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Saturday, March 09, 2002
I didn't say anything about this pork-fest, because I was hoping right up until the end that President Bush would remember he was a Republican and veto it. Silly me.
There is no other spectacle quite as repulsive as what happens when the socialist left and the cash-snorting corporate right team up to raid the public purse. Attila had more restraint in his plundering.
Zero tolerance equals zero intelligence in this bizarre report. Don't male kids play guns any more?
Evidently not. I'm glad I was a part of the last generation of kids allowed to actually have fun growing up. It's sad to see those times pass away, with the newer bunch not even knowing what they've missed.
One of the more interesting undercurrents about this tale is the saga of former White House Counsel Jack Quinn, whom the court ruled was hired by Marc Rich "more for his lobbying abilities" than his legal talents. Well, certainly, except that, on his first day in office in 1993, President Clinton banned senior White House officials from lobbying former colleagues (yes, that would include the Prexy himself) for five years.
Clinton did lift the ban - but not until the end of December, 2000 - nearly a year and a half after Quinn began his lobbying efforts on behalf of Marc Rich. But we all know the Clinton standard: Rules, even his own, are for other people. Right?
No doubt the usual suspects will work themselves into a froth over this, but the US government would be wholly derelict in its duty if it didn't prepare contingency plans like these.
Editor -- I can't recall the last time I felt as much satisfaction with an election result as I did upon learning that Jeff Adachi had defeated Kimiko Burton for the post of San Francisco public defender. Adachi had toiled tirelessly in the public defender's office for 15 years, only to find the promotion that was by all accounts rightfully his snatched away from him in 2001 and delivered (by mayoral appointment) to an inexperienced upstart who happens to be the daughter of one of the most powerful politicians in the state (Senate President Pro Tem John Burton). Kimiko Burton then fired Adachi from the public defender's staff. The conduct of Kimiko Burton, her father and her father's political machine was an exhibition in unadulterated greed and sheer arrogance. They apparently believed they would outspend Adachi and simply buy the post. The result (a 55-to-45-percent Adachi victory) seems to demonstrate that San Francisco voters appreciate the value of hard work and dedication, and reject the notion that political cronyism should ever be allowed to substitute for meritocracy. NITIN SUBHEDAR San Francisco
The Willie Brown-Burton Brothers Democratic Boss machine has dominated San Francisco, indeed, California politics for almost a generation. The members of the machine trade political offices back and forth - or bestow them on their children - like poker chips. The public cynicism on all sides is amazing. Yet even so, on occasion the machine stumbles. This was one of those occasions, and it was beautiful to behold.
Editor -- Once again, The Chronicle publishes stories on record-low voter turnouts and fails to mention one glaringly obvious reason for it. We read about people who forgot, people who were too busy, people who were turned off by negative ads -- but we still don't read about people like myself and Thomas E. Braun (Letters, March 6), who have been thoroughly disgusted by the broken systems, partisan games, fraud, injustice and suspicious court rulings that dominated the 2000 presidential election. Braun and I are not alone in being turned off by the corruption we see, especially here in the Bay Area. ERIC R. KINGSLEY San Francisco
It's difficult to determine Eric R. Kinglsley's politics. Well, actually, no it isn't. Anybody who speaks of "broken systems, partisan games, fraud, injustice and suspicious court rulings that dominated the 2000 presidential election" is unlikely to be voting for the Elephants any time soon. Which is what makes "turned off by the corruption we see, especially here in the Bay Area," so hard to fathom.
If Eric R. Kingsley thinks "especially" the Bay Area, which last elected a Rebublican to anything about ten years ago, is a hotbed of pro-conservative, anti-progressive corruption, then I doubt he'll be satisfied with much less than complete political and electoral reform - say to something like the 100% voter "turnouts" under the old Soviet Union's system.
If anybody knows how to keep Blogger from putting heds on every post you create using Blog This!, please email me and let me in on the secret. Grumble. Thanks.
Maybe it's because I'm primarily a novelist, but the idea of a book-burning really bothers me. And for some reason, this particular burning especially does so. The great conflict of modern times, and so soon, the memory of the loser begins to vanish from human ken.
The entire notion that legally available products should not be advertised on the most effective marketing venue in history has always been ridiculous. Thank goodness it is finally ending.
