The Salt Lake Tribune's New Year's Day Our View was given over to the fifth annual collection of Dream Headlines. Those are readers' submissions of headlines they hope to see in the coming year. As always, the subjects ranged from the serious to the absurd, on topics global to local. And, as always, we received far more than we had room for in the newspaper.

But, then, that's what the Internet is for.

Here are many more of the submissions we were pleased to receive. Some of them are here, not in print, simply because they are technically too long to be headlines. Some of them may be a bit obscure. Think yourself bright and incisive if you get it. Think the author obtuse and thick if you don't.

Thanks to all who played along. And Happy New Year!

-- George Pyle

Kirby becomes serious and makes sense

Trib eliminates annoying sticky note on newspaper

NFL team comes to Salt Lake

TRAX gets understandable speakers on trains

No one died in Iraq today

-- Ed Hall

DeLay, Abramoff, Rumsfeld awarded Medal of Freedom

Supreme Court: Constitution declared unconstitutional

Iraq situation upgraded to monumental tragedy

-- Paul Zelenka

Rocky Anderson seeks Mexican presidency

-- Harry W. Patrick

Bush, Cheney resign; Pelosi takes oath

Hatch composes ballet: The Nutcaker

-- Frank Musgrave

Mary Brown Malouf finally finds restaurant she can stomach

Larry H. Miller bails-out Real Salt Lake

-- Paul McGill

Larry H. Miller caves; Arena renamed US Airways Center

U.S. signs Kyoto

TSA stays stupid airport security rules

-- Scott Widmer

Democracy restored in USA: World watches

No more torture! Geneva not "quaint"

Utah public ed leads nation

-- Dennis L. Kay

Cannon out; Bagley to edit D-News

Conway out; Kirby to edit Tribune

-- Fred Brady

Bush impeached

Monkey Wrench Gang finally succeeds

Washington Co. land boom busts

-- Edwin Firmage Jr.

Scientists find red meat & lard have health benefits

-- Arthur Reilly

Questar provides free green stickers

-- Joyce Scott

Independent investigation launched for 9/11 crimes

-- Curtis Holt

Hinckley decries Utah theocracy; says 'Get real"

-- W. Ellington

Harvard and Yale abolish legacy admissions based on Bush presidential performance

U.S. troops push south to Panama in search of defendable southern border

-- Lew Baker

Nothing left to chance: Utah Lottery funds education

-- Brigitte Klement

Huntsman education plan: 'Adopt-a-Teacher'

Polygamists provide critical swing vote for Romney

-- Mike Ptaschinski

Hinckley reveals: Shun promiscuity, promote gay marriage

Mullen recants, returns to Tribune

-- Peggy Fujimura

Tribune hires a conservative to replace Mullen

-- James R. Clendenon

Bush administration on trial for war crimes

-- D. Wood

U.S. no longer largest arms dealer

Cheap, clean fusion power for all

-- Will Crowther

Hatch resigns: 'We lost our way, I'm sorry'

People take back government from business

Bush has epiphany: People mean more than money and power

-- Mike Coronella

Legislature repeals everything, adjourns, order ensues

-- Rob Latham

Monorail will connect City Creek Center to Gateway

Lake Powell filled to capacity

-- J.L. Smith

Mitt Romney changes mind again, wants Hillary as running mate

-- Alan E. Wright

Scores emulate Huntsmans: Thousand foster kids adopted

-- James Schnitter

Utah leads nation in science education

Teaching evolution becomes mandatory in Utah schools

-- Steven Peck

Mullen returns; editor fired

-- Willard G. Smith

Bush, Cheney impeached

-- Glen V. Ruff

Iraqi government orders all coalition forces out of country immediately

-- Joe Cronin

Utah's new 4th District elects Democrat

al-Sadr: Democracy is better than Sharia

Gov confesses: I'm really a Democrat

-- Ann Kamp

Huntsman Cancer Center finds cure for breast cancer

Brian David Mitchell behaves in court

Original Book of Mormon found at Deseret Industries

Kobe Bryant has two scoreless games

Olympics return in 2014

-- Nancy S. Bento

Utah joins civilized world

Wine recognized as food

-- Glen M. Burnham

All U.S. troops home

-- G. Edward Lloyd

New Deseret News editor, Joe Cannon, provides details on brother Chris, Abramoff ties

