R.I.P.

Farewell, sweet Escort. You served me well....

Great Letter in Today's OshNW:

Editorial: Highway workers deserve respect for work, not immature scorn

I'd like to respond to Mr. Ken McGuire's extremely immature letter to the editor dated Feb. 8.

I am the wife of a county highway employee and would like to comment on a few things myself. We have two very young children at home that have seen very little of their father this winter because he has been making sure that your highway and county roads are safe for you and your family to travel on. They recently lost two of their peers due to the dangers of their job and I am disappointed that an individual would feel the need to make public issue with seven of them receiving compensation for hours unpaid that spanned over a year and a half worth of time.

So in the future, consider who takes care of your roads when it's 95 degrees and they are laying asphalt or 15 below and 2 a.m. when the roads are blown shut. These are honest, hard-working individuals that are trying to do the same thing that I am sure you are - provide for their family.

Lisa Averkamp Hilbert

More troubles with electronic voting - in Winnebago County

Some residents were unable to vote in Tuesday's presidential primary after they mistakenly selected the nonpartisan designation on the electronic voting machines and submitted their ballots without correcting the error.

City Clerk Patty Sturn said some voters didn't realize that they were required to select a party designation if they wished to vote in the presidential race.

Presidential primaries are party races and there are no nonpartisan presidential candidates. If voters did not select a party designation, they were able to vote only for the school board.

What does the military feel about the Bush administration?

• 60 percent of the officers surveyed say the military is weaker today than five years ago, largely because of Iraq, Afghanistan and the punishing rate of troop deployments.
• More than half say the military is weaker than it was 10 or 15 years ago.
• Some 88 percent say the demands of the Iraq war have stretched the military "dangerously thin."
• The officers rate their confidence in Mr. Bush ? who was hugely popular with the military in the 2000 election ? at a mere 5.5 on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best.

...

• More than 80 percent of the officers say it would be "unreasonable" to ask the military to wage another major war today.
• When asked how prepared the United States is to execute a military mission against Iran or North Korea, both of whose nuclear programs are a cause of great concern in Washington, officers put both below 5 on a 1 to 10 scale.
• When asked to judge the readiness of the military services to fight, the Army, which has shouldered the bulk of the Iraq war, rated the worst score - 4.7 on a scale of 1 to 10.

It's all here

Is Oshkosh the Center of the World?

From the Dallas Morning News:

"Welcome to the center of the world," joked Jef Hall, a Winnebago County supervisor and chairman of the county Democratic Party. "Oshkosh is a great barometer for national politics – we're a 50-50 city in a 50-50 county in a 50-50 state. As goes Oshkosh, so goes the world."