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.

Confronting the CBS Evening News on their Election Coverage
Topic: Dan's Rather Biased
(background: I'd just finished asking the CBS Evening News people to look up some footage they'd taken of my son, the soldier training at Fort Hood, and suddenly the indignation I'd felt today over the latest series of slanted innuendo-ridden substitutes for reporting got the better of me. Oh, well, maybe the PAO at Ft. Hood knows what I want and where to get it.

The letter I wound up sending after having smooched their butts earlier to try to get a tape of my son riding on an M-113):

Dear CBS Evening News:

I just asked you to help me find some footage your people took of my son while he was at Ft.Hood, TX training for deployment to Iraq, but read this letter first before you do so.

I'd understand if, after I told you what I think of your coverage of the election, you all felt you didn't owe me any favors. I suppose the Public Affairs Office at Ft.Hood could point me in the proper direction, anyway.

I have tried to give your program the benefit of the doubt regarding your objectivity in reporting the news until recent months; however, morally, I feel as though now I have to confront your writers, reporters, and above all, Mr. Rather.

To say that your coverage of this election is slanted is to understate the case grotesquely.

John Forbes Kerry has admitted under oath to having committed war crimes on multiple occasions before the Fulbright Committee. After coming home from Vietnam, not only did he protest the war, as was his perfect right, but he campaigned openly for American withdrawal from Southeast Asia, knowing that after that occurred Stalinist purges would occur from Cambodia, to Laos, to South Vietnam itself.

After the US withdrew from Southeast Asia, partly on the strength of Kerry's testimony before the Senate and partly owing to the strategy which Kerry apparently helped the North Vietnamese with during the Paris Peace Talks, one and a half million people perished in the resulting purges and flight from governments which Kerry described to the Senate as morally equivalent to our own.

In Congress, John Kerry repeatedly stated that the United States faced no danger from Communism, even though the Soviets:
- broke the ABM and SALT I treaties not long after signing them;
- soon after signing the Biological Weapons Protocol, embarked on a massive research, development and biological weapons production program which culminated in the mid-1980s with Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev's orders to fill ICBM warheads with weaponized smallpox and plague for launch at targets in the US and UK;
- embarked on an ambitious program to spread Sovietism throughout Central America and the Caribbean, interrupted only by decisive action from the US under Ronald Reagan - action denounced bitterly at the time by John Kerry and his colleagues in Congress.

John Kerry staunchly supported dictator Daniel Ortega and his violently repressive Sandinista clique until the voters of Nicaragua finally, emboldened by support from the United States, ejected that whole terrorist crew from power.

Where is the coverage of all these stories?

You people covered the President's inglorious but non-lethal and non-traitorous National Guard service until bone-cracking yawns from across the country got your advertisers' attention.

But when the Swifties showed up, you people decided that it wasn't necessary to report on THAT story except to elliptically debunk it. Why is that?

The excuse "They're Republicans" won't hold up - those pathetic disgruntled employees 60 Minutes likes to parade before their cameras each week are all Democrats, aren't they? If the Swifties' testimony is suspect because they choose to exercise their right to vote for and campaign for the candidates and party of their choice, and it turns out not to be John Kerry's party, then what about the 60 Minutes Book Plug of the Week Club?

(And where's the "Oops" we're all owed after Joe Wilson turned out to be full of crap, by the way?)

And what about the political affiliations of the CBS Evening News' editorial staff? If the Swifties' mere political affiliation can be used by you to throw doubt on their veracity, then how about your own? Their personal honor against your professional ethics?

At the very least, many of us viewers, regardless of our political party (I, myself, am a registered Libertarian) would really like to have the Swift Boat issue investigated, and not covered up.

If the Swift Boat Veterans for Justice turn out to be wrong, or even lying, wouldn't that be an impressive story - especially if Kerry were right and the Swifties accepted more than legal advice from the White House political team?

Your program's refusal to investigate what, regardless of what turned out to be true - a malfeasant Kerry or vindictively mistaken Swifties - would be a very big story makes many people suspect that you are covering up a sorry episode in John Kerry's past - once again.

And how about letting us know where the huge amount of soft money behind Kerry is coming from? How much money George Soros has in this campaign, and how his support of despots in former Soviet republics makes his choice to support John Kerry with massive infusions of soft money is perhaps a little troubling?

And what about the utter failure of McCain-Feingold to do what it was promised to be able to do - keep the rich and powerful from shouting out less well-funded voices come election time? As it now stands, McCain-Feingold couldn't have been more beneficial to the Democratic Party if it had been just "Feingold."

As a former police officer who was loath to arrest anyone unnecessarily and have to explain that lack of necessity on the paperwork afterward, why weren't the charges on which the "record number of protesteres" described on your program?

