And the Denver-area winner in the category, "Pot Calling the Kettle Ugly" is....
Topic: the Denver media and me
The Denver Post, in its op-ed section (called "Perspectives," even though the appearance of more than one perspective among its op-ed columns would be remarkable) joined the pile of Democratic political hacks punching, kicking and shivving Sen. Zell Miller in the back for daring to state the obvious - the national Democratic Party just... doesn't... get it.

In his speech before the Republican Convention, Senator Miller doubtless spoke what is on many minds within the Democratic Party - that John Forbes Kerry is the last man we should be considering electing President of the United States.

And Senator Miller is right.

But the Denver Post apparently doesn't think that Senator Miller's right to speak freely counts as much as party loyalty.

The only op-ed piece they ran on the story was "Tone of politics gets ugly," by former Colorado state treasurer and lieutenant-governor, Democratic candidate for Governor, and Clinton-appointed United States Ambassador Gail Schoettler.

Ms. Schoettler didn't pull any punches. She described Miller's speech at the Republican National Convention as a "vitriolic attack on Democrats, his party," and went on for ten vitriolic paragraphs, calling Sen. Miller "simply pathetic" and a "dyspeptic ingrate."

Schoettler also managed to spin Zell Miller's remarks into an ominous foreshadowing of an age of political ugliness.

Ambassador Schoettler's duties at the World Radiocommunication Conference in Turkey in 2000 must have prevented her from seeing how ugly her own party can get, as when Linda Tripp's character was expertly assassinated by the White House and their host of allies in the news and entertainment complex, while she and her family were physically threatened by Clinton-friendly thugs and her personnel records illegally released by the Pentagon - the exact same criminal offense for which Chuck Colson was thrown in jail.

But that's ancient history, right? Fine.

What about when moveon.org took out ads saying that Bush was like Hitler? (never mind the rest of moveon.org's rabid line of hate propaganda against Bush, Cheney and the Republican Party)

And when someone who dared to shout a question critical of John Kerry was carried out of one of his rallies in Ohio in a headlock? (nothing like the good old Third World Dictator Ton Ton Macoutes approach to dissent, is there?)

And when the lies about a corrupt connection between Halliburton and the White House are carried as straight news by Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News?

And when a number of disgruntled former employees of the Bush White House and Kerry campaign staffers are interviewed by 60 Minutes with slloooowww sympathetic softball-pitch questions?

And when MSNBC's senior political analyst and McLaughlin Group panelist Lawrence O'Donnell called Zell Miller "crazy" and "a liar" - no, THAT'S not ugly, is it?

I had to chuckle - the resulting torrent of Email and other correspondence condemning O'Donnell's moronic comments about Miller provoked a hand-wringing session on the next McLaughlin Group about how very, very hard it is to be a modern journalist and risk the wrath of lots of ticked-off readers or viewers, since the Democratic Party doesn't control blogs and Email the way it does the print and broadcast media - yet.

The problem with Ambassador Schoettler's article is that she mixes up ordinary, rank-and-file Democrats - almost all of whom, especially the vast majority of their local activists, are good, decent people who participate in politics because they care about their country and other people - with the national Democratic Party and the DNC, cynical players of dirty politics devoted to the personal destruction of their enemies and totally unworthy of their supporters - as evident from their behavior.

I decided to send a quick, under-200 word note (thus complying with their "letters guidelines") to the Denver Post's "OpenForum" page (Orwellian irony is apparently their long suit) commenting on Amb. Schoettler's column:

"Dear Editor:

Denver Post columnist (and longtime Democrat office-holder) Gail Schoettler's personal attack on Senator Zell Miller:

(a) shows the utter hypocrisy of Schoettler's party and the media - moveon.org can run ads comparing Bush to Hitler, Kerry's trained seals can pour tons of vitriol on the President and the people who support him, but the Denver Post and the other news media only discover that the "Tone of Politics Gets Ugly" when a Bush supporter speaks about the Democratic Party's disconnect from morality, reality and about half of the people;

(b) illustrates the Democratic Party's damage control procedures -

When someone washes the Democrats' dirty undies in public:

First, assassinate his or her character (remember Linda Tripp and Ken Starr?);

Second, whine about "divisive" and "vitriolic" comments if there is no way to disprove them or, as in Senator Miller's case, they are so obviously true that even character assassination won't work.

