On a lazy July day with the outside temperature flirting with 100, inside at the computer seemed the best place to be.
Yahoo found Del Brinkman, who was dean of the KU school of journalism while Susan was there. Decades later, he spoke to a graduating class at University of Colorado in 2002, the Internet discovered, and gave them this formula for living a happy life:
“First, be great. Strive to excel in whatever you do. Set high standards for yourself and you will be surprised at how well you can perform.
“Second, be good. Strive to be ethical and have high integrity. There is enough bad in the world. Our hope is that you can make some of the bad things good. If you always do right, it will gratify many and astonish the rest.
“Third, be grateful. Recognize that it takes a lot of people and support for you to succeed. Say ‘thank you’ often along the way and you will see even more help come your way.
“Fourth, be gracious. Getting along with people involves seeing things as others see them. Being nice to people can bring many personal rewards, and, on top of that, society as a whole will be enriched.
“Fifth, be generous. Remember to support worthy causes with your time, energy and money. That includes higher education and the university and school that provided you the opportunities you celebrate today.
“Sixth, be glad. Another way of saying this is to enjoy life. Make every day count and have fun along the way. As you well know , time flies when you are having fun.
“Although retirement is far from your mind right now when you are thinking about where that first or next job will be, take it from me, that time comes quicker than you can imagine. There will be obstacles and detours in your life, but a truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.
“So, be great, be good, be grateful, be gracious, be generous and be glad, and life will treat you well. And don’t be sad or cry because your college days are over. Rather, smile because they happened.”

As Aug. 2 draws closer, day by day, there are no signs that the “cooler heads” rational people put their faith in will prevail. Instead, the nation seems to have been taken over by know-nothing radicals who don’t believe anything bad will happen if the debt ceiling isn’t raised.
These same people apparently believe the government will go on borrowing anyway and that the checks will go out as usual. Interest will be paid to bond holders; pensions will be paid to Social Security beneficiaries; hospitals, doctors and druggists will get their money for tending to Medicare patients — all the warnings, in short, have been nothing but political scare talk.
This argument is dangerous nonsense. It is based on the unvoiced belief that the law doesn’t mean anything. If the government can ignore the debt ceiling without consequence, then there is no debt ceiling.
Now, an excellent argument can be made that there should be no debt ceiling; that setting an arbitrary limit on how much the government can borrow, regardless of circumstances, is not wise. Debt ceilings don’t control the getting and spending decisions that government makes. That’s what Congress does with its power of the purse.
To use an arbitrary debt ceiling to force Congress and the president to cut spending and increase taxes, or both, puts the cart before the horse. Those management decisions should be made every year — and should be based on the infinite number of factors involved in managing our nation rather than on a single number agreed upon by a previous Congress based on nothing at all but wishful thinking.
But in today’s Mad Hatter Washington, the debt ceiling is being treated as though it were a barrier deliberately constructed by the nation’s wisest economists which should be defended to the death.

SHOULD WE CUT spending and raise income to bring the budget into balance, as it was just 11 years ago? Of course we should. Doing so would give an enormous boost to our economy. Should Republicans and Democrats work together to get that done?
Yes . . . but the Know-Nothings rule.
Fortunately there will be an opportunity in 2012 to improve the mix; to give reason another chance to prevail.

— Emerson Lynn, jr.

Immigration problem may solve itself
While Congress finds other things — almost any unimportant thing that pops up — to do rather than deal with immigration reform, the stream of illegals from Mexico has slowed to a trickle.
Douglas Massey, co-director of the Mexican Immigration Project at Princeton, said the interest in Mexico in heading north has fallen to its lowest level since at least the 1950s.
“No one wants to hear it, but the flow has already stopped,” he said, referring to illegal traffic. “For the first time in 60 years, the net traffic has gone to zero and is probably a bit negative,” he told a New York Times reporter.
Massey and other immigration researchers cite several factors, including expanding economic and educational opportunities in Mexico, rising border crime, shrinking families and immigrant crackdowns in the U.S.
What’s happening should come as no surprise to Iolans. About 150 of Iola’s jobs went to Monterrey, Mexico last year. Which helps explain why Angel Orozco, an 18-year-old in a family with a long history of heading north for a better job, is staying in Mexico. He is a student in a new technological institute where he is earning a degree in industrial engineering.
All of his classmates in a recent graduating class there said they were better educated than their parents  — and that they planned to stay in Mexico rather than go to the United States.
Angel may wind up in Monterrey at a Haldex desk.
The change in the immigration scene is not small. The Pew Hispanic Center shows that fewer than 100,000 illegal border-crossers and visa-violators settled in the U.S. in 2010 — down from 525,000 annually from 2000 to 2004.

ANOTHER IMPORTANT factor is that Mexican families are shrinking. Birth control has pushed down the fertility rate to about two children per woman from 6.8 in 1970. Mexico is producing about 800,000 job-seekers a year rather than 1,000,000 and the number is expected to drop to 300,000 by 2030. By then there is every reason to believe that those jobs will be there in Mexico, itself.
In the meantime, should Alabama, Arizona and the U.S. Congress be given credit for tightening border security, cracking down on the employers of illegals and the stepped up prosecution of employers who hire illegals?
Sure. The atmosphere for illegals has gotten much tougher. But the fact is that those who want to come to the U.S. usually get here, papers or not. While illegals are more likely to be picked up and sent back than they were a few years ago, the fact is that 92 to 98 percent of those who try to cross eventually succeed.
Immigration policies have not been uniform, however. While some states have declared war on illegals, the federal government has made it easier for many job seekers to get papers and come in legally. Under a program known as H-2a, farm workers can come in by the tens of thousands to pick cotton, harvest fruit and do the other kinds of back-breaking work few others will do.
Across the board, U.S. immigration officials are working with immigrants who want to come to the U.S. to take jobs in agriculture and construction that go begging otherwise.
Demographers point to the tens of thousands of baby boomers who are retiring every year and say the United States will be importing workers for years to come.
Put all these things together and the immigration crisis may solve itself in a combination of happy ways, leaving, like the Cheshire cat, its dimming smile as a reminder that it once was here.

— Emerson Lynn, jr.