Stop The Agenda - Vote Yes on Question 1

Item one on the homosexual agenda is: “There is no homosexual agenda and anyone who says so is homophobic.”

A coalition of two dozen homosexual activist groups met in Kansas City in 1960 calling themselves the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations. According to a favorable, left/liberal history of “Gay Liberation” at Religioustolerance.org:

A radical faction surfaced [and] called for a change in tactics. Item 4 of their manifesto stated: Our enemies, an implacable, repressive governmental system; much of organized religion, business and medicine, will not be moved by appeasement or appeals to reason and justice, but only by power and force. . . . The homosexual agenda emerged at this point.

Item two on the agenda was to decriminalize homosexual acts in liberal states, then set up bacchanalian “bath houses” in which homosexuals “celebrated” their sexuality with orgies of anonymous sex. Soon, the “bath houses” in New York City and San Francisco would incubate and spread a horrible new disease initially called GRID, or “Gay-Related Immunodeficiency Disease.” More about that later.

Item 3 was to bully the American Psychiatric Association (APA) into declassifying homosexuality as a mental disorder in the “Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (DSM). This they accomplished by breaking into the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC to disrupt the 1973 APA Convention. Homosexuals in drag shouted down speakers, stormed the dais, seized the microphone, and the APA folded. The decision was based on intimidation, not science. That’s how homosexual activists operate when they’re not playing the victim role.

Item 4 was to persuade America that people who still considered homosexuality disordered or perverted were themselves disordered. They invented the clinical-sounding term “homophobia” and propagated it everywhere, calling anyone who criticized homosexuality “homophobic.”

When GRID surfaced in the early eighties, it looked like their agenda would go off the rails. Hence Item 5: Revert to victim mode. Pressure the Centers for Disease Control to change the name of this terrible new disease from GRID to AIDS, scare the hell out of heterosexuals by telling them they’re going to die next, and blame President Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush for spreading AIDS. More than a quarter-century later, the bath houses are still open, homosexuals still comprise the majority of AIDS cases in America, and they control billions in government AIDS spending. The agenda stayed on track and picked up steam.

Item 6 was to establish homosexuals as a protected class by passing “Gay Rights” statutes. Activists stayed in victim mode and jumped on the civil rights bandwagon. With this came a subtle change in nomenclature: Substituting “sexual orientation” for “sexual preference,” they would persuade America that homosexuality is biological and not a choice. Homosexuality is just like race, they claimed. That there’s no science to support this is irrelevant. Most Americans believe it, and, in politics, perception is reality.

The notion that people are born homosexual and cannot change had become the keystone of the homosexual agenda. Remove it, and everything collapses.

It may be that some have an inherent proclivity for homosexuality. Evidence exists, however, that many - male and female - become homosexual after being being molested in childhood. Due to enormous pressure by activists, virtually all research funds granted for decades look for a biological origin and ignore other possible causes. Evidence that homosexuality could be caused by environmental factors is scoffed at, and activists make sure nobody gets money to study it.

As long as Americans believe homosexuality is innate, they’re sympathetic to the homosexual agenda. They’ll allow activists and their propaganda into schools and other venues, figuring that if their children weren’t born homosexual, there’s no chance they’ll be influenced to become so. If, however, parents were to suspect otherwise - that their children might be changed by homosexual propaganda - those doors would surely slam shut.

That people can change their sexual preference is poisonous to the agenda and Dr. Robert Spitzer, Chief of Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, has earned the wrath of activists by claiming it. Ironically, as a young psychiatrist Spitzer was instrumental in persuading the 1973 APA Convention to drop homosexuality from the DSM, and thus became the darling of radicals. At the 2001 APA Convention, however, he said: “Like most psychiatrists, I thought that homosexual behavior could be resisted, but sexual orientation could not be changed. I now believe that's untrue--some people can and do change,” and he published a study supporting his belief.

“It's snake oil, it's not science,” said David Elliot, homosexual activist with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force - as if activists like him ever paid attention to science.

Item 7 was to sue for homosexual “marriage” in Massachusetts, claiming marriage laws “discriminated” against homosexuals based on the above-mentioned “Gay Rights” statutes. The liberal Massachusetts Supreme Court ordered its legislature to pass homosexual “marriage,” and then blocked a people’s referendum to repeal it.

