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Originally posted by Grey:
Valkaryn, you amaze me with how you can twist & turn my opinion on the state of the democratic party as if by doing so it changes how I feel.

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Maybe you should get out more often?

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You claim I come to hasty conclusions when I am telling you my opinion is the result of a few years of witnessing whats going on yet in one sentence you believe I need to get out more often.

But wait, thanks to your definition of "hasty conclusions" am I right to assume that because its easy for me to say my opinion that its not valid?

Im sorry if this seems off topic, however I do feel my post in question was within the lines of the topic but I feel the need to answer to Valkaryns assumptions & definitions of what I have said.

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When a premise is drawn for an argument using statistics, it is always a good idea to make certain of the representative sampling. Otherwise, the logic can be proved unfounded and irrelevant. For example, if you go to Africa and based on your experience of African elephants, determined that all elephants have small ears. You would be wrong. Because Indian Elephants have signicantly larger ears. (I may have the fact about the ears backwards, but the point is the same).

In context, your statement "I just don't like the radical Democrats that I see everywhere I look" indicates that your opinion of democrats is based on experience limited to your environment. I, merely, suggested that you might want to broaden your environment. By the use of the "winky smiley" ( ), I had hoped to convey it in a lightsided manner. It is obvious to me that the message was not received in the manner it was intended.

Your opinions are always valid, whether or not they are supported by facts and statistics. For instance, I have the opinion that the FBI and CIA were used as patsies in the 9/11 hearings, but I have absolutely no supportive facts to that end. But note that as a result of my recognition that I have nothing to support that statement, I do not run around making statements such as "the whole 9/11 hearing was staged" except within the context of this example. Lacking facts, I can only make assumptions - which leaves me to be very pragmatic about my opinion.

You are most welcome to continue to maintain your opinion that democrats. Out of curiosity, are you also pragmatic about your opinions?

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Originally posted by Grey:
You are right, I should not be making any statements without facts to back them up. Even if I believe theres enough facts out there that its in plain sight for all who want to see them.

I don't have time usually to define each word I type & provide links to every reason for my beliefs.

Given that maybe I should not even bother unless I have time to come up with an essay for everything I say.

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Does it take an essay to evaluate whether or not a statement that "ALL democrats are radicals", or even "MOST democrats are radicals", is true? I doubt that even Tolstoy could make more than a few sentences out of the reasoning involved in proving or disproving such a statement.

The reasons people come to these boards are varied. Here are SOME of the reasons I can identify.

Comiseration
Personal Validation
Challenge
Evaluation of the ideas and people involved
in a issue

It's quite acceptable to say: "I hate democrats!" However, the proclamation that "Every where I look I see radical democrats" is a challenging behavior which opens you to have your assumptions challenged for verification. The reason I put the winky smily ( ) was that I did acknowledge that your challenging statement was really in comiseration's clothing.

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Originally posted by jgr220:
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Heroism, And Growing Concern About War

By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff, 6/16/2003

Kerry served two tours. For a relatively uneventful six months, from December 1967 to June 1968, he served in the electrical department aboard the USS Gridley, a guided-missile frigate that supported aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin and was far removed from combat.

Kerry initially hoped to continue his service at a relatively safe distance from most fighting, securing an assignment as "swift boat" skipper. While the 50-foot swift boats cruised the Vietnamese coast a little closer to the action than the Gridley had come, they were still considered relatively safe.

"I didn't really want to get involved in the war," Kerry said in a little-noticed contribution to a book of Vietnam reminiscences published in 1986. "When I signed up for the swift boats, they had very little to do with the war. They were engaged in coastal patrolling and that's what I thought I was going to be doing."

But two weeks after he arrived in Vietnam, the swift boat mission changed -- and Kerry went from having one of the safest assignments in the escalating conflict to one of the most dangerous.

Kerry experienced his first intense combat action on Dec. 2, 1968, when he "semi-volunteered for, was semi-drafted" for a risky covert mission in which he essentially was supposed to "flush out" the enemy, using a little Boston Whaler named "Batman." A larger backup craft was called "Robin."

Unfortunately, Robin had engine trouble, and Batman's exit was delayed until the boats could depart in unison. The Batman crew encountered some Viet Cong, engaged in a firefight, and Kerry was slightly wounded on his arm, earning his first Purple Heart on his first day of serious action.

"It was not a very serious wound at all," recalled William Schachte, who oversaw the mission and went on to become a rear admiral.

In any case, Kerry said he was appalled that the Navy's ''free fire zone'' policy put civilians at such high risk. So, on Jan. 22, 1969, Kerry and several dozen fellow skippers and officers traveled to Saigon to complain about the policy in an extraordinary meeting with Zumwalt and the overall commander of the war, General Creighton W. Abrams Jr. ''We were fighting the [free fire] policy very, very hard, to the point that many of the members were refusing to carry out orders on some of their missions, to the point where crews were starting to mutiny, [to] say, `I would not go back in the rivers again,''' Kerry recalled during a 1971 television appearance on the Dick Cavett Show.

But Kerry went back in the rivers. Indeed, it was after this meeting that he began his most deadly round of combat. Within days of the Saigon meeting, he joined a five-man crew on swift boat No. 94 on a series of missions in which he won the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, and two of his three Purple Hearts. Starting in late January 1969, this crew completed 18 missions over an intense and dangerous 48 days, almost all of them in the dense jungles of the Mekong Delta.

The most intense action came during an extraordinary eight days of more than 10 firefights, remembered by Kerry's crew as the "days of hell."

On Feb. 20, 1969, Kerry earned his second Purple Heart after sustaining a shrapnel wound in his left thigh.

A couple of weeks later, on March 13, 1969, a mine detonated near Kerry's boat, wounding Kerry in the right arm, according to the citation written by Zumwalt.

Kerry had been wounded three times and received three Purple Hearts. Asked about the severity of the wounds, Kerry said that one of them cost him about two days of service, and that the other two did not interrupt his duty. "Walking wounded," as Kerry put it. A shrapnel wound in his left arm gave Kerry pain for years. Kerry declined a request from the Globe to sign a waiver authorizing the release of military documents that are covered under the Privacy Act and that might shed more light on the extent of the treatment Kerry needed as a result of the wounds.

