Looks like it’s acquired some substance, however unwanted.

Thanks for the link, man. Much appreciated. I’m shocked you hadn’t heard about the “pants lawsuit,” actually–it was rivaling Paris Hilton’s hard time as the most heavily covered news story with the least substance.

Look under “Best Web OpEds.”

Meanwhile, re: “You

For example, tort lawyers tend to be Democrats. Their level of income affords them the luxury of supporting the Democratic Party. The way to control their financial contributions is to cut off their source of income.

Thus, the whole ruse about how medical malpractice suits were driving up healthcare costs. The result was a cap on awards to cut the wages of lawyers. The added perk was that it also rewarded Republican supporters such as doctors and insurance executives.

Likewise, labor unions have been a traditional ally of Democratic candidates. To control unions, a movement began to export jobs – many of them requiring technical skills. Then, to further depress the domestic wage scale, the powers that be opened the borders to a flood of illegal immigrants even as blue-collar job hemorrhaged. Democrats were afraid to say anything for fear of being labeled racists.

Again, the goal was to cripple the Democratic Party, by any means necessary, regardless of collateral damage to working families. After all, in the neocon mind, it was the fault of working families for not having enough children.

Year in and year out, schoolteachers have been the most powerful lobby in most state capitols. They tend to be more formidable than either doctors or lawyers. They also tend to support Democratic candidates for office with votes and dollars.

To neutralize the political power of teachers, Republicans needed to gut the public school system. They did so with No Child Left Behind. In addition to the frustration of meeting ever changing standards, the funding of mandated testing has cut into teacher salary and benefits. In turn, this took teachers out of a proactive political mode and put them into a personal survival mode with no time to visit state capitols to put pressure of legislators.

Now, the plan is to extend No Child Left Behind into higher education because college professors tend to be liberal and vote for Democrats. Additionally, because college graduates are apt to be more liberal than high school graduates, deep cuts were made in grants so that college students would have to borrow money from private lenders and, then, after graduating, work in a global market with a depressed wage scale to pay back student loans rather than become politically active pests.

Furthermore, the disincentives put in place against working class children achieving a higher education serve to protect children of the wealthy from competition from undesirables with too many academic credentials. It also makes the riffraff easier to control since they don’t know enough in a to become a threat to the status quo.

As always, since the Civil War, Democrats have been painted as the “party of treason.” Only now, the rhetoric is “soft-on” crime, terrorism, or whoever the enemy of the week happens to be. The tort cap is merely an attempt to portray the Democratic Party as having betrayed the American people by not protecting them from lawyers.

The ultimate goal has been to repeal any trace of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal initiatives. Democrats have been complacent in the plan. Welfare was all but repealed under Bill Clinton. Since then, George W. Bush has tried his best to get Social Security to disappear from the face of the earth.

So far, the plan has worked quite well because too many Democrats are still living in the 1960s. Their “flower children” attitude is an anachronism from another age. They are little more than Peter Pans frozen in time.

All the talk about gay rights is playing right into the hands of the neocons. Even in their wildest dreams, the neocons could not have invented a more perfect foil with which to do battle. Consequently, both literally and figuratively, Democrats are being taken to the cleaners!

You’re probably familiar with the case of Roy Pearson vs. the Chung cleaners over a pair of damaged pants that were allegedly worth $54 million. The Chungs now owe over $100,000 in legal costs from the suit, which Pearson is refusing to pay pending ap…