Was there an attempt on the part of your program to investigate whether there was actually an attempt on the part of the protesters to break the law in large numbers in order to create the large number of arrests your program described repeatedly?

Was there any attempt by your program to investigate whether the local judge who ordered the release of several hundred protesters from custody owed his or her position to the Democratic Party?

I'm also interested in the complete lack of coverage of protests and protesters at the Demcoratic Convention in Boston this year. I know from reading print news sources that there were indeed such protests, but if I'd relied on your program for my information, I wouldn't have known that.

Finally, aren't you people concerned at all at what happens AFTER November, when the people realize that you have slanted the facts, hidden the truth, and barefacedly lied to them in order to get your man into the White House?

If we can't trust you on this story, what makes you think we'll trust you on anything else?

There was a point during the Reagan administration when the shrill slanting of news coverage against Ronald Reagan caused news viewers to drastically revise their ability to trust the news on a number of things. I seem to remember an opinion poll in which the esteem in which journalists were held actually fell down to the level formerly reserved for used car dealers and politicians.

Tell me you people plan to redeem yourselves at some point in the future. Then please do it.

Kerry Takes the Gloves Off!
Topic: Kerry's Lies and Spin
For weeks now, the part of the Kerry for President staff cleverly disguised as national journalists with obligations to report the facts objectively have held forth about what a big wuss Kerry has been about Bush's not having sent Federal Marshals to arrest the Swift Boat Veterans for Justice, and similar failings.

(instrumental accompaniment: organ, music to hymn "Yes, Jesus Loves Me")

"What was this about? Now I know;
Because Dan Rather told me so."

(/instrumental accompaniment)

Kerry has chosen to pay Bush back for not silencing the Swift Boat Veterans for Justice by... (drum roll... ) talking about him behind his back at the American Legion convention.

Bet that went over well - veterans like nothing better than whiners who called them rapists and murderers in 1971 backbiting the President of the United States in time of war.

And I bet Kerry's Secret Service detail - including the agent whom Kerry referred to as a "son of a bitch" for knocking into him accidentally during his recent ski holiday - was really excited over the chance to defend a foul-mouthed egotist against some of the soldiers, marines, airmen and sailors he had accused of killing civilians and generally being all about war crimes.
________

John Kerry told the American Legion "I'd have done almost everything in Iraq differently." Which is why he voted for the war beforehand.

As P.J. O'Rourke put it when Gulf War II started in 2003,

"Massachusetts' thinner, more sober senator, John Kerry, said that he voted for threatening to use force on Saddam Hussein, but that actually using force was wrong. This is what's known, in the language of diplomacy, as bullshit."

"Why Americans Hate Foreign Policy," Peace Kills Atlantic Monthly Press, New York 2004.
_____

CBS showed us a sound and video bite of Kerry saying anything Bush could do, he'd have done better.

We didn't see the reaction of the American Legion to Kerry's remarks.

We didn't see a wall-size map of Iraq and Iran and Saudi Arabia where Kerry could laser-point where, when and how he'd have done almost everything differently than George W. Bush did.

We didn't see flip charts detailing how John Kerry would have known in advance that there were no weapons of mass destruction after Saddam Hussein brought an invasion down upon himself by acting as though he had the things and just wasn't going to tell us where they were.

We didn't see proof that the weapons of mass destruction aren't hidden somewhere in a country the size of France or California, or hidden outside Iraq, perhaps in Iran, which has been acting as a refuge for terrorists who kill in Iraq.

We didn't see proof of John Kerry's absurd claims that he would have forged an alliance to fight the war on terror which included France and Germany as fully-participating partners rather than kibitzing back-seat drivers with a veto over everything and no real contribution to make.

We didn't see the magic wand John Kerry would wield to make the Europeans see that our dominance over the Atlantic Alliance (better known as NATO) is not their problem.

Islamist expansionism and terrorism is the threat which absolutely must be met with resolve - and with the fire and the sword of Western Civilization, now that the scum and dirt of these terrorists have dared kidnap children in Russia or decapitate innocent Frenchmen in order to dictate France's laws to them.

The only question is how long Europe will delude themselves that supporting John Kerry is going to help them somehow. Sure, they'll have a puppet whose strings they can pull - which is why George Soros is throwing so much soft money into the Kerry campaign - so he can own his very own President of the United States.

But John Kerry is showing us that even with George Soros as a Gepetto, there's no real chance for the wooden puppet who likes to tell a lie now and then to turn into someone who can save Europe from the new barbarians at its gates.