"There were an awful lot of Purple Hearts -- from shrapnel, some of those might have been M-40 grenades," said Elliott, Kerry's commanding officer. "The Purple Hearts were coming down in boxes. Kerry, he had three Purple Hearts. None of them took him off duty. Not to belittle it, that was more the rule than the exception."

But Kerry thought he had seen and done enough. The rules, he said, allowed a thrice-wounded soldier to return to the United States immediately. So Kerry went to talk to Commodore Charles F. Horne, an administrative official and commander of the coastal squadron in which Kerry served. Horne filled out a document on March 17, 1969, that said Kerry "has been thrice wounded in action while on duty incountry Vietnam. Reassignment is requested ... as a personal aide in Boston, New York, or Wash., D.C. area."

Horne, in a telephone interview, said the transfer request was allowed under then-existing naval instructions and was "above board and proper." Transfer was not automatic and was subject to approval by the Bureau of Naval Personnel, he said.

"I never once in any way thought my decision was wrong," Horne said. "To get three Purple Hearts and not be killed is awesome."

Kerry, asked whether he is certain a rule enabled him to leave Vietnam after three Purple Hearts, responded: "Yep. Three and you're out."

For the past several weeks, Kerry's staff said it has been unable to come up with a Navy document to explain that assertion. On Friday, however, the National Archives provided the Globe with a Navy "instruction" document that formed the basis for Kerry's request. The instruction, titled 1300.39, says that a Naval officer who requires hospitalization on two separate occasions, or who receives three wounds "regardless of the nature of the wounds," can ask a superior officer to request a reassignment. The instruction makes clear the reassignment is not automatic. It says that the reassignment "will be determined after consideration of his physical classification for duty and on an individual basis." Because Kerry's wounds were not considered serious, his reassignment appears to have been made on an individual basis.

Moreover, the instruction makes clear that Kerry could have asked that any reassignment be waived.

The bottom line is that Kerry could have remained but he chose to seek an early transfer. He met with Horne, who agreed to forward the request, which Horne said probably ensured final approval. The Navy could not say how many other officers or sailors got a similar early release from combat, but it was unusual for anyone to have three Purple Hearts.

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WASHINGTON (AP) - At least three times in his Senate career, Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry has recommended individuals for positions at federal home loan banks just before or after receiving political contributions from the nominees, records show.

In one case, Kerry wrote to the Federal Housing Finance Board to urge the reappointment of a candidate just one day before a Kerry campaign committee received $1,000 from the nominee, the records show.

``One has nothing to do with the other,'' said Marvin Siflinger, who contributed around the time of Kerry's Oct. 1, 1996, recommendation that he be reappointed for another term to the board.

Kerry's office, like the nominees, insists the timing of the donations and the nominations was a coincidence.

``Sen. Kerry recommends dozens of very qualified individuals each year without regard to their politics or contributions. In this case each of the individuals were highly qualified for the jobs they were appointed to and served with distinction,'' spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said.

``John Kerry is grateful for their support, and we should be thanking them for their service, not questioning it,'' she added. ``The timing of the contributions was completely circumstantial.''

But a longtime government watchdog says it is common for Washington appointees to donate just before or after they are nominated.

``This is just business as usual in Washington,'' said Larry Noble, the former chief lawyer for the Federal Election Commission who now heads the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. ``Kerry is out there saying he is not being part of that game, yet he is the product of the same money system.''

With Kerry more vocally portraying himself on the presidential campaign trail as an opponent of special interest money in Washington, scrutiny of his dealings with donors and special interests has increased among his rivals and the news media.

Noble said while Kerry long has advocated campaign finance reform, he also has benefited from the big money system he now distances himself from on the campaign trail. ``It's like a game where you say the people who support me just want good government, but the people who support my opponent are special interests,'' he said.

When he first ran for the Senate, Kerry promised voters he would carefully choose nominees on merit.

``I will act as a persistent watchdog over presidential appointments to ensure that only people of integrity, ability and commitment hold positions of power in our national government,'' Kerry wrote in a June 1984 fund-raising appeal.

All three of the people Kerry recommended got the positions they sought on various boards of Federal Home Loan Banks in Boston and New York that provide money for home mortgages.

Kerry's recommendations went to the five-member Federal Housing Finance Board, the regulatory body that votes on the final selections. Recommendations come from members of Congress, the White House and trade associations.

Siflinger, who was a state housing finance official when Kerry was Massachusetts lieutenant governor, was first appointed to the bank board in Boston during President George H.W. Bush's presidency and in 1996 sought Kerry's help to get reappointed.

``You normally seek the support of prominent people who are respected. Certainly in this instance I sought the support of Senator Kerry and I sought support of other members of the congressional delegation,'' Siflinger said in an interview Thursday.

Siflinger made his first donation to Kerry's Senate campaign committee in 1995 more than a year before his reappointment, according to Federal Election Commission records. His most recent donation to Kerry was several weeks ago, Siflinger said.

Investment banker Derek Bryson Park says it's ``pure happenstance'' that he made a pair of $1,000 donations to Kerry a month before the senator's Dec. 29, 1998, letter recommending Park for a position at the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York.

``I got assistance from both ... Democrats and Republicans'' in attaining the bank board post, Park said.

The only political donations Park made to federal candidates around the period of his appointment were to Kerry, according to FEC records.

``I've been fortunate to be invited to Senator Kerry's home and we've had a number of meals together and get-togethers,'' said Park, who got to know Kerry through a longtime supporter of the senator.

Former congressional staffer Patrick Dober said that ``there's absolutely no relationship'' between his $408 donation nearly three months after Kerry's Oct. 9, 1998, recommendation to the federal bank board. Kerry's letter praised Dober for having ``worked closely with my office'' on ``the banking crisis in the early 1990s.''

At the time, Dober worked for Boston Capital, a real estate financing and investment firm co-founded by Kerry supporter Jack Manning. Manning, who has donated more than $800,000 to the Democratic causes over the past 14 years, gave $65,000 in 2001 and 2002 to a tax-exempt political group Kerry set up.

Dober says he thinks his $408 for tickets to a Kerry fund-raiser is the only contribution he's ever made to Kerry.

``There was a fund-raiser for Kerry and they had James Taylor and Robin Williams playing,'' Dober recalled. ``My wife and I said this looks like fun. The tickets were a hundred bucks and a $2 service charge, so my wife and I went with another couple and I wrote the check.''