Also, Ms. Schoettler is wrong - the voters of Georgia put Zell Miller in office and kept him there, not the Democratic Party.

Vance P. Frickey, Denver, CO

NOTE TO EDITOR: LETTER TO THE EDITOR ENDS WITH PRECEDING LINE

Documentation of compliance with "Letters Guidelines," the Denver Post, Sunday, September 12, 2004, Page 2E:

Word count (from Microsoft Word "File, Properties, Statistics"): 180 words between "Dear Editor" and "Vance P. Frickey, Denver, CO," inclusive.

Request: please advise me if you (a) either find it impossible to publish the letter without removing any of my carefully chosen words or (b) would like to propose the removal of any such words prior to publication

Accuracy of comments: much greater than the comments made by Ms. Schoettler in the column to which I responded. If Zell Miller's speech at the Republican Convention was "a vitriolic attack," her own comments on Senator Miller stopped just short of an episode of Tourette's Syndrome, and you printed them.

Apart from that, how does one evaluate the "accuracy" of another person's opinion? Isn't that the sort of thing done in the People's Republic of Vietnam?

I only ask because the rules of journalism seem to have changed dramatically from my last formal exposure to them in high school journalism class. In particular, someone seems to have repealed the Canons of Journalism with regard to things like objectivity, apparent and actual conflict of interest (although I do applaud your disclosure of Gail Schoettler's long history as a Democratic Party office holder and operative at the end of her column), and balanced presentation of viewpoints. Just read "Perspectives" if you don't see what I mean - every syndicated and locally written op-ed column represents ONE perspective - the view from left-of-center.

Requested contact information (please withhold any and all such information from publication or casual disclosure outside of the editorial process):

Vance P. Frickey

(mailing address) (blogger note: withheld here in the blog because a tiny minority of the Democratic Party's activist base deals in physical intimidation, including vandalism and pet murder)

(day and evening telephone) (blogger note: ditto)

(Email) (blogger note: ditto)"

Of course, the last time I sent a letter to OpenForum, they couldn't use it.

Thank God for the blogosphere, huh?

9/11/2001 - Why we remember - why we must win - why the national press is now showing its true colors.
Topic: No Truce with Terror!
Three years ago today almost 3,000 people died as a result of the hijacking of four airliners and the intentional crash of three of these airliners into each of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center at New York, New York and the Pentagon (the US Department of Defense headquarters building) in Arlington, Virginia, near Washington, DC. The fourth airliner crashed in a field in Pennsylvania as the crew and passengers heroically struggled to wrest control from the hijackers, before it, too could be used as a manned missile to destroy another target in America.

I have tried several times to itemize the death toll and can't do it. There is no way to call the roll of the innocent dead from that day within the limits of a blog entry that does them enough honor. I'll just try to tell the story as best I can, instead.

I was home watching television when ABC News broke in with videotape footage of the first World Trade Center collision, and I remember thinking "What a ghastly screw-up," and wondering if the mainframe computer serving New York FAA Traffic Control had malfunctioned really badly.

Then I saw the second plane hit the second tower, and I knew that we were not seeing an accident here. I don't remember much after that, except that the Pentagon also got hit, and that FAA and NORAD grounded every nonmilitary aircraft in US airspace shortly after that.

