Question Number 5: Response to Blue Stater question What makes you a liberal? What are the values that underlie your allegiance to your chosen form of political belief?

Actually, my first response to my esteemed colleagues' views of Republicans (once I realized they were describing my party and not trolls under a bridge in hell) was, in the words of rap artist Rodney King, "Can't we all just learn to get along?"

The idea that the Republican Party (the party of that billionaire Lincoln)is only for the "rich" is not true but makes a good bumper sticker.

Indeed, their very own candidate married his money by marrying the women who married her money who then inherited it from her dead Republican husband.

The Heinz-Kerrys, whose followers in the Democratic Party eschew all notions of capitalism and wealth creation even as they cash their dollar-denominated paychecks, own no less than six estates: Nantucket: $9.1 million for "windsurfing"; Ketchum, Idaho: $5 million for snowboarding and skiing -- the "family" room is 1,325 square feet and a 25-foot high "soaring" ceiling; Les Essarts in France owned by Forbes/Kerry (yes, that Forbes) cousins: no word on value in Eurodollars; Boston on Beacon Hill: $7 million; and "tony" Georgetown townhouse: $4.7 million.

Oh, wait! I forgot the most important property (sorry Pennsylvania, you got lost in the shuffle). There is the "small" 90-acre farm in Fox Chapel, Pa.: $3.7 million. At least the Heinz family fortune began in Pennsylvania.

That is nearly $30 million in six different homes alone for their guy.

Bush, net worth of $8 million (one-tenth of what even John Edwards has accumulated from physicians and your insurance companies), lives in the ugliest "earth-friendly" ranchhouse on the planet.

To this day I cannot understand how any self-respecting Southern woman would live in that house in, of all places, Crawford, Texas.

Bush also has been the beneficiary of his family connections but he is not trying to take away what little money we have under the guise of "you don't really need that money we could use it for the greater good."

The proletariat Heinz-Kerry's own a fleet of SUVs (necessary for the mountains in Idaho/Boston/New York/France and Pennsylvania), a $2 million yacht and a $750,000 powerboat (handy as father Kerry fishes to feed his family off the shores of Nantucket).

And then there is Teresa's toy - The Flying Squirrel, her very own Lear Jet. After all, surely one would not expect a Heinz-Kerry to actually board an "airplane" and sit in "first class." My God, she might be accosted by a Republican.

Of course, the senator has explained to us that none of the "fleet" of SUVs belong to him. They belong to the "family" (just like the French castle). Just like he explained to us all that we should only purchase vehicles made in Detroit (what, no France) while he is driving an Audi.

The Heinz-Kerrys sold George Clooney (you remember George, he was going to move to Europe with his pig if Bush won the election-yea!) their Italian villa prior to announcing his candidacy for the party of the "little people." No word on the sale price but the pig is ecstatic.

Fortunately for the Heinz-Kerrys, a young 25-year old Pennsylvania man named Henry Heinz started bottling horseradish in the fledging food processing industry during the infancy of that terrible period of oppression in American history-the industrial revolution. After horseradish came pickles, sauerkraut and vinegar, delivered by horse-drawn wagons to grocers in Pittsburgh, and within five years, Heinz and partner L.C. Noble were on the way to becoming one of the nation's leading greedy capitalist pigs - I mean producers of condiments.

In the banking panic of 1875, this overextended young enterprise was forced into bankruptcy. Heinz then discovered that the grocers he had been supplying were unwilling to extend credit even to feed his family (probably Republicans).

And thus he had to start again.

There was no "federal government" to bail young Heinz out of his troubles. There was no Kerry and Edwards to save them from the America had failed Henry Heinz and his workers in the first place.
There was only the Heinz brothers and Nobel, a free nation and a capitalist system that allowed the young brothers to rebuild that which was lost, to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps and continue with the American dream (nightmare if you listen to Team Kerry/Edwards).

Starting over in 1875, the Heinz brothers introduced one of the bright spots of the depression, tomato ketchup which my own great-grandmother mixed with hot water to make soup on days the family groceries were short.

Other products followed and the rest is history.

Now the Heinz company and the men and women who run it are branded as greedy capitalists wealth-seekers, Benedict Arnold pigs really, uncaring, unfeeling and incapable of any redeeming social value by the very individuals and their followers who live off of the largesse of the system that men like Henry Heinz, Henry Ford, Tom Edison, Alexander Bell and Estee Lauder made possible.

I don't know. With six mansions, a fleet of SUVs, a Lear Jet, a yacht, it looks like Kerry has fared pretty dang well under our greedy capitalist pig system.