TOUGH CHOICES: Local shoppers apparently will be spared the angst, but elsewhere in the country Thanksgiving tradition may be in peril. Pumpkins are in short supply, thanks to two straight wet Midwestern summers.

With winter again nearing, Buffalo might be tempted to root for global warming—but what if it means a choice between Halloween and pumpkin pie? And how come that’s never mentioned in the dire climate change predictions?

DOING THE MATH: As discrepancies between politicians and real people go, it doesn’t get any wider than this: While the Obama administration last month identified 640,000 jobs as linked to stimulus projects across the country, a poll this week indicates fewer than 1 in every 10 Americans think the stimulus has created any jobs at all, so far.

On Capitol Hill, officials admitted they could not certify the numbers and a congressman suggested the administration had “no idea” whether the counts were correct. Kind of colors your confidence in health care reform cost estimates, doesn’t it?

THE VIRTUAL MAILBAG: Thanks to the dozens of you who took the time to click—er, write—to us in regard to House passage of health care reform. Your amazingly similar e-mailed thanks to, or condemnation of, your representatives is duly noted.

But not published. For one thing, we don’t do third-party thank-you letters, preferring to allocate scarce space to the public debate of issues. For another, the same sort of letters went to editorial pages and editors all across the country, triggering nationwide warnings of “astroturf,” our industry’s shorthand for fake grass-roots letters. One letter we got even noted that “several organizations” wanted their talking points relayed to newspapers. The mybarackobama.com site seemed to be prominent among them. A colleague at another paper got one that didn’t even bother to fill in the blanks for a representative’s name.

We still consider all letters sent to

lettertoeditor@buffnews.com

. But letter-senders have a better chance of getting published if they’re actually letter-writers, expressing their own views in their own words. Simple agreement with somebody else’s words is not enough, even if it saves work; we believe in the Constitution, but we don’t claim we wrote it.