Still, officials said that U.S. and coalition troops have successfully sealed off the area and are pressing in toward several major pockets of resistance. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in his most optimistic comments about the operation, said the fighting could wrap up in a matter of days, and possibly as soon as this weekend. Another senior U.S. defense official, citing the poor weather, said the operation could last at least several more days.
In other words, US troops are fighting in the high Afghan mountains, in the dead of winter, and kicking ass.
Remember...when...many...predicted the US military effort would end in "snowmire," the Afghan version of "quagmire," high in the "inaccessible" mountain peaks? I wonder if those pundits are as surprised to find the 10th Mountain up there as the al-Qaeda murderers are?
Noting that more al-Qaida and Taliban fighters had entered the area, he said, "If they want to bring in more people . . . so we can kill them, we're happy to oblige."
Editor -- Once again, The Chronicle publishes stories on record-low voter turnouts and fails to mention one glaringly obvious reason for it. We read about people who forgot, people who were too busy, people who were turned off by negative ads -- but we still don't read about people like myself and Thomas E. Braun (Letters, March 6), who have been thoroughly disgusted by the broken systems, partisan games, fraud, injustice and suspicious court rulings that dominated the 2000 presidential election. Braun and I are not alone in being turned off by the corruption we see, especially here in the Bay Area. ERIC R. KINGSLEY San Francisco
It's difficult to determine Eric R. Kinglsley's politics. Well, actually, no it isn't. Anybody who speaks of "broken systems, partisan games, fraud, injustice and suspicious court rulings that dominated the 2000 presidential election" is unlikely to be voting for the Elephants any time soon. Which is what makes "turned off by the corruption we see, especially here in the Bay Area," so hard to fathom.
If Eric R. Kingsley thinks "especially" the Bay Area, which last elected a Rebublican to anything about ten years ago, is a hotbed of pro-conservative, anti-progressive corruption, then I doubt he'll be satisfied with much less than complete political and electoral reform - say to something like the 100% voter "turnouts" under the old Soviet Union's system.
Reuters (One man's information source is another man's propaganda outlet) reports that a bunch of "arms controls researchers" at Stanford have created a database of all the 'missing" nuclear material in the world. But when you read the handout carefully, you find that
"2 kg of highly enriched uranium stolen from a reactor in Georgia remains missing."
as well as
"Other thefts have included several fuel rods that disappeared from a research reactor in the Congo in the mid-1990s. While one of these fuel rods later resurfaced in Italy -- reportedly in the hands of the Mafia -- the other has not been found."
In this case, "several" evidently means "two."
So we've got evidence that two kilos plus one fuel rod have gone missing. How terrified should we be, according to Reuters/Stanford/"arms control researchers?"
"This is hot stuff. If you steal 20 kilograms of that material, you can build a nuclear weapon."
In other words, call me back when another 18 kilos goes missing.
Military reporters have their pet sources, and when they want to, they can always find a "military officer" to say anything at all. This is a particularly ridiculous example. Nobody comes right out and says "quagmire," but the latest code-word for "Vietnam-like military miscalculation," ie., "Mogadishu," does get tossed around. I find the suggestion from the REMF's quoted in this article, "use[d] air strikes for days or weeks before sending ground forces against 800 enemy troops in Afghanistan," particularly risible. Wasn't that how all these guys we're now fighting escaped in the first place?
And what happened to the Pentagon "sources" who were screaming, early on, that we had to have "boots on the ground?
Editor -- Thanks to Ruth Rosen for her column, "Preparing for perpetual war" (March 4). I was extremely gratified finally to see someone expressing in print what has been obvious to me since about Sept. 20: that George W. Bush learned the lesson from his father that his popularity will last as long as the war continues, and may very well evaporate if it ends. His answer: Create a war that has no defined objective, or keep changing the objective to suit his ends. This is clearly what has happened. People don't appear to have noticed that our first objective was to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. Then, it changed to making the Taliban "share his fate." The justification for this was their alleged refusal to turn bin Laden over to Bush. No one seems to recall that the Taliban did offer to turn bin Laden over to an international body or neutral country. LINDA BURRELL Berkeley
You know, Linda Burrell, the reason that people didn't notice that our first objective was to "bring Osama bin Laden to justice" is that it wasn't our first objective. Our first, and still primary objective is to defend ourselves from terrorist attacks by destroying as much of the terrorist apparatus, organization, and support infrastructure (including governments) as we possibly can. But you are probably a pacifist, and so you don't believe in self defense, do you?
