Only the blind would think that New York welcomed the RNC with anything but contempt. Even my mother is mocking them. My mother.
I'll do a round up later, but this is pretty much an open thread about the convention and protests tonight.
Oh yeah, for my fellow bloggers who want to experience New York while at the Tank.
Walk east one block, turn on to 9th Avenue and walk up one of the best restaurant rows in the city. If you get tired of donuts and pizza, if you have the cash, some of the best inexpensive restaurants in the city are on 9th Avenue.
It's something the tourists miss, the delegates will definitely miss, but New Yorkers love. I don't think there are any great places, but a lot of interesting ones.
There are a lot of other places to see. If you want ideas, just e-mail me. I just feel that with all these fine guests in our city, there's more to life than pizza, beer and donuts, although, like a cop, I love all three:)
Oh yeah, has anyone noticed that the black delegates look even stupider than the white ones?
There are a shitload of arrests tonight. Indymedia has reports and I'll post on what the local news says after Jenna and Not Jenna and Zombie First Lady babble their way through their speech.
Let me count the number of times Judi and I had sex in Gracie Mansion while I was married to Donna
While I'm listening to Air America at home tonight, because I've been running two days straight, and if a man can't work from his own home one night, what's the point? Besides, I wanted to check out the TV coverage, since I'm going to be at the Tank most of the day tomorrow and Thursday night, unless I just crap out. After all, conventions are a lot of work, even when you sit on your ass and write.
Anyway, it's taken me this long to write about Giuliani's Mussolini-like speech because it so enraged me. It was filled with lies. But then, it takes a coward to admire a coward. Giuliani stole the credit from honest, hardworking New Yorkers and made himself into a hero across America. The racist prick can barely open his mouth here, but in cowtown USA, he's a real hero, despite the mousy voice and creepy grin.
Ok, like most non-white and many white New Yorkers, every time I see Giuliani, I feel like reminding him of the lives he ruined, starting with his kids and ending with the Dorismond and Diallo families. He strides across like a hero, when he's really just a small-minded punk. With a father who was a draft dodging knee-breaker, Giuliani is the second generation of draft dodgers in his family. His language is of the phony tough and the big talking bully, which is why he gets along with Bush so well.
Don't be fooled by Pataki's gracious words, Giuliani is his mortal enemy, but he is a patient man.
Anyway, John McCain's speech either sucked on purpose, masquaraded as high minded politics, or is laying the foundation for a John Walker level of betrayal. McCain knows the party neither likes nor trusts him. The odds of him surviving a primary campaign are small. However, if he torpedos Bush, the GOP may hate him, but he could switch parties overnight.
Not that I think he'll do this, but I, like any smart person, wouldn't trust McCain farther than I can piss. If he betrays Bush, well, it couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
Having turned Ford into their instrument, Rumsfeld and Cheney staged a palace coup. They pushed Ford to fire Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, tell Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to look for another job and remove Henry Kissinger from his post as national security adviser. Rumsfeld was named secretary of defense, and Cheney became chief of staff to the president. The Yale dropout and draft dodger was, at the age of thirty-four, the second-most-powerful man in the White House.
As the 1976 election approached, Rumsfeld and Cheney used the immense powers they had arrogated to themselves to persuade Ford to scuttle the Salt II treaty on nuclear-arms control. The move helped Ford turn back Reagan's challenge for the party's nomination -- but at the cost of ceding the heart of the GOP to the New Right. Then, in the presidential election, Jimmy Carter defeated Ford by 2 million votes.
In his first test-drive at the wheels of power, Cheney had played a central role in the undoing of a president. Wrote right-wing columnist Robert Novak, "White House Chief of Staff Richard Cheney . . . is blamed by Ford insiders for a succession of campaign blunders." Those in the old elitist wing of the party thought the decision to dump Rockefeller was both stupid and wrong: "I think Ford lost the election because of it," one of Kissinger's former aides says now. Ford agreed, calling it "the biggest political mistake of my life."
Cheney is the dark omen which ruins presidencies.
Appointed to another powerful position, Cheney promptly went about screwing it up. He pushed to turn many military duties over to private companies and began moving "defense intellectuals" with no military experience into key posts at the Pentagon. Most notable among them was Paul Wolfowitz, who later masterminded much of the disastrous strategy that George W. Bush has pursued in Iraq. In 1992, as undersecretary of defense, Wolfowitz turned out a forty-page report titled "Defense Planning Guidance," arguing that historic allies should be demoted to the status of U.S. satellites, and that the modernization of India and China should be treated as a threat, as should the democratization of Russia. "We must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role," the report declared. It was nothing less than a blueprint for worldwide domination, and Cheney loved it. He maneuvered to have the president adopt it as doctrine, but the elder Bush, recognizing that the proposals were not only foolish but dangerous, immediately rejected them.
