February 2004, Week 2

Don't try to outweird me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal. Zaphod Beeblebrox

Loren Godfrey's funeral today, I told Tony I would be at his house at 1145. I got there a little early, he was cleaning his Fiat... he'd lost track of time... We made it to the Funeral with 7 minutes to spare. It was a gravesite service, I little Korean lady was the minister. Sort of surreal... Dave Smith, Joe Pohlmeier, John McQueen, John Achen, Steve Harper and his wife, Ladonna Hunt and her husband, Andrea Spears, Nancy King and bunch of folks from the Newhall and Ventura area... I don't know their names. I didn't know Loren so it was neat to hear his family and friends from the community talk about him, he must have been a pretty nice fells. It always surprises me to realize folks have lives outside the Phone Company, that's usually the only way I know them but to find out they were baseball coaches, Sponsored a band, raised kids... it's not really a surprise I guess, more like a smack upside the head. It just bothers me to think that I know someone and then find out I really didn't even scratch the surface...

What upsets me is not that you lied to me, but that from now on I can no longer believe you. Frederick Nietzsche

"B" called home from school... said he was sick... he acted stoned... not sure what's going on.

I took Cindy to Dr. D. we modified her meds... she seems to be doing much better on just Zoloft and Resperadol...

I got an e-mail showing Kerry at VVAW rally at Valley Forge in 1970, it showed him in a crowd behind a close-up of Jane Fonda... 2 years before she went to Hanoi... the picture is labled "Hanoi John" My response, (Written but not sent yet)

I take it you're a Republican... So am I ... Sometimes... This struck a nerve.

In the last election the RNC tried to claim that Max Cleland and John McCain were unpatriotic too, they must feel Kerry's a threat because they are pulling out all stops to stop him. This is the third e-mail I have seen running him down by putting their own spin on the truth. This picture is very misleading... As though Kerry's anti war stance was some sort of secret...

The picture was taken in 1970, at a VVAW (Vietnam Veterans Against the War) rally (Two years prior to Jane Fonda's trip to Hanoi, before she was known as Hanoi Jane, she was just 34 year old actress then), John Kerry was a member of VVAW, he left them before 1972 before giving his speech against the war at a Senate hearing. (One of the e-mails I got called the VVAW a "Bunch of Commies", these guys put their lives on the line for their country and their uniform, they are the real deal and they have a right to express their views) John Kerry is a Honest to God war hero. He could have taken a legitimate deferment, and his family was influential enough to have made it possible for him to hide out in the Air National Guard like George.. But he didn't. He returned to America after being wounded three times. (Three wounds is a legitimate ticket home for any soldier, one e-mail called it an "obscure regulation" it wasn't, everyone in Vietnam knew what three Purple Hearts meant) By that time he had lost several friends, one was a very close friend that he went the Academy with. He had been in the Mekong Delta Free Fire Zone and seen things done and done things he couldn't reconcile. He asked for and received an honorable discharge. He was (and is) a very articulate and credible Anti War Activist... He spoke out against the war not to aid the Viet Cong but to get our soldiers out of harms way. He hated that war... So did I... Too many young men and women were coming home screwed up, wounded or dead... to make a few men rich.
Equating what John Kerry did to what Jane Fonda did seems a little Ridiculous.

So... Bottom line, if you think the war in Vietnam was a righteous war and you think no one in America had the right to protest against it then I guess you won't be voting for him... I will.

What we have in this country is socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor

Today I was a little overwhelmed by the kids, I was tired or something they just really made me angry... I got through it without getting physical but it was a strain.

I took the kids to school and then I took Mike to the dentist... he thought a filling had fallen out but it just needed filing.

Mike is kicked out of first period for saying F**k in class... he says he wasn't talking to the teacher but the teacher says he was. This guy is the coach... mile wants to get into sports but he is rapidly burning bridges.

I went to the Cardiologist (Nurse Practitioner) for my annual review. She was very thorough and all appears to be well. I have an appointment with Dr Kodel on the 19th and a visit to the Lab tomorrow.

My computer froze up and I lost everything I typed in today.... again... no Auto-save in FrontPage... still... damn-it.

In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not in its taste, but in its effects.

I went to Kaiser to get my blood work done, Christy took Christian in to get his braces repaired and dropped him off at school. She had "B" too because he had an 0830 appointment at Kaiser with BJ.

I met Christy for lunch at the Olive Garden... I had fasted for about 16 hours by then so I splurged and ordered the "Tour of Italy" it was pretty good. The Lasagna wasn't up to the Spaghetti Factory but it wasn't bad.

I was anticipating a good turnout for the ROF and I was right... It was a well attended... 26 people showed up.

So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights, we'll be called a democracy.