I've heard a lot of crap about Islamist this and "desperation of the Arab street" that, and I have decided that none of it is true. Watching thousands Palestinians - men, women and children - dance in the street and sing for joy that afternoon on the TV news made me wish at that moment that I had been able to visit REAL desperation on them, the desperation hitherto felt only by the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

What started long before 9/11/2001 (only Bill Clinton couldn't be bothered to protect us from it - giving the order to whack Osama bin Laden would have interrupted his schmoozing at the VIP tent at Augusta during a golf tournament), was the decision on the part of the leading clergy of Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations, and largely covert non-clerical allies to buy enough military might and turn enough of its endless supply of poor, pissed-off kids into suicide drones in order to fight and win a Third World War with Western Civilization.

The stakes: the world. The entire world. The radical Islamists want it, but we - the industrialized West, including the Pacific Rim nations of Japan and the other Asian democracies - seem to be running most of it just now.

And we're preventing them from destroying Israel, so we Americans will have to die, too, so the Islamists can realize their old dream of killing every Jew in Israel. That's the lethal arithmetic of the radical Islamist clergy which, unfortunately, tells the average Saudi citizen what to think.

We're fighting that war as you read this.

It hasn't been declared by either side because there's a slim chance that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia can get control of its country back from the wild-eyed fanatics who are telling every Muslim with a gun and a grudge against the West that it's OK to kill Americans - just because.

If the KSA can't win this civil war of theirs - which is in progress right now - then the Saudi royal families will have little choice but either to join the radicals against us or fly off into exile, which also leaves the Saudi radical clerics in power.

And like the last World War, no one wanted to admit it had started until it was well under way.

Like the last World War, Western Europe showed a brief flutter of resolve, then decided to appease the enemy and seek what peace they could with them.

There are also important and probably vital differences between our present World War and World War Two:

The United States of America didn't wait until the war was almost lost this time - we instead chose to partner with the United Kingdom of Great Britain (and for all of me, they can assert their historic claims to France all they want now) in assessing, tracking, preventing, forestalling and punishing terrorism throughout the world.

We struck hard and decisively at our enemies this time, scattering the Taliban and Osama bin Laden and restoring Afghanistan to its people - as an example of what happens to rogue countries that harbor terrorists who attack us.

We announced that we were in this war for the long haul. For the first time since John F. Kennedy's "long, midnight struggle" speech about the Cold War, an American president committed our forces, our treasure and our lives to defeating our implacable enemies over an indefinite, long period.

We attacked where we had good reason to believe our enemies had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction and were training and preparing to attack us.

One horrible difference - unlike the last World War, the President's political opposition is milking the situation for everything it's worth, slandering the President, casting aspersions on his motives for wanting to defend our country - to get their own men in the White House and Congress.

Another ghastly, unimaginable in 1940 difference between now and World War Two - a national press determined to bend the truth, fabricate evidence, and flat-out lie to get its favored Presidential candidate elected - even at the cost of our ability to fight this war.

I'm tired of using even the tiny amount of restraint I've used so far to describe what is happening.

It's September 11th, 2004, and three years later, we're back to having an elitist corps of self-proclaimed geniuses who think they're better equipped than the voters to choose the next President - whose only qualification is the ability to give inaccurate reports of events to other people - the inaccuracy as often as not deliberate and intended to create a false impression of the events covered. In other words, lying.

These people are not only traitors to their own professional creed and the idea of a representative government with real power and real accountability, but given the chance they will become part of the tyrant class of America, along with the activist judiciary and the permanent, fradulently-elected Democratic Senate. They seem to be working incessantly to engineer an electoral victory for themselves and their friends.

We plain old Americans aren't completely helpless, though. There's a fine old trick that, if enough of us use it, works wonders.

Write down the name of every advertiser on a news program or in a newspaper or magazine that bends the truth or flat-out lies - as when forged documents were used to "prove" bad things about the President's past - then look the advertisers up on the labels of any of their products that you use, the Internet, or at the library and tell them that as long as they are paying for lies (be sure to mention which ones, and who told them), you won't be buying what they have to sell.

The future of our country depends on it.