Associated Press writer Pete Yost contributed to this report.

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VIETNAM has been the defining issue for John Kerry. His status as a decorated war hero has helped to propel him to the front of the pack of Democrat candidates seeking to evict George W. Bush from the White House. Conservative critics believe he has been given a free ride for too long on his war record, however, and are planning a fightback.

Support for their case is expected to come from a book to be published next month by reporters from The Boston Globe in Kerry's home state of Massachusetts. The book, JF Kerry, the Complete Biography, will question the extent of his injuries in Vietnam and whether he was entitled to an early release from the war.

Vietnam, The Washington Post opined at the weekend, "is a double-edged issue" for the 60-year-old Democratic frontrunner. Kerry has not authorised the release of his war records - a strange omission, say his political foes, given the ferocity with which his supporters have demanded to see every last document of Bush's military service in the Texas Air National Guard.

"Vietnam is such a crucial part of his background and his campaign, you would think he would want people to see them," said Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, a conservative journal. "There is going to be pressure on him to release them."

Kerry, who is surrounded on the stump by the "band of brothers" who fought with him in the Mekong Delta, became a fierce public critic of the Vietnam War after he left the navy.

A faked photograph of Kerry sharing a microphone with Jane Fonda was a warning of how his opposition to the conflict would be used against him. There also has been much criticism of the way he threw away another man's medals rather than his own during a 1971 protest demonstration.

Kerry's conduct during the war, however, was until now thought to be sacrosanct. Unlike many of his generation, he volunteered for service in Vietnam. He went on to perform heroically as the skipper of a Swift boat patrolling Vietcong-infested waters, and won a Bronze Star and a Silver Star for bravery.

Kerry served only four months of a year-long tour of duty after he received three Purple Hearts for being wounded in action. The injuries were not serious; by his own account, one shrapnel wound laid him off for two days and the other two did not interrupt his duties.

Five of his friends died in action and his medals show that, at the very least, he had several brushes with death. The future senator then invoked what he insists was a "three and you're out" rule enabling a soldier with three Purple Hearts to be sent home.

He requested a transfer and was given a plum job as an admiral's aide in Brooklyn. He returned to the US a bitter opponent of the war and was released from the army early.

In response to an inquiry from The Sunday Times, Kerry's campaign staff gave the newspaper a copy of naval regulations stating that "all naval personnel" who are "wounded three times, regardless of the nature of the wound or the treatment required for each wound" may be reassigned.

A spokesman for the US Navy said, however, that such redeployment was not automatic: "It would depend a lot on the nature of the injuries."

Ted Sampley, who runs Vietnam Vets Against John Kerry, said if a soldier could be sent home for minor wounds, "there would have been a lot of people claiming scratches, getting their Purple Hearts and getting out of there".

Sampley believes that the well-connected Kerry - photographed with president John F. Kennedy as a young man - simply received favourable treatment. "How many other people were able to get out of Vietnam early and be reassigned to a cushy post?" he said.

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Will Communist Vietnam be among the biggest behind-the-scenes bankrollers of the Democratic National Convention this July 26-29 in Boston? It already has been, via a de facto intermediary, thanks to the Massachusetts boy and friend of Hanoi now likely to be nominated there as the Democrats’ presidential standard-bearer.

Senator John F. Kerry has a long political career, distinguished by his willingness to go farther Left in politics and lower for money than most other American politicians would dream of going. He has been largely unnoticed outside the liberal Northeast and the approving pages of leftist magazines and newspapers.

But now, with the latest polls showing Senator Kerry likely to follow his Iowa Caucuses win last week with a strong victory this Tuesday in the New Hampshire Primary, it’s time for America to wake up and smell the Kerry.

Who is this gaunt and haunted, French-looking apparition nicknamed “Ichabod” by his preppy classmates? And what could America expect from a John Kerry candidacy – or presidency?

“Who would have guessed it,” said Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie last Friday. “Ted Kennedy is the conservative Senator from Massachusetts?” But that is exactly what the leftist group Americans for Democratic Action makes clear by giving Kennedy a lifetime liberal vote rating of only 88 percent but John Kerry’s 19 years as the state’s junior Senator a lifetime liberal vote rating of 93 percent .

John Forbes Kerry was born December 11, 1943, in a hospital in Denver, Colorado, where his test-pilot father Richard had been sent to treat his tuberculosis. His mother, Rosemary, was by descent a double New England Brahmin, her father James part of the colonial Forbes family and her mother a Winthrop whose lineage included the pilgrim leader who helped establish the Congregational Church in the young Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Rosemary’s Forbes family had wealth through its hereditary ownership of much of Cape Cod. Her father used his money to raise his family in France, where aspiring lawyer Richard met her during a youthful idyll. Setting a pattern his son would follow more than once, Richard did not hesitate to wed a rich girl.

In this aristocratic tradition, young John Kerry spent much of his childhood in Europe – with his family in Berlin, Oslo and St. Briac, France – and in an upper-class boarding school in Switzerland. So recounts historian Douglas Brinkley in his fawning-but-eye-opening new biography Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War . Kerry grew up speaking foreign tongues and absorbing a European socialist’s view of the world – and of America.

By 1957, his family had returned to the United States and enrolled John in the elitist Fessenden School in West Newton, Massachusetts, and thereafter at patrician St. Paul’s school in Concord, New Hampshire, where John began to ponder politics.

While dating Janet Auchincloss, Jacqueline Kennedy’s half-sister, Kerry found himself unexpectedly alone in a room of her home with President John F. Kennedy. When the President asked “What are you doing with yourself?” the 6’4” young man blurted out: “Well, I’m about to go to Yale.” Harvard graduate JFK smiled: “I’m a Yale man too now!”

At Yale, John Kerry was one of only 15 in his class upper-crusty enough to be invited to join Skull and Bones, as George W. Bush had done two years earlier like his father and grandfather. (The deceased husband of Kerry’s current wife, John Heinz, was also Skull and Bones. For such people it’s a small world.)

When Kerry in 1986 tried privately to recruit into Skull and Bones Jacob Weisberg, now Slate.com editor, wrote the Boston Herald’s Andrew Miga, “Weisberg declined, pointedly asking Kerry how he squared his liberalism with membership in such an elitist club that refused to admit women. ‘Kerry got sort of flustered….’”

