Dear Ms. Friend,
Imagine being confined to a cell for 17 hours a day, and having little or no access to reading, writing, or learning -- or talks with friends.
Imagine that the Bible is the only reading material you are given. When there is a copy of a magazine, imagine that you have to share it with 699* other women.
Now imagine receiving your own personal copy of Ms. magazine, and knowing that more will come.
You can make this happen with a tax deductible gift to the Ms. Magazine Prison and Domestic Violence Shelter Program, a fund dedicated to creating a link with women in prison and women who have reached the safety of a shelter but rarely have access to supportive books and magazines.
Whatever you celebrate in this season -- Christmas or Kwanzaa, Diwali, Ramadan, Chanukah or the Winter Solstice -- reach out in the spirit of giving that is universal. Just click here and you can extend the sisterhood, support, facts, creativity, humor and community that the women's movement has brought to you: https://feminist.org/donations/ms/prisons_121004.asp
In fact, Ms. has always done its best to provide free magazines to individual women in prisons and shelters who requested it, but only in the last few years have we been able to get the official permissions necessary to create an organized initiative.
Our current resources allow us to just skim the surface. Of the tens of thousands of women in prisons in the U.S., Ms. is reaching only 15,430. Of the more than 1,800 domestic violence shelters nationwide, Ms. is sent to 467. Please help us to empower and inspire more women in 2005 by making a tax-deductible donation today: https://feminist.org/donations/ms/prisons_121004.asp
Let me tell you a story about the origin of this dream of sending Ms. behind bars and into shelters.
Years ago I met an elegant African American woman in her late thirties who told me that she had first read Ms. in prison. She had been convicted of prostitution, and after reading a few issues of Ms., she began to wonder why she was serving time, yet her pimp and customers were not. She went to the prison library to find law books, only to be told that in her state, men's prisons had law libraries but women's did not. She organized other women prisoners to protest.
When law books arrived, she began researching questions for herself and other prisoners; questions of unequal justice, child custody, and others. After her release, she found a clerical job at a women's law firm, and went on to finish high school and attend college at night. "Now I'm a lawyer," she said. "I thought you just might like to know."
I will never forget that woman. She gave me the greatest gift of all: the feeling of making a difference. I want to share this gift with you by asking you to join me in sending Ms. as a portable friend to places where women have few friends and few resources. https://feminist.org/donations/ms/prisons_121004.asp
We'll be publishing letters of response from women who are reached by this program. Help make their voices heard. They will be a gift to you.
In sisterhood,
Gloria Steinem
*An actual number from the Virginia Correctional Center librarian.

One of the little appreciated facts about 1960 is that Nixon got more votes than Kennedy. The figures that appear in standard reference works are 34,226,731 for Kennedy and 34,108,157 for Nixon, but the Kennedy total includes 324,050 votes for an unpledged slate of Democratic electors in Alabama, where Kennedy’s name was not on the ballot. His actual vote total was 205,476 less than Nixon’s.

In answer to Mr. Derbyshire's bleg, it appears that JF Neal and John Neal are indeed one and the same.

All Mr. Derbyshire needed to do was consult the website of the Waterboro (Maine) Public Library (wouldn't that have been your first research stop?) to find out, that John Neal (Aug. 23, 1793 - Jun. 20, 1876) was an American writer and author of many works including Brother John. He spent 1823-27 in England where he wrote a series of columns for Blackwood's Magazine, which work was "considered the first effort to chronicle and explain American literature and was reprinted as American Writers in 1937. "

Mr. Neal also taught boxing at Bowdoin College. But perhaps the most endearing Neal story (to me anyway), is that he, "at 79 years old, is noted for throwing a defiant cigar-smoking passenger off a street car."

Washington, D.C. --Congressman Steve King (IA-05) has been chosen to lead a prominent conservative Republican forum on Capitol Hill during the 109th Congress.

King will serve as chairman of the Conservative Opportunity Society, a 22-year-old organization that provided the common ground on which conservative Republican House members planned the revolution that ultimately captured majority control of the House in 1994.

King will join the ranks of former speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, who along with Republican "young Turk" conservatives, envisioned a forum for conservative House members to discuss and debate issues facing the country and develop legislative responses and tactics to lead Republicans out of decades of minority status. Years later, the "Contract With America" emerged as the watchword for the successful 1994 campaign that installed a GOP majority in the House for the first time in 40 years.

"The Conservative Opportunity Society is the core of the new face of American conservatism," Congressman King said. "The recent election just shows us how important traditional American conservative values are to this country, and this historical and important group of lawmakers will continue to lead the modern conservative movement."

King represents the Fifth Congressional District of Iowa. In January, he will begin his second term in the U.S. House. Since his election to Congress in 2002, King has emerged as a leading conservative. He is a frequent guest of nationally syndicated news and talk shows.

A number of people have written about the possibility she will move to Bush's right on the subject (not terribly hard to do). Here's an email about it:

"Hillary has done very little to move in our direction re immigration but this could be major if she moves further. Promising to 'end illegal immigration as we know it' could be a key ad of 2008.