By the end of the first Bush administration, others had come to the conclusion that Cheney and his followers were dangerous. "They were referred to collectively as the crazies," recalls Ray McGovern, a CIA professional who interpreted intelligence for presidents going back to Kennedy. Around the same time, McGovern remembers, Secretary of State James Baker and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft counseled the elder President Bush, "Keep these guys at arm's length."
Cheney is a power addict. He may be reflexisively conservative, but principles don't much matter to him.
Cheney suffered his biggest failure in March 2002, when he visited nine Arab and Muslim countries six months after the 9/11 attacks. The vice president anticipated a triumphal tour of the region as, one by one, he enlisted the countries he visited in the cause of "taking out" Saddam Hussein. In the end, not a single country Cheney visited provided troops for the Bush-Cheney war -- including staunch American allies in Jordan and Turkey -- and almost all refused to let their territory be used for the attack.
Once again, however, Cheney did not let reality dissuade him from his course. As the disaster has unfolded in Iraq, he has continued to insist against all evidence that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, that the dictator was aiding Al Qaeda, that nothing the Bush administration has done was a mistake. Those who have known him over the years remain astounded by what they describe as his almost autistic indifference to the thoughts and feelings of others. "He has the least interest in human beings of anyone I have ever met," says John Perry Barlow, his former supporter. Cheney's freshman-year roommate, Steve Billings, agrees: "If I could ask Dick one question, I'd ask him how he could be so unempathetic."
Cheney is as much a failure as Bush, but he hides it under a veneer of competence. Which, in Cheney's life, is an illusion. He, far more than daddy's boy Bush, has failed upward. At every turn, Dick Cheney has left a disaster behind him (see, Shia, 1991), but powerful patrons have saved him. There isn't the dramatic drunk to Jesus trail behind him, but there's enough damage behind him to rival a demolition derby.
So McCain's big "mistake" was to mention Michael Moore. Whether it was for a cheap applause line or to make the delegates look like thugs, it certainly worked on both accounts. Tonight, George Bush is whining about the "horrible" Michael Moore. Which is certainly ironic, since his cousin got Moore into the documentary business.
The Dems were handwringing about the Swift Boat attacks and were chided for it. Why isn't someone saying "hey, it's a film. Let it alone." Nope, he's all manner of scumbag liar instead. Look, if there was a lie in F 9/11 it would have been discreted. It hasn't been. So why make him more famous.
Anyway, while watching the speeches in the Tank, I was screaming shit out, like I was at the movies. Whenever Dick Cheney came on, I made a cup with my hands and hummed the Imperial March from Star Wars. I figure Maureen Dowd got one thing right, and that is Dick Cheney as Darth Vader. I think I called Giuliani a lying cocksucker several times. Recited his marital history. Called him a fucking liar. Racist as well. Then I mentioned his draft dodging thug daddy.
As Kos said, I speak like I write. The poor guy was on his Powerbook, wearing his Cubs jersey, and as I looked over his shoulder, checked on his rotisserie team. OSX is sweet. A lot of the bloggers have Macs, like Jeralyn Merritt, who I recognized from TV. I had been slighty confused as to if they were the same person (blogger and MSNBC person), but I guess they are. She's pretty nice, not that I said three words to her, besides pointing out an outlet. Her son, a Columbia Law student showed up. I think they went to the big Stand Up show at the Beacon. I haven't done shit other than write. It's my reporter head kicking in, besides, it was brutally humid the last two days. And to be honest, my job, such as it is, is to watch the convention and write on it, not see a comedy show.
But since I was sitting right behind him, I hope I didn't yell in his ear too much. Loud public discussion is a New York thing.
I should see something besides the inside of the Tank. But that's a decision for tomorrow.
However, the thing about blogging from the Tank, far more than from the Fleet Center, is that you have two different vibes, one, being outlaws, and bloggers need to at least feel that they're outside the system. Two, a wonderful sense of cooperation. Just like the rightwingers have. They all socialize and work together, but those of us on the left hadn't done so. There were no movement liberals.
So, even from home, I feel that this has been a MUCH better experiment with bloggers than what happened in Boston. No matter which party runs the show, people should seek to work outside it. They should keep that independent voice. Some of the folks there are, for lack of a better term, hardcore lefties. Some loyal Democrats. Hell, the McManus Democratic club have kept us fat and happy in dounts.
This is the kind of thing which has been so missing from Democratic politics. We have relied so long on the party to define what our role as citizens should be. There were conservatives before there were Republicans and liberals need to do the same thing. We can save ourselves if we want. We don't need terry McAuliffe, John Kerry or anyone to define our beliefs. They should reflect them.
