I liked your letter better than the edited one.

 This whole situation has been an eye-opener for me about how hate and fear spread on the internet.  You, our Dave, have become a symbol of persecution of the poor conservatives who just want to spread the truth about Global Warming. I never knew you had that much power!

Aunt Phyllis

And the editing job wasn't horrible. Don't these blustering philistines like Jacoby know that their rants are just bring glory to their enemies?

That is an excellent letter, David.  I am very proud of you.  And rest assured that many readers of the Boston Globe are on your side.

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

These people do worse than suppress speech. They destroy the very preconditions of informed debate.

Eh, how about easing up on the hyperbole?  You're blogging away, safely covered by the Bill of Rights, and still you're somehow restrained by some "preconditions?"  No, the only constraint is that imposed by civil discourse, the one you want to follow, if you want to be to be taken seriously.

Loot,

It's very true that David enjoys the same (very considerable) freedoms as everyone else in the US.

Those freedoms just aren't as considerable as we'd like to think.  We can say whatever we want, but when we're drowned out by corporations that have many orders of magnitude more resources than you and I do, I think it's still fair to say the debate is constrained.  

We let corporations speak freely too, don't forget.  As long as they don't tell lies for profit--well, okay, as long as they don't get caught--they can say just about anything.  They have the voice of hundreds or even thousands of individuals, all saying the same thing, and I think that's an unfair precondition.  Our civil rights were not intended to be given away to corporate "persons" who are able to drown out actual people.  Watering down our rights does, in fact, take some of them away.

Great letter, though, David.

to figure out you weren't going after the lumber industry:

"They have an agenda: to protect lumbering, fossil-fuel-intensive corporate dinosaurs."

Very well said, David.  Not that logic and reason will have much to do with it!  ;-)

Invent a clever saying, and your name will live forever! -- Anonymous

Right, KathyF.  But it is true, the Bush administration has been irresponsibly supportive of all the extraction industries, including the timber folks.

As a staunch dinosaurophile, I was at first suspicious that David was picking on dinosaurs.

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

Maybe the letter was edited because it was a bit on the long side? Then editors tend to do what their job title implies - they edit.

Not a bad word about the letter though. Well, just one thing. A reference to Nuremberg is a reference to prosecution, so maybe it would be more tactful to avoid that type of wording in the future.