We get letters

On May 8th, the Los Angeles Times published a photograph on its front page of the first passenger train to leave Baghdad since the recent hostilities in Iraq had started. A pithy observation instantly occurred to me, and decided I might as well e-mail it to the Times as a letter to the editor.

Three days later, I was surprised to see my letter, complete and unedited, in the paper, especially since they hadn't called me to verify my identity. It was Sunday, so there was a larger potential readership for my letter than the other six days of the week...although I had a feeling that a lot of the Sunday readers get waylaid by the Best Buy ads and the TV magazine and never make it all the way back to the Opinion section.

For the record: "Re news photo, front page, May 8: It's nice to see that passenger train service has returned to Iraq with the help of the U.S. government. Now, where is the Bush administration's support for passenger train service in the United States?"

I'm sure it didn't hurt that it was short, and it was actually timely, although I don't think the L.A. Times ran any articles about the hearings Congress recently had in which deputy secretary of transportation Michael Jackson basically said the Bush administration wants Amtrak to go away.