At Yale, Kerry also made a special friendship with David Thorne, whose sister Julia he courted. (One published estimate of Thorne family wealth: $300 million.) They wed in 1970. She was descended from George Washington’s Attorney General William Bradford (who ended the Whiskey Rebellion). Her great-uncle was Henry Stimson, the Secretary of State under President Herbert Hoover and Secretary of War under Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman. (Stimson by some accounts made the decision to target Nagasaki , the most Christian city in Japan, for nuclear annihilation.)

“Between the two of them,” wrote Brinkley, “John Kerry and Julia Thorne constituted a virtual storehouse of America’s most productive and distinguished bloodlines.” But what Kerry seemed to love most was that 5’8” dark-haired “Judy” Thorne had spent much of her childhood in Europe as he had, smoked cigarettes, and spoke fluent French and Italian. Part of their courtship had been at the Thorne summer house on Italy’s Tuscan seacoast.

“Old Europe,” wrote Brinkley, “remained her home, and her culture.” Or as he quotes Julia: “I considered myself European.” No wonder she felt drawn to the French-looking, French-thinking, aristocratic-but-not-personally-wealthy John Kerry.

But after two children and 12 years of marriage, Julia Kerry had been driven to depression and the brink of suicide. The couple separated in 1982, but on election night she kept this secret from voters as she had during the rest of John’s first successful political campaign. He became Lt. Governor of Massachusetts under Michael Dukakis. Although elected on a separate ballot line, as he has stressed since Dukakis’ humiliating defeat in the presidential race of 1988, Kerry embraced almost all Dukakis policies including weekend furloughs for convicted murderers, government subsidies for drug addicts and alcoholics, and opposition to the death penalty even for terrorist mass murderers.

John Kerry and Julia did not formally divorce until 1988, by which time Kerry had been dating (in the strict sense adulterously) for more than half a decade. The gossip columns linked Kerry romantically to, among others, actress Morgan Fairchild, Cornelia Guest and Patti Davis, the leftist daughter of Republican President Ronald Reagan.

Kerry, a Roman Catholic, would (like onetime-Congressman Joe Kennedy) in 1997 apply to have his marriage annulled by his church. Julia’s outspoken opposition made Kerry back down.

“After his divorce to Julia Thorne was finalized,” notes a CBS News timeline on Kerry’s career, “it was apparent how much she helped the family financially. The divorce left him strapped for cash…Before finally renting apartments in Washington and Boston, he was a bit of a roamer.”

Translation: during six years of separation from his wife Julia, John Kerry continued to live on money she provided to him. Before and after their divorce in 1988, Kerry slept around – both in the beds of other women and in the plush accommodations provided to him by lobbyists, especially after his election to the U.S. Senate in the Orwellian year 1984.

Among the goodies lobbyists and other insiders provided Kerry, writes Michael Grunwald of The New Republic, were “a car he ‘leased’ for 16 months without any payments, a ritzy condo he rented for $200 per month from a friendly developer, a no-risk $21,000 real estate windfall arranged by a top fund-raiser, a lobbyist’s $8,000-per-month waterfront apartment where he crashed without paying.”

When criticized for giving only $175 one year to charity, notes Grunwald, Kerry claimed that sending his kids to private schools had left him strapped for cash – but, as reporters ferreted out, not too poor to buy a handmade, ruby red $8,600 Ducati motorcycle for his joy rides.

(Such Kerry deception and dissimulation is common. Knowing that his Bohemian Jewish grandfather had changed his name from Kohn to Kerry , look how long Kerry passed himself off as Irish to gain ethnic votes, making such statements as “For those of us who are fortunate to share an Irish ancestry, we take great pride in the contributions that Irish-Americans….” Well, okay, there is a lot of Blarney in Kerry. And probably a lot of European French, too. But it leaves us wondering whether he is what he pretends to be today.)

A new partner soon entered John Kerry’s life. At the 1992 environmental summit on global warming, Kerry found himself warming to the widow of Republican Pennsylvania Senator John Heinz.

Teresa Simoes-Ferreira Heinz was born the daughter of a Portuguese physician on October 5, 1938, in Mozambique in East Africa. She earned a BA degree in Romance Languages and Literature in 1960 from the University of Witwatersrand in apartheid-era South Africa. She is fluent in five languages, has worked for the United Nations, and is tough, worldly and cosmopolitan in outlook.

Kerry, five years younger than Teresa, courted and won the older woman’s hand. Cynics wondered if his relish to wed her was whetted by Teresa being one of the world’s wealthiest women. Her first husband, who died in a 1991 aircraft accident, was heir to the Heinz ketchup and steak sauce fortune. Her inherited wealth exceeds $500 million, and she oversees the Heinz Foundation endowment of $1.2 billion.

(As Kerry doubtless has thought, George Washington made his stake by marrying an older woman, Martha Custis, one of the wealthiest widows in the American colonies.)

Kerry was expected to use Teresa’s wealth in his longtime quest for the presidency. He then announced that campaign finance laws limited his political use of her money to $2,000. But now Kerry’s once-stalled campaign has been re-ignited with money he has borrowed against multimillion-dollar property they own jointly, a debt she later can pay off from her fortune. This certainly violates the spirit, even if it circumvents the letter, of the law.

Like his Democratic rival Howard Dean, Kerry (after railing against the influence of the evil rich in politics) has decided not to accept Federal matching funds nor the limits that come with such funds for his own campaign.

Kerry, his critics say, has since his teens been angling to become President. Any idealism he began with has been dulled and tarnished with experience in politics.

Kerry has spent 19 years deferring to Massachusetts’ senior Senator Ted Kennedy and acting as a rubberstamp second vote for every Kennedy legislative proposal.

One of the easiest ways to embarrass Kerry in an interview, it’s said, is to ask him to list the major pieces of enacted legislation he has authored in his career. There are none. As a lawmaker, Kerry is one of the least successful politicians in American history.

But early on, Kerry as Chairman of the Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations set out to conduct news-making, important hearings into drugs and the Noriega regime in Panama, Oliver North and Iran-Contra, and other topics that could attract television cameras. One thing his chief investigator vis-à-vis Noriega stumbled onto were the dictator’s links to BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a bank connected to prominent Democratic Party figures such as Clark Clifford.

