The Real Campaign Has Been Underway since 2000

I once had a colleague, an attorney, who explained to me that there are
no cases with bad facts. There are only cases with inconvenient facts.
He didn't consider it a lie to leave out the inconvenient facts. He
illustrated the proper handling of "inconvenient" facts by telling me,
for example, that he never wanted his secretary to have to lie on his
behalf, so, if a call came in from someone he didn't want to talk to,
he would step out of his office. She could then tell the caller that
he was not in his office. She would omit the inconvenient fact that he
was standing right behind her, not in his office, but in her cubicle.

I read a story in the Seattle Times this morning about so called
diplomats and military figures against Bush. The reporter on this story
must know my former colleague. While the story is full of
condemnations of Bush's policies, it is strangely silent on party
affiliations and connections of the speakers except one who says that
she is really, fundamentally a Republican. She says it in the way that
would make most investigators wonder what facts are being left out. Is
there a Democrat registration somewhere? Is there an appointment by a
Democrat president or Democrat administration?

What is more disturbing is that a very large part of the press has
almost completely abandoned their role as reporter and has, instead,
become advocates. Now it is not a good thing when an attorney sees his
or her role as advocate requiring a wholesale abandonment of the truth,
but at least when you step into a courtroom you know this person is an
advocate for a particular party. You expect him to be partisan and to
dwell on the facts that are favorable to his client. The press
masquerades as non-partisan. One can expect bias to creep in to any
reporting because we are all human. I fear, however, that the skew in
reporting has now gone far beyond that. I suspect that some in the
press think that they did not go far enough in 2000 as a consequence of
which, Al Gore lost. They do not intend to make that mistake this
year.

George Bush with his millions in campaign funds is not just up against
the Democratic Party. He is up against a press corps that thinks it
has not only the right, but the duty to determine the outcome of the
next election by the way it filters the news. That possibility is
frightening because this is a cadre of people elected by no one and
accountable to no one, except, finally the consumer. When enough
consumers decide that they are tired of people who doctor the news,
this will stop. It is our job in the blogosphere and minority
(politically) press to bring that day about sooner rather than later.

It's time to Get Serious

this country is undergoing a mass insanity attack. A prominent author,
Scott Turow, attacks the administration for holding a man who intended
to blow up and kill thousands of Americans in cooperation with Al Qaeda
in custody indefinitely while American soldiers are being blown up and
killed on a daily basis in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Wake up and smell the coffee Scott!. While you are diddling about
getting ready for trial, the terrorist friends of Jose Padilla are
planning to kill you. And me. To be honest Scott, it they kill you, I
will be outraged. But part of me will think you are getting your just
deserts. If they kill me, I will be dead. So, the thing is Scott,
your stupidity, by getting in the way of the people who are trying to
protect me, makes me pretty angry at you. If your being stupid only
affected you, hey, I could live with it. Unfortunately, it affects me
and mine. STOP IT.

You are insane as are all of your liberal brethren. Look at these
people-- the Al Qaeda-- they want to kill you. Jose Padilla wants to
kill you.When are you going to defend yourself?

The Political Press

What is becoming increasingly clear when one reads press reports is
that the entire establishment press, with rare exceptions, sees the
Woodward Bernstein Watergate phenomenon as their proper role in life.
That is-- they believe it is not only their right, but their duty to
present the so-called "news" in a light which will sway elections in
the way they think the election should go. Part of the partisan anger
toward Bush is based on the fact that many people felt that had they
only played the game a little stronger, a little better he would not be
president now.

This arrogance, this l'etat c'est moi mentality exhibited by the vast
majority of the press, is part of an odious anti-democratic, liberal
elitism that is part and parcel of Marxism. We, the little people,
cannot be trusted with the facts because we are incapable of discerning
from them the "truth". That is, we will not come to the same leftwing
conclusions as the leftist press so we must not be allowed to have the
information from which to form our own opinions. We can never be
trusted again because we did not vote for the Democrat in sufficient
numbers.

In order to understand this mentality, one must understand that, to
liberals, membership in the Democratic party is like membership in a
church except enormously more important. Yes, your church might do
things from time to time that you disapprove of but that's no reason to
become apostate.

I believe that it is this reality and it alone that explains Bush's
poor polling numbers. They will not help even to the extent of
broadcasting his speeches. In the end he will have to buy nearly all
of the favorable air time he gets no matter how favoarable the facts
are for him.