Bush wants to take Bambi to Crawford and BBQ him!!!. Yeah, that's the ticket!
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Kerry's Lies and Spin
There's a new attack ad paying for the evening news show on the local CBS affiliate. KCNC-TV, Denver.

(Update, Thursday, September 2nd: I didn't see the ad today. Out of money, or did their campaign backfire this soon after the Hayman Fire? Who knows?)

(2nd Update, Wednesday, September 8th: The ads are popping up sporadically and in Late, Late, TV Show World here in Denver. To paraphrase Dennis Miller discussing Michael Moore on the Tonight Show, it they seem to be "Trolling for Concubines.")

In this ad, suddenly the forests of America are under attack by who else, the Bush Administration.

Here in Colorado, this ad is probably intended to raise the blood pressure of local environmentalists, and get them to do something foolish like support John Kerry. Viewers who remember the Hayman Burn may feel differently on the matter.

This particular attack ad, however, didn't hand out the phone number of their intended victims' office. Instead, it directed the viewer to a Web site, ourforests.org - and being insatiably curious, I couldn't resist going there.

The site was standard Enviro-bunny cute, with lots of photos of purple mountain majesties and fir forests - and overheated, one-sided crap about how cutting roads into forests would lead to their total conversion into Wal-Marts.

No mention was made of the trouble we've had here in Colorado because our wonderful roadless forests have been so tinder-dry in recent years that they've burned in epic fires that have spread into populated areas and devastated entire neighborhoods. If major logging had been permitted to fell some of those trees BEFORE the drought, hundreds of homes and a good few human lives might have been saved.

No mention was made of the fact that if the natural gas under our public lands were available NOW, energy prices - including our power bills and the price of gasoline at the pump - would be lower as this natural gas displaced imported oil in our nation's energy economy. No, that would be an inconvenient truth, too.

The web site offers us the opportunity to send a letter to the Chief of the Forest Service and whoever our state governor happens to be (there was a form that I had to fill in to address the letter which apparently told the javascript of the Web Page where I live).

The letter - considerately pre-written to present the Web site's political views as my own:

"Dear [Decision Maker]:

Please accept this letter as official public comment for the roadless area management state petition proposal [Docket Number: 04-16191].

I strongly oppose this proposal to repeal the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. The Roadless Rule is a balanced policy that was finalized after years of scientific study, 600 public hearings and a record number of public comments, the majority of which overwhelmingly support protecting roadless areas through the rule.

The Roadless Rule is a vital tool for protecting our national forests from harmful and costly road-building and commercial logging. Our national forests need real protections because of the important role they play in providing fish and wildlife habitat, clean drinking water for millions of Americans, and endless recreational opportunities.

I urge you to abandon this misguided proposal and keep the Roadless Area Conservation Rule intact in the Lower 48 states and Alaska's Chugach National Forest and reinstate the rule in the Tongass National Forest.

Thank you for consideration of my comments on this crucial national forest conservation issue.

Sincerely,
[Your name]
[Your address]


Of course, I am a writer by profession and avocation, so I couldn't resist the Web site authors' invitation to "please edit the letter with some personal comments." These guys should know better than to leave me an opening like that.


My letter, complete with "added personal comments:"

"Please accept this letter as official public comment for the roadless area management state petition proposal [Docket Number: 04-16191].

I strongly support this proposal to repeal the Roadless Area Conservation Rule.

The current campaign to smear the Bush Administration's good name by ourforests.org and its Democratic Party allies is simply an attempt to prostitute environmentalism into another political weapon for the Kerry campaign.

I urge you to adopt this proposal and either repeal the Roadless Area Conservation Rule or amend it as necessary to ensure the health of our nation's forests by judicious logging, and the development of additional domestic energy sources within our borders to enhance our independence from unstable outside energy suppliers in the Middle East, Nigeria and Venezuela.

It is vital that in particular, natural gas fields and other energy-related mineral resources in our nation's public lands be made available to allow us to focus our foreign policy on destroying terror rather than placating foreign despots in order to secure access to their oil.

Thank you for consideration of my comments on this crucial national forest conservation issue."

Now, these people feel they need a million letters to make their point.

If you're reading this blog and feel strongly about the issues raised - or the ones conveniently NOT raised - by the covert Kerry political partisans at ourforests.org, why don't you help them out a little? I did and I feel fantastic about it!

ourforests.org's form to send a comment to the Chief of the Forest Service about the Kerry Campaign's latest try to smear the President

Have fun, people!

(Update - it's still not too late to help these worthies talk to the Forest Service about all those roads needed to do horrible conservative things like preventing mass forest fires and locating natural gas, coal and other alternatives to taking crap from Saudi Arabia. COME ON, LET'S WRITE SOME LETTERS!")