Voters in California, however, were able to reverse what their liberal court and legislature did and they repealed homosexual “marriage.” Next Tuesday, Maine voters will have the same opportunity.

Stop the homosexual agenda. Do it for the children.

Vote Yes on Question 1.

Nobel Numbskulls

Two of our best presidents, Lincoln and Jackson, never went to college. Another great one, Harry Truman, attended only very briefly. Some of the most knowledgeable people I’ve met have no formal education beyond high school. I’ve known several from whom I learned more than I did from most of my professors. Excavators, loggers and well-drillers taught me more than my Earth Science courses did, and what I liked most was their lack of pomposity. Knowledge wasn’t something they used to impress others. It was for understanding, and they were willing to share it freely hoping to get more in return. Knowledge was its own reward.

There was a time college degrees impressed me, but that dissipated steadily during years spent on campus with people holding advanced degrees in what are aptly named the “soft sciences.” Fifty or sixty years ago, a Liberal Arts degree from an American college or university was good evidence that the person holding it had at least a basic understanding of philosophy, history, mathematics, literature, science, the arts, and was capable of rational thought, but that hasn’t been true for a while now.

The best illustration I can offer is from a project called “A Private Universe,” first published in 1987. Twenty-three randomly-selected graduates and faculty at a Harvard commencement were asked to explain what caused earth’s changing seasons, and only two could answer correctly. The rest confidently explained that as the earth gets closer to the sun in its orbit we get warmer weather, and as the earth gets farther away from the sun, we get colder weather. I was shocked when I first watched the clip. They didn’t realize their understanding is negated by the obvious fact that, while our northern hemisphere is experiencing winter, it’s summer in the southern hemisphere, so distance from the sun would be irrelevant. Twenty-one of twenty-three? Faculty as well as students? At our most prestigious university?

Scariest was how confident they were in their dubious understanding of climate. Now consider how impressed American voters are when a candidate has a degree from Harvard. Consider also that former vice president, Harvard man, and almost-president, Al Gore has convinced hundreds of millions that “our planet has a fever.” He further insists on restructuring our whole economy to reverse global warming. President Obama, another Harvard man, promises us that he will cut human-generated carbon emissions or our coastal cities will be flooded by melting ice caps - even if it means raising fuel costs for an average family by more than $1700 annually. All this while our economy is in deep recession.

Again, two Harvard-educated intellectuals are ignorant what should be obvious to any truly-knowledgeable, thinking person with only a cursory understanding of history: The earth has experienced at least four ice ages over hundreds of millions of years during which the Harvard campus was covered by glaciers a mile thick or more. Many times, those glaciers melted - because of what? Global warming. And what is the earliest evidence of human-generated carbon emissions beyond scattered camp fires? A few centuries? A few millennia at most? Those periods of acute global warming could not possibly have been caused by human-induced carbon emissions. It’s the height of hubris to think humans can reverse global warming in the 21st century - if indeed it’s occurring at all, which seems unlikely. As I write, it’s mid-October in New England and I’m watching the Patriots play the Tennessee Titans in a snowstorm. Sunday River Ski Area just opened for business twenty miles north of where I sit.

For this, Gore gets a Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar? And what did Obama get the Peace Prize for? I give up.

I can only watch as these two Nobel laureate, intellectual, Harvard graduates lead half the world in a mass, global-warming psychosis reminiscent of Chicken Little and Turkey Lurkey. A quote from the late William F. Buckley is worth repeating: “I would rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than by the 2000 members of the faculty of Harvard University.”

A highly-educated, intellectual, British leader is evidently caught in their hysteria. The BBC quotes UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown: “The costs of failing to tackle [global warming in the next 50 days] would be greater than the impact of both world wars and the Great Depression combined.”

That bad, huh Gordon? You remind me of what your late countryman, George Orwell, said about people like you and our two intellectual American leaders: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

Picturing Things

A photographer has pictures of everything and everyone but himself, and I’m no exception. My image in newspapers or online is usually a school picture, and people often comment that I look too serious. I don’t like posing and I guess it shows. For decades it’s been the same scenario: The photographer from Life Touch, or wherever, has to say something genuinely funny or a smile won’t rise. Most often, they send a young woman who asks me to take the pen out of my pocket and remove the glasses hanging around my neck. “I like to leave them there,” I say.

“Okay,” she’ll say, perplexed. “Now smile!”