“Why did John Kerry not confront Clark Clifford?” asked reporters James Ring Adams and Douglas Franz in their 1992 book A Full Service Bank: How BCCI Stole Billions Around the World . “One explanation lies in Kerry’s own character. He tends to operate in bursts, pushing relentlessly on a subject and then seeming to lose interest in it.”

[And to his credit, sometimes Kerry touches briefly on bold positions such as criticizing teacher unions, whose members comprise roughly 25 percent of delegates at Democratic National Conventions.]

“Also, Kerry was learning the Washington game,” Adams and Franz continue , “and beginning to think of himself as possible presidential timber down the road. That meant that certain people were not attacked, at least not until all the evidence was in.”

“By this time, Kerry had become chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee,” they write. “Known by its shorthand DSCC, the committee was one of the key fund-raising mechanisms for the party’s senators and a big step on the path to power in Washington…Much of both the individual donations and PAC money is channeled through the DSCC…So Kerry’s new job put him at the center of power and meant that he would rub shoulders with the movers and shakers who were financing the Democratic Party.”

“One of these men was David Paul, the owner of CenTrust Savings in Miami,” Adams
and Franz continue. “On July 20, 1988, Kerry hosted a reception honoring Paul, one of the largest contributors to the DSCC, and later the Senator used Paul’s private jet to fly to a DSCC leadership meeting.”

David Paul would turn out to be deeply involved with the machinations of BCCI. And Kerry would help bring at least some BCCI wrongdoing to light. He would also experience private attacks from several of his Democratic colleagues for doing so. From such punishments, Kerry soon learned how to play the Democratic Party’s dirty “Washington game.”

Consider two of the big money people backing Kerry’s current presidential campaign. One, who since 1999 has reportedly funneled nearly $700,000 in both hard and soft money to Kerry, is Alan Solomont.

Remember the controversy four years ago when it came to light that one of the flagship stations of the Public Broadcasting Service, WGBH in Boston, had been violating the privacy of its contributors and the taxpayer-supported impartiality of this PBS station by giving its confidential lists of contributor addresses, telephone numbers and other personal information to the Democratic National Committee? The partisan person who reportedly committed this outrage was WGBH Board Member and bigtime Democratic fundraiser Alan Solomont, now the Daddy Warbucks of the Kerry Campaign.

Another Kerry moneybags is former Texas Lt. Governor Ben Barnes, who during the same period ponied up more than $450,000 for the Massachusetts senator. This fatcat lobbyist, called by Tom Daschle “the fifty-first Democratic senator,” was so adroit as a fixer that he once cut a deal so that, after Texas enacted a state lottery, he and a partner would personally be paid 3.5 cents for every ticket sold – which added up to more than $3 million for them each year. Bill Clinton, a master at backroom money-grubbing, once reportedly told a group of Methodist ministers: “If you all will take a sinner like [Ben] Barnes, you might take me.”

A third cash-and-Kerryer, who during this same period gave Kerry more than $180,000, is Hassan Nemazee. This Iranian-American investor raised a cool $250,000 for Al Gore in November 1995, and he and his family slushed another $150,000 to Democrats during the mid-1990s. Six Nemazee family members and friends (including the caretaker of his 12-acre Katonah, N.Y., estate) donated a total of $60,000 – the maximum legally allowed -- to Bill Clinton’s legal defense fund.

In the closing days of 1998 Clinton named Nemazee his Ambassador-designate to Argentina. Hillary Clinton embraced the Muslim moneyman at a January 1999 White House celebration of the Islamic holiday Eid. The Senate, however, refused to confirm the controversial nominee after a Forbes Magazine investigation exposed Nemazee’s questionable business dealings. “He was,” said a bitter former business partner, “the Iranian equivalent of J.R. Ewing.”

The Forbes magazine investigation also documented how, in order to get his hands on public-employee pension fund monies allocated for minority managers, the U.S.-born Nemazee had falsely claimed to be a Hispanic of Venezuelan background and, on another occasion, an Asian-Indian.

But Nemazee’s cynical lust for money can be frightening as well as laughable. He is a founding board member of the Iranian American Political Action Committee [IAPAC], which seeks to create friendly and lucrative business relationships with the medieval theocratic dictatorship now ruling Iran. Iran is, of course, an “Axis of Evil” nation that seeks to acquire nuclear weapons and is on our State Department’s official list of nations that support terrorism. Nemazee seeks to enrich himself by further enriching the power-mad Mullahs ruling Iran.

“The founding member of this group is Mr. Hassan Nemazee, an American of Iranian origin and one discredited, and well-known agent of the Islamic Republic, within the Iranian community in the United States,” wrote opponent of the Iran regime Aryo B. Pirouznia of the Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran. “Their [IAPAC’s] agenda in their own words is: ‘…how relations between the Islamic Republic and the United States can be restored in support of the Islamic Republic and the revolution.’”

Pirouznia wrote this in an open letter to Senator Edward Kennedy urging the Massachusetts Democrat to dissociate himself from Nemazee. The more-leftward senator from the Bay State, John Kerry, continues to embrace Nemazee and the suitcases full of money that he donates.

And, needless to say, Kerry welcomes all sorts of other benefactors, e.g., happily pocketing $50,000 apiece from Hollywood actor Dennis Hopper and Viacom Entertainment Chairman Jonathan Dolgen.

Such are the strange bedfellows of John Kerry, these Big Money payers who call his tune and pull his puppet strings today – and will do so if he becomes President of the United States. But these people are clean and honest compared to the evil foreign cesspools where Kerry has gotten cash. To understand these, we need to remember Kerry’s past in Vietnam.

Lowell Ponte exposes Kerry's Vietnam history -- and much more -- in Part Two, tomorrow.

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Mr. Ponte hosts a national radio talk show Saturdays 6-9 PM Eastern Time (3-6 PM Pacific Time) and Sundays 9 PM-Midnight Eastern Time (6-9 PM Pacific Time) on the Liberty Broadcasting network (formerly TalkAmerica). Internet Audio worldwide is at LibertyBroadcasting .com. The show’s live call-in number is (888) 822-8255. A professional speaker, he is a former Roving Editor for Reader’s Digest.

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“An America that belongs not to the privileged, not to the few, but to all Americans.” That was what the winner of the New Hampshire Primary promised Tuesday night in his victory speech.

But, paradoxically, if Senator John Kerry becomes the Democratic nominee and is elected this November, the White House for the next four or eight years will belong to a man born to enormous wealth and privilege.

