We added this feature due to the increasing interest readers are having with adding feedback to our stories. In The Vent, you don’t have to confine your comments to the stories on the site.

Our intention is to occasionally “reverse publish” comments from The Vent back into the newspaper. I experimented with this last week by reprinting a few comments on some of our stories in the newspaper on the opinion page.

The rules are a little bit looser than letters to the editor, but as a result we (and I assume readers) don’t treat them as seriously, and we’ll only run short ones, so a large screed on The Vent is not going to get you published.

In addition, the same guidelines for appropriate comments in The Vent apply as they do in other parts of the site and in the newspaper. Please report any obscene or inappropriate posts there for removal.

Head over to The Vent at let us know what’s on your mind.

It’s a complicated, nuanced issue, despite the appearance of a typical government squabble over who wears the pants in Washngton. The White House argues that it has the right to receive “candid and unfettered advice and open discussions and deliberations occur among his advisors and between those advisors and others within and outside the Executive Branch” in order to perform his duties.

To put this in terms for those who follow local government, what he’s talking about is the right to negotiate in private over issues and not have to publicly reveal his hand. City Council, for example, is permitted to have closed-door sessions about certain types of legal and contract negotiations, because if the conversations happened in public, they would lose all their bargaining power. it would be like playing poker with all your cards face up on the table.

However, the problem here is that there’s no oversight. The White House is demanding the right to decide what falls under this privilege. It would be like City Council rewriting the state’s Brown Act to cover whatever it wants to cover (not that most city councils wouldn’t love to be able to do this).

This has become a very important hallmark for the Bush Administration, and I believe that history will ultimately show these past seven years as an object lesson as to why governmental separation of powers are so important. It’s not about the (D) or the (R) as such. We may think that the war in Iraq is going to be the big issue that history records (after 9/11), but I tend to think that it’s really the most visible example of a much larger problem. Congress chose to give the president a lot of power. And once power is granted to a government agent, it’s very hard to take it away again.

Or to put in a different way to those who still support the administration’s behavior: If Hillary Clinton wins election next year, would you be satisfied with her having just as much power as President George W. Bush has now? Because as it stands, she will.

With this information, I’d have to say that the decision is a far more serious blow against the First Amendment rights of students then I first thought. It makes it permissible for school administrators to monitor speech in places where they don’t have the real jurisdiction to do so. Expect to see more instances of schools taking action against students’ use of speech in public areas that aren’t necessarily connected to the school, such as Web sites.

So what do you think of the folks who write regular commentaries on our opinion pages? Some have local ties, like Richard Reeb, Carol Jensen, and Barry Gadbois. Others, like Michelle Malkin and Tibor Machan, do not, but provide some interesting perspectives.

Which commentators do you like the most? Which do you disagree with, but read anyway? Which ones just aren’t worth your time at all? Feel free to post comments, but please explain your answers. I’m not going to change or eliminate a commentary writer just because people don’t like what he or she has to say. I’m looking for better understanding about how you interact with our opinion page.

This guy, however, gets points for gutsiness by really grasping to make a connection between his book and “reducing global warming”:

Silicon Valley, CA: If you’ve been turning ‘Green’ and wondering how you can help save the environment and even stop global warming, Silicon Valley inventor Dale Zamzow has the answer: “Build your own multi-purpose furniture.”

According to Zamzow, “why does a coffee table have to be just a coffee table? Why not construct a piece of furniture that can serve as a coffee table, a storage chest, liquor cabinet, hope chest…even your very own ultimate home.”

Zamzow has documented his idea in a new book entitled BUILD YOUR OWN COFFIN FOR UNDER TEN BUCKS. With this manual you can create your own dual-purpose coffin…a box that you can use now, as a piece of beautiful furniture. Then later, when the need arises, it can become your ultimate resting place.

“At last count, there were more than 6,556,773,622 people on this planet. If only a fraction of these folks followed the instructions in my book, we’d bring back the rain forests and halt this dreaded global warming syndrome. It’s the ultimate do-it-yourself project. Build a simple bookcase, a plush home entertainment center, an unique coffin table; handcraft a hope chest or linen cabinet. See how you can construct a piece of furniture that can be used now…and forevermore.”

For a free preview of this book, check out www.lulu.com/zamzow.

Yes, of course. We’ll halt global warming by making our own coffins! It all makes perfect sense!

First, the court ruled unconstitutional certain restrictions on advocacy political advertisements prior to elections. The court ruled 5-4 that the guidelines restricting a timeframe prior to elections when the ads could run were too severe.

This goes down as a partial “W” for the First Amendment. The court didn’t throw out the entire McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, but does allow more freedom for interested parties to make their cases to the American people as elections approach. Now if the whole law, which favors incumbents in the guise of allegedly “cleaning up” politics, could get tossed out, that would be great.

