_______________HEAD OF NEWT BY JOE CONASON (11/03/98)
	In response to Joe Conason's articles on two of the most disliked men in American politics today: "Head of Newt" (Gingrich) and "The Canary" (D'Amato), I would like to say that Tuesday, Nov. 3, was one great day for Clinton, and one great day for "Clinton-kind." The "mean-spirited" Republicans had already dug Clinton's grave. They were just waiting for the elections to put him to rest. The vast right-wing conspirators (D'Amato and Gingrich along with Lauch Faircloth, Jesse Helms, Kenneth Starr, Richard Mellon Scaife, et al.) had done their dastardly deeds and were all ready to celebrate the president's destruction. But then, lo and behold, they looked at the ashes and he arose again -- The Great Phoenix (Clinton). "How could this happen? This cannot be," they said. "We had already driven the nails in his coffin," they thought. The conspiracy was devised to be the greatest political coup d'état in American history. But it backfired on them. It blew up in their faces. All of the dirty deals done behind closed doors that were later implemented and carried out mainly by Kenneth (he ain't no) Starr had all but unraveled by Election Day. The American people are very intelligent. We get it. We got it a long time ago. No human should be treated like the president was treated: embarrassed and humiliated over consensual sex. His political opponents tried to make a case about perjury, but the truth is it is about sex. Starr took the sex and tried to entrap Clinton into committing perjury, but Clinton -- admitting he was misleading in his testimony -- was smart enough to "technically" fall short of fully admitting perjury. Good for him. So the political grave that was dug for "The Great Phoenix" was used for Faircloth and D'Amato. Let us see what happens to "The Newt" before we cover that grave. Lesson learned: All the evil and deceptive tactics devised for the sake of evil to bring about destruction oftentimes boomerang and destroy the very ones who devised them. -- Esther M. Brunson Virginia Beach, Va. Maybe Newt Gingrich realized that the two-party system, which is not reflected in our political documents, is an integral part of our political system. The Republican Party is held captive by a small, vocal, God-crazed minority who make it impossible to deal with the larger issues that really affect the people of the country. These people will not accept that they do not have a majority, or even enough members to veto anything the majority wants. Yet they will not give up, compromise or refocus. Probably, it's time for a centrist party of moderates from both parties to form a new party. Single-issue extremists are not going to benefit even themselves in the long run. American policies are formed through compromise and pragmatism, and fundamental change requires time and leadership to trickle down and through our large, diverse population. It is time we all recognized that our system will never give anyone everything she/he wants. Our government was specifically intended to prevent even the victors from grabbing all the spoils. -- Marjorie H. Holden Manhattan Beach, Calif. Sex may have, for a time, crippled the Clinton presidency, but it absolutely demolished Newt Gingrich and his partisans. Gingrich's single-minded obsession with presidential fellatio moved armies of political operatives, squandered tens of millions -- perhaps, hundreds of millions -- of the American public's dollars and led the GOP straight off an electoral cliff. It's just that simple, as Ross Perot would say. -- Sean Prpick Regina, Saskatchewan
_______________TWO HARD MEN ARE GOOD TO FIND BY RONA MARECH (11/05/98)
	I read with interest your most recent article about how black women are buying and reading gay porn, sending some authors to the top of local bestseller lists. I wanted to mention that I and many other of my friends, mostly white females, buy and read quite a lot of the same kind of books. Many of us began with fan fiction (stories written by amateur authors based on characters from various television shows) and a genre called "slash." "Slash" stories are those that postulate a sexual relationship between two same-sex (usually male) characters in a television show. (The name derives from the "/" symbol used in conjunction with the initials of the characters to identify the pairing in a story.) From reading and writing slash stories, many of us eventually branched out into buying and reading professional gay porn. There's no way to explain the attraction of gay porn for women. As your article said, if one penis is good, then two is better. But there are a lot more of us out here than anyone suspects. -- Anne Zook
_______________MONEY TALKS, BUT VOTERS TALK BACK BY ELLEN MILLER (11/06/98)
	Ellen Miller, like the editors and columnists at the New York Times and the Washington Post, is sadly wrong about why Sen. Russ Feingold won in Wisconsin. As much as I admire him, one should take little comfort from his stance on campaign finance reform. His noble refusal to take "soft money" may have swayed some voters, but a large additional factor that all the pundits have overlooked (because they didn't see it all day, every day, on every Wisconsin channel) was his opponent's irritatingly ubiquitous and annoyingly incessant television commercials. Even some of the normally dimwitted conservatives here in rural Wisconsin recognized that Feingold's opponent's ads were totally partisan, ultraconservative, laced with half-truths and frequently sophomoric. That's why Sen. Feingold (just barely) won. -- William J. Jacobson, II Juneau, Wisc.
_______________A RESOUNDING MORAL DEFEAT FOR THE MORALIZERS BY RICHARD RODRIGUEZ (11/05/98)
	Thank you, Richard Rodriguez and Salon, for putting voice to my annoyance and disgust with the hectoring hypocrites of the rabid right. I -- and, from the election results, apparently many others -- am perfectly capable of deciding what is in my best interests, and it has nothing to do with any phony piety or rosily remembered values. Life is complex and so are people, so save the morality speeches and holier-than-thou attitude. What I want is a government that is actively engaged in confronting and mitigating the real problems of life. If you aren't going to roll up your sleeves and attend to the issues of importance to our families and future, then don't expect me to send you off to Washington, D.C., on my tax dollars. -- Rus Howser SALON | Nov. 11, 1998

R E C E N T L Y+| GONE WITH THE WINDBAGS BY GARY KAMIYA

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