“You have to say something funny,” I’ll respond, and she usually can’t come up with anything. Last month, the woman closed her eyes and seemed to be trying hard to think of something funny. That amused me and I grinned. As a student or teacher, I’ve had my picture taken this way about forty-five times. My first-grade school picture was on our refrigerator for a while last summer with those of my children and grandchildren after my wife dug it out for comparison.

Group shots are worst. Leaning in close and holding a fake smile makes my cheek muscles cramp. I feel foolish trying to keep a goofy smile on my face while somebody fumbles with a camera, so I just don’t do it anymore. I never ask others to pose either because I don’t want to put them through the ordeal. Besides, candid shots are much better. With an 18-270 mm zoom on my Nikon D-60, good portraits are possible when people don’t know I’m capturing their image. I get them as they are, not as they may wish to appear.
My camera is always with me, but I forgot it recently while rushing out to church. We visited my new granddaughter on the way home and it bothered me awfully that I couldn’t take pictures of her. Then at Fryeburg Fair last week, the auto-focus on my zoom lens stopped functioning while I was shooting faces in the crowd. I had to send it out for repair and I miss it every day it’s not available to me. I’ve enjoyed photography for almost forty years, but I’m liking it more lately than I ever have. That’s good because it’s an indication of my attitude toward my world these days: I’m noticing what is around me and savoring it.

If I see something while driving, I’ll pull over and even back up to get a picture. When she’s with me my wife tries to be patient, but she gets annoyed if we’re running late and that can diminish the creative mood. As a columnist, I like to write about whatever I want any given week. As a photographer, I’m the same way. Whatever catches my eye is what I shoot. When writing, I feel like I’m putting out. While shooting pictures, I feel like I’m taking in.

We have thousands of shots with children, grandchildren, other people and much else over the past thirty-eight years since my wife gave me a 35mm Minolta SRT-101 for Christmas. I still have that camera, but seldom use it since I bought myself a good digital SLR last year. Now I’m taking a thousand shots a month and they’re clogging my computer and I have to invest in a second portable hard drive to store them. Every day I see beauty in nature and in people, and try to capture it. What I get is never as good as what my eye sees, but sometimes I can carry a little sunshine home in my jar, so to speak. It might be a scene, a flower, a tree, a face, a shadow, a bog, a rock formation, an old building, an integration of color - it could be most anything. Others may not see what I see and that’s fine. I’ll show them if they ask, or give away images upon request, but my pictures are for me.

That’s what I came to this month after a friend suggested I enter some in a contest. I considered it, and even pondered which shots might be suitable, but couldn’t decide because I like them all. Then I asked myself why I should submit and I couldn’t come up with a good enough answer. It’s immaterial whether others think my pictures are good. That’s not why I take them.

My pictures are for me.

Going Rogue?

As we watch his administration unravel, it’s becoming apparent to the whole world that Barack Obama wasn’t prepared to become President of the United States. Many of us knew that and said so months before the election. During the campaign, however, the mainstream media covered up his glaring lack of experience, but they focused like a laser on Republican Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s. Why?

Palin had been a mayor and governor - of a small city and a small state, yes - but she was a successful executive in both capacities. Barack Obama had been a “community organizer,” whatever that is, and a senator. Unlike executives, senators don’t do things. They discuss things. What do community organizers do? We could look to the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN) for clues. Obama worked with them for decades.

We heard much about Obama’s Ivy League education at Columbia and Harvard because our media elite were impressed by that. Ordinary Americans aren’t. They adhere more to what William F. Buckley said about Ivy Leaguers: “I would rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than by the 2000 members of the faculty of Harvard University.” The state of our union after the first nine months of the Obama Administration only lends credence to Buckley’s assessment. It’s been a disaster and getting worse. Obama’s poll numbers are plummeting faster than those of any other president in history as Americans realize how the mainstream media have sold them a pig in a poke in the totally unvetted chief executive. The media elite anointed Obama as their candidate, and when Palin’s emergence threatened their anointed one, they had to take her down.

According to a recent Sacred Heart University poll, nearly 90% of Americans believe the mainstream media got Obama elected and 70% believe they’re actively promoting his presidency. Nearly half “have permanently stopped watching a news media organization, print or electronic, because of perceived bias.” Liberal, big-city broadsheets all over the country are hemorrhaging readers. Some are being sold and others have filed for bankruptcy. Meanwhile, Americans are turning to other sources for news and political analysis.