I'm sorry, but I just love reading stuff like this:
But as they came out, the mortars detonated over their heads, spraying the al-Qaida fighters with shrapnel. Four of them died, said U.S. special operations soldiers who scaled the mountains and counted bodies.
"It was like a game of mortar pingpong," Butler said. "They might think twice before they try that move again."
Ever since Vietnam, the anti-war under any circumstances crowd has been proclaiming the inability of the American military to do anything. They're at it again, and Ken Adelman says they are full of it. He's right. It's not just the rest of the world. Even much of America doesn't understand how immensely powerful our military really is.
Special operations forces from Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany and Norway are also on the ground, clearing caves and engaging in firefights alongside the Americans and Afghans.
Suddenly the jokes about pathetic Canooks and cheese-eating surrender monkeys aren't so funny any more. Despite what their politicians are saying and doing, their soldiers are on the ground next to ours, prepared to fight and die. Blood makes up for an enormous amount of bullshit.
It must have broken former reporter Helen Thomas's heart (she keeps it in a jar by the door to the cryogenics chamber) to admit this, but she finally agreed that her personal nightmare, President Ronald Reagan, was responsible for defeating the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War:
At the end of that road, the President had spent $1.5 trillion in terms of new arms, but there is also no question that the arms race did help to break down the Soviet Union. It was already, I believe, on its last ropes, last feet, but that was the straw that broke the camel’s back of having to spend more and more money on arms.
Many observers noted that Ms. Thomas seemed to be on her "last ropes, last feet" as well.
"Bill Simon is a true-blue think-tank conservative. I am a practical problem-solver," Davis said. "I believe many of his ideas are out of step and out of touch with most Californians. We need to keep moving California forward. Not backward--and certainly not to the right."
Here it is, the Davis campaign in a nutshell. For those who'd like a translation, it goes something like this: "Bill Simon is a radical right wing Christian religious nutball who wants to send California women back to the kitchen while the patriarchy keeps them constantly pregnant. He's also in favor of millions of minorities being slaughtered with freely available submachine guns handed out on streetcorners by agents of the NRA, and he hates Asians, (whom he believes should only work in laundries) Blacks, (whom he wants to return to the back of the bus) and Hispanics (whom he wants to send back to Mexico after first starving their children to death)."
Simon's campaign will be somewhat simpler: "Grayout Davis is an incompetent idiot."
I still make it a fifty-fifty contest, and I believe it is Simon's to lose. If Davis hadn't already extorted a hundred bazillion dollars in campaign money, I'd call Simon the clear favorite. Davis's hack job on Riordan worked in part because voters were often confused as to who was making the charges. Many thought the attacks came from other Republicans, and gave them more weight than they would have if they had known the real source was Davis. That won't be the case in the general election, and if Davis runs his usual mudslide of a campaign, it will likely backfire this time around.
One final thought about Riordan: Even in California, you don't beat a Democrat with another Democrat.
Editor -- Everything Ray Carlson and Robert Ashley Martin said (Letters, March 4) -- blaming Al Gore for his own loss in the 2000 election and not Ralph Nader -- may well be true. Now subtract Ralph Nader from that election, and Gore wins instead of the environmental anti-Christ we now have. Perhaps it was right to support a candidate who couldn't possibly win in order to make a significant statement. Perhaps that will prove comforting when the species start dying at an increased rate and there is oil drilling in the Arctic, and the water and air begin to degrade just a little bit more while the president continues to believe that global warming isn't science but some left-wing radical environmental fantasy. It's not a perfect world, you know -- it's just the only one we've got and we can't wait for perfection to deal with our very real problems. MIKE STEINBERG Berkeley
"Environmental anti-Christ?" But Mike Steinberg, does Berkeley allow that sort of religious language these days?
"On Tuesday we caught several hundred of them with RPGs and mortars heading toward the fight. We body slammed them today and killed hundreds of those guys," the commander said.
I salute the brave Americans risking their lives and, on occasion, losing them in Afghanistan. That said, in this particular action the article indicates one US soldier was killed. We can trade one our ours for "hundreds" of theirs a long, long time. This is no quagmire. This is a slaughter.