Rather Biased Lies Again! or, Are The New Air Guard Files on Bush FORGERIES?
Mood:  celebratory
Topic: CBS is 2/3 BS
"It doesn't matter whether inaccurate information is intentionally or accidentally put in our paths, we have the obligation to know that something is accurate before we repeat it. And it doesn't matter whether the slander is directed at friends or enemies." - James P. Tartaro

"Authenticity of new Bush military papers questioned," AP Washington, as published on www.usatoday.com"

Quoting from the USA Today article:

"The personnel chief in Killian's unit at the time said he believes the documents are fake.

(Blogger note: Lt. Col. Jerry Killian was one of Bush's commanders in 1972 and 1973, and the purported author of the Texas Air National Guard memos which are now suspected by independent document experts of having been forged in order to defame the President.)

"They looked to me like forgeries," said Rufus Martin. "I don't think Killian would do that, and I knew him for 17 years." Killian died in 1984.

Independent document examiner Sandra Ramsey Lines said the memos looked like they had been produced on a computer using Microsoft Word software. Lines, a document expert and fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, pointed to a superscript -- a smaller, raised "th" in "111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron" -- as evidence indicating forgery.

Microsoft Word automatically inserts superscripts in the same style as the two on the memos obtained by CBS, she said.

"I'm virtually certain these were computer generated," Lines said after reviewing copies of the documents at her office in Paradise Valley, Ariz. She produced a nearly identical document using her computer's Microsoft Word software."

"The most outrageous lies that can be invented will find believers if a person only tells them with all his might." - Mark Twain

And predictably, CBS had a nice spin prepared and waiting: "Bush Guard Memos Questioned"

"In a statement, CBS News said it stands by its story.

"This report was not based solely on recovered documents, but rather on a preponderance of evidence, including documents that were provided by unimpeachable sources, interviews with former Texas National Guard officials and individuals who worked closely back in the early 1970s with Colonel Jerry Killian and were well acquainted with his procedures, his character and his thinking," the statement read.

"In addition, the documents are backed up not only by independent handwriting and forensic document experts but by sources familiar with their content," the statement continued. "Contrary to some rumors, no internal investigation is underway at CBS News nor is one planned."

Friday afternoon, CBS News addressed one of the authenticity issues raised, whether typewriters in the 1960s had the "th" superscript key. "CBS News states with absolute certainty that the ability to produce the "th" superscript mentioned in reports about the documents did exist on typewriters as early as 1968, and in fact is in President Bush's official military records released by the White House, CBS said in a statement. The issue will be addressed in Friday's Evening News broadcast, 6:30 p.m. ET."

I am really looking forward to this explanation - and the blinding speed with which it can be flushed down the commode with the rest of the CBS story.

Having come of typewriting age (for high school research papers as well as helping to compose and layout type for my high school newspaper) at the same time these memos were typed, I can comment from personal experience that yes, IBM Selectric typewriters could be equipped with "type balls" that had some superscripts such as the one in question.

However, these typewriters were extraordinarily expensive - the one our school newspaper purchased with its own revenues cost over $1,200 in 1973 dollars (over $5,000 in 2004 dollars) - and were thus not likely to be used to be used for casual, unsigned memos.

Typewriters like these often required special skills and training to use which would have meant Col. Hibbard would have probably had to dictate this unsigned memo, providing another witness to the authenticity - or lack thereof - of the disputed memos.

In any case, it's easy to confirm or deny the truth of the memos' alleged provenance - check the Texas Air National Guard's property control records for the time in question and see whether or not a typewriter of the sort needed to type the letters "th" in superscript - and the required Times New Roman type ball - existed in Col. Hibbard's office - or in the 111th Interceptor Squadron's offices at all.

Back to CBS' spin doctors:

"The White House distributed the four memos from 1972 and 1973 after obtaining them from CBS News. The White House did not question their accuracy."

(Note: Probably because the White House is, with the rest of us, waiting for the Monty Python-like sixteen-ton weight to drop on John Kerry's head for concocting this elaborate fraud.)

Richard Starr asks "The Hoaxing of CBS - Why Were They so Easily Duped?" in The Daily Standard... and one answer is...

