Your editorial endorsing Al Gore for President shows an amazing reliance on Gore’s propaganda for support. It also shows a monumentally shallow understanding of reality.

In Texas, judges sign off on the orders for execution of the condemned.

The governor has only limited powers to intervene, such as by granting a stay of execution. Your review of the numbers conceals the horrific crimes which led to the death sentences, in each case from 12 good and true jurors, not from Gov. Bush.

In fact, the Texas Constitution severely limits the governor’s powers in a wide range of areas. Indeed, Bush’s ability to work with Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock, a Democrat who, unlike the Texas governor, wields vast and supreme power over the Legislative agenda, to develop and pass various initiatives on education, taxes and the like says quite a lot for both men.

Your editorial endorsement relies on various “bad” things about Texas to support a Gore endorsement, but you fail to note that Houston has had a bad smog year after several years of a combination of a Democrat mayor (Lee Brown) and a series of years without hurricanes or tropical storms (which tend to clean out the air, among other climactic effects).

As someone who has chosen to live in Houston and raise children here, I am unimpressed by a simple conclusion that it’s a bad place to raise kids. My children have a lot of advantages and opportunities to do things I never could do growing up in Storm Lake, idyllic though it is. I do agree that it’s not perfect, but even Storm Lake was not perfect.

I doubt many ISU students will be overly swayed by the choice of the editorial board. To those who might be, I say think critically and independently. Do not rely on the tracts from Gore (or from Bush, Nader, Buchanan or anyone else for that matter).

Steve BorgmanAlumnusHouston