Real Double Talk on the Rather Biased CBS Evening News
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Dan's Rather Biased
Today:
- On the "Inside Story" segment of the CBS Evening News, Bush's adherence to his campaign promises is allegedly being covered.

Today's promise was Bush's promise to "be a uniter, not a divider."

Fair enough, except that the video bites played as documentation of the article almost all came from such famously biased political players as Democratic Senator Robert Byrd and the liberal Brookings Institutions' Thomas Mann. You can guess what they had to say.

Never mind that one-time Klansman and full-time Bush hater Robert Byrd - somehow those stories got missed in the "Inside Story" segment today - has been the archetypical "divider" in the United States Senate all of his miserable career when, as a Dixiecrat, Byrd actually prolonged segregation throughout the 50s and 60s by playing both major parties in the country against each other.

Never mind that Robert Byrd's excessive tenure in the Senate has depended on his party's play-to-win, no matter what attitude - and Byrd's utterances in the Senate have always been shamelessly partisan when required.

Never mind that (to paraphrase Upton Sinclair), Thomas Mann's paycheck depends on his not seeing when George W. Bush plays the "uniter" role - and the President has passed up innumerable chances to shout that John Kerry, the Man Who Would be Emperor, is a lying, cynical, unprincipled turncoat.

The President has declined time and time again to pander to the fear and hatred that sometimes pops up among more extreme conservatives, and he had endless chances to do that, too.

No, the CBS Evening News must blame George W. Bush first, foremost and always, even if Dan Rather has to either lie actively, leave important news stories uncovered, or use his rapidly-expanding and stomach-turning repertoire of dramatic vocal flourishes and facial mugging to say what even CBS News would prefer not to see in black and white (or have to defend in court) on one of their transcripts.
_____

Speaking of Dumb Dan Rather Tricks, I don't know if this just happened at CBS's Denver affiliate (KCNC, Channel 4) or nationwide, but it was funny -
Apparently a second audio channel was mixed in with Dan Rather's mike at the beginning of the CBS Evening News for several minutes, giving us both the sound and the reality of Dan Rather Double-Talking.

I really need to start recording these things.
______

I wasn't feeling well yesterday, so I didn't get to talk about Dan Rather's performance then.

Here's a highlight - Dan Rather called pro-choice, middle-of-the-road Republicans Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rudy Giuliani "'quote' moderates."

Fair enough, I guess, considering Dan Rather is a "'quote' objective journalist" and has been since he first became a leftist flack in Vietnam.

It's the character thing, Stupid, er, Ambassador Holbrooke
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Dumb Ambassador Tricks
Quoted from the Washington Post's op-ed pages:

"Our Second Civil War

By Richard Holbrooke
Saturday, August 28, 2004; Page A25

"Americans under 40 can be excused if they think that the presidential campaign went a bit nuts recently. After all, why has campaign coverage been dominated by a war that ended 29 years ago, even as a dozen Americans were dying and more than 130,000 fighting in Iraq?"

It's the character issue, STUPID!

Kerry
- lied about other people to build a political career,
- he killed civilians to look good for the history books,
- and he lied about his country in order to make it possible for Southeast Asian dictators to murder 1.5 million people after the United States left the region. John Kerry was the Khmer Rouge's best friend.

It's our turn to shout, spam USENET, and wave placards with the simple message:

KERRY LIED, PEOPLE DIED! KERRY LIED, PEOPLE DIED!

Kerry's lack of a conscience got a million and a half people killed. More than died in Iraq.

Ambassador Holbrooke, your side of the (gasp!!!) "Second Civil War" is the side that doesn't care about character, integrity, or our country or Kerry would have gotten the same reception George Wallace got when he tried to run Democratic in 1968.

To quote Joseph Welch at the Army-McCarthy hearings, (imagine theatrical vocal flourishes and vacuum tube noise in the background),

"Sir, have - you - no - shame?"

And the answer is, Ambassador Holbrooke, that your party has none at all. The leadership of the national Democratic Party are unprincipled hypocrites who will stop at nothing to put one of their sort into the White House.

Russia and Greece Try and Fail to stop US athletes; Saints Cyril and Methodius Puke
Mood:  celebratory
Now Playing: the National Anthem of the United States of America
Topic: Take THAT, you...
Despite two separate attempts on the part of Greek and Russian rooting sections to bring unending shame upon the Olympics, American athletes prevailed (fancy talk for "they kicked some serious ass.")

You'd think the Russians would have taken the hint from Fate, seeing how the Cold War turned out, huh?

"Americans sweep 200m amid jeers" by Jeremy Laurence, ATHENS (Reuters) contains the nauseating details, but in short:

"Shawn Crawford led an American sweep of Olympic medals in the 200 metres in Athens, ignoring the jeers of a hostile crowd livid that their local hero was not on the starting line after missing a doping test.

