"OPERATION TREE" SHOULD BE RECYCLED FOR ANOTHER YEAR

We'll be back tomorrow night on Channel 13 at 8 p.m. with a program of interest to every voter and taxpayer in Cape Girardeau County. Behind the Headlines, which airs Wednesdays at 8, will feature the Senior Citizens tax proposal that's before county voters one week from today.

Guests will be Glenda Hood, Director of the Area Agency on Aging, and retired Cape businessman Russell Faust, a widely respected senior volunteer. They'll be there to answer your questions and respond to your comments.

Do you have questions or an opinion to share? Tune in and give us a call to participate in an informative dialogue on this important issue.

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Best wishes for a speedy recovery to Judy Crow, a longtime friend who's in Southeast Hospital recuperating from a nasty fall last week. Hurry back, Judy, we need you!

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Friday's torrential rains gave way to warm, sunny weather Saturday, Sunday and Monday, accentuating spring's arrival with its theme of rebirth and renewal just in time for Holy Week. The spectacular redbuds, the flowering peartrees, jonquils, daffodills, forsythia and other colorful growing things make this a special time of year.

Those of us who saved up old newspapers and recycled them as part of "Operation Tree" a few weeks back will be picking up our trees early next month. The time for turning in coupons for trees will be Friday through Sunday, April 5-7, at the Arena Building.

Thanks to the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and Department Director G. Tracy Mehan for an innovative and successful program that involved hundreds of people locally, and thousands statewide. This is one recycling program that should be recycled. How about a repeat sometime soon?

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Is it a Bush cover-up?

You might have thought there was a limit to the shamelessness of some in Congress to try to have it every possible way on the war in the Gulf. You'd be wrong.

Recall that a few weeks ago, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry sent two blatantly contradictory letters to a constituent who had written Kerry urging his support for President Bush's gulf policy. One letter expressed Kerry's opposition to the whole gulf policy, while the other declared his all-out support for President Bush, the troops and the war.

Sen. Kerry has done himself one better. His most recent pronouncement:

"If the President had told me that there would be only 100 casualties and it would take just a week, I would have voted in favor of using military force."

Oh.

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The national Democratic Party continues to hang out a sign that says to all comers, "No conservatives need apply." The New York Times noted recently that Senate Democrats took the highly unusual step of kicking a colleague off the Budget Committee for the sin of wanting to reduce the deficit by means of spending cuts rather than tax increases. Virginia Sen. Chuck Robb, the son-in-law of the late President Lyndon Baines Johnson, is too conservative for today's leadership in what used to be called the World's Greatest Deliberative Body.

Sen. Robb, a hugely popular former governor of the Old Dominion, was kicked off the Senate Budget Committee by Chairman Jim Sasser, D.-Tenn. and Majority Leader George Mitchell, D.-Maine. Seems the sort of fiscal conservatism that makes a state chief executive unbeatable in a southern state such as Virginia is not what they're looking for among our current majority in the United States Senate.

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Lifelong Democrat Edward Koch, who served seven terms in Congress before two terms as mayor of New York, has some harsh things to say about his party's recent showing on the debate over the war in the Persian Gulf. Citing the "isolationist views of Ted Kennedy, Sam Nunn and Pat Moynihan," Koch wrote in his New York Post column: "the Democratic Pary has now become the party of appeasement. Let us now weep for our party."