Reader Stephen Green of VodkaPundit writes to say: "Bloggers making a difference!" As evidence, he cites his own email to NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger about Ted Rall's Wrawl's [Ed.] latest wretched offering, which appeared on the NYT web site. Said Green:
I assume you've been made aware by now of the Ted Rall Wrawl [Ed.] "comic strip" that recently ran in your paper.
Revolting."
In reply, he received this from Sulzberger:
"Agreed; it's off."
And indeed, the former link to Rall's Wrawl's "cartoon" now loads an empty page. (Cartoon is now here). I've already stated my position on the issue; awful though they are, in a free nation commentators like Rall Wrawl serve as markers for the state of liberty's health. Nonetheless, an impressive display, though I can't believe that Green's missive was the only one received at the NYT's offices.
UPDATE I: Yes, others wrote to the NYT. Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs did, not to mention skewering Rall Wrawl earlier than VodkaPundit did, and he also received a reply from the publisher. Many other blogs piled on as well. I doubt that anybody from the blogosphere actually wished to censor Rall Wrawl, but that certainly doesn't preclude heaping well-deserved contempt on the pathetic fool and his disgusting doodles. My only regret is that I'd bet that somewhere Ted Rall Wrawl is sitting in front of a computer screen, genitals firmly in hand, reacting to all the publicity he's getting.
Well, at least I'm not gonna spell his name right any more.
UPDATE II: Reader Marc Webster directs me to an earlier, eerily prophetic Wrawl scribble.
InstaPundit links to information about the newly-formed Harvard Law Students's gun club. Seems the club
got its start last September when second-year law student Sasha Volokh decided to address what he saw as a serious problem on the HLS campus—the absolute lack of lethal firearms.
Sasha Volokh, eh? Not a common name. I wonder if there's any relationship to Eugene Volokh, one of the dismantlers of the infamous Michael Bellesisles's handiwork?
I'm not happy about Ted Rall - the man is a disgusting, no-talent, neanderthal-brained disgrace - but he does serve a healthy function in our democracy: he's the canary in the coal mine. Despite his moronic, half-baked communist drivel about how "totalitarian" capitalist America is, he still manages to not only publish, but distribute his loathesome simulacra of humor in outlets as august as the New York Times. There can be no better indicator of the healthy state of liberty in the nation he so obviously despises.
Gentle readers, in case you have in the past tried to buy my latest book via the link to amazon.com at the top of this page, I'm pleased to announce that Amazon does finally have the book in stock and ready to ship. I think the thing turned out damned well, especially for those who'd like to venture a bit deeper into e-publishing than the blogosphere without having to learn a lot of technical boogaloo they don't really want to bother with. At any rate, click now in full confidence that your voracious hunger for my expertise can finally be satisfied. Buy early and often!
Just as we suspected: The hard-left British intellectual media is as consciously biased and America-hating as they appear to be. Even to the point of actively censoring opposing views. Thanks to Midwest Conservative Journal for the link.
Reader Randall Parker send a link to this piece by JOHN PODHORETZ:
One can therefore assume that when Daschle decided last week to offer a very muted criticism of President Bush's efforts in the war on terrorism, he was not speaking off the cuff or hysterically or irrationally. By answering questions about the war in a skeptical and pessimistic way, America's most important Democrat chose deliberately to open the first meaningful chasm between his party and the president on the war since Sept. 11.
The Pod skillfully parses Daschle's obscurantist pronouncements in order to arrive at this nut-graf:
Daschle may believe that the more skeptical news coverage of the war in the past month has penetrated into the American consciousness and has therefore given him and other Democrats an opportunity to chip away at a president who has been all but unassailable for six months.
This is a risky, but highly calculated gamble. Nonetheless, he may be onto something. Despite President Bush's still-stratospheric numbers in the polls, I suspect there is an undercurrent of public disappointment, even worry, about the fact that Osama's and Mullah Omar's fates remain unknown. After all, even President Bush built them up as "arch-devils," and made their destruction at least implicitly one of the primary goals of the excursion into Afghanistan. This strikes me as similar to the same sort of undercurrent that accompanied the jubilation at the end of Desert Storm - yes, we won, but what the fuck about Saddam?
Daschle's gamble is this: can he exploit this yet mostly inchoate anxiety for partisan advantage, or will his efforts blow up in his face with the Donkeys being perceived as unchangeably pacifist and unpatriotic?