The packed 75,000 crowd at the Olympic Stadium began chanting "Kenteris, Kenteris!" and "Hellas, Hellas!", holding up the start of the race by about five minutes.

Costas Kenteris, Greece's 2000 Olympic champion in the event, withdrew from the Games after missing a drugs test in mysterious circumstances the day before the opening ceremony."

Showing that logic is no longer the Greek national long suit, the Greeks booed three young men who hadn't done a damn thing wrong except be American and NOT disqualify themselves from competing by failing to show for their doping tests, the way the local favorite Kenteris did repeatedly.

Result: we won, they lost. Get used to it, Hellas.

Before that, the Russians (and doubtless some Greeks who stumbled in from the 24/7 Hate America First Ouzo Fest) tried the same stunt at the men's horizontal bar final; thirteen thousand frenzied jerks raised such a fuss over their boy Alexei Nemov of the Russian team that the event's chief official, Adrian Stoica, "emphatically urged" Canadian judge Chris Grabowecky to increase his score of Nemov's performance - and Grabowecky caved in to the request.

After this, the crowd decided to boo and shout while Paul Hamm competed for the men's high bar event - and to Alexei Nemov's eternal credit, he came over at Hamm's request to try to calm the crowd down; the crowd wasn't having any of that "sportsmanship" crap, and the shaken Hamm went home with a Silver.

Fortunately, he still had his Gold in the Men's All-Around Gymnastics, and he and his twin brother Marvin also went home with Silvers from the team all-around.

Now I suppose the "Blame America First" crowd's crack Excuses For People and Countries Who Screw Us Over Laboratory is working overtime to explain how this fits in with the great Olympic Tradition.

Already, we have an early Quisling System report from the Tacoma, WA News-Tribune's Scott McGrath "Poor Paul Hamm - he had a shot at immortality"on how Paul Hamm "blew it" for not handing his Gold over to the South Korean Yang Tae-young who may or may not have deserved it after a scoring table mistake - one which the South Korean's coaches failed to appeal in time to change the award decision.

Experts looking at the video tape have seen both unawarded points and previously unremarked errors in Yang's performance. Unfortunately, this helps neither Paul Hamm nor Yang Tae-young; Hamm has since been asked to decide whether or not he deserves one of his life-long goals - a decision NOT in his job description as Olympic athlete, while Yang will always wonder whether his performance in 2004 would have gotten him a Gold if his coaches and the judges had been paying attention.

Bruno Grande of the FIG gymnastics regulatory body (any European can tell you why that particular acronym is so appropriate this year - their version of "unintentional truth") basically wimped out of any organizational claim to integrity by saying - in spoken words, and everything - that they weren't going to decide to award the Gold to the South Korean even though their assessment of the situation showed he'd earned the medal - then for the hard part, pantomimed - I wish I were kidding, but the man pantomimed an official communication - the act of removing the medal from around his neck and said that this is what Hamm should have done.

So the Blame America Firsters are saying it's Paul Hamm's fault that no one, not one person responsible for deciding who earned the Gold Medal in the Men's All Around Gymnastics Event this year had the necessary integrity to do anything but draw a fat paycheck.
___

It's a real "Oops" for the Blame America Firsters that the Greeks, who have been being built up as noble successors to the Athenians of old and the other Hellenic idealists who gave us the Olympics by the world and US press, turned out to be among the least well-behaved national delegations at the Olympics.

And the call that Russia was finally going to be ready to play in the big leagues, sportsmanship-wise, well, that was probably wrong, too. The Russian fans definitely did not deserve their country's athletes - who, by contrast, are uniformly a class act both in performance and sportsmanship.

This isn't a chauvinistic slap at the Greeks and Russians as Greeks and Russians.

The Greeks are supposed to have given us democracy, although I think the Swiss/Helvetii's Neanderthal forebears may have given it to us much earlier, based on the anthropological and historical evidence. Then again, my wife and kids say that even stronger evidence - including a striking visual similarity to that poor fellow they dug out of the Tyrolean Alps in the early 1990s - indicates that I, myself, am a Neanderthal, and I have never been a Democrat.

There are a whole lot of other things the Greeks gave us, such as ill-conceived, generations-long wars of conquest (I'm thinking Athens-Syracuse and Sparta-Everyone Else In The Neighborhood) that I'm not going to talk about.

And doubtless the bleachers got a little raucous when (say) Delos gave Athens a good shellacking in the discus, but the number of writers who have described the original Olympics as being a more-or-less sportsmanlike business over a span of centuries leaves little room for doubt that what we've seen in this Olympics is an aberration.