In a small way, the Tank and the independent voice that the bloggers have there is the start of rebuilding our democratic voice.
Being There What does 9/11 tell us about Bush? Nothing.
By William Saletan
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 31, 2004, at 11:19 AM PT
For the past month, a group of veterans funded by a Bush campaign contributor and advised by a Bush campaign lawyer has attacked the story of John Kerry's heroism in Vietnam. They have argued, contrary to all known contemporaneous records, that Kerry was too brutal in a counterattack that earned him the Silver Star, and that he survived only mines, not bullets, when he rescued a fellow serviceman from a river. President Bush, who joined the National Guard as a young man to avoid Vietnam, has been challenged to denounce the group's charges. He has refused.
Now the Republican National Convention is showcasing Bush's own heroic moment. As John McCain put it last night: "I knew my confidence was well placed when I watched him stand on the rubble of the World Trade Center with his arm around a hero of September 11 and, in our moment of mourning and anger, strengthen our unity and our resolve by promising to right this terrible wrong and to stand up and fight for the values we hold dear."
Pardon me for asking, but where exactly is the heroism in this story? Where, indeed, is the heroism in anything Bush has done before 9/11 or since?
He says it better than I can at the moment. I'm still pissed at the Giuliani speech.
Is he merely a money-grubbing Jew or drug dealing Jew. The right needs to make up its mind
You'll remember a couple days ago we noted House Speaker Denny Hastert suggesting that George Soros may get his money from drug cartels or other such groups.
I've talked to reporters who've asked Hastert this around the convention hall. And he's been aggressively restating the 'charge.' I'm told he even shoved his finger in the chest of one of them when repeating it.
Now Soros has written this letter to Hastert, asking him to put up or shut up, or, more specifically "either substantiate these claims -- which you canont do because they are false -- or publicly apologize for attempting to defame my character and damage my reputation."
Whatever you think of Soros, this is the sort of slur that only comes from a real pig. And to think that the author of it is the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and out in the light of day.
-- Josh Marshall
Pig, yes, idiot, surely.
Unless there is some master plan, George Soros could bankrupt Denny Hastert and go after his seat, prevent him from a post-Congress lobbying career or just sue his ass back to the Stone Age.
Hastert is a stupid hatchet man, but like with the purple heart insults, a lot of people are wandering off the reservation. But fucking with a billionaire? That's just fucking stupid. I mean, Soros lets a lot slide, but accusing him of being a member of a drug cartel is insane.
And his letter is basically a retract or be sued for libel/slander demand. It's something I'd take very seriously, because unless there's some state secrets lying around, Hastert has no defense, and the lie is driven by his support of liberal causes.
Why is it such a stupid thing to say, repeatedly?
Because while you can claim some things as opinion, this is a lie designed to harm Soros's career and political viability. It is a lie without basis in fact and designed to harm, the textbook case of libel/slander.
Oh yeah, there is the Zyklon B whiff of gross anti-semitism.
Hey, moolie (well, why should he talk to me differently than he talked to my elected representatives?)
Last night, in Madison Square Garden, I took the stage at the Republican National Convention to speak to America about the threats we face in the world, the events we have been through together over the last three years, and the clear, steady leadership of President George W. Bush that has guided us through these difficult times.
Kind of like your leadership helped your family during your serial adultery. Your whore wife was sitting near Darth Cheney last night. I bet your kids felt great seeing that.
Millions of Americans tuned their TVs to convention coverage last night and heard my words. And many more will hear the words of others who will come before our convention. They will hear our story.
Your lies, Rudy, your lies.
Will you help us tell the story to those who don't tune in?
Goddamn right. I certainly will, Mayor serial adulterer
www.GeorgeWBush.com/Rudy
President Bush has been the steady hand we need in these times of uncertainty and danger. He understands the stakes. He makes decisions based on deeply held beliefs, not the political winds. He chooses to fight terror in places like Baghdad and Kabul, rather than New York and Kansas. It is the right way to fight this enemy and it is a fight we must win.
Yes, as if Al Qaeda isn't a world wide organization. All those battles in Fallujah sure kept Madrid safe, right? What the fuck do you think terrorists are? Some kind of Army? They're all over the world, cretin. What happens in Iraq doesn't mean shit to New York.
In order to keep the pressure on al-Qaeda, we must keep George W. Bush in the White House. In order to take the fight to our enemies, we must have the strength of conviction, and support for our Armed Forces. This is not a fight for those who talk tough, and then leave our troops unarmed. This is not a fight for those who talk about the need for better intelligence, but have a history of voting against it.
Yes, after all, Osama is facing trial today in New York....what, he isn't?