Until the black intelligentsia breaks the chain-gang ideological lock-step in which it marches, it will remain marginalized from the American mainstream, despised by its ideological opponents, and taken for granted by the power structures of its ideological "friends."
For some reason, this strikes me as just desserts. I regard this sort of behavior as a mirror image of those conservatives and Republicans caught with their pants down and their dicks up whilst condemning the same "sins" in others. I still can't forget Goodwin's ubiquitous presence during the Clinton scandals, offering her justifications while sneering at the ethics of those who attacked the man for his ethics. Now, deliciously, it's revealed her ethics aren't pristine, either. All those Republicans paid a price for their hypocrisy, so why not Doris Kearns Goodwin, too?
This could turn into a major blockbuster. It's already ranked number two on amazon.com, and is provoking a storm of race-baiting from the man's supporters. For some reason, I've got a hunch that, "The book is only a racist effort to destroy a great black leader," argument isn't going to get as much traction as it usually does.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on Monday New York officials should have been told about alleged fears of a nuclear attack on the city last October as reported by Time magazine.
I can understand why a general announcement of the potential threat was not made, but leaving city officials in the dark strikes me as the worst sort of false concern for "security."
Yes, it would have been irresponsible to publicize this before it had been thoroughly checked out, but that doesn't mean that those who would be responsible for the frontline handling of the incident should it have turned out to be credible should not have been notified so they could begin to prepare. There would have been some risk of the news leaking, but that possibility should have been weighed against the necessity to get ready should the threat turn out to be legitimate. The bias was toward security, and in this case, that was wrong.
Editor -- Thanks to The Chronicle for the editorial, "Soft cry of a hard hawk" (March 1), about Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. His is not exactly a household name. You have served readers well by giving us information about this powerful and dangerous man. A look at his background reveals that in the late '60s, Wolfowitz became a protege of Albert Wohlstetter, a member of the Rand think tank and intellectual leader of opposition to detente with the Soviets and to any negotiated disarmament agreements with the Soviet Union. A few years later, Wolfowitz was part of a study group made up largely of members of the Cold War- era Committee on the Present Danger, and was brought into the CIA by the agency's then-Director George H. W. Bush. Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, Wolfowitz continued to refer to Russia as a major threat to American security. At the end of the Persian Gulf War, he advocated going beyond the agreed goals of the international coalition organized to drive Iraq out of Kuwait by going on to Baghdad to remove Saddam Hussein, with or without our allies. The United States' 1878 law, the "Posse Comitatus Act," prohibits our troops from acting as a domestic police force. It has served our country well. There are now advocates for knocking down this fire wall between military and civilian law enforcement. In testimony before a congressional committee last Oct. 2, Wolfowitz stated flatly that the doctrine of "posse comitatus has had its day." He is one very scary guy.
BETH GRIMES Petaluma
It depends on what you find scary, I suppose. Regarding a collapsing nation loaded with ICBMs and nukes as dangerous, or advocating that Desert Storm should have finished the job on Saddam Hussien would probably not strike many Americans outside the confines of the San Francisco Bay Area as overly frightening.
WaPo fronts a long account of the dangers journos are facing in trying to cover the war in Afghanistan, especially the new, hotted-up version: 'These Guys Will Kill Anybody'.
One journalist, Kathleen Kenna, was badly injured when her vehicle was hit by a hand grenade. After the incident, journalists were told,
"We've had a lot of casualties," one U.S. soldier said at the base, where the American troops appeared particularly on edge tonight. "It's not safe here," another urged. "Get the heck out."
I think the reporters understand this - at least I didn't detect any air of self-pity in the WaPo account of the threats they've experienced. I believe that, after several deadly incidents involving those covering the war - from assaults within Afghanistan to the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl - that most of the newshounds working the Afghan beat fully understand the danger they risk in trying to do their jobs.
It's been a while since the world press corps has been so directly a target, and their reflexes had gotten rusty - which resulted in some whining about US inability to "protect them" early on. Now, though, everybody seems to understand the ground rules, and more practical reflexes are the order of the day. When the authors of this article discovered that they were being targeted by some local thugs, they didn't stay around to argue. They ran. As it turned out, that was a smart move. They are probably alive today because they did.