Now, the Russians don't have the direct historical connection to the Olympic tradition that the Greeks do, but they owe their very alphabet and the precursor to their language to a couple of Orthodox monks named Cyril and Methodius. Methodius was apparently standing behind the door when the alphabet for half of Eastern Europe's modern languages was named, as we now call it the "Cyrillic" alphabet. But they were both canonized as saints, so I suppose the important bases were touched.

We don't know how Saints Cyril and Methodius felt about what would, to them, have been the ancient Greek Olympics. Perhaps they, using the wonderfully contracting lens of hindsight, lumped it in with the Paganism and other horrible things the ancient Greeks did before Christ, His Disciples, and Roman Imperial converts - on each side of the Empire - became available to explain matters to the rest of central Europe.

But in Heaven, I'm sure that they are doing the saintly equivalent of puking when they consider what their compatriots and/or cultural beneficiaries are doing in Athens, at the Olympic Center right now.

If the dearly departed were eligible to represent their countries in the Olympics this year, Greece would at least have taken Gold and Silver in the 1000-meter Horizontal Hurl.

Can we please get Jimmy Carter to p-off the Russians again so they boycott the next Olympics? Maybe foment another Amur River border crisis in 2008? I know old James Earl's got yet another foreign policy fiasco in him before he dies... the way he helped us get taken to the cleaners by the North Koreans in the 1990s was prime, disastrous Carter magic.

Paul O'Neill is the real deal. His critics... well, they're another deal
Quoted from "Vietnam vet questions Kerry on war record," By Jerry Schwartz, Associated Press

"Critics have rebutted O'Neill and Corsi's accusations and charged that the campaign surrounding the book is orchestrated by President Bush's people. They dismiss O'Neill as a Republican stooge, citing his donations to GOP candidates and his law firm's ties to Republicans.

But Gerry Birnberg, chairman of the Harris County Democratic Committee in Houston, has known O'Neill more than 20 years, and while he believes O'Neill is wrong about Kerry, he does not see a Republican plot. O'Neill simply "has intense personal antipathy" for Kerry, he says.

Things Kerry did and said in 1971 "stick in John's craw," he says.

Both Kerry and O'Neill were decorated in Vietnam - the Navy says O'Neill received three Bronze Stars - and both commanded swiftboat No. 94 at different times.

But Kerry is a product of Yale; O'Neill, of the U.S. Naval Academy, where his father (a retired rear admiral), two brothers and 15 other relatives had graduated. Kerry spent 10 months in Vietnam, including six on a frigate offshore; O'Neill was there for 18.

Returning from Vietnam, Kerry got an early discharge to run for Congress and joined the anti-war movement. O'Neill came back to work for the Naval Reserve Officers' Training Corps at the College of Holy Cross.

Hospitalized for an injury exacerbated in Vietnam, O'Neill watched Kerry tell the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the war was foolhardy and recount stories by other veterans about how they had "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads."

O'Neill believed in the war effort, thought immediate withdrawal would abandon prisoners of war and was outraged by Kerry's war crime reports.

When the Foreign Relations Committee didn't respond to his offer to rebut Kerry (blogger note: my emphasis), he contacted Bruce Kesler, an ex-Marine who had written a New York Times op-ed piece supporting the war.

Kesler invited him to a Washington news conference for the new Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace.

He was "a young guy like ourselves, very sweet and straight, a Midwestern sort of guy ... ," Kesler recalls. "He had one suit, which was going out of style even then, a blue-and-white seersucker. And he wore white socks."

That day, O'Neill gave a speech that drew notice from the Nixon administration, alarmed by Kerry's increasing star power.

Kerry "was very articulate, a credible leader of the opposition. He forced us to create a counterfoil," Nixon aide Chuck Colson once said, reported Joe Klein in The New Yorker. "We found a vet named John O'Neill and formed a group called Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. We had O'Neill meet the president, and we did everything we could do to boost his group."

Kesler and O'Neill deny the White House instigated their effort. Kesler says Nixon might have exploited his group but didn't create or fund it.

O'Neill visited Nixon for an hour. He remembers they talked of Vietnam, Kerry and politics. He also recalls Nixon's awkward pause when O'Neill said he supported Hubert Humphrey in 1968.

Tapes show he told Nixon that he had been in Cambodia with his swiftboat - though he has since denied it, and has called Kerry's claims of being in Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1968 "complete lies."

Two weeks after meeting Nixon, O'Neill debated Kerry on "The Dick Cavett Show."

"You obviously are quite good on the polished rhetoric, but I did serve in the same place you did ... and I never saw anything," O'Neill said, "and I would like you to tell me about the war crimes you saw committed there, and also why you didn't do something about them."