"I've been thinking that it is about time that liberal Dems wake up and smell the coffee on immigration. Substantially reducing immigration levels would be a great issue for them. Supporters could include:

1. Environmentalists, for obvious reasons
2. Labor union that finally realize that having more potential members is worthless if immigrants increase competition at the lower end of the income spectrum, thereby making it more difficult to organize.
3. Blacks, who will become a smaller share of the population if immigration trends continue.
4. Hispanics already here who have to compete with new workers added via even more immigration.

"The problem will be with the up-scale social liberals, but they are more concerned with being able to kill babies and Hillary is golden on that issue."

Pianin, perhaps the Washington Post's most biased reporter, had a Daschle-legacy article in yesterday's paper. You will not be surprised to see the reference to "the Republicans' three-year campaign to portray Daschle as unpatriotic." Nor will you be surprised that the existence of this campaign is presented as objective truth rather than Democratic spin. Republicans are not given a chance to deny the charge. Daschle turns out to be a sweet, moderate, accomplished public servant.

What was surprising was this sentence: "Daschle and Lott believed that conservative House Republicans had gone too far by impeaching the president for essentially lying about his affair in a civil proceeding, and they worked successfully behind the scenes to avert a conviction." Lott didn't say that at the time; nor has he said it since. Pianin seems to have gotten actual news here without realizing it--he doesn't play the comment up. But what's all this about behind-the-scenes work to avert a conviction? Everyone knew that the votes weren't there for conviction. How much work had to be done?

Men with children favored the president on the question of agreement on cultural direction by nearly 60 percentage points (Bush 77, Kerry 18), while men without kids slightly favored Mr. Kerry (Bush 37, Kerry 43). The pattern among women still strongly favors President Bush, but the differences are smaller -- a 25 percent advantage for the president among women with kids and a statistical tie among those without children.

Many analysts, including myself, assumed that the "values voters" popularized in this election were mothers with kids, concerned about the increasing moral relativism and cultural coarseness in the world around them. These data support that idea. Yet men with kids are even more divided and intense on the issue -- a less-understood pattern.

While the conventional wisdom focused on "security moms" and their passion for protecting their kids from everything from threats to physical safety to moral degradation, dads overwhelmingly had the same concerns and felt even more convinced that Mr. Bush would lead the culture in the right direction.

As he admits, Hitler's Pope (1999), his biography of Pope Pius XII, lacked balance. “I would now argue,” he says, “in the light of the debates and evidence following Hitler's Pope, that Pius XII had so little scope of action that it is impossible to judge the motives for his silence during the war, while Rome was under the heel of Mussolini and later occupied by the Germans.”

If the Americans need to increase their support for diplomatic efforts, Europeans must prove to the Iranians that severe political and economic consequences will result if Iran does not renounce the nuclear weapons option. In the event that diplomacy fails and Iran decides not to abandon its efforts to develop nuclear weapons, Europeans should be ready for alternative courses of action, including going to the U.N. Security Council, and they should repeatedly stress their willingness to act. The transatlantic community should not be trying to force a confrontation with Iran, but we must not fear one if that's what is necessary to prevent the introduction of another nuclear weapons program into the combustible Middle East.

Fat chance
The District-based WMAL radio is leading a fund-raising drive on behalf of Fisher House, which, explains talk-show host Michael Graham, assists "the wives, children and parents who have wounded loved ones receiving treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Bethesda Naval Hospital or Malcolm Grow Medical at Andrews Air Force base."
Mr. Graham offered that explanation in a letter to a potential big donor — or, rather, a big potential donor: documentary filmmaker Michael Moore.
"America's soldiers have been very good to you," Mr. Graham writes in an open letter to Mr. Moore. "Most of them don't like you, but they're prepared to die attempting to protect you from terrorism so that you can continue to crank out your profitable propaganda.
"They've done all this for you. I'm writing to give you the opportunity to do something for them. ...
"The message of your books and films is that the American soldier is a victim. The soldiers I've spoken with at Fisher House vehemently disagree with you, as do the majority of my active-duty military listeners. However, we all agree that the soldiers who have been the victims of Iraqi terrorist violence ... deserve our support.
"Therefore, I am writing to challenge you to give back just a small portion of the money you have earned as a critic of their mission. Your film 'Fahrenheit 9/11' has grossed around $150 million. Our entire goal for the Fisher House this holiday season is a tiny percentage of that amount. ...
"If you feel, however, that the money can be better spent on yet another trip to France, nobody will be surprised.
"You can send your check made out to the Fisher House Foundation, care of 630 WMAL, 4400 Jenifer Street NW, Washington, DC 20015."

Did you see the Fritz Hollings piece on 60 minutes? The only reason I watched was because I thought someone would finally call him in his segregationist past. Surely Mike Wallace, the "relentless" "bulldog" of CBS News will level his famous "piercing glare" and why then-Governor Hollings told Eisenhower that minorities had no right to demonstrate outside segregationist lunch counters.

Here's what we got:

Wallace: "Condoleeza Rice?"

Hollings: "She needs to go back to teaching Russian or whatever."

Wallace: "Ha!"

Cripes, it was like watching Larry King.

I'm sorry but that guy was an idiot.

Were I the doctor I'd have simply decided the guys injuries were clouding his thinking, sedated him and saved what I could of the finger, ring be damned.

The ring, no matter how sentimental its value, could be replaced. The finger cannot.