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PRESIDENT'S CORNER
Pamela Smith, Greater Fort Worth PRSA
I've decided to take a vacation from the president's message. No long speech this August. I tried my hardest to think about a column from my Twin Cities hotel in Minnesota, but at the end of the day, the one thing that stood out in my mind is that everyone needs a vacation. I even gave the PRSA leadership a break from our monthly board meeting.
If you haven't already taken a much-needed siesta this year, make arrangements, soon. We all need a vacation -- even presidents. As a wife, mother of a 4-year-old, full-time employee, part-time graduate student and a volunteer, I think I am entitled to one month off. And even if your plate isn't as full, you are, too.
So give your mind a midyear rest, even if it's just for the day. You'll need that replenished energy in the months ahead. See you at the monthly luncheon. I should be back to the real world by then.
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PRESIDENT'S COLUMN
Tim Tune, IABC/Fort Worth
We're one for one in meaningful meetings this new year. In early July, we launched the 2004-05 board term by holding our first speed networking lunch. It's not a new concept, but it was new to us, and we hit a home run. Members and guests had a great time and made some good connections, or just got acquainted. Some things you take your time with. Some things you don't.
Coming up Aug. 3, don't miss memory marvel Ron White's program on "How to Have a Winning Year," a presentation packed with demonstrations, instructions, techniques and strategies for making the next 12 months your best ever. And in September, Weslynn Martin will challenge us to sharpen an overlooked aspect of communications: the art of listening.
We look forward to seeing you -- and hearing from you -- again soon.
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OVER & OUT
John Dycus, Fort Worth SPJ
Welcome to the leadership biz, new board members Linda P. Campbell and Jim Douglas, board president Gayle Reaves-King, scholarships VP Angie Summers, programs co-VPs Paul and Paula LaRocque, awards and recognition VP Kristin Sullivan and membership VP Mike Martinez. Welcome back to the board, John Sparks, Dino Chiecchi, John Jenkins and Tom Williams. Good luck and tell us how we can help, Tony Pederson, who resigned from the board to devote more time to SPJ efforts in Dallas. ...
A heartfelt hat tip and cross-species huzzahs to Gary and Cami Hardee, sons Evan and Taylor and Hunter the fat-back beagle for loan of their picturesque Grand Prairie backyard for our annual splash day. Jim Douglas took a Stockyards-worthy melodic turn on guitar, Ron Holcomb fed us with flair, troubadour Brad Hines sounded better than James Taylor, and organizer Mark Horvit ably tied everything together. Thanks to them all. Brad deserves a robust throng wherever he plays, and Hunter, who did a nosedive like a pig on truffles into the musician's foil-wrapped take-home rib dinner, should have his own show. ...
Knight Ridder's Joseph L. Galloway delivers "a real keeper" of a story by a West Point graduate, Class of 2003, who's at war in Iraq. The author gave permission to quote from a letter he wrote if his name wasn't used. It's here. ...
When others say it, it's treason. So what is it when conservatives say it? "... So the leitmotif for Operation Iraqi Freedom was not WMDs, but the freedom of Iraq in the larger context of long-range security for Israel. Mr. Bush is right to change the rationale for war to isn't-the-world-a-better-place-without-Saddam? Of course it is. Was Iraq ever a threat to the U.S. homeland? Of course it wasn't. But hasn't the U.S. occupation of Iraq provided a force multiplier for al Qaeda? Of course it has. And the world is not a more peaceful place than it was before the occupation of Iraq." -- Arnaud de Borchgrave, editor-at-large, The Washington Times, Feb. 10. "When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate. Leave aside the question of who or what failed before Sept. 11, 2001. But who lost his or her job because the president's 2003 State of the Union address gave currency to a fraud -- the story of Iraq's attempting to buy uranium in Niger? Or because the primary and only sufficient reason for waging preemptive war -- weapons of mass destruction -- was largely spurious? Or because postwar planning, from failure to anticipate the initial looting to today's insufficient force levels, has been botched? Failures are multiplying because of choices for which no one seems accountable." -- George Will in his column April 30.
Closing words: "Do not fall into the easy trap of mourning the loss of U.S. lives." -- from one of a series of daily memos apparently sent to the entire Fox news operation by John Moody, a senior vice president; the memos are a focal point of Robert Greenwald's film, "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism" ... "We're about to elect a president of the United States at a time when we have young people dying in our name overseas, we just had a report from the 9-11 commission which says we are not safe as a nation, and one of these two groups of people is going to run our country. The fact that you three networks decided it was not important enough to run in prime time, the message that gives the American people is huge. As a citizen, it bothers me." -- PBS anchor Jim Lehrer to Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings, at a panel discussion at Harvard U., on their networks' paltry political convention plans ... "Even criticism of the United States has to be imported from the United States." -- the left-leaning Polish newspaper Trybuna on the generally negative reviews in that country of "Fahrenheit 9/11" ... "My youngest [child] is 23, my oldest is 36. This is about them. What right do we have to put them in a permanent war with people who are crazy? Here we have 9-11, and the whole Muslim world, 99 percent of them, even the true believers, were horrified and said, 'What can we do to help you?' And these nuts [in the Bush administration] drove them away. These ideologues drove them away." -- Seymour Hersh to the Star-Telegram's Tim Madigan ... "There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write." -- William Makepeace Thackeray ... Top administration officials "cherry-picked the intel for the most damning, and often least reliable, tidbits and produced alarming conclusions -- the 45-minute chemical attack scenario, the African uranium and the al Qaeda connection. The CIA never supported these assertions." -- Lt. Col. Dale Davis, a former Marine counterintelligence officer now at the Virginia Military Institute, relating conversations with former intelligence colleagues to New York Times writer Nicholas D. Kristof ... "We call them, we have questions, we want to know, and they don't have anything to tell us. They don't have nothing to say, and that's not right." -- Lufkin resident Rebecca Suell, contesting the Army's assertion that her 24-year-old husband, a three-year military man who preached to others that suicide was a sin, died of a drug-overdose suicide in Iraq