In a more complicated decision, the First Amendment gets a small “L”in the case of a high school student and his “bong hits 4 Jesus” banner. You can probably guess what this case is about. Boy hangs up banner, gets in trouble. The school’s argument here was that he wasn’t saying anything of substance about drugs and the banner could be seen as advocating illegal behavior. The court agreed, but made it clear that the nature of the boy’s message mattered here. If it had made some sort of political statement about drug legalization or something to that effect, the decision might have gone otherwise.

While I understand the nature of the decision, I don’t expect that most school administrators will understand or care about the distinctions. I fully expect this decision to be pointed to when schools suppress actual political speech.

And in a ruling regarding the executive branch of the United States and the separation of church and state, I’m still not quite sure how to call it. The Supreme Court blocked a suit against the Bush Administration’s Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. The plaintiffs argued (quite correctly, in my opinion) that the government was giving tax money to churches, a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. In a 5-4 ruling, the majority determined that the plaintiffs had “no standing” to argue damages in this situation.

My limited understanding of the court ruling (and I did actually read several pages of both sides here, but I’m not even capable of being a pretend Internet lawyer) was that the money spent was distributed at the discretion of the executive branch. The distribution of funds in this fashion could not be subjected to lawsuits in this fashion, or else it would open the executive branch up to lawsuits over every expense or decision. It falls upon the legislative branch (Congress) to set guidelines for executive branch expenditures if it chooses to do so.

I feel a little odd about the decision. I understand the logic they’re presenting, but if a branch of the government is violating the Establishment Clause, does it matter the circumstances? In this case, the Supreme Court narrowly ruled that it doesn’t have the power to tell the executive branch what it may or may not spend money on, even if it’s a violation.

Of course, from a libertarian perspective, if the government didn’t take tax dollars and redistribute them to charities against our will in the first place, we’d all be free to donate to whichever secular or religious charity suited us.

We also have a tool in the blog that automatically rejects what is believed to be spam. However, I don’t see these comments at all when they’re rejected by the system, so I have no oversight there.

If you’re trying to post a comment on any of the blogs and it’s just not working, shoot me an e-mail at scott_shackford@link.freedom.com and I’ll see if I can’t figure out what’s going on.

My personal attitude is that as a field, we are being silly and pretentious when we try to pretend that we aren’t engaged as citizens in our community, using ethics as a justification.

The larger problem, one which journalism ethics doesn’t seem able to deal with, is that the prohibition against journalists giving contributions to campaigns does not even remotely reduce the appearance of bias. Bias comes from thoughts, not actions. The incorrect assumption here is: “If journalists don’t contribute or participate in political campaigns, then there is no evidence of bias, and people will trust them.” But what actually happens is that people will draw their own conclusions (and sometimes inaccurate ones) about the level of a journalist’s objectivity anyway. Does knowing that a larger percentage of journalists have given to the left than the right (in this particular investigation) change what you already believed to be true about journalists? Probably not.

The public would probably be better served if individual journalists participated in our society as they chose to and then simply be honest about it, instead of this foolish idea of trying to build integrity by hiding who we are. Evidence continues to show that it doesn’t work.

This is mostly how our ethics policy works. We don’t have a policy prohibiting involvement — we have a policy of avoiding conflict of interest. This means our reporters and editors are allowed to get involved with organizations and can donate their private money to whomever they choose. However, this also means that they cannot report news related to the areas they’ve gotten involved with.

For example, I’m a member of our local Rotary club. In the event that Rotary gets into some sort of trouble for whatever reason (not that we would), I would have to “recuse” myself from involvement with the story here at the Desert Dispatch, much like a judge would in a trial in which he has a stake in the outcome.

As a newspaper, though, we don’t get involved or donate money to campaigns. We don’t even endorse candidates. So we acknowledge the separation of the independence of our newspaper as an institution, and the independence of the people who make up the newspaper. I think that’s an important distinction.

The two comments are related. Some people make the transition from writing journalism to writing opinion pieces more easily than others. It has been difficult for me at times, because I worry that I’m going to write an opinion that may influence readers’ views or behaviors, and then it will turn out that I was totally off-base in my editorial (which I’m accused of anyway. I mean that I will come to my own realization that I was wrong).

It’s the flip side of a common (and necessary) fear among journalists about printing something that turns out to be untrue. It may be true that opinions cannot be wrong, but they can be poorly informed. Whenever I set forth an opinion, especially about a local issue, I worry that there’s information I don’t have that might have affected my stance.

For example, I don’t plan to write an editorial at this time regarding the conflict over the contracts for the wastewater facility upgrade. My immediate instinct is much like council member Joe Gomez’s — possibly abandoning a current plan over a $65,000 contract after having already spent $1 million seems incredibly wasteful.

However, if the costs are spiraling far beyond what was originally planned for, as Mayor Lawrence Dale is claiming, then the city (and the taxpayers) could end up losing far more than $1 million in the end.

But there’s gaps in our understanding right now. In our reporters’ discussions with those involved in the story, it’s not clear where the costs actually stand. We’re not yet sure of the facts of the situation, so I’m not comfortable with picking a side for this debate as yet.