Kerry as a boy was raised and educated mostly in Europe. He fluently speaks, and thinks in, French. He preferred to marry wealthy women of foreign orientation. He believes that the United Nations and its permanent Security Council members such as France should have veto power over what actions the United States may take to defend its national security.

A Kerry presidency could therefore be tantamount to putting a quasi-European aristocrat in control of the United States and relinquishing to the United Nations a large measure of American sovereignty.

In Kerry-merica, patrician privilege would rule, and ordinary Americans and our Constitution would have less and less sovereign power.

Is he the “Real Deal,” as Kerry calls himself, or would a John Kerry presidency be a Dirty Deal, a Steal Deal for most Americans?

To glimpse this alternative future, we need to look deeper into John Kerry’s double-dealing past.

Both Bill Clinton and John Kerry modeled their personal ambitions on John F. Kennedy. Clinton imitated the womanizing, playboy JFK. Kerry imitated the young JFK, born to privilege, who volunteered to seek military glory in a PT boat.

Kerry grew up in a world of luxury boats and had gone yachting with John F. Kennedy. But his father had been a test pilot as well as a sailor. He cut his young son’s teeth on flying, and Kerry loved to pilot small airplanes. Despite this, when Vietnam beckoned Kerry signed up not for the Air Force but for the Navy to command small “swift boats” that resembled PT-109 in the Mekong Delta.

It was dangerous duty, bringing Kerry three wounds and three Purple Hearts. For risking his life to rescue a Green Beret who had been swept overboard amid enemy fire, Kerry was awarded the Bronze Star for Valor (“for personal bravery”). Days before the 2004 Iowa Caucuses, that now-Republican Special Forces soldier Jim Rassman traveled from Oregon to Iowa to thank Kerry for saving his life .

For single-handedly going ashore after and killing an enemy soldier who was armed with a loaded B-40 rocket launcher, Kerry was awarded the Silver Star (“for gallantry”). Boston Globe reporter David Warsh adduced evidence suggesting that this Viet Cong was alone, already wounded, and might have been shot in the back by Kerry. Soldiers serving under Lt. (Junior Grade) Kerry said Warsh was incorrect.

“I committed the same kinds of atrocities as thousands of others,” said Kerry as an anti-war activist guest on NBC’s Meet the Press (quoted in Brinkley’s book, page 362) after he returned stateside, “in that I shot in free fire zones, fired .50-caliber machine [gun] bullets, used harass-and-interdiction fire, joined in search-and-destroy missions, and burned villages. All of these acts are contrary to the laws of the Geneva Convention, and all were ordered as written, established policies from the top down, and the men who ordered this are war criminals.”

But Kerry was an officer in Vietnam who gave such orders to his men. Kerry has therefore confessed to being a war criminal himself. Was he saying that he was “merely following orders” from above, like a good German? Or does he accept his share of legal and moral responsibility for the illegal orders he said he gave? Either way, this is proof that John Kerry is, by his own yardstick, unfit ever to be President of the United States.

In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23, 1971, Kerry claimed under oath that American soldiers had “raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.”

He dramatically told reporters that such atrocities were the norm, not rare exceptions, for U.S. soldier behavior. This Kerry false blood libel against honorable soldiers gave protestors a kind of license to protestors to attack, belittle and ridicule soldiers returning to America.

But when Kerry became a Senator, using fame as his ladder to this political office, he would do something far worse to our soldiers, especially those held as prisoners of war.

For the record, some in the media recently echoed a website story claiming that Kerry had killed 21 unarmed Vietnamese civilians during the war. The author apparently confused Senator John Kerry with now-retired war hero and Senator Bob Kerrey (D-Nebraska).

Kerrey, to quote the liberal magazine The American Prospect (TAP), “had evidently ordered the wanton slaughter of 21 Vietnamese civilians, including babies, at point-blank range,” then filed a report claiming that all were Viet Cong. “That report,” wrote TAP reporter Robert Dreyfuss, “was enough to win Kerrey a Bronze Star, which he did not refuse.”

By contrast, John Kerry has told audiences that he “once refused a direct order from a far-away commander to open fire on a group of Vietnamese civilians standing alongside a riverbank in the Mekong,” wrote unabashed Kerry supporter Joe Shea in the January 21, 2004, issue of The American Reporter.

“When [Kerry] got back to base, facing the threat of a court martial,” writes Shea, “he defended himself with a tattered copy of the Rules of Engagement he kept handy in his hip pocket. He knew the rules, and he won the day."

Put aside the fact that these Rules of Engagement were always changing, and that many believe these often-bizarre and arbitrary bureaucratic restrictions on where, when and how our troops could fight were the reason America lost in Vietnam.

If we take Kerry’s story as true, we then face questions Shea neglected to raise. Did not these rules that Kerry knew by heart also require a soldier to report war crimes, or attempted war crimes, by others? Did Kerry report this officer’s illegal order to kill civilians to superiors? Or did Kerry remain silent, thereby becoming this officer’s ally and enabler, if not accomplice?

If this story is true, then I hereby ask Senator Kerry to name the officer who issued this illegal order and the officers before whom he defended with that tattered rule book his refusal to obey it. Surely a memory so indelible as to play a role in young Kerry’s anti-war speeches can also recall the name of this officer who ordered him to slaughter innocent civilians. (If 60-year-old Kerry’s memory is now failing, of course, this is evidence that he may have lost the mental acuity to be President.)

The same questions could be asked about all the other routine atrocities young Kerry alleged before a Senate committee. If he had firsthand knowledge from witnessing who did these illegal things, why did Kerry fail to turn in the criminals in accord with the Rules of Engagement? If he shielded those whose war crimes he witnessed, Kerry is an accomplice after the fact to these atrocities.

On the other hand, if his knowledge was only secondhand gossip, rumor or intoxicated tales told by bored soldiers around jungle campfires – what the law calls hearsay evidence – then Kerry was reckless, irresponsible and almost treasonous to make such outrageous claims under oath before the Senate, the press and the American people.

