Follow the Money - or, the Democrats - The Best Political Party Money Can Buy
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Unintentional truths
While watching the CBS Evening News talking about the record-breaking arrests of demonstrators outside the Republican Convention, I noticed that there were a LOT of people out there demonstrating.

Very expensive to haul that much photogenic whitebread into the Big Apple, no?

WHO'S picking up the tab for all this?

And what do they expect for their donations to the John Kerry campaign?

In less than a year, the trial lawyers of America donated FIVE MILLION DOLLARS to Democratic vice-presidential candidate Senator John Edwards' short-lived (2003-2004) Presidential primary campaign.

Since 1990, the trial lawyers of America have given FOUR HUNDRED AND SEVENTY MILLION DOLLARS - just under half a billion dollars - to various Federal politicians' campaigns.

Almost all of this money went to Democrats.

And that's just the legal money, understand. The Fifth Amendment and common sense prevent us from easily learning how much money the big law firms of America have paid politicians under the table.

Why all this generosity?

If you have a personal injury claim - or represent someone who does in court, you want to have it in the United States of America, that's why.

American courts award more wildly disproportionate damages than any other country of comparable size.

Law firms have gotten incredibly wealthy in this country convincing juries that (for example) the lady who spilled a cup of coffee from a drive-thru McDonald's restaurant was entitled to a massive, multi-million dollar award because she bobbled the cup while driving her minivan and spilled it all over herself - tragically, causing months of therapy to repair the resulting burns all over her body.

The trial lawyers of America have it good - other people's tragedies are their gold mines, their vast buried oil fields, their hit records and their best selling novels and blockbuster movies - their tickets to sudden wealth.

The problem is that the multi-million damage awards on which some American trial law firms have grown fat are ultimately paid by... us.

The companies, big and small, and the individual small businessmen and businesswomen who are sued for big money in court must pay insurance companies to come up with at least some of that big money.

After enough big money has been paid out through the courts, everyone's insurance premiums go up. Other people's insurance premiums are one of the things which we pay for when we buy stuff.

In this way, all of us are paying a secret tax on everything we buy - a weird tax paid not to the government, but to people who in many cases own more than one home (the better to take frequent vacations at), boats, fancy cars and airplanes.

And that tax is levied on every last one of us - even and especially the poor.

You have to go to Monty Python for an example of anything this absurd in fiction. John Cleese once played a highwayman who started by robbing the rich, but was so successful at it that soon the rich were poor. At the end of the sketch, Cleese's not-too-bright character robbed everyone so he could make sure everyone had a fair share of the swag.

All through the sketch, a chorus sings the praises of Cleese's character - and as he descends down the ladder of activism to Socialist redistribution of wealth, the chorus becomes more and more critical until:

"he steals from the poooor,
to give to the riiich -
Stupid bitch!"

That's what the national Democrats are doing - they take money, and take money and take even MORE money from the trial lawyers of America so that multi-million dollar law firms can enrich themselves from wildly disproportionate legal awards - of which they collect huge chunks - levied on our industries, small businessmen and our doctors, hospitals and drug companies by the courts.

And the money the trial lawyers are giving the Democrats comes from the poor just as much as the rich or the rest of us.

To stay in business, our industries, small businessmen, doctors, hospitals and drug companies must raise the prices for the goods, medical care and medicine they sell to us to pay the trial lawyers' cut of their business income.

We pay those higher prices because we have no more choice to pay them than our businesses have to pass their costs along.

But as long as the trial lawyers of America are making big money and sharing some of it with the Democratic Party and its career politicians, every American, no matter how rich or how poor, must pay trial lawyers their secret, extortionate cut of almost every business transaction in America.

Terry McAuliffe, John Kerry, John Edwards and the other national Democrats don't seem to care if the poor must do without after the modern-day robber barons, the trial lawyers of America, push the price of everything up - not as long as they get their cut of the swag.

That's how the Democrats can fill the streets of New York with photogenic ditzes to protest, seemingly, the mere existence of their political opposition.