"It is difficult for those to see whose paycheck depends on them not seeing." - Upton Sinclair.

back to the CBS damage control team:

"Robert Strong was a friend and colleague of Killian who ran the Texas Air National Guard administrative office in the Vietnam era. Strong, now a college professor, also believes the documents are genuine.

"They are compatible with the way business was done at the time. They are compatible with the man that I remember Jerry Killian being," says Strong. "I don't see anything in the documents that is discordant with what were the times, what was the situation and what were the people involved."

(Note: Especially the Democrat good-old-boy network which ran Texas.)

"The documents were described in a 60 Minutes story that featured a retired Texas politician's claim that he pulled strings to get young Mr. Bush, then a college graduate at the height of the Vietnam War in 1968, into the Guard -- a posting that made service overseas unlikely."

Now, readers, please note the complete and total absence of the word "Democrat" anywhere in CBS' explanation of these new (and I suspect they are "new" in every sense of the word) memos.

The man who brought the memos to CBS's attention just happened to have risen through the ranks of the Texas Democratic Party to election as state Lieutenant-Governor, and CBS somehow forgets to disclose this fact. This is the same CBS who made such a big deal about the Swifties' O'Neill having made some campaign contributions to the Republicans over the years.

But CBS, like that famous trio of monkeys, sees no Democrats, hears no Democrats, and (are you kidding?) speaks about no Democrats when discussing where it got these memos.

The sad thing is that no one else in the mainstream media has commented on the lack of arm's length between CBS and its allies in the Democratic Party.

Dan Rather and CBS News didn't tell us that they got these memos from the Kerry campaign - specifically from a former Democratic Texas lieutenant-governor active as a high-level organizer for Kerry.

Yet, while the whole embarrasking thing was covered (over 1,200 stories four hours after the story broke, according to Google News), no one else in Big Journalism found the lack of objectivity inherent in the coziness between CBS and the Democratic Party worthy of much comment. It really is sad that the national press have given up on journalistic objectivity - on themselves.

Another of those things we got hammered into us in high school journalism class was "disclosure of conflicts of interest." It's clear that Dan Rather and I didn't have the same journalism teacher in high school.

Kerry Got Goons! (or why manhandling protesters is OK if they're hassling Hanoi John)
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Kerry's Lies and Spin

The Scotsman Speaks on Islamist Terrorism!
Topic: No Truce with Terror!
It's comforting to see common sense break out in newspaper editorials:

John Llyod, "The non-negotiable path of hatred," (editorial). The Scotsman, Sun 5 Sep 2004

Mr Llyod said, among other things, most of what I did in the post immediately before this one - only much more eloquently than I did.

The closing of his article is great:

"The drive to succour the wretched, and more pertinently to bring some form of accountability, or even democracy, to much of the Middle East and beyond, is a duty we shouldn't shirk; but it's a duty which makes sense in its own terms. It won't, or at least won't soon, be an answer to mass murder. The answer to mass murderers now can only be certainty in one's own democratic beliefs, and the strength to fight for them. In that, at least, George W Bush is right.

And so the struggle deepens, and will do until Islam can purge itself of its murderous perversion - or have it done for it."

Well, damn! So much for EVERYONE in Europe hating our guts and rooting for Kerry... but the Scots always were tough.

When Bad Things Should Happen to Bad People...
Mood:  on fire
Topic: No Truce with Terror!
Having seen on the television news that the toll of the dead and missing - mostly children - could go as high as 400 after the tragedy at that school in Russia, I can't feel much but the dark, bitter sadness best left undescribed for the tragic deaths, mingled with the burning urge to punish those responsible.

And "those responsible" are more than a handful of screwed-up punks with machine guns and rocket launchers who took that school over last week.