This is not a fight that favors sensitivity and nuance. This is a fight that requires strength, determination and resolve.
So why has Bush called for a more sensititve war. I don't need lessons on toughness from a second generation draft dodger.The ONLY time your old man was tough was when he was knocking heads for the Mob. When it came to serving his country, he freely admitted he was a convicted felon and ineligible for the draft, even though other people with criminal records were eager to serve. Save your fake machismo for the families of innocent people murdered by the police and your mistresses.
Will you help ensure this fight is won by contributing $1000, $500, $250, $100 or even $50 to the President's campaign?
No, actually, I'll send that amount to ACT If Giuliani and his fellow lying fucks piss you off, send the money to ACT
www.GeorgeWBush.com/Rudy
I hope I can count on you to help me tell this story. As you watch the convention tonight, you will know that you have helped us reach millions that may not be watching. You have spread the message to those who may not watch, but need to know.
Yeah, spread the lies and the insult. Not only have I made millions off the bodies of the dead, I want to run for higher office on their corpses. Necromancy, the best tool possible for a rising pol. They only let the dead vote in Jersey City, I plan to have them walk side by side for me.
You will make the difference.
That's goddamn right. Give generously to ACT. Remember. Every dime you give will help register voters and fight for a real democracy in America. Tasking back our government, one citizen at a time.
McCain mauls Moore Hits filmmaker, praises Prez for tough choices on terror
BY RICHARD SISK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU
John McCain unleashed the big guns on Michael Moore last night, unleashing pent-up partisan fury on the Bush-bashing filmmaker as he sat in the hall.
McCain called Moore, whose "Fahrenheit 9/11" drew unprecedented crowds for a documentary, a "disingenuous filmmaker who would have us believe that Saddam's Iraq was an oasis of peace."
"I'm just trying to do my job," Moore said as the rabid Republicans pointed his way and booed for several minutes.
As the crowd broke out into chants of "Four more years," Moore stood, grinned and flashed an "L" sign with his fingers, meaning "loser," to the crowd jeering his presence.
He also appeared to respond "two more months"
McCain was tickled at the spontaneous reaction his comments about Moore, who is at the GOP convention writing a column for USA Today, received and exclaimed: "That line was so good, I'll use it again."
The delegates went wild, thrilled that in such a public forum they could show the filmmaker just how angry at him they are.
Utterly stupid.
Michael Moore makes movies. He doesn't work for John Kerry. He isn't associated with the Democratic Party any more than I am, although they treat him nicer.
Why John McCain would point him out is beyond me.
All it signals is that the film has had a major impact on the race and has hurt Bush. They can't debunk its claims, so they boo Moore?
What they did is make Moore into a hero. They so hate what he had to say, that they disrupt the speech and boo him. He's not a Kerry surrogate, in fact he hasn't even said he's backing Kerry. Yet, they derail a less than inspiring speech to go after a filmmaker.
I think Moore went home quite happy last night, with the free ad and all.
Why would the GOP be distracted by a movie? Unless it was eroding support among independents.
While sitting in the Tank, the crowd broke out in applause when McCain launched his attack on Moore. Why? Because it signaled that Moore had gotten a good shot in on the GOP.
Manchester United have informed the Stock Exchange they have reached an "outline agreement" to sign England striker Wayne Rooney from Everton.
The deal is likely to be in the region of £25m, and should be sealed once Rooney has completed a medical and hospital tests in Manchester.
But Everton are still pressing for the highest possible transfer fee.
"We have always said we are looking for the best available deal for the club," said Toffees spokesman Ian Ross.
The 18-year-old arrived at United's Carrington training complex in Manchester on Tuesday after Everton gave permission for them to proceed with medical check-ups.
England's Euro 2004 star has been sidelined since the tournament with the foot injury he sustained in the quarter-final defeat to Portugal.
Rooney's arrival is a clear indication the deal will be sealed before Tuesday's transfer deadline, though it is also obvious there are still a few outstanding issues to be resolved before it is completed.
Newcastle had also wanted Rooney, who handed in a transfer request at Goodison Park on Friday after rejecting a club-record contract offer from Everton.
At one stage, it seemed Rooney preferred St James' Park as a destination, but it is now clear his future lies at Old Trafford
.......
So what is it that makes Rooney so special, and worth the very public multi-million pound scramble?
And why was Ferguson so determined to win the battle?
Rooney's talent was whispered about in almost hushed tones when he emerged barely out of his teens at Everton.
He was quickly labelled as the finest youngster Everton had ever produced, and occasionally visiting reporters would be beckoned into the club's Bellefield training headquarters to watch a video of the prodigy's latest feat.