Susan Salisbury

The Real Agenda In Homosexual Marriage

Homosexuals have been getting married in the United States for at
least 30 years. Ever since the Metropolitan Community Church was
created, a church created by and for homosexuals, wedding ceremonies
have been performed without much ado or fuss by anyone else. The
difference between those wedding ceremonies and the ones which are now
taking place in Massachusetts is that the civil law did not recognize
such marriages as conferring the legally benefits of marriage in the
eyes of the state. That is to say, they weren't illegal. Anybody can
have any religious ceremony he or she wants to have so long is no one
is hurt. But the marriage was not going to qualify to get you social
security benefits when your spouse died. What is going on now is a
move to require the state and all of the rest of us to recognize such
marriages as conferring those legal entitlements heretofore conferred
upon spouses in heterosexual marriages upon spouses in homosexual
marriages.

When pressed, those who agitate to legalize homosexual marriage state
that there are over 1000 legal benefits conferred on those who are
legally married which are denied to homosexual couples . This
assertion is probably true. It is this assertion that people ought to
look at carefully before they endorse the legal recognition of
homosexual marriage.

Before embarking on that discussion, it is useful to remember that the
state has been pretty picky about which heterosexuals can get married
legally. A person can legally have only one spouse at a time. In
fact, having more than one spouse is a crime in most states. The
spouses have to be old enough to consent to a marriage. There are
still sects in Utah who find that these rules interfere with their
desires and beliefs.

Putting that aside, let's look at just some of the benefis. The first
one to come to mind is that one I have already mentioned-- Social
Security. If you have the necessary quarters of coverage and you die,
your spouse can collect social security survivor benefits for either
the rest of his or her life or until he or she remarries. So, if we
recognize a marriage as legal we are adding a potential cost to our
social security system. How much? No one knows because no one has
studied it. Let us go further-- worker's compensation also allows
spouses to collect for work related deaths and the civil system allows
spouses, but not mere partners, to file claims for wrongful death.
What will the additional costs be? Again, no one knows because no one
has bothered to make a cost analysis. The law prohibits employers from
discriminating in health insurance benefits, so if one spouse is
covered all spouses must be covered for health insurance. Usually
today, the cost for adding spousal coverage is less than for the
employee alone. This is another additional potential cost where
employers subsidize health insurance coverage.

Homosexual activitists will argue that this is, after all, only fair.
They pay the same, sometimes more, in taxes. Why shouldn't they get
the same benefits? Their arguments are pretty much the arguments of
all single people in our country. It is unquestionably true that
single people pay higher taxes. And the arguments for that are the
same as they always have been. They have not taken upon themselves the
burden of conceiving and raising children. ( By the way, married
people without children tend to pay the highest taxes) There is a
reason for all the tax and other benefits conferred on people who raise
children. It is, in fact, our children who will be paying those
benefits in the future.

Savings accounts and investments and all of those other financial
instruments are a way of placing a demand on future generations that
they pay back the investment we have made in them. To be less abstract
about it-- if you are not employed at some useful and productive job,
no matter what the source of your income is, you are living off of the
labor of others-- the people who actually go out and farm and
manufacture and produce. Financial instruments are a reflection of the
fact that you, in the past, produced and invested and created a
situation where today's workers could be more productive and could
produce more goods with less labor. It is a great system and it works
very well. But it only works if there is a new generation to take on
the burdens which we shouldered in the past.

And that is one biological social fact which has not changed. it takes
a man and a woman to create a child. Even in a test tube it takes a
sperm and an ovum. This is the unchanging biological fact. A new
generation can be created only by the union of many men and many
women. Another sociological fact-- a man and a woman who are legally
committed to each other make the optimum family for raising a child.
Men are different from women. Children raised in homes in which they
have both a father and a mother tend to, themselves, be more likely to
engage in successful marriages and raise children themselves.

Another sociological fact rarely commented upon by the people who
discuss the issue of marriage is that we in the United States and more
so in Europe, are not having enough children to replicate our
societies. In the United States the problem is being solved by
immigration mostly from south of the border. In Europe it is being
solved by immigration from the Middle East. After years of
environmentalist screeching about overpopulation, no one wants to talk
about the declining birth rate as a problem.

But getting back to the compelled legal recognition of homosexual
marriages, the government has the right and the duty to try to preserve
the future of our country through assuring that we will have a next
generation to pay the benefits. Homosexual marriage by its nature is
not a vehicle toward that end.

Homosexuals are free to get married already. They are not, however,
under current law, able to compel anyone else to recognize that
marriage. They should not be allowed to do so in the future because
they cannot confer the benefits on society that are the reasons that
government recognizes and bestows benefits on married people-- the fact
that married people tend to bear a disproportionate responsibility for
assuring that there is a next generation to take care of us when we are
too old to take care of ourselves.