Supreme Court decides that only civil weddings are legal

Jeffs has revelation: A woman to replace him

-- Paul S. Carpenter

Finealee Edukashun Fundead Fairlee: Tax Exhempshun per child Eliminated

-- Jon Dewey

As a seasonal public service, which I learned many years ago from The Kansas City Star, we present the genuine and orginal lyrics to the festive Christmas carol, Deck Us All With Boston Charlie, lyrics by Walt Kelly, music by Traditional (whoever he is).

Deck us all with Boston Charlie
Walla Walla, Wash., an' Kalamazoo!
Nora's freezin' on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo!

Don't we know archaic barrel,
Lullaby Lilla boy, Louisville Lou?
Trolley Molly don't love Harold,
Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Polly wolly cracker n' too-da-loo!
Hunky Dory's pop is lolly gaggin' on the wagon,
Willy, folly go through!

Donkey Bonny brays a carol,
Antelope Cantaloup, 'lope with you!
Chollie's collie barks at Barrow,
Harum scarum five alarum bung-a-loo!

There. Not as profound as "We have met the enemy, and he is us." But a good Pogo memory all the same.

Happy Yule.

-- George Pyle

My column in last Sunday's Tribune, "Our perverse farm policy," is being picked up by a few other newspapers and Web sites around the country. It's about how U.S. government policy encourages vast, unsustainable overproduction of basic grains that the world cannot afford to buy, wrecking prices, the economies of already poor nations and threatening the global environment too boot.

It's a topic I've written about before.

That column led to an interview I did Tuesday morning on Uprising Radio, on the progressive Pacifica Radio's Los Angeles station, KPFK. You can hear that interview here.

The column was distributed by my old colleagues at The Prairie Writers Circle, at The Land Institute, Salina, Kansas. Many other writers have held forth on similar themes, and you can have a look here.

-- George Pyle

"They say only the good die young. Generalissimo Francisco Franco was 82. Seems about right."
-- Richard Aregood
Philadelphia Daily News, 1975

Aregood, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing in 1985, later lamented that the above editorial -- yes, that's the whole thing -- could have done without the last sentence.

It's a remarkably useful piece, fully applicable to the passing over the weekend of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, long-time dictator of Chile. Pinochet's death at age 91, by this calculation, makes him worse than Franco. Which he would have been if he had remained in power for the 36 years that Franco did.

Pinochet was ousted after 17 years, but never really did face justice for his murderous regime, in which thousands disappeared and tens of thousands were tortured. Attempts to bring him to trial always ended in claims that he was too ill.

Lest American's think that this is someone else's story, never let it be forgotten that the United States government actively supported the criminal acts that brought Pinochet to power after the overthrow and murder of the democratically elected president Salvador Allende, and that his assassins struck their enemies in the very streets of Washington, D.C.

This is what I mean about blaming America first. We didn't overthrown Allende. But it wouldn't have happened the way it did without our support. We may not be responsible for what Pinochet did, but we are responsible for what our government did to help him. Just as we will be the next time it happens, unless and until the American people make it clear that we will not stand for it.

Until we do make that clear, our democratic ideals are mocked in the most cruel way.

More on this from one of the experts on the subject, Christopher Hitchens, and from The Los Angeles Times.

-- George Pyle

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, the academic and diplomat who won Ronald Reagan's heart by rationalizing the idea that right-wing dictators are good and left-wing dictators are bad, died Thursday. She was 80.

She will be remembered as a leading light of the neo-con movement, which is now well on its way to being fully discredited, and as the first woman to rise high enough in a president's national security apparatus to be listened to in private and sent to speak in public. She was the first woman -- well, other than Eleanor Roosevelt -- to represent the United States at the United Nations.

It was Kirkpatrick, speaking at the 1984 Republican Convention, who popularized the phrase "blame America first" as a way of dismissing all claims by the softy left that American foreign policy should have a moral component.

But any nation, like any person, should always blame themselves first. Not first, last and always, but first. Only after one has examined one's own behavior for faults and errors can one either morally or reasonably seek to blame others for whatever it is we don't like. Not only is that true ethically, it is true practically. Other people don't work for you, and you cannot hope to set their behavior. Only your own.

-- George Pyle

Another key findings of the Iraq Study Group: Those who say the media has made the violence seem worse than it is are wrong. If anything, the amount of bleeding and death that go on in Iraq every day since the U.S. invasion has been grossly underreported, perhaps deliberately, as a way of hiding the degree to which the whole enterprise has been a failure.

The story that nails this is, as so many other good bits of information have been, from McClatchy Newspapers:

Study says violence in Iraq has been underreported
By Jonathan S. Landay
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration routinely has underreported the level of violence in Iraq in order to disguise its policy failings, the Iraq Study Group report said Wednesday.

The bipartisan group called on the Pentagon and the director of the U.S. intelligence community to immediately institute a new reporting system that provides "a more accurate picture of events on the ground."

Another take on the same matter is at the Editor & Publisher Web site.

-- George Pyle

Apparently, someone gave Rep. Chris Cannon the wrong book.

There is no way that anyone who can read English could have looked at the Iraq Study Group report and come to the same conclusion that Cannon did in commenting on same to The Salt Lake Tribune.

"As I read the report, it says the president is right," he said. "Basically, it says the president is a smart guy."

The report says nothing of the kind. Cannon can still get a copy of the real report at most bookstores, or by clicking here.

Sen. Orrin Hatch's reaction is that, no matter what anybody's report says, "We can't go home losers."

That, clearly, is a false statement. The possibility that we will go home losers gets larger every day. And blindly supporting the administration only increases the chances of that happening.

Other commentaries sum up the report as nailing the current situation in a way the Bush adminstration has crushingly failed to do. But the analysis then concludes that the study group report then enters into its own world of fantasy when it prescribes increased blending of American forces with Iraqi troops as a way to bring that nation's government up to the level that it can defend itself.

In The Washington Post:

Threats Wrapped in Misunderstandings

By Sudarsan Raghavan

BAGHDAD, Dec. 6 -- The Iraq Study Group's prescriptions hinge on a fragile Iraqi government's ability to achieve national reconciliation and security at a time when the country is fractured along sectarian lines, its security forces are ineffective and competing visions threaten to collapse the state, Iraqi politicians and analysts said Wednesday.

They said the report is a recipe, backed by threats and disincentives, that neither addresses nor understands the complex forces that fuel Iraq's woes. They described it as a strategy largely to help U.S. troops return home and resurrect America's frayed influence in the Middle East.

In The New York Times:

Will Iraq Study Group's Plan Work on the Battlefield?

By MICHAEL R. GORDON

The military recommendations issued yesterday by the Iraq Study Group are based more on hope than history and run counter to assessments made by some of its own military advisers.

Ever since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States has struggled in vain to tamp down the violence in Iraq and to build up the capacity of Iraq's security forces. Now the study group is positing that the United States can accomplish in little more than one year what it has failed to carry out in three.

Read the book.

-- George Pyle

I will admit to being one of those who cringes when people who should know better pronounce the adjective dealing with the behavior of subatomic particles "nuc-u-lar."

People who should know better include the man with his finger on the button -- President Bush -- and the man who is promising to make himself and much of Utah very rich by cleaning up the leftovers -- EnergySolutions boss Steve Creamer.

Recent Public Forum letters have raised the same criticism -- here and here -- while others have defended this alternative pronunciation as just the normal evolution of the language -- here and here.

I did know a fine architect once who did a good job building libraries, despite the fact that he insisted on calling them "lie-berries." Ouch.

If you want to remember how the word should be pronounced, remember what Howland Owl was frustrated about all those years ago in the Pogo comic strip when he was trying to puzzle out a book on nuclear physics:

"It's not new. It's not clear. And," he said dipping the book in water and listening carefully, "it doesn't fizz."

-- George Pyle