Despite the media airing of every aspect of Sarah Palin’s life, despite the ridicule elitists have continuously heaped upon her over the past year, Americans like Sarah Palin. A surprise pick for McCain’s vice presidential running mate, she electrified voters with her convention speech, so Democrats - but especially their mainstream media minions - went after her relentlessly. In the face of this onslaught, the inept McCain campaign did just about everything wrong. While you’d never see Obama go on Fox News Sunday, for example, the McCain campaign set up interviews with liberal alphabet networks anxious to slice her up. In spite of all that, and because of it as well, Americans like her and identify with her.

It’s not all good for Palin though. Several women whose opinions I listen to with respect have doubts about Palin’s political ambitions, given that she has young children - one with a severe handicap. They like her positions on the issues of the day, but question her judgement in her seeming quest for national office in 2012 given her family obligations.

Palin’s book won’t be out until November 17th, but it’s already number one on Amazon, having sold a million and a half copies. Called Going Rogue, it would seem to be an account of her frustration over how certain key McCain aids seemed to sabotage her. It was bad enough being hounded by the other side, but her own as well? That would have been too much for anyone new to the national political spotlight, but this woman from Alaska has taken all the best shots either side can deliver, but - not only is she still in the ring - she’s still throwing punches. When David Letterman chased some cheap sexual laughs at her daughter’s expense, Palin went after him. Letterman offered a semi-apology, but continued trying to squeeze out chuckles from his liberal-elite friends with whom it’s the height of fashion to ridicule her. Since then, Letterman’s own indescretions have people calling for his dismissal. He had President Obama on his show two weeks ago, but Obama's ratings are nose-diving while Palin’s are climbing.

It was Palin Obama referred to in his desperate speech before a joint session of Congress last month, trying to salvage his doomed health-care “reform” bill. He claimed her “death-panel” comments were lies. The president had sent Rahm Emanuel’s brother Ezekiel after her on that point, but he couldn’t take her down. Liberal Democrats vehemently denied anything like “death panels” were in the bill, while they quietly removed them. All Palin did was send a message on Twitter to send Obama and his party minions scrambling.

Quite possibly, Sarah Palin is reading the political landscape more accurately than Democrats, mainstream media pundits, and Republicans as well. The title choice of her new book may portend more than any of them are considering at present. Could she be considering a third-party run?

Whatever else Sarah Palin may be, she’s certainly interesting. I’m keeping an eye on her.

Gutless Disgrace

Recent consternation about incivility in politics is lost on me. I’m thinking our politicians are much too polite. Our early leaders often worked out differences fighting duels. President Andrew Jackson took office with two bullets still in his body. Vice President Aaron Burr shot former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. There’s a place for diplomacy, certainly, but too much isn’t good and we’re way over the limit.

It’s hard to stay quiet and be “polite” while listening to someone lie. It’s impossible if one must work with the person or live with him. The most diplomatic we should get is talking to him privately after - and we should only do that once. If there’s a next time, we must confront publicly. To sit quiet is to abet deceit and silence implies assent. Lying - when everyone in the room knows it - challenges us. If we don’t react, what are we?

Which brings us to the United Nations. It started off well back in 1945, dealing seriously with problems in Cyprus, Israel and Korea, but the UN today is useless. North Korea has ignored every UN resolution since 1993 while it built nuclear weapons and ICBMs - and it’s led by a nut-case. Meanwhile, Israel is forced to defend itself against Iranian terrorist puppets Hezbollah and Hamas, which rockets Israel daily. Iran ignores UN resolutions, lies to the world about building nuclear weapons, develops long-range missiles with North Korea’s help, denies the Holocaust, then promises to perpetrate another one by repeatedly threatening to wipe Israel off the map. What good is the UN?

In the face of all this, President Obama gave a speech filled with naive cliches like “No nation can or should try to dominate another nation.” What? Has he ever opened a history book? Ask Poland, Czechoslovakia or Hungary if a nation can try to dominate another nation. Ask Tibet. Ask Georgia. Ask Ukraine. Nobody is going to argue about the “should” part, but the can part? Who is going to stop them? The United Nations? Don’t make me laugh. I thought this guy was supposed to be smart.