Bush is getting desperate to get his military record put behind him. It's interesting to watch him squirm. We are all here by virtue of the decisions we made in our youth. We made decisions about how much we were willing to invest in our educations, how involved and committed to our jobs and family responsibilities we were going to be. Ambition, passion, all the incidental roads we have taken got us to where we are today. George is an ambitious boy and he appears to have had his eye on the future and not paid a whole lot of attention to the present. Cocaine, Alcohol, not taking his commitment to the National Guard seriously. Searching for facts to support his preconceptions... it's all biting him in the ass... good.

Gay Marriage... No one gives a damn what my opinion is but here's my 2¢. Does anyone out there feel threatened by the concept that people of the same gender, in love with each other, want to get married? Does it diminish your commitment marriage, do you feel somehow diminished , are your vows no longer as sanctified. Aside from a general feeling of "It's none of my business what other people do." I feel totally ambivalent about the whole thing. I have heard that there are some Fundamentalist religious people are just livid... I don't understand what their problem is, If you don't want to marry people of the same gender... don't... who gives a damn. All they want is a license, that is just a legal document saying they are related... they don't need that sacrament of any tight-butt religion to get married, all they need is a clerk of the court.

Just a thought on genealogy. I surmise that 90 percent of the people reading this (I like to pretend I am writing to a vast audience... humor me) couldn't care less about their family history. The fact that their family, their genes, their DNA stretches back to the beginning of time either is to profoundly boggling to contemplate or they feel it has no relevance to their current place in the world. 30 years ago I felt like that... I wasn't thinking about eternity, I wasn't concerned about "What it's all about". Genealogy, is about remembering, it's about respect and it is about honoring your past. We are all footnotes in someone's Family Tree. One hundred years from now some researcher may stumble on this website in an archive somewhere... and I will have a contributed to his history.

The decisions made by my 9th Great Grandfather to Emigrate to the "New World" with his young family set in motion the chain if events that put me in this chair to write this. My Ancestors survived deprivation, Indian Wars, poverty, Revolution, Civil War, two World Wars, family tragedy, epidemics... and I am the end result. My father's only son, I have no biological children but the name will continue on with the children I have adopted. The biological link to my fore fathers will be lost. What will not be lost is the chain of events going back to to 'Adam' that brought us all together into a family.

I am having a hard time posting this website lately, not sure why. I get an error message accusing me of using unregistered shareware... my version of FrontPage is legal, registered and activated... I don't know what's going on... it aborts every time I try to post a new page. I wrote to MS... I hope they can tell me what's wrong.

I took the kids to the park... they had fun for a short time and then got bored, we bought some donuts and went home...

Lot of Kerry bashing going on, I find the venomous ones especially tedious. Trying to sum him up by calling him an Anti-War Activist as though that is a bad thing is especially offensive to me. What sort of person is a Pro-War Activist... that's just insane!. John Kerry is a legitimate war hero, he came back form Vietnam hating what was going on over ther, he became an Anti War activist to make a diference and try to end the war... to get the soldiers home.

If this doesn't get you to at least examine the current administration a little closer then I guess we deserve to have our rights and private documents as public record. I want you to think about where this will end. What about Drug treatment records, cancer, heart trouble. This is a Corporate Culture Administration, what if his corporate backers like SBC, Lucent, and all those other Enron's out there that never got caught decide it should be illegal to keep your medical history private. Your court proceedings and legal history. Lawsuits, Divorce, Driving history... where will it end. Like I said, before, this is an administration built on and by the Corporate Culture, all they care about is the bottom line. If you worked for a large company like I did, was there ever a moment in your business life that you felt like you couldn't have been disposed of if your job a negative affect on the bottom line. Layoff's, early retirement, outsourcing, relocation, consolidation... As far as the Business World is concerned, In the "Bottom Line" world you're just a cipher in an accounting book you are deemed either an asset or a liability, and the bean counters make the decisions for your company you don't matter to the company and you don't matter to this administration... Think about Bush, think about Ashcroft... do you really believe they give a damn?

Privacy in Peril

n an attempt to bolster its defense of the unconstitutional Partial Birth Abortion Act of 2003, the Bush administration has gone beyond its campaign to destroy women's reproductive rights and has attacked the privacy rights of all Americans.

This assault is being conducted through subpoenas the Justice Department has issued demanding that at least six hospitals in New York City, Philadelphia, Illinois and elsewhere turn over hundreds of patient records for certain abortions. This egregious intrusion on patients' privacy is being pursued in the name of defending lawsuits against the abortion ban. Not only is the information not needed to do that, but it is also a flagrant example of why Congress and the attorney general have no business second-guessing sensitive medical decisions made by individuals and their doctors.