Kerry insisted there were violations of the Geneva Conventions and said O'Neill's group should be named "Vietnam Veterans for a Continued War."

After a speaking tour and appearance at the 1972 Republican National Convention, O'Neill entered the University of Texas law school, graduated first in his class and clerked for Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist. He married, had two kids and practiced law, often pressing security fraud cases against brokerages.

He describes his political involvement as minimal. He says he voted for Al Gore in 2000, has given $7,000 to Republicans in recent years but also $20,000 to Democratic candidates for Houston mayor and councilman.

But at age 58, he joined the effort to derail the candidacy of the man he debated at age 25. Others in what became Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had been researching Kerry's record since January; O'Neill and Corsi wrote their book in May and June.

Rolled out with hard-hitting television spots, the book has 650,000 copies in print.

For the second time, O'Neill is being pilloried as a puppet of a Republican president. He is again in a debate involving Vietnam, a war that ended in 1975 and yet may never end.

"I hope that's not true," he says. "I hope we can all forget about it."
_______

But not, Mr. O'Neill, until we settle John Kerry's nasty hash once and for all (politically speaking - I hope that one day he retires to France or some other country, and has all the nuance, socialisme et fromage he can choke down).

We don't need Kerry's sort in the White House, because as a Cajun I can say with no fear of contradiction that Hanoi John is also plein de merde.

Thanks for standing up and doing the right thing, especially knowing that the band of hypocrites whose baton the Democratic Party waves will bend every effort to smear your reputation.

Don't let the bastards grind you down.

When John Kerry Snivels, People Listen....
Mood:  irritated
Topic: CBS is 2/3 BS

How does this letter to the editor selection stuff work?
Mood:  not sure
Topic: the Denver media and me
The editor of the weekend op-ed section at the The Denver Post, "Open Forum," asked readers for "your thoughts on Medicaid and other health-cost issues" after running not one, but two columns on the front page of his section in the Sunday Post on why Colorado Medicaid doesn't pick up the tab for dental care and chiropractic treatments among other services which are on the Medicaid menu in other states, but not here.

At ten-ish this morning, I got a call from a nice young lady from the Post asking whether I wanted my letter to run in their newspaper. I missed being able to take the call in person owing to acute, very late-stage post-prandial indisposition, but have it on voice mail. I can't say this enough, she was as nice as she could be.

Then, I got the following Email from the editor of the weekend op-ed section of The Denver Post at 4:43 pm (all times I used are US/Canadian Mountain Time, GMT-07:00) this afternoon:

"Thanks for this submission. It's not something we can use at this time, but we appreciate your thinking of The Post.

Todd Editor
Assistant Editorial Page Editor, The Denver Post
teditor@denverpost.com
(303) 820-1650
1560 Broadway, Denver, Colorado 80202

-----Original Message-----
From: Vance P. Frickey [mailto:vfrickey@omitted on this blog because I'm not a moron.com]
Sent: Sunday, August 22, 2004 3:54 PM
To: openforum@denverpost.com
Subject: Colorado Medicaid and why we can't fund it all...

Mr. Todd Editor, Perpsectives Editor
The Denver Post

Dear Editor:

The cost of medical care is out of control in Colorado and everywhere else in the US because we don't have medical tort reform - but we do have a healthy, multi-billion dollar national industry of suing doctors, hospitals
and drug companies.

This reduces both the effectiveness of Medicaid funding in Colorado and its availability. Every dollar diverted from provision of medical care to the pockets of trial lawyers contracts the economy, prolonging the recession and reducing tax revenues.

Two of the reasons why Colorado can't afford to fund Medicaid as completely as other states are the same reasons Senator John Edwards and other trial lawyers practice here in the US and not in Canada:

First, Canada has the sort of medical tort reform that John Kerry, John Edwards, and other Democrats in the United States Senate oppose. Trial
lawyers liked the Democratic Party so much, they bought it.

Second, filing nuisance lawsuits in Canada is a losing game, financially. In Canada, when someone brings such a lawsuit and loses, they pay their
opponents' reasonable legal costs and their own.

Vance P. Frickey, Denver

(Please do not publish my street address or telephone number, as the Democratic Party has FAR too many activists who are unfortunately prone to
personal violence and harassment against their opponents, and we'd prefer not to lose another house cat.)

home address:
(omitted on this blog because I'm not a moron)

day/evening time phone number:
(omitted on this blog because, etc, etc)

Before editing this letter for ANY reason, please advise me of intended changes by Email to vfrickey@(omitted on this blog.com)."

Now, I went all the way to comply with the requirements set forth on the second page of the weekend op-ed section for people who want to state their opinion.