Before Saudi Arabia started sending its missionaries throughout the world, Chechnya's own national form of Islam was not the strident, blood-thirsty version which is preached from Saudi Arabia, the Islam of ibn Wah'hab... who helped build the modern Saudi State centuries ago by allying radical imams with the Saudi princes. Chechnyan Islam was not of the bomb-throwing variety before, but now it certainly has fallen into line with worldwide Wah'habism.

At the end of the first stage of the Wah'habi struggle to control all around them, most of the Hejaz peninsula was united under the austere Islam of ibn Wah'hab. The tolerance taught by the Prophet Muhammad for the People of the Book, Jews and Christians, was replaced by a simmering hatred which extended even to other Muslims who did not agree with the changes ibn Wah'hab had made to Islam - and which he tried to impose on the Saudis' neighbors at the point of the sword until just after the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War One.

It seems that the imams of Saudi Arabia have been getting ambitious of late, preaching again that the lives of the rest of us who share this planet with the followers of Ibn Wah'hab are worth less than those of believers. They have been raising money for many years and sending missionaries throughout the world to get Muslims to accept this message and to take up the bloody sword against the rest of us.

The result? (not a complete list at all)
- the embassy bombings
- the murder of American and other servicemen in the Khobar Towers bombing
- the murder of hundreds of Marines and other Americans in the Beirut barracks bombing
- the bombing of the USS Cole
- the attacks of September 11th, 2001 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
- the apartment house bombings in Moscow
- the disastrous movie theater hostage stand-off in Moscow
- the train bombings at Madrid
- the anthrax attacks in America
- the attempted release of ricin in a train station in Paris
- the destruction of two Russian airlners by suicide bombers late last month
- the murder of hostages in order to try to get a law repealed in France, or to get members of the international military coalition in Iraq to defect
- and finally, the cowardly and despicable hostage taking at an elementary school in southern Russia.

This is nonsense, people.

It's time to put all the touchy-feely crap about cultural sensitivity away and talk about real solutions.

The Saudis apparently have deluded themselves that they can pay their rabid hate-filled surrogates to do these things and not pay a price beyond the money they spent to make these cowardly acts happen in the first place.

They forgot who Vladimir Putin worked for before the fall of the Soviet Union. President Putin was, in his past life, an officer of the Soviet Committee for State Security, or in Russian, Komitet v Gosudarstvannoye Bezopasnosti - the KGB.

I mention this because in the old days, Islamists hijacked a Soviet Aeroflot airliner ONCE. The hijackers sent a list of demands to Moscow, and in return received a parcel containing certain reproductive organs excised from male relatives of the hijackers by KGB operatives. The plane and hostages were released forthwith.

I hate to appear to endorse such a grisly solution to the problem of Islamist terrorism... but it worked. From that point on, only two airlines could count on not having their planes hijacked - Aeroflot and El Al.

The Arabs appear to have let their short memories get the better of them. There comes a point when, if the Saudi people, clergy and royal family all are content to pay for terrorism and the deaths of innocent people in terrorist incidents, then their actions require an appropriate punishment.

Bombing Chechnya would do little or no good - the Chechens themselves have little power to change the ways of the terrorist scum who pretend to act in their behalf.

It's time to cauterize the abcess from which the infection is spreading.

Both the United States of America and the Republic of Russia maintain strategic nuclear arsenals which can be launched after only minor preparations. Long lists of cities, military bases and industrial plants belonging to potential adversaries are kept ready to be electronically programmed into our ICBMs in minutes. Should the worst happen, any or all of these cities, military bases and industries could cease to exist in under an hour.

It's time for the West - and philosophically, culturally and theologically Russia is part of the West- to stop pretending that sweet reason is going to prevail against bloodthirsty, conscienceless terrorism and extremism.

We and the Russians need to alter our lists of nuclear destruction to reflect current realities, and to let the Saudis know that it is not our culture they are about to destroy, but theirs.

And after that, we and the Russians, and any other countries who care to stand beside us must remain vigilant against those who would pervert worship into a warrant for hatred, murder and conquest.

If we must use it, salt is cheaper than rot, and fire less harmful than pestilence.

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!")