Obama was followed at the podium by Libyan President Moammar Ghadafy, who - and I’m not making this up - tried to pitch a Bedouin tent on Donald Trump’s lawn the night before. After complaints from neighbors, he was kicked out by code enforcement officers. This is the guy who ordered one of his minions to hijack and blow up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland killing 139 Americans, then gave a hero’s welcome to the conspirator in Tripoli a only weeks ago after he was inexplicably released by the Scots. In his 96-minute diatribe, Ghadafy had the gall to say: “It should not be called the [UN] Security Council, it should be called the ‘terror council.’”

Diplomats listened politely.

Evidently, he was pleased by Obama’s remarks because he kept referring to him as “our son” and said, “We are content and happy if Obama can stay forever as a President of United States of America.” So are Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro and Vladimir Putin. It’s the American people who are nervous about him.

Ahmadinejad spewed his lies that night.

The next day, President Obama chaired the UN Security Council and said he envisioned a world without nuclear weapons. What? Last week, he scrapped the anti-missile system planned for Poland and the Czech Republic - knowing Iran had recently launched a satellite into space with a missile that can double as an ICBM. He also knew that Iran has built a second uranium processing plant and is close to making a nuclear weapon. Poland and the Czechs accused Obama of selling them out. Envisioning a world without nuclear weapons is fine if you’re some kind of mystic, but Obama is our commander-in-chief. We rely on his judgement for our security, even our very existence, in a dangerous world.

After listening to Obama’s remarks, French President Sarkozy said: “President Obama dreams of a world without [nuclear] weapons . . . but right in front of us are two countries doing the exact opposite. . . . We live in the real world, not the virtual world. And the real world expects us to take decisions.”

You know it’s bad when the President of the United States has to be lectured by the president of France about courage.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s turn came next. To the UN General Assembly - most of whom sat politely through speeches by terrorist murderers Ghadafy and Ahmadinejad - Netanyahu said: “. . . to those who gave [Ahmadinejad] a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame? Have you no decency? . . . a mere six decades after the Holocaust, you give legitimacy to a man who denies the murder of six million Jews while promising to wipe out the state of Israel? What a disgrace! What a mockery of the charter of the United Nations.”

Now, to save itself, Israel must confront Iran alone because the UN doesn’t have the guts to do it, and neither does our president. It’s time to quit this useless organization and kick them out of New York City. Let them practice their “civility” somewhere else.

Meanwhile, let’s look around for another Andrew Jackson.

Land of the Free

Constitution Day was approaching and I’d gotten a memo encouraging teachers to recognize it in some way. It was to be observed exactly a week after Andrew Breitbart broke the ACORN scandal on his brand new web site: BigGovernment.com. I’m charged with teaching US History since 1900, weaving in civics, economics, geography and current events, so I try to include as many of those themes as possible when planning lessons.

“Open your books to page 872,” I said. “This is the US Constitution - the supreme law of the land, our design for government. Whenever you say ‘This is a free country,’ you are correct only because of this document.”

Then I explained how Congress is divided into two parts with each state getting two senators and House members according to how many people they have. “Look down to the bottom of the page where it says Article I, Section 2, number 3. I’d like somebody to read that part while the rest follow along.”

A girl volunteered. “‘Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this Union,” she read, “according to their respective numbers. The actual enumeration shall be made within three years after the first meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent term of ten years, in such manner as they shall by law direct.’”

After thanking her, I explained that Congress directed the Commerce Department to conduct a census - count everybody - every ten years, and they had contracted with an organization called ACORN (Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now) to do much of the work.

“However,” I said, “ACORN is in trouble.” I showed them video from BigGovernment.com in which a young man of 25 and a young woman of 20 posed as a pimp and a prostitute, respectively, and were getting help from ACORN officials in Baltimore to help them set up house of prostitution with underaged, illegal-alien girls. I explained what a prostitute and a pimp were, although they seemed to know already. “ACORN says it has fired the two women in the video [who were helping]” I explained, “claiming it was an isolated incident.”

The next day, BigGovernment.com released another video of the same young people getting help from ACORN officials in Washington, DC. I showed them that one too. “ACORN fired them also. This huge organization has received more than $50 million in taxpayer money to help people get housing and other things and are supposed to receive up to $8.5 billion as part of President Obama’s stimulus bill. President Obama worked for ACORN when he was a lawyer in Chicago, and his campaign paid them at least $800,000 last year to help get people out to vote for him. This is very embarrassing.”