Even veteran former Everton manager and youth team coach Colin Harvey, never a man to deliver undeserved praise, could not contain his enthusiasm.
Rooney signed his first contract on the pitch at Goodison Park before he was even near a first team place - the club was that sure they had a budding genius on their hands.
.........
Rooney made his debut as a 16-year-old on the opening day of the 2002/03 against Spurs - but burst on to the national consciousness on 19 October 2002.
He scored a now famous 25-yard winner in the last minute as Everton ended Arsenal's 30-match unbeaten run with a 2-1 victory.
Rooney then became England's youngest player and goalscorer, although his form was mixed last season in a struggling Everton side.
Indeed he went into Euro 2004 with question marks surrounding his weight and fitness - questions he answered so spectacularly that it effectively set the ground for the current bidding war.
The highest stage in European football held no terrors as he roughed up France hard man Lilian Thuram, then scored twice in wins against Switzerland and Croatia.
England was in the grip of "Roomania" - while Everton feared his feats were forcing him further away from the club he supported as a boy.
...............
Manchester United felt they could wait until next summer before signing Rooney at a relatively knockdown price, but Newcastle's dramatic intervention forced their hand.
Ferguson simply felt he could not allow Rooney to move elsewhere, a testimony to his importance in the future Old Trafford strategy.
Now we will soon discover whether Sir Alex's move - and determination to empty Old Trafford's coffers - will be successful.
Why all the fuss? Because the last time a young player had talent like this, his name was Michael Owen. With Rooney, they have the chance to have the allure of David Beckham without the metrosexuality and famous wife. It's not just about his talent, which seems to be considerable, or the risk of his "lurid" personal life (he's 18, most lives at that age are pretty much not for family consumption, toss money on it....), but the fact that they can rebuild the franchise around him, the way that Beckham was the perfect partner for the marketing boom of ManU and the entire Premiership. Rooney may well be the player for a new era in not only the Premiership, but international soccer.
"Everyone wants to go to Baghdad; real men want to go to Tehran." That was the attitude in Washington two years ago, when Ahmad Chalabi was assuring everyone that Iraqis would greet us with flowers. More recently, some of us had a different slogan: "Everyone worries about Najaf; people who are really paying attention worry about Ramadi."
Ever since the uprising in April, the Iraqi town of Falluja has in effect been a small, nasty Islamic republic. But what about the rest of the Sunni triangle?
Last month a Knight-Ridder report suggested that U.S. forces were effectively ceding many urban areas to insurgents. Last Sunday The Times confirmed that while the world's attention was focused on Najaf, western Iraq fell firmly under rebel control. Representatives of the U.S.-installed government have been intimidated, assassinated or executed.
Other towns, like Samarra, have also fallen to insurgents. Attacks on oil pipelines are proliferating. And we're still playing whack-a-mole with Moktada al-Sadr: his Mahdi Army has left Najaf, but remains in control of Sadr City, with its two million people. The Christian Science Monitor reports that "interviews in Baghdad suggest that Sadr is walking away from the standoff with a widening base and supporters who are more militant than before."
For a long time, anyone suggesting analogies with Vietnam was ridiculed. But Iraq optimists have, by my count, already declared victory three times. First there was "Mission Accomplished" - followed by an escalating insurgency. Then there was the capture of Saddam - followed by April's bloody uprising. Finally there was the furtive transfer of formal sovereignty to Ayad Allawi, with implausible claims that this showed progress - a fantasy exploded by the guns of August.
Now, serious security analysts have begun to admit that the goal of a democratic, pro-American Iraq has receded out of reach. Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies - no peacenik - writes that "there is little prospect for peace and stability in Iraq before late 2005, if then."
Mr. Cordesman still thinks (or thought a few weeks ago) that the odds of success in Iraq are "at least even," but by success he means the creation of a government that "is almost certain to be more inclusive of Ba'ath, hard-line religious, and divisive ethnic/sectarian movements than the West would like." And just in case, he urges the U.S. to prepare "a contingency plan for failure."
Does this sound like we're winning the war on terra?
The Republican Party opened its convention yesterday with a searing evocation of the Sept. 11 attacks that leveled the World Trade Center three years ago, as former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York asserted that Senator John Kerry did not have the fortitude to lead the nation through a war on terror.
A procession of speakers - including a former New York City police commissioner, the current mayor of New York and a former terrorism prosecutor - invoked Mr. Bush's leadership after Sept. 11, 2001, in the city where the attacks took their greatest toll to recount the tragedy that the president's aides view as the linchpin to his re-election. Three relatives of victims of the terrorist attacks, standing before the words "September 11, 2001" beamed in white on the darkened stage behind them, paid quiet tribute to their lost ones, as television cameras showed delegates, bathed in deep blue light, weeping.