Judges in New York and Nebraska have barred the administration from enforcing the abortion law in response to suits brought by groups of doctors, who have argued, correctly, that the ban should be struck down because of imprecise wording and the lack of an exception to protect a woman's health. A narrow Supreme Court majority struck down a state ban in 2000 for omitting a health exception.

Attorney General John Ashcroft says the fishing expedition his department has started is justified to evaluate whether the procedures covered by the law are ever necessary to preserve a woman's health. In a sound ruling last week, a federal judge in Illinois rebuffed this flimsy argument. Citing state and federal law, as well as Supreme Court precedent, the judge, Charles Kocoras, also rejected the Ashcroft team's astonishing claim that no doctor-patient privilege exists under federal law protecting patients from public disclosure of their records.

Unfortunately, the federal judge in New York overseeing one of the legal challenges to the new law does not grasp his duty to protect patient privacy. That judge, Richard Conway Casey of New York's Southern District, has threatened to lift his injunction blocking enforcement of the abortion ban if leading hospitals in New York City and elsewhere fail to produce files on at least several dozen women's abortions.

Underscoring the legally dubious nature of Judge Casey's threat, the hospitals in question are not themselves parties to the lawsuit. Nor, for that matter, are the women whose personal privacy Mr. Ashcroft is so determined to invade. Moreover, as Judge Kocoras aptly noted, redacting a patient's name and identification number from her file neither ends the harm to individuals of having intimate details of their medical history publicly disclosed, nor adequately protects the patients' identities.

We applaud those hospitals that are resisting Mr. Ashcroft's privacy invasion, and encourage them to stand firm until the legal proceedings run their course. Meanwhile, Americans should see Mr. Ashcroft's intimidating tactics for the dangerous threat to liberty and privacy they really are.

February 11, 2004

Dear Mr. Bush,

Thank you for providing the illegible Xeroxed partial payroll sheets (or whatever they were) yesterday covering a few of your days in the National Guard. Now we know that, not only didn't you complete your tour of duty, you were actually paid for work you never did. Did you cash those checks? Wouldn't that be, um, illegal?

Watching the press aggressively demand the truth from your press secretary -- and refusing to accept the deceit, the dodging, and the cover-up -- was a sight to behold, something we really haven't seen since you took office (to watch or listen to the entire press conference, or to read the full transcript, go here).

More than one reporter pointed out that those pieces of paper your press secretary waved at them yesterday mean nothing. Even if they aren't forged documents, getting paid does not necessarily mean you showed up to do your duties. As retired Army Col. Dan Smith, a 26-year veteran, told the AP:

"Pay records don't mean anything except that you're in or you're out," said Smith. "It doesn't necessarily reflect what duty you've actually performed because pay records simply record your unit of assignment and then all of your pay and benefits per pay period."

Mr. Bush, this issue is not going to go away -- and I think yesterday's actions just dug you into a deeper hole. You're probably wondering why the heck this story won't just die. You probably thought that after I brought it up last month and then got slammed by Peter Jennings for uttering the "d" word, the whole matter would just disappear as fast as bag of blow being thrown out the window of a speeding car on a deserted Maine highway.

But your "desertion" didn't go away -- and here's the reason why. You have sent countless numbers of our sons and daughters in the National Guard to their deaths in the last 11 months. You did this while misleading their parents and the nation with bogus lies about weapons of mass destruction and scary phony Saddam ties to al Qaeda. You sent them off to a never-ending war so that your benefactors at Halliburton and the oil companies could line their pockets. And then you had the audacity to prance around in a soldier's uniform on an aircraft carrier proclaiming "Mission Accomplished" -- while the cameras from your re-election campaign ad agency rolled.

THAT is what makes this whole business of you being AWOL so despicable, and makes the grief-stricken relatives want to turn away from you in disgust. The reason your skipping-out on your enlistment didn't matter in the 2000 election was because we were not at war. Being stuck in a deadly, daily quagmire now in 2004 makes your military history-fiction and your fly-boy costume VERY relevant.

You still have not answered the questions surrounding your National Guard "service." Let me repeat them as simply as I can for you (all of them based on the investigative work of the Associated Press and the Boston Globe):

Look, I'm sorry to have put you through all this. I was just goofing around when I made that comment about wanting to see a debate between the general and the deserter. I had no idea that it would lead to this. And there you were, having to suffer through Tim Russert on Sunday, saying weird things like "I'm a war president!" I guess you believe that, or you want us to believe that. Americans have never voted out a Commander-in-Chief during a war. I guess that's what you're hoping for. You need the war.

But we don't. And our troops in the National Guard don't either. I know you see the writing on the wall, so why not come clean now? We are a forgiving people, and though you will not be returned to White House, you will find us grateful for a little bit of truth. Answer our questions, apologize to the nation, and bring our kids home.

Yours,

Michael Moore
mmflint@aol.com