Over the weekend, a huge crowd gathered in Washington, DC to protest what the president and Congress have been doing lately, and what they are planning - including changes in how Americans get healthcare. BigGovernment.com released still another videotape showing ACORN officials in New York City offering to help the same two young people set up a house of prostitution and avoid paying taxes. After showing them that video and images of the demonstration, I told them the US Census Bureau had fired ACORN.

“James O’Keefe, 25, and Hannah Giles, 20 - not much older than you are - have embarrassed the president and shaken up government. Where do they get the right to do that?” I asked, knowing their English teacher had recently given them a copy of the Bill of Rights with a writing assignment.

“The First Amendment,” said a boy.

“Good,” I said. “What in the First Amendment gives them that right?”

“Freedom of speech,” he said.

“Very good. James and Hannah believed ACORN was a corrupt organization and set out to prove it. Big TV networks and newpapers ignored what they found but Andrew Breitbart gave them publicity on his web site and Fox News picked it up. That publicity is forcing government to act.

“Turn to page 884 and follow along while I recite Amendment One: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances.’”

“That last right is what a million people exercised Saturday outside the White House and the Capitol Building where Congress meets - peaceably assembling and petitioning government with their grievances.” I pointed out that people in Iran were speaking and marching against their government too, but they were being gassed, beaten and shot. Iran doesn’t have a Constitution like ours.

On Monday and Tuesday, I showed them two more videos BigGovernment.com released showing ACORN officials in two California cities helping James and Hannah, and reported that the US Senate and the US House both voted overwhelmingly to cut off federal money to ACORN.

“These are example of what people - even very young people - have freedom to do under the US Constitution,” I said.

Had Enough Yet?

How many people protested Obamacare in Washington last Saturday? Twenty thousand? A hundred thousand? A million? Two million? The Washington Post said there were “tens of thousands.” So did the New York Times. They got the memo from Democrat leaders worried that if 1-2 million showed up it would be a major PR victory for the right, so they did what they could to play numbers down. The UK’s Daily Mail said there were up to 2 million protesters there.

Watching the demonstration on C-SPAN, I was struck by who I was seeing. They looked like ordinary men and women 40-70 years old, some younger, some older, but they didn’t look like demonstrators I’ve seen there for decades. There were no dreadlocked anarchists, no angry minorities, no fat feminists, no flamboyant homosexuals. These were efficient, mind-your-own-business people who quietly keep everything running while others demand favors from government. I wondered what caused them to make signs and journey to Washington in huge numbers. Something’s happening out there. Something different. Something big.

The only thing these people want from government is to be left alone. While liberal baby boomers waxed nostalgic over Woodstock last month, they went to town hall meetings to question their congressmen and senators, worried that their government planned to take away their health insurance plans and force them into a government-controlled system. Unlike their hippie contemporaries, they didn’t go to Woodstock forty years ago to smoke weed and frolic naked in the mud. They went to work instead - bagging groceries, banging nails, mowing lawns, and saving money for their future.

Though Obama, Pelosi and Reid continue to deny it, they know government would ration their health care when they get older. They know a younger gangbanger or illegal immigrant would get treated before they would when they were 65, 75, or 85 even though they’re the ones who pay the bills. They know Obama lied in his speech last week when he said his alleged reforms “would not apply to those who are here illegally.” When they heard Congressman Joe Wilson shout back “You lie!” they jumped up in front of their television sets and cheered him.

As part of its effort to demonize Congressman Wilson, CNN sent a reporter to the demonstration, but it backfired. Marchers didn’t trust CNN and wouldn’t be used as stooges for left-wing propaganda, so they gathered behind the reporter and shouted “Tell the truth!” over and over. The anchor back in Atlanta was exasperated when her reporter in the field said: “There are people who very strongly support Congressman Joe Wilson - and many of them are right here.”

They were there all right - over a million of them - and they don’t get their news from CNN and the other alphabet networks. They get it online and from talk radio because the mainstream media doesn’t have complete control of news anymore.

These are people who know they’ve been paying higher premiums on their private health insurance plans for years because hospitals charge them more for health care. They haven’t liked it, but they’ve paid anyway. They pay because they know hospitals cannot otherwise function when government pays much less than it costs to deliver health care to poor and elderly patients on Medicaid and Medicare.

These are people who pay on both ends - with their taxes and with their premiums. They know that if Obamacare passes with a “public option,” the private health insurance they’ve been paying for will disappear and they won’t have any more choices. Government will decide what health care they get - and don’t get.