Mr. Giuliani, who was in the final months of his second term when the two planes rammed the towers, went even further, combining a withering attack on Mr. Kerry's record and character with a description of his first hours at ground zero, and Mr. Bush's visit there three days later, that at times left Republicans gathered in Madison Square Garden listening in stunned silence.
"Yes, people in public office at times change their minds, or realize that they are wrong - I have, others have - when they realize they are wrong or circumstances change,'' Mr. Giuliani said. "But John Kerry has made it the rule to change his position, rather than the exception." [Excerpts, Page P10; video, nytimes.com.]
"The contrasts are dramatic," Mr. Giuliani continued. "They involve very different views of how to deal with terrorism. President Bush will make certain that we are combating terrorism at the source, beyond our shores, so we can reduce the risk of having to confront, or run the risk of confronting it, here in New York or Chicago. John Kerry's record of inconsistent positions on combating terrorism gives us no confidence he'll pursue such a determined, difficult course."
Lying fuck.
I'll do a more detailed response later. I'll be back at the Tank Wednesday, I'll work from home today.
Monday, August 30, 2004 Posted: 11:25 PM EDT (0325 GMT)
NEW YORK (CNN) -- Delegates to the Republican National Convention found a new way to take a jab at Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's Vietnam service record: by sporting adhesive bandages with small purple hearts on them.
Morton Blackwell, a prominent Virginia delegate, has been handing out the heart-covered bandages to delegates, who've worn them on their chins, cheeks, the backs of their hands and other places.
Blackwell is president of the Leadership Institute, a nonpartisan educational foundation he founded in 1979. According to its Web site, the institute prepares conservatives for success in politics, government and the news media.
Kerry was a decorated Navy officer in Vietnam who became a prominent antiwar activist upon his return home. A group calling itself "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" has accused Kerry of lying to win combat decorations in Vietnam, including the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart.
And last week, former Sen. Bob Dole, the party's 1996 presidential nominee, brought more attention to the allegations when he told CNN's Wolf Blitzer, "With three Purple Hearts, he never bled that I know of. And they're all superficial wounds."
Dole apologized for the remark the next day after a personal call from Kerry, saying that before taping the interview, "maybe I should have stayed longer for brunch somewhere."
Donna Cain, an Oregon delegate, wore a purple heart bandage on her wrist.
"Probably a lot of people are handing them out because they are very symbolic," she said. Kerry, she said, "has made the war that he served in far more important than his recent records of the last 18 to 20 years."
Stupid, mean and ignorant.
Fucking assholes.
Even if Kerry didn't win his medals fairly, and he did, this is like spitting on the graves of 973 Americans.
Working out of the Tank, not really, but I like the pun
Rightwing Congressman caught up in gay sex scandal.
No shit. Why am I not shocked beyond all reason.
The story broke on Blogactive and hit the mainstream via Kos and Atrios, who ate sitting, oh, 10 feet from me.
Congressman Ed Schrock had a little problem. He liked to troll for men on an online phone dating service. Which would be cool, if he weren't A: married, B: a cosponsor of the Family Marriage Amendment, or the Nuremberg law Hitler missed. Now, he's going to have to develop that law practice or something. And probably find a new place to live. But since he's from Virginia Beach, he should have no problem finding gay men for frolicing with.
Not bad for a C-list blogger, as according to a certain racist law professor obssesed with copyright law.
The thing is that the set up at the Tank, where all the liberal bloggers are based is one of the cooler setups for covering the convention. True, we're not being lavished upon like Howie Kurtz and the credentialed reporters, but we can relax, chat, and have the occasional drink and work in a stable, air conditioned environment with sane people.
The thing is that this allows people to build trust and create an atmosphere of respect. We're bloggers and when we get in trouble, we'll all stick up for each other, or I hope so. It's kinda neat being an independent voice with independent voices.
The fact is that face to face meeting makes things easier. Because you need to build trust. Working reporters tend to at least know each other. Bloggers work alone, unless something happens. So hanging out at the Tank makes for connections with real people.
It's easy to forget that there is a human behind every post and comment. This reminds you that there is.
New York Post columnist Robert George says that "unlike some Republican conventions of the past, there's more than one event or party featuring prominent black Republicans." He's also interested in Mayor Mike Bloomberg holding a Bryant Park reception for gay Republicans.
I like Bob George. I don't agree with his choice of employers, but I like the guy. He has managed to keep some of his dignity while working for the right.
He also sent me an early e-mail about the site which was nice. So I don't have any personal animus towards him.
But this is fucking delusional.
They have a multiple coon show? Lordy, that's what us colored folks call progress.