Gary Farber writes to wonder why the mainstream press has been reluctant to pick up on what has been commonly reported previously in their own organs on the subject of the locations of the centers set up to maintain government in the event of a major emergency, centers of whose location he has made note in his own blog. He speculates that the reluctance to give further publicity to what is already public knowledge springs from the media's wish not to highlight potential U.S. vulnerabilities to possible terror attack - or for fear of irritating their own government sources.
There could be some element of this, but my feeling is that this explanation ascribes a benevolence to the media that may not exist. Tempermentally and financially, modern American media is designed to applaud - and award - the expose, the scoop, the controversial. But in the wake of 9/11, this tendency has collided head-on with a new attitude among the consumers of American media: A willingness to punish those elements of American society perceived as being un-patriotic. For an organization like ABC News, say, to "expose" those elements of government designed to help the nation withstand a new terrorist attack would lay the network open to near-violent denunciation from the same people who were appalled by ABC News President David Westin's seemingly unpatriotic quest for "objectivity," not to mention similar charges of lack of patriotism leveled against ABC anchor Peter Jennings.
In the end, American media is, for the most part, a commercial beast, and not likely to poke itself in the eye - or the pocketbook - unnecessarily. Supposedly "non-commercial" organizations like NPR are made up of affiliates who are even more dependent on the general goodwill of their consumers for their survival, and hence also unlikely to unnecessarily (in their view) provoke these sorts of controversies. So my guess would be that unless the editorial decision makers within the various outlets can come up with a compelling reason to publicize a subject that doesn't seem of critical news value (as Farber notes, all this stuff is already in the public domain) they won't. If only from a hard-nosed financial point of view, what's their percentage?
One other reason does occur to me, though: Some elements of the media - and of the Democratic political leadership - are using lurid accounts of the supposed secret, shadow Bush government to make political hay for the Donkey stables. Such tactics would not be well-served by emphasizing just how prosaic, long-established, and public these "secrets" really are.
I'd be willing to hazard a guess that the only accident involved in this tragedy was the occupants of the vehicles. Probably Hussein Abu Kweik and his guards were supposed to be in the cars, not his family. The alternative would reduce the IDF to the level of their terrorist enemies.
Budget problems have prompted state and local government leaders to explore cuts in a traditionally untouchable area, employee health insurance.
Only in the public sector would employee health insurance be considered "untouchable." The rest of us extend to you a cordial welcome to the real world.
Even if closing off all escape routes for poor children had some chance of preventing inner-city schools such as Cleveland's from becoming even more dreadful, it would be morally indefensible to deny decent educations to low-income children for the sake of the school system. Would you sacrifice your own children to dilute the dreariness of the worst public schools?
And so, amazingly enough, the suspects will be acquitted and released into the tender care of the ISI. If this does happen, one hopes that this prediction will come to pass:
The editors aver, "God will not avenge Daniel Pearl's blood; anonymous soldiers from the State of Israel will find his murderers and close a bloody account with them."
A century of promises that there is such a thing as a free lunch has led to a population unable to make the connection between their demands for more and more nanny-state services and the fact that their taxes don't seem to go down.
I don't care about Portland. I just wish they'd come to San Francisco. This was the best thing to come out of the dot.com bubble. Too bad it didn't last.
Yoko Ono has booked one of the most high-profile advertising sites in the UK to propagate a message of world peace. The musician-cum-artist is paying an estimated £150,000 for a prime site in Piccadilly Circus in London to highlight the words of her late husband John Lennon's classic song, Imagine. It will carry the line "Imagine all the people living life in peace".
Imagine if John Lennon had never written this ridiculous song. It's easy, if you try.
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. Here he goes to work on The Guardian's execrable Mary Riddell:
Riddell: We should try again, for humanity's sake and because the alternative may be apocalypse. Or it may not.
Farber: Damn decisive journalism, that. This is a professional at work. Don't try running with a sharp conclusion like this at home; you might put someone's eye out. Or you might not.
Editor -- Those who don't participate in democracy have meekly surrendered to those who have corrupted our system. What we have now is an oligarchy of the wealthy elite who think they know what's best (preserving their dominance and increasing their wealth, of course) versus the needs of America's people. Look toward the Bush White House to see this oligarchy's frightening disregard of the American tradition of freedom under the rule of law. ROSALYNE S. MONTGOMERY San Francisco
Indeed, Rosalyne S. Montgomery, so very true! But how have you been able to get this cry for freedom out from the dungeon into which the lawless oligarchs have clapped you?
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