These are people who have been planning for their retirement while others have been living fast and loose. They know they can’t depend on Social Security or any other government program. They watched the “War on Poverty” waste trillions and paid the taxes that financed it. They watched their money go down the drain while they worked in PTAs, Scouts, Rotary clubs and churches without government assistance. They are the real community organizers - quite unlike the government-funded ACORN (Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now) types caught last week scheming to fund child prostitution with taxpayer money in Baltimore, Washington, DC, New York City and San Bernardino. Because President Obama did legal work for ACORN, CNN and the alphabet networks continue to ignore the story. Demonstrators, however, know about it anyway.

These people are the ants who worked, who took care of themselves, who laid up food for the winter while their grasshopper contemporaries flitted about “finding themselves” at Grateful Dead concerts and the like. Now they’re envisioning their old age as government would force it upon them, not as they planned it and worked for it all their whole lives. Obamacare is the final straw for them. These people have had enough - and there are millions of them.

Boys and Forts

One of my favorite things as a boy was building “forts” in the woods with other boys. Not sure now why we called them forts because they were not fortified in any way. They were structures we liked to go into and just sit. If they were in trees, they were “tree forts.” If they were holes in the ground with boards over them covered with dirt, leaves and pine needles, they were “underground forts.” The ones we built in wintertime were “snow forts.” None of us ever thought to question the label.

I suspect we boys were biologically programmed to build forts and were happiest doing so, just as Labrador Retrievers are happiest when they’re retrieving. Sitting in classrooms with teachers trying to program us to be “nice” like the girls would make us crazy. Building forts was not the only thing we did and I’m not sure where the notion came from. It was usually around this time of year - when summer was ending and school was beginning. I suspect it was instinctual. Cold weather was approaching and we felt like building a shelter, so we did.

We’d use available tools and materials. In suburban Boston during the fifties and sixties lots of houses going up, so we would prowl job sites and ask carpenters if we could have their scrap wood and bent nails and they always obliged. It was great fun to straighten out the nails, carry materials into the woods and start building. Tools we borrowed from our fathers, with permission or without. Hammers and saws were all we used really and the fathers were off to work all day so we would raid their workbenches. I'd borrow a hammer and saw and return them to the workbench before my father got home from work. Sometimes I’d forget though and leave them at the “fort.” If he should go looking for his tools that night and not find them, I’d be in trouble.

The numerous forts usually ended up getting wrecked by groups of older, bigger boys or boys from neighborhoods on the other side of a thousand-acre swamp. We’d journey to the site one day and find it destroyed, speculate on who may have done it, and plot revenge. If it was the boys across the woods, we’d seek alliances with older boys in our neighborhood for protection or retaliation.

My sisters and their friends played house close to home while we were building forts in the woods. Sometimes they’d rake pine needles into rows outlining rooms and make beds for their dolls. They were obeying their instincts too and got satisfaction from playing out their fantasies day after day. Often they’d try to entice us to play with them and pretend to be fathers in their “houses” but we weren’t interested. We’d only agree to when they blackmailed us. We’d play house with them for a limited time if they promised not to tell on us for something we did that they found out about.

As I reflect on it now, we were all playing out our inherent inclinations and there are corollaries in the larger human story. A concise description of human history might outline, for example, a series of periods when we built things, interspersed with periods when we wrecked what we’d built. If we extended the building periods and shortened the wrecking periods, it could be considered a measure of civilizational progress. Men generally built villages and cities while women bred, nurtured and maintained households in them. Men fortified their towns and cities and defended them, successfully or unsuccessfully, against assaults by other groups from other regions. Sometimes the assaults were preemptive attacks on potential enemies. Sometimes they were naked grabs for wealth and power. There were also occasions when men would seek alliances with other groups for defensive or offensive purposes.

It was similar with us boys and our forts. After a while they didn’t get wrecked very often, and that was probably because we were becoming the bigger boys, and the ones who had been the destroyers had grown up to discover cars and girls. Not too many years later, they settled down to play house for real.

Eventually, so did we.

Kennedy Worship Syndrome

I’m not mourning Ted Kennedy any more than I did Michael Jackson, even though the rest of the western world went into orgies of keening. Born a Boston-Irish-Catholic-Democrat, I was raised with KWS (Kennedy Worship Syndrome) but, unlike most, I got over it many years ago.