A paradox worth remembering is that Kerry modeled himself on President John F. Kennedy, the Commander-in-Chief who committed the first 17,000 armed troops into Vietnam. (Republican President Dwight Eisenhower sent only unarmed advisors.) So when Kerry criticizes what happened in Vietnam, and when on victory night in Iowa he embraced Ted Kennedy, Kerry has been wrapped up in the legacy of the very Democratic President who created the morass in Vietnam. Psychoanalysts have words for such mental aberrations.
Like most Leftist Democrats, Cleopatra Kerry has a Queen of Denial fixation with blaming Vietnam not on Democratic Presidents JFK or LBJ but on Republican Richard Nixon, who did not become President until 1969 when JFK’s war had been entrenched for seven years.

Coming home, decorated Vietnam veteran John Kerry quickly pushed himself into the spotlight of two anti-war activities funded by Jane Fonda – Vietnam Veterans Against the War and the so-called Winter Soldier Investigations.

If TV cameras were present, Kerry could be found staging events with other veterans – such as throwing medals away in protest on the steps of the Capitol. “This Administration forced us to return our medals,” Kerry told reporters at this event. (It later turned out that Kerry was throwing other peoples’ medals while keeping his own, an act of deceit and phoniness typical of Kerry.)

Cartoonist Gary Trudeau caught Kerry’s inner essence perfectly in two Doonesbury cartoons. “If you care about this country at all, you better go listen to that John Kerry fellow,” a stranger lectures Mike Doonesbury and B.D. in the October 21, 1971, strip . “He speaks with rare eloquence and astonishing conviction. If you see no one else this year, you must see John Kerry!”

The stranger departs, and B.D. asks “Who was that?” Mike responds: “John Kerry.”

In the next day’s Doonesbury , we see Kerry giving a crowd-rousing anti-war speech, at the end of which bubbles above his head reveal his inner thoughts: “You’re really clicking tonight, you gorgeous preppie.”

Back then Kerry apparently believed that being anti-war was his ticket to fame, wealth and power. He expected to enter the holy city of Washington, D.C., riding a Democratic donkey while the adoring masses threw down palm branches before him.

(Kerry was dropped from Al Gore’s 2000 short list for Vice President mostly because Kerry had voted against the successful Gulf War in 1991, a war Gore cut a political deal to support. But in 2004 Kerry has been criticized by Democrats for voting, as Senators Hillary Clinton and John Edwards did, to give President George W. Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq.)

In 2004, ironically, an older Kerry with a fake patina of maturity is trying to seize the White House by depicting himself as a war hero on horseback who says we need more troops for Iraq and comes wearing the Bronze and Silver Stars he once pretended to throw away.

This is worse than schizophrenia. The reality is that Kerry apparently did fight bravely in Vietnam, but he then betrayed his fellow soldiers in several ways. By supplying anti-war-propaganda ammunition to the enemy, Kerry encouraged the North Vietnamese to keep fighting and helped prolong the war.

Only God knows how many more Americans and Vietnamese died because of Kerry’s ego-trip activism. Every time you visit that black memorial with nearly 70,000 names in Washington, D.C., remember that some of them died because John Kerry gave aid and comfort to the enemy in order to advance his own celebrity, wealth and power.

Whenever Kerry now prates that the first duty of a Commander-in-Chief is to protect the lives of our soldiers, this hypocrite should be spit on by everyone present in remembrance of all the American soldiers Kerry helped our enemies to kill.

Kerry apparently fancies himself a bridge between America and Vietnam, between those who fought the war and those who fought against it, and between the opposed worlds of Communism and Capitalism.

During the Clinton era, Kerry received an $8,000 campaign contribution from notorious Democratic brown bag man Johnny Chung at a 1996 fundraiser. That same year the Senator took $10,000, in exchange for which Kerry arranged a high level meeting between Communist Chinese intelligence operative Lieutenant Colonel Liu Chaoying, Johnny Chung and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

From Red China’s point of view, this SEC meeting apparently had multiple purposes – including money to be made from creating Chinese “front” companies on American stock exchanges, and the potential use of such companies to transfer militarily-useful technologies and hardware to Beijing.

Seen as a friend and ally by the Communist regime in Vietnam, Senator Kerry knew that a huge lucrative prize might be within his grasp. As they are today over Iran, giant multinational corporations have been eager to sell goods and purchase resources in Vietnam. The Marxist Vietnamese dictatorship has been eager to re-enter the world marketplace, especially with its chief ally the Soviet Union gone. A politician who restored links between Vietnam and America could gain huge amounts of money in campaign contributions and other benefits.

What stood in the way of such a profitable thaw in U.S.-Vietnam relations, Kerry knew, were the lack of human rights in Vietnam and its apparent continued holding of many American prisoners of war (POWs) and soldiers missing in action (MIAs) from the war.
To make these stumbling blocks disappear, Kerry in 1991 conjured a new Senate Select Committee for POW/MIA Affairs with himself as chairman and his legislative assistant Ms. Francis Zwenig as the committee’s Chief of Staff. She would act as liaison to interested corporations through their umbrella organization, the U.S./Vietnam Trade Council (that she would later leave the committee to run).

“Zwenig, according to documents, coached the North Vietnamese to concoct plausible stories on the fate of POW/MIAs in order to show that Hanoi was cooperating to resolve the POW/MIA issue, a hurdle in the diplomatic dance to lift the trade embargo and renew relations with Vietnam,” writes Anthony Nguyen at the anti-communist website VietPage.com.

“Senator Kerry,” Nguyen continues, “was caught on camera making a promise to the North Vietnamese communists that he would ensure that they weren’t embarrassed by their concocted stories.”

Senator Kerry also prevented a vote on the Vietnam Human Rights Act (HR2833), which would have made lifting trade restrictions contingent on Communist Vietnam restoring basic human rights. By stopping this measure from becoming law , Kerry protected Marxist Vietnam from pressure to free its slave society.

Through much manipulation and arm-twisting, Kerry persuaded his now-defunct committee to vote unanimously that no POWs existed in Vietnam. And with the disappearance of this and the proposed human rights legislation, Kerry gave Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party the pretext they needed to begin re-opening trade that could help keep the Marxist Vietnamese dictatorship afloat. Those given first place in line for such trade opportunities, of course, were the biggest contributors to Democrats such as Senator Kerry and Bill Clinton.

The year after his committee’s vote to give Communist Vietnam a clean bill of health, the strangest thing happened. In December 1992 Vietnam signed its first huge commercial deal worth at least $905 million to develop a deep-sea commercial port at Vung Tau to accommodate all the trade that was to come. It signed the deal with a company called Colliers International. At the time, the Chief Executive Officer of this company was C. Stewart Forbes. Name sound familiar? It should. He is Senator John F. Kerry’s cousin . What a coincidence!

