In an article published in the New York Sun on October 13, 2004, Thomas Lipscomb noted that an official Navy document posted on Sen. John Kerry's campaign Web site listed as his "Honorable Discharge from the Reserves" opens a well kept secret about his military service.

It is a form cover letter in the name of the Carter administration's secretary of the Navy, W. Graham Claytor. It describes Mr. Kerry's discharge as being subsequent to the review of "a board of officers." No ordinary honorable discharge action in the Navy requires a review by a board of officers.

According to the posted letter, the "authority of reference" the board was using was Title 10, US Code Section 1162 & 1163. This section refers to the grounds for involuntary separation from the service -- indicating a review of Kerry's involuntary separation from the service. If it had been an honorable discharge, there would have been no reason for any review. The review was likely held to improve Kerry's status of discharge from a less than honorable discharge to an honorable one.

David Wade, a Kerry campaign spokesman did not reply to an inquiry on whether there had ever been any attempt to deny Kerry an honorable discharge.

The document is dated February 16, 1978. Kerry's military commitment began with his 6-year enlistment contract with the Navy on February 18, 1966. It should have terminated in 1972. There is no indication that Kerry ever re-enlisted. The Claytor document indicates proceedings to reverse a less than honorable discharge that took place prior to Feb. 1978.

Release of the Nixon tapes showed a great deal of interest in Kerry by Nixon and his executive staff, including his special counsel, Charles Colson, who regarded him as a "complete opportunist" after his 1971 Senate testimony. They could not find any "dirt" on him.

The Nixon administration ran FBI surveillance on Kerry from Sep. 1970 until Aug. 1972. However, finding grounds for an other than honorable discharge for a leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, while still a reserve officer of the Navy, was easier than finding "dirt."

For example, while America was still at war, Kerry had met with the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong delegation to the Paris Peace talks in May 1970 and then held a demonstration in July 1971 in Washington to try to get Congress to accept the enemy's seven point peace proposal without a single change.

The "board of officers" review reported in the Claytor document is even more extraordinary because it came about "by direction of the President." No normal honorable discharge requires the direction of the President.

Remember that Jimmy Carter's first act as president was a general amnesty for draft dodgers and other war protesters. He signed the Executive Order doing so within an hour after his inauguration on Jan. 21, 1977. By March 1977, it had been expanded to include other offenders who may have had general, bad conduct, dishonorable discharges, and any other discharge or sentence with negative effect on military records. In those cases the directive outlined a procedure for appeal on a case by case basis before a board of officers. A satisfactory appeal would result in an improvement of discharge status or an honorable discharge.

Kerry has repeatedly refused to sign a Standard Form 180, which would allow the release of all his military records. The Navy is still withholding about 100 pages of files.

There are a number of categories besides honorable. There are general, medical, bad conduct, as well as other than honorable and dishonorable discharges. There is one odd coincidence that gives some weight to the possibility that Kerry was dishonorable discharged. Kerry has claimed that he lost his medal certificates and that is why he asked that they be reissued. But when a dishonorable discharge is issued, all pay benefits, allowances and all medals and honors are revoked as well. Five months after Kerry joined the US Senate in 1985, on a single day, June 4, all of Kerry's medals were reissued.

D.P Heimbold, in the July 14, 204 edition of StAugustine.com, noted that the Democrats must be thrilled that the Communist Party of The United States of America, CPUSA, is publicly supporting the election of John Kerry.

On its website, www.cpusa.org, an advertisement entitled "Top Ten Reasons To Defeat Bush" are identical to those of the Democratic party: outsourcing, homosexual rights, abortion and the like.

Heimbold wrote to a spokesman of the CPUSA in Georgia to ask about this "coincidence" and provides part of the response:

One of Kerry's campaign themes is "Let America be America Again." This slogan was borrowed from a Communist poet, Langston Hughes.

A Vietnam vet group took a trip to Communist Hanoi to investigate a report that John Kerry was in the "Hanoi Hall of Fame." There is a museum in Hanoi with a section dedicated to foreign activists who helped defeat the United States Military in Vietnam. Along with Jane Fonda's picture was a picture of John Kerry shaking the hand of a communist official.

John French-Loving Kerry, who has married his money, often tells voters about how he knows the difficulties that we ordinary people face. This is usually just before he promises to raise taxes and get rid of the "tax breaks for the rich." These are the tax cuts that George Bush signed which allowed people to keep more of their own money. However, when deciding if he really has any relationship with reality, considering his wife's fortune has been recently estimated to be about a billion dollars, compare their living arrangements with your own.


Fox Chapel, Pennsylvania Assessed value, $3.7 million	Ketchum, Idaho -- ski/vacation hideaway Assessed value, $4.916 million	Boston, Massachusetts -- Beacon Hill Assessed Value $6.9 million

Nantucket, Massachusetts Waterfront retreat on Brant Point Assessed value, $9.18 million	Washington, DC -- Georgetown Area Assessment, $4.9 million	He sold this estate in Italy to activist actor George Clooney, just before announcing his presidential run. Price, $7.8 million

Other foreign property ownership by John Kerry is unknown... because he denied repeated requests for this information.

Ken Ballowe, Vice President Sales & Marketing, QS 9000 / ISO 9002 Certified
CEC Industries LTD. 599 Bond Street Lincolnshire, Illinois 60069
1-847-821-1199 Phone, 1-847-821-1133 Fax

In contrast, George and Laura Bush live on their Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford, Texas -- (population, less than 800). They purchased the 1,583-acre ranch in 1999. On the land, there are seven canyons and three miles of river and creek frontage. There is also a 10-acre man-made pond that is stocked with 5,000 bass.

They have a 10,000 square foot limestone single level home. 1/3 of that is high-ceiling rooms; the rest is a limestone porch that circles around the house like a moat. The limestone comes from nearby Lampasas, Texas. The house was designed to wind around a series of old live oak trees. The focal point of the front is an old oak spread. There is also a swimming pool that Bush calls the "whining pool." Bush's daughters, Jenna and Barbara, whined till they got it.

The Bush ranch is environmentally friendly by recycling rain runoff and wastewater, and has a geothermal heating system. Mrs. Bush also restored wildflowers and native grasses to the grounds. (Source: Compassionate.Conservative.Com)

FROM THE JFK DEMO-LITION DERBY...
From The Federalist, May 7, 2004, http://Federalist.com

This week witnessed more rough waters for the JFK of PT Boat fame -- scratch that -- the JFK of Swift Boat infamy. On Tuesday, two dozen fellow swift-boat Vietnam veterans held a press conference to question the veracity of John Kerry's war record, his career as an anti-war, anti-veteran protester following his three month swift-boat tour, and his fitness to become commander-in-chief.

The group of retired naval officers, "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," is composed of some 200 swift-boat veterans -- many of whom served with or commanded John Kerry, including 12 of the 17 officers appearing in a photo alongside Kerry 35 years ago. They charge that Kerry "grossly and knowingly distorted the conduct of the American soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen of that war" and "withheld and/or distorted material facts" about his own Vietnam War conduct. They challenge Kerry: "Your conduct is such as to raise substantive concerns as to your honesty and your ability to serve, as you currently seek, as Commander-in-Chief of the military services." They conclude, "Kerry is unfit for office."

Kerry himself tried to preempt the group's letter when he approached one of the authors, Retired Rear Adm. Roy Hoffman, and offered to have disparaging 'misrepresentations' of Hoffman's military service corrected in a recently published biography of the senator. (That seems like the sort of thing Kerry would have wanted corrected before the book was published, not when the victim of his libel is threatening his presidential bid.)

Additionally, the physician who treated Kerry's first combat wound came forward this week, recalling Kerry as the man who even then claimed he'd be "the next JFK from Massachusetts." Louis Letson, now a retired medical doctor, recalled the encounter in which Kerry attributed the superficial wound to incoming enemy fire -- although other crew members said Kerry likely injured himself with a ricocheted fragment from a mortar round fired into nearby rocks. Dr. Letson remembered the metal fragment as barely having broken the skin and easily removed with forceps; in fact, he covered the wound with a Band-Aid.

Also weighing in was retired Lt. Commander Grant Hibbard, who commanded Kerry's swift-boat unit. Hibbard questions whether the aforementioned scratch was worthy of a Purple Heart -- and he questions how Kerry got it. "The briefing from some members of that crew the morning after revealed that they had not received enemy fire," Hibbard said. "and yet Lieutenant Kerry informed me of a wound, he showed me a scratch on his arm and a piece of shrapnel in his hand that appeared to be from one of our own M-79s. It was later reported to me that Lieutenant Kerry had fired an M-79 and it had exploded off the adjacent shoreline. I do not recall being advised of any medical treatment and probably said something like, 'Forget it.' He later received a Purple Heart for that scratch, and I don't know how." The group has pushed Kerry to allow the Navy to release his complete medical and service records.

Contrast Kerry's behavior, please, with our current fighting forces on the front lines. Kerry served just over a scant four months in Vietnam, bugging out back home as soon as his three Purple Hearts permitted. Many of our troops are staying in combat roles, although recently wounded, and some are re-enlisting in order to remain in the fight. Perhaps the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are correct in alleging that Kerry is not fit to command warriors like these. Perhaps there's more to Kerry's military record than meets the eye.

For his part, Kerry ignored the charges and instead launched a $25-million ad buy, especially targeting "battleground states" considered close enough to fall either way. Bad timing -- but, then again, Kerry's poll numbers have risen on those occasions when he's been out of the public eye.

In other JFK news, it seems the flip-flopping knows no bounds. John "F is for 'Foreign Leaders'" Kerry continues to claim support from unnamed "foreign leaders," and weakly offers the following: "You can go to New York City, and you can be in a restaurant, and you can meet a foreign leader." Taking his opening, President Bush replied, "I've got a hunch this whole thing might be a case of mistaken identity. Just because somebody has an interesting accent, a nice suit, and a good table at a New York restaurant doesn't make him a foreign leader." To be fair to Kerry, though, we at The Federalist are quite certain we know whom Jacques Chirac, Kim Jong Il, and Osama bin Laden will be rooting for come November.

In another flip-flop by John (F is for "Fuel-Economy") Kerry recently offered the following to a Michigan audience: "We have some SUVs. We have a Jeep. We have a couple of Chrysler minivans. We have a PT Cruiser up in Boston. I have an old Dodge 600. ... We also have a Chevy, a big Suburban." Perhaps it was mere coincidence that Kerry was speaking in Detroit, the center of the automotive universe. Or perhaps not. Suddenly wary of the environmental lobby, Kerry cleared up the whole misunderstanding by telling reporters that the SUV wasn't his. "The family has it," he said. "I don't have it."

"In other words," President Bush responded, "he doesn't have an SUV except when he's in Michigan."

John F. (French-loving) Kerry and his wife Teresa (ter-Raze-ah) Heinz (now Heinz Kerry for the election), both got their money the old-fashioned way. They married it. This is Kerry's second marriage to a wealthy woman. She became wealthy by marrying Senator John Heinz, III (R-Pennsylvania) who had the misfortune of dying in an airplane crash and leaving her the heiress of the Heinz 57 fortune. (By the way, while Kerry calls companies that hire people in other countries "Benedict Arnold" companies, Heinz has 57 of its 78 plants in other countries.)

What is interesting is to see what Teresa does with some of her estimated half-a-billion dollars.

According to Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. in the March 10, 2004 edition of The Washington Times, a beneficiary of substantial largess is the San Francisco-based Tides Foundation and a spinoff called the Tides Center. These entities in turn help distribute funds to and operate as clearinghouses for policy-networking and coordination between a veritable Who's Who of radical leftist organizations. The recipients share a hostility to what most Americans understand to be our country's security interests and the capabilities needed to protect them.

In recent years Teresa's foundations have given at least $5.9 million to these entities.

Gaffney quotes Ben Johnson from a February article in FrontPageMagazine.com titled "Teresa Heinz Kerry: bag lady for the radical left," beneficiaries of some $300 million distributed over the years by the Tides' operations include:

"Rabid antiwar demonstrators, antitrade demonstrators, domestic Islamist organizations, pro-terrorists legal groups, environmentalists, abortion partisans, extremist homosexual activists and open-borders advocates."

When President Bush aired an ad containing fleeting images of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, a Tides-associated outfit call "September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows" led a caucus of press-amplified denunciations of their exploitative "insensitivity" to the victims.

Themes that benefit Candidate Kerry's run for the White House also have been promoted by far more sophisticated, visible and better-funded active measures campaigns by Tides-supported operations like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER, two prime movers behind opposition to President Bush's War on Terror.

If Kerry were to be elected he will owe a lot to these radical organizations. Is there any reason to believe that he will not deliver on their agendas?