There's no happy ending for this story of a boy and his service dog, but it's a testament to a father trying to make the world a better, more loving place for his son.

I'm a liberal Democrat, and forty years ago I played Little League baseball with Bill Haslam. I like Bill, but he's too conservative for me and I'm too liberal for him. If I still lived in Tennessee, I'd be voting McWherter even though he's not anywhere close to liberal.

That said, I want to defend Bill from Steve Barrett's column in the Chattanooga News-Free Times Free Press. Barrett is deceitful from start to finish and relies on his readers' eager ignorance. No doubt, lots of them qualify - the American public proves P.T. Barnum right every day.

CNN, at least, has sent a medical journalist to Harriman to check on the coal ash disaster.

Growing up in East Tennessee, I often heard my father complain about mugwump Democrats who would vote for the stupidest, most venal, most hide-bound and conservative candidate in the primary. These mugwumps would then vote for the Republican in the general, though they'd maintain that they were still part of the Democrat (sic) Party.

"I vote for the man," they'd say, "not the party." Sure, that way they could be sure of getting the dumbest bag of hammers to represent them. Probably representing them accurately, at that.

Two Republican candidates have cancer. The spouse of one Democratic candidate has cancer. Which has gotten the most pundit and press attention?

Elizabeth Edwards's recurrence of cancer was conventionally supposed to spell the end of her husband's candidacy, but the Edwardses decided to live the rest of her life to the fullest and hopefully for years, rather than settling down to wait for her to die.

Fred Thompson has non-Hodgkins lymphoma, but the press has basically said ho-hum. I happened to channel-surf past "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World" last night, and the contrast between his appearance there - playing himself only with better lines - and his skeletal appearance now was a hell of a lot more than better make-up.

Rudy spent the night in the hospital with those ubiquitous "flu-like symptoms". His spokeswoman said afterward (my emphasis):

After precautionary tests the doctors found nothing of concern at this time...

Will the press herd question this? My bet: nope.

Cross-posted from my home

Update: There's more.

Our Constitutional democracy is in grave peril. Dick Cheney and his sock puppet, George Duhbya Bush, claim that they want to restore the powers of the Executive Branch. In this, as in practically everything they say, they are lying.

The continued safety of our bold American experiment in democracy requires that we reject the Bushist despotism explicitly and legally. Otherwise, the Cheney-Bush precedent will be that the words of the Constitution are just words and that they can be redefined at will to mean whatever the Executive Branch wants them to mean

The final remedy the Constitution provides for a President who refuses just and legal oversight and separation of powers is impeachment.

How can patriotic Americans accomplish this act of loyalty to our founding ideals?