Less widely noticed, when the Democratic Party decided to give Kerry a leg up towards its presidential nomination by holding its 2004 National Convention in Boston, certain big corporations rushed to pony up money for the Democratic event. One of the first of these rushing to fill Democratic coffers was Spaulding & Slye Colliers, the current corporate partnership involving Colliers International, which anted up $100,000.

The Boston press sniffed at how this and other companies with business pending before the Democrat-dominated city might be trying to curry favor or satisfy politician demands for money.

But perhaps a more global agenda is at work behind the scenes. Money is fungible, and part of the Vietnam millions channeled to Colliers International can easily be inferred to be co-mingled in this $100,000 donation to the Democratic National Convention.

This July as you watch the red, white and blue balloons fall from that Boston convention ceiling to celebrate the newly-selected Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry, think of the red ones as being purchased and used to seduce you by Communist Vietnam.

And if Kerry surprises the world by naming as his running mate Arizona Republican John McCain, former POW and Kerry’s close friend and ally in re-opening trade with Vietnam, remember on election day the prisoners of war still in Vietnam who will never come home to their families because they were betrayed by the politics of cash and Kerry.

To read Part One of this article on Kerry, Click Here .

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Mr. Ponte hosts a national radio talk show Saturdays 6-9 PM Eastern Time (3-6 PM Pacific Time) and Sundays 9 PM-Midnight Eastern Time (6-9 PM Pacific Time) on the Liberty Broadcasting network (formerly TalkAmerica). Internet Audio worldwide is at LibertyBroadcasting .com. The show’s live call-in number is (888) 822-8255. A professional speaker, he is a former Roving Editor for Reader’s Digest.

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WASHINGTON -- A Senate colleague was trying to close a loophole that allowed a major insurer to divert millions of federal dollars from the nation's most expensive construction project. John Kerry stepped in and blocked the legislation.

Over the next two years, the insurer, American International Group, paid Kerry's way on a trip to Vermont and donated at least $30,000 to a tax-exempt group Kerry used to set up his presidential campaign. Company executives donated $18,000 to his Senate and presidential campaigns.

Were the two connected? Kerry says no.

But to some government watchdogs, the tale of the Massachusetts senator's 2000 intervention, detailed in documents obtained by the Associated Press, is a textbook case of the special-interest politicking that Kerry rails against on the presidential campaign trail.

"The idea that Kerry has not helped or benefited from a specific special interest, which he has said, is utterly absurd," said Charles Lewis, head of the Center for Public Integrity, which just published a book on political donations to the presidential candidates.

"Anyone who gets millions of dollars over time, and thousands of dollars from specific donors, knows there's a symbiotic relationship. He needs the donors' money. The donors need favors. Welcome to Washington. That is how it works."

The documents obtained by the AP provide a window on Kerry's involvement in a two-decade-old highway and tunnel construction project in his home state of Massachusetts. Known as the "Big Dig," it had become infamous for its multibillion-dollar cost overruns.

Kerry's office confirmed yesterday that as a member of the Senate Commerce Committee, he persuaded committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) to drop a provision that would have stripped $150 million from the project and ended the insurance funding loophole.

The Massachusetts Democrat actually was angered by the loophole but didn't want money stripped from the project because it would hurt his constituents who needed the Boston project finished, spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said.

Instead of McCain's bluntly worded legislation, Kerry asked for a committee hearing in May 2000. Kerry thanked McCain at the start of the hearing for dropping his legislation and an AIG executive was permitted to testify that he believed the company's work for the Big Dig was a good thing even though it was criticized by federal auditors.

Asked why Kerry would subsequently accept a trip and money from AIG in 2001 and 2002 if he was angered by the investment scheme, Cutter replied: "Any contributions AIG made to the senator's campaign came years after the investigation. Throughout his career, John Kerry has stood up to special interests on behalf of average Americans. This case is no different."

The New York-based insurer, one of the world's largest, declined to comment on its donations to Kerry, simply stating: "AIG never requested any assistance from Sen. Kerry concerning the insurance we provided the Big Dig."

The project has become a symbol of government contracting gone awry, known for cost overruns that now total several billion dollars, and its admissions of mismanagement.

During the 1990s, Sens. Kerry and Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) helped win new federal funding for the project as its costs skyrocketed and threatened to burden the state's government. In 1998, Kerry was credited with winning $100 million in new federal funding.

But in 1999, the Transportation Department uncovered a financing scheme in which the project had overpaid $129.8 million to AIG for worker compensation and liability insurance that wasn't needed, then had allowed the insurer to keep the money in a trust and invest it in the market. The government alleged AIG kept about half of the profits it made from the investments, providing the other half to the project.

Outraged by the revelations, McCain submitted legislation that would have stripped $150 million from the Big Dig and banned the practice of allowing an insurer to invest and profit from excessive premiums paid with government money.

"Any refunds of insurance premiums or reserve amounts, including interest, that exceed a project's liabilities shall be immediately returned to the federal government," McCain's legislation declared.

But Kerry and Kennedy intervened, and McCain withdrew the legislation in 2000 in favor of the hearing.

In September 2001, Kerry disclosed to the Senate ethics office that AIG had paid an estimated $540 in travel expenses to cover his costs for a speech in Burlington, Vt.

A few months later, in December 2001, several AIG executives gave maximum $1,000 donations to Kerry's Senate campaign on the same day. The donations totaled $9,700 and were followed by several thousand dollars more over the next two years.

The next spring, AIG donated $10,000 to a new tax-exempt group Kerry formed, the Citizen Soldier Fund, to lay groundwork for his presidential campaign. Later in 2002, AIG gave two more donations of $10,000 each to the same group, making it one of the largest corporate donors to Kerry's group.

The insurer wasn't the only company connected to the Big Dig to donate to Kerry's new group. Two construction companies on the project -- Modern Continental Group and Jay Cashman Construction -- each donated $25,000, IRS records show.

Rep. James McGovern (D- Mass.), a Boston area lawmaker, credited Kerry for getting McCain's legislation blocked in favor of a hearing, saying Massachusetts lawmakers "were on the side of good government here but also concerned the language might go too far and put more of a burden on a Massachusetts project."

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