in Bush’s approval rating, a terror alert is announced. This isn’t entirely accurate. We don’t see sudden drops before terror alerts are raised that are steeper than general decline that is already occurring. It’s unquestionable that Bush’s approval rating has been declining for some time. But the rate of decline has been fairly steady if you remove the terror alerts from the picture. The low point shown before each rise is only a low point because the number then goes back up a bit. Otherwise, it would pretty much be a straight line headed in the same downward direction. There are no real potholes appearing here.

Second, he suggests that the terror alerts always raise Bush’s approval rating, justifying this continuing tactic. It’s not true. Many of the terror alerts do precede a brief spike in the numbers, but not all of them do. Some seem to have no effect at all. Also, there are occasional spikes that occur in the absence of an immediate terror alert, which means that they cannot be the sole cause of improved ratings for the president. Therefore, you cannot even assume that the terror alerts that do precede a riseare the only possible reason for that the rise.

Third, he suggests that as we approach the election, the number and frequency of terror alerts keeps growing. It is not entirely impossible to imagine that our election could be a time at which terrorists wish to strike in the hopes of altering the outcome. Also, this fails to consider the fact that as we dig deeper into the terror threat, it is inevitable that we will find more details about possible plans. The same thing occurs in medicine when a new test is perfected to successfully diagnose illness: more cases are generally found. This doesn’t mean that the number of cases are on the rise or that doctors are trying to scare the general public; it simply means that they have new tools that enable them to diagnose the problem more efficiently.

Fourth, the writer seems to miss one very obvious fact: despite the spikes that have occurred in Bush’s approval rating, none seems to be permanent. If, as he is trying so hard to prove, the Bush administration is issuing terror alerts to “boost” his numbers, it should be clear by now that the spikes are short-lived and that when an alert is issued without either a major arrest or a terrorist attack occurring, the numbers end up dropping lower than they were before the alert is issued. Does this sound like a strategy any team would use for long?

Fifth, he then adds:

“…for the record, we are not claiming that all these alerts are politically motivated. We are sure a considerable amount of these alerts were legit and caused by real and immediate information of potential threats. What is important to note is that many of these “immediate” terror alerts were later on discredited (in some cases they used old data, in other cases the announcements were less immediate and less urgent that we were lead to believe, as the press reported.) Those are the cases that could be interpreted as politically motivated, especially when they seemed to coincide with political news and events unfavorable to the administration.”

The conditional language, (”not all,” “could be interpreted,” “seemed to coincide”), means, in translation, that he could be completely off base. The facts the writer provides do not support the bulk of his case, least of all the notion that Bush is using terror alerts to “improve” his approval rating.

It comes down to this: you have to decide for yourself how seriously you want to take the threat when a new alert is issued. If you choose to assume that a new threat must be bogus because you feel Bush is a bogus president, so be it. But if an alert is issued and an attack occurs, you cannot then blame the government for not doing its part to warn you.

Many people seem so annoyed by even the mention of a terror alert these days that I am beginning to think they would like for this country to completely suspend all homeland security activities until Inauguration Day in January. That way, the possibility of the alert system being used as a political ploy would be impossible.

Of course, this election year, we are learning that virtually anything can be used as a political ploy…even a trio of Purple Hearts!

Since the campaign began, John Kerry has tried to identify himself almost completely by his Vietnam service, despite two decades as a senator. We all know that he won three Purple Hearts, but most people would have a harder time naming any signature piece of legislation that he is credited for getting onto the books.

Since President Bush’s slip of the tongue, in which he said, “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we,” many Democrats have delighted themselves in taking the obvious shots, claiming that for the first time, Bush has spoken the complete truth.

(Naturally, any time a Republican takes an obvious shot at a Democrat, these same bloggers refer to the Republican comments as the “typical” partisan response, but that’s another rant.)

I don’t think anyone would be shocked at this point to hear it suggested that Bush might not be the brightest bulb in the lamp store. Late night comedians and political cartoonists have been making that point for three and a half years now. I think that most of the same people would likely agree that Kerry is either smarter than Bush…or that he at least appears to be.

Yet according to some polls, both candidates are still within a few points of each other: roughly half of likely voters — even if they believe that Bush isn’t an intellectual heavyweight — don’t seem to know enough about Kerry to believe that he’s a better choice!

No matter which candidate you side with, considering what’s at stake, the fact that either candidate could be that unknown…to that many people…this close to an election…should scare the hell out of all of us.

To play, answer the questions here or put the answers in an entry on your journal…but the link you leave here gives everyone who plays a chance to visit your journal! Enjoy!

1. How many E-mails are in your mailbox that you have already read, but are “holding” there anyway?

Have a question you’d like to see asked on an upcoming edition of the “Saturday Six?” Just click that white envelope icon in my “About Me” panel and E-mail it to me.

MY ANSWERS:
1. At the moment, there are 20 items that I’m holding in my E-mail. I don’t know why, but that whole “personal file cabinet” thing never held much appeal. I hang on to E-mails if there is an ongoing conversation or if I’m waiting to confirm something until I know everything is clear.

6. I learned early in my career about the pressures of live TV. No one wants to make a mistake when you’re live, because there’s no going back to fix it. My philosophy sort of came out of that background of having to learn which mistakes you can correct and which ones aren’t:

If there’s no way to fix a mistake, spend your time worrying about preventing the next one, not beating yourself up over something over which you no longer have any control.