Ted’s brother John was elected president when was in the fourth grade at St. William’s School in Tewksbury, Massachusetts - about twenty miles outside of Boston. My teacher, Sister Charles Paul, talked endlessly about Senator Kennedy - then President Kennedy - all year. Three years hence I was upstairs in seventh grade with Sister Maureen Catherine when JFK was shot by a communist organizer in Dallas. We watched the classroom TV as Walter Cronkite told us he was dead. The girls cried. I was in shock.
My father next to JFK at NAGE meeting

My father had worked with then-Senator John Kennedy in the fifties when WWII vets formed a union that later became NAGE - National Association of Government Employees - now a subsidiary of the notorious SIEU (Service Employees International Union) providing thugs to disrupt congressional town meetings.

Ted Kennedy ran for the US Senate in 1962 when I was in fifth grade. His campaign motorcade went by St. William’s School while we were out at recess and pulled over. He got out to press the flesh and I threw a football to him, which he caught and tossed back. I threw it again, but he had looked away to shake hands and the ball hit him in the head, messing up his hair.

In summer of 1967, I attended a very spirited party on Martha’s Vineyard with some of Robert Kennedy’s children. The following June, I was getting ready for school when my mother told me Robert Kennedy had died in Los Angeles after being shot by a Palestinian activist while running for president.

I’ve since read every major biography of the Kennedy family. Most are by authors suffering from KWS like Doris Kearns Goodwin and Arthur Schlesinger. The three that infuenced me most, however, were The Kennedy Imprisonment by Garry Wills; Kennedys: An American Drama by Collier and Horowitz; and The Dark Side of Camelot by Seymour Hersch. These authors examined the family without glossing over the carbuncles, such as: Joseph P. Kennedy’s involvement with organized crime during Prohibition, his pro-Nazi sentiments as Ambassador to the Court of St. James, his obsessive philandering, his svengali-like control of his children, driving his sons to seek the presidency, fixing 1960 election results in Illinois, West Virginia and Louisiana, and so forth. Then there were JFK’s too-numerous-to-mention dalliances as congressman, senator and president. Hersch’s book was the most damning, depicting John and Robert as arrogant, brash, and playing fast and loose with civilization itself in their handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

For those who insist all this lacks significance when measured against the political achievements of the Kennedys, there’s Chappaquiddick. Ted, like his father and brothers, frolicked with countless women. Unlike them, he had a problem with alcohol, which made him sloppier. It’s one thing to drunkenly drive off a bridge with a young woman not your wife in the car. It’s quite another to slink off and leave her to drown while you’re trying to cover up the incident to preserve your political career. If he’d reported the incident right away as the law required, Mary Jo Kopechne would be alive today according to investigators. Whatever was left in me of Kennedy Worship Syndrome, it was thoroughly eliminated after reading Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Coverup by Leo Damore. The Kennedy political machine, together with the Irish political mafia running Massachusetts at the time, gave Ted Kennedy a pass for what would have put anybody else in prison. Somehow kept his US Senate seat. Only in Massachusetts where KWS is epidemic could this have happened.

Hearing endlessly of Ted Kennedy’s legislative “achievements,” foremost in my mind is The 1965 Immigration Act, which opened the door for 20 million illegal immigrants now bankrupting our country. That was Ted’s baby. As I watch ordinary Americans revolt against socialized medicine, I think of Ted Kennedy.

When I hear of his “senatorial civility,” I remember how he baselessly savaged Robert Bork before the Senate Judiciary Committee declaring: “Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, children could not be taught about evolution.”

When I hear of his patriotism, I remember how he treasonously undercut President Reagan during the Cold War by offering a secret deal to Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov.

About the only positive thing about Ted Kennedy’s political career is when he ran in the primaries against an incumbent president from his own party, weakening Jimmy Carter and ushering in Ronald Reagan.

Now there’s talk of changing the law in Massachusetts to preserve the “Kennedy” senate seat by appointing nephew Joe Kennedy. You remember the former congressman who has been kissing up to Hugo Chavez the past few years? Joe calls them “our good friends in Venezuela.” With friends like that, who needs enemies?

I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but after last week, it’s pretty clear the mainstream media still suffers from KWS. As someone who recovered years ago, this Boston-Irish-Catholic-former Democrat had to get it out.