I gave my home address and phone number to people I don't know from Adam, and on whose favored Presidential and vice-Presidential candidate I may have just placed partial blame for the rape of our medical health industry by Kerry and Edwards' major Senatorial clients... but I wanted my say on the topic.

My word processor tells me that there were fewer than 200 words in the piece between "Dear Editor" and "Vance P. Frickey, Denver," inclusive, as specified in the editor's instructions.

I did ask the editor to inform me beforehand if he intended to edit my letter for "length, grammar or inaccuracy.
____

I want to be very careful here. I don't know the editor of the "Perspective" section of the Denver Post from Adam's cat. I have no idea whatsoever of his political leanings, personal beliefs, or professional standing, nor any interest in them apart from whether they affect the views allowed to be presented in Denver's largest newspaper.

But I think we should look at what's on last Sunday's "Perspectives" section, just on the off chance that we can learn something about how the process of selecting letters to the editor works at the Denver Post....

Last Sunday's "Perspectives" topic was "The Race for the United States Senate: Pete Coors vs. Ken Salazar"

The letters which made the cut (quoted in their entirety, the authors' names omitted):

Letter #1

"Republican Senate candidate Pete Coors says we should we should elect him to the U.S. Senate because the Senate has too many lawyers and he's businessman, not a lawyer.

"Actually, the Senate has too many white, male millionaires who know next to nothing about how most Americans really live.

"Besides, we already have a white, male businessman who knows next to nothing as president. For crying out loud, why would we want to compound our error by sending another such character to Washington?"

letter #2

"Re: 'Abortion coverage finding spotlight, Aug. 18 business news story'.

"Pete Coors compares face jobs and breast implants with abortion. It is no wonder he is opposed to abortion if he has no better understanding than that. Who is going to raise those kids, Pete? Are you going to guarantee them the basics required to have a reasonably healthy, happy life? When calling abortion a "voluntary medical procedure," one should first think of the alternative, that is, the risk of raising an unhealthy child because there aren't enough resources for his or her needs. I call that a necessary medical procedure. It is a rare woman who is faced with a pregnancy and does not think about all those things before deciding what must be done."

letter #3

"Re:'Hopefuls sidestep religion,' and 'Bishops plant seeds on the political field,' Aug. 16 news stories.

"Your articles were interesting, but incomplete. The Senate candidates and the bishops also need to address the issues of U.S. policy regarding transubstantiation, the assumption of the Virgin, and the infallibility of the Pope.

"We don't want any surprises after the election, so let's get this all out in the open now!"

letter #4

"Bob Schaeffer campaigned for the Republican Senate nomination with the full backing of the Christian conservatives and repeatedly referenced his faith in God. However, after the primary election, Pete Coors thanked God a few times for his victory over Schaeffer, so apparently God was really on his side, although she may not have tipped her hand to Schaeffer. Finally, in an interview with the Denver Post, Ken Salazar states that the November election is 'in God's hands.' How is one God going to select so many candidates clamoring for her support?"

Is it just me, or is there a theme, a sameness among the letters (apart from the fact that they were all in the 80 to 130-word range)? Perhaps a slight clustering of the political data points leftward?

Or am I just suffering from sour grapes at not being invited to clutter up the "Perspectives" section of the Denver Post with what appears to be a missing reader perspective?

I mean, if this were Boulder and not metropolitan Denver (I live in Diana DeGetteville, myself), I'd buy last Sunday's spectrum of opinions as representative of the community's views.

But somehow I don't think the "let's kill unborn babies because they might grow up poor" letter is representative of how most Denverites think. Neither is all the smarting-off in which two of the lucky selectees for publication indulged about a God in Whom I and most of my neighbors believe in strongly.

I think all the people whose letters Todd Editor chose for publication deserve to be heard, just as much as the rest of us in Denver. But these people sound as though they all hang out at the same Starbucks, which means we readers of the Denver Post are getting not "Perspectives," but one "Perspective" - two, tops.

If these letter writers' perspectives are an accurate reflection of how people in this town think, Denver would be a much different town than the one my friends, my wife and I see every day.

Maybe the Denver Post is trying to gain street cred among big-city daily newspapers by running a weekend science fiction feature in its op-ed section - to complement Molly Ivins' fantasy column.

Lately, Molly Ivins seems to be writing about some parallel universe in which Kerry hadn't tried to parlay his war record into support among veterans, only to make them remember that he called them rapists and murderers back in his Viet-Cong flag-loving, working for the North Vietnamese as a Congressional lobbyist and giving them crucial pointers during the Paris Peace Talks days. Here's a tip, Molly - get a BIG advance if you want to slap hard covers around your collected Ravings for Kerry.