The local ABC station gave this black woman mayor from Mississippi a DV camera to shoot video of her adventures in New York.
When they ask her to get their bags, like GOP delegates did to their black cohorts last time, well, I wonder if she'll get that on film.
And the casual racism she'll encounter. They usually do. It's what happens when you sell your people out for quick gain.
I don't know why these people want to be Republicans, but I know we all love to see them humiliated.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 29--The first customer of the night, a friendly guy with a head of neat cornrows, was a prophet. "Should be busy," he told the bartender. "The Republican convention's here. There's a lot of cats in town looking for a little entertainment."
Sure enough, a few hours later the delegates began to trickle in. The first group I waited on told me they were from D.C. A mix of young, attractive men and women, they seemed more interested in flirting with each other--"I'm going to make sure I sit right across from you," a man with lacquered hair said to a giggling blond--than in watching "the girls" on stage. The group shelled out a few twenties for dances, but purely for the novelty of it, it seemed. Otherwise, they acted unimpressed. "This is it?" one man asked me.
Other delegates followed in ones and twos, and I started to see driver's licenses from the South attached to men who displayed ever-increasing levels of naïveté. A Texas man sitting alone in front of the stage balked at the price of his glass of wine and insisted that I ask the bartender what brand it was.
When I returned with an answer, his indignation had subsided. "Why aren't you up there dancing?" he asked me, gesturing to the woman gyrating. (On the list of questions frequently asked of a strip-club waitress, this one is rivaled only by "Can we see some girls over here?") "Listen," he said, his already thick drawl slurred by alcohol. "I like buying beautiful women expensive clothes. I like taking them out to any restaurant in town." He went on, detailing his gentlemanly ways, for some time. I noticed he had a red, white, and blue ribbon pinned to his lapel.
Then he said, "I like playing with two girls at once--but that's not a requirement. If I wanted to pay for a girl to spend the night with me, I could." He wrote his cell phone number on the back of a business card. "But that makes me uncomfortable." He handed me the card. I saw the name of an energy firm.
The party of family values in action.
Everybody likes two girls. We just don't lecture people on their morals beforehand.
"We the people say no to Bush" Hundreds of thousands of protesters filled the New York streets Sunday. Clash songs blasted, anarchists taunted "Aida"-goers, and moms, queers and Wall Street bankers told the Bush administration it must go.
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By Michelle Goldberg
For most of the day, there was a carnival air in the streets. The crowd was almost as polyglot as New York itself. A man from the International Bolshevik Tendency marched beside a guy whose sign called for "More Dior, Less War." Christians Against the War held posters asking "Whose Taxes Would Jesus Cut?" An incredibly tight marching band from Seattle moved through the mass of people. There was a giant green papier-mache dragon, which later caused a few moments of chaos when it was set on fire outside Madison Square Garden. Clash songs blasted. It was a party.
It was also a rebuke. A great many New Yorkers are profoundly insulted by Bush's decision to use their city -- whose cosmopolitan values he's treated with utter contempt -- to bolster his reelection bid. "Our city's tragedy is being used for propaganda," said Bradley McCormick, a 35-year-old from Spanish Harlem. "I'm upset about the insult to New York City. I think it's going to backfire."
click here
In the run up to the convention, there were fears that the protests would backfire, that swing voters would see middle American delegates besieged by angry urban radicals and blame it all on the Democrats. Some had worried that undercover agent provocateurs would try to spur violence, but that didn't happen. Indeed, the provocateurs made no effort to disguise themselves.
Protest Warriors, a Texas-based, right-wing group whose members have crashed lefty demonstrations carrying mocking signs like "Communism has only killed 100 million people. Let's Give it Another Chance," sent a contingent to march into the crowd. "We're about to have some fun," said Sergio Kadinsky, a 20-year-old Protest Warrior from City College of New York. At first, to their evident frustration, they were ignored or indulged. "They have the right to be here, but they're jerks," shrugged McCormick
Michelle, don't you feel like a fucking idiot with all your fearmongering articles?
I mean, if shame was a journalistic trait, and it's not, your head should hang low.
Anarchists causing mayhem.
Yeah, that paper dragon was a real showstopper. Man, that was such a bummer, all that paper burning and shit.
Next time, ask yourself if the hype is just that or backed ny oh, arrests by the police and FBI. See anyone arrested for conspiracy? No? Oops.
What's next, telling us that thugs may disrupt voting?
Gospel singer Donnie McClurkin - who'll perform Thursday night at the Republican Convention before President Bush's acceptance speech - is ex-gay and proud.
Actually, the 44-year-old McClurkin calls himself a "reformed bisexual." "I was involved at one time in bisexuality, but it was God that delivered me from that," McClurkin told Lowdown.
"There is a way out, there is change, there is another way," added the Grammy-winning artist, who's the father of a young son as well as the pastor of the Perfecting Faith nondenominational church in Freeport, N.Y.
"Those that want help, I am here to help. There may be someone at the convention that the message could reach."
McClurkin said a staffer from First Lady Laura Bush's office first asked him if he'd sing in Madison Square Garden. "My response was, 'Anything for the President,' " he said. "I'm going to pray with the President. We'll shoot the breeze and we'll say a general prayer."
For McClurkin, maintaining a strong heterosexual identity has been a continual struggle.
"It was a progression of years around '88, '89. It's not like you just stop smoking," McClurkin explained. "There are still some thoughts. You're subject to the memories of the past. But I understand who I am now."
And does he agree with the President that the Constitution should be amended to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman?
"I sure do," McClurkin said. "Because that's what I had - a mom and a dad." McClurkin sure isn't afraid of controversy.
He's quoted on the Christian Broadcasting Network's Web site as harshing homosexuals: "I'm not in the mood to play with those who are trying to kill our children."
McClurkin's publicist, Erma Byrd, insisted yesterday that the incendiary comment has been taken out of context.
Oh, so he was on the down low, huh?
So he just stopped sucking dick, right? Sure, and one day I'll stop lusting after women.
When he was sucking dick and assfucking, it was OK, now the homos are trying to "kill our kids". Uh, Donnie, you ARE a homo. I've lived 39 years and I've never had a "bisexual" moment. Never wanted to be naked with another man. Not once.
Yeah, right. One time. If he walked into a room and oh, Leonardo Di Caprio was naked on the bed, we'd see how "reformed" he is. I mean, this guy is lying about where his dick is going and people tolerate this crap. He's a reformed bisexual my ass. Well, I don't think I'd let him get near my ass, honestly. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I'm an active heterosexual and I really don't have to struggle with that. Any time you have to struggle, you still wanna do it.
Kill our kids? When he was on the down low, was he killing kids?
Out of context?
Just another homophobe/closet case for Hatefest, 2004.
I am a former cancer victim in my third year of what I hope to be a successful remission. It is therefor disturbing to find that apart from ABC's Peter Jennings' inquiries about Sen. John Kerry's fairly recent encounter with prostate cancer, the issue appears to have been totally avoided by the media.
Kerry is seeking the presidency. Is that a responsible undertaking for anyone who could well be faced with a recurrence of cancer? Is Kerry truly confident that Sen. John Edwards, a first-term senator, is ready and qualified to replace him should that happen a year or so into a President Kerry's first term in office?
Before too long, Kerry should be asked the following question during a prime-time TV appearance: "In this time when the United States faces an extended war against terror, is the nation best served by a president who has not so long ago been a victim of cancer?"
The U.S. public deserves an honest answer.
SHARON CORNISH Hillsboro
***************************************
Bush backers' scare tactics Sunday, August 29, 2004
A representative of the Bush campaign called recently, asking if she could count on me to vote for him in November. I am a registered independent voter.
After a short, respectful discussion, she asked if I knew that Kerry had had cancer. She added that a patient is not truly a "cancer survivor" until one is cancer-free for five years.
The message was clear: I should not vote for Kerry for fear that he will have a recurrence while in office. A February 2003 Reuters article noted that after surgery to remove his prostate, Kerry's doctor gave him a 95 percent chance of being cancer-free in 10 years.
This is another excellent example of the scare tactics used by the Bush administration and its supporters. Thank you, caller, for reinforcing my conviction that I will not vote for an administration that deliberately instills fear among its constituents for political gain.
ROD LUNDBERG Southwest Portland
Are Bush's internals that bad?
He had prostate cancer. And was treated early and successfully for it. Just like Rudy Giuliani.
I mean, bringing up his prostate cancer as a reason to not vote for him? What the fuck? This is even dumber than the Swift Boat ads and deeply offensive to millions of cancer survivors and their families. My father had cancer and survived, hell, he kept working for years after. Steven Spielberg is a cancer survivor as well, as are millions of people. Using this against Kerry is not only offensive, and wrong, but stupid. Very, very stupid.
Now they're push polling his cancer and treatment. Jesus, I'd love to see what Rove is reading. And since the President is deeply involved in his campaign, this has to be part of the game plan.
What's next? His ability to speak French fluently?
I know there are many freaks at the GOP convention.
But the Log Cabin Republicans seem to be the freakiest of them all. As I was eating a donut at the Tank, some of us bloggers were kicking the idea of these people around.
I don't get these people, I said, they don't seem to understand that the current GOP would put them on trains to Birkenau if they could.
They were having some party at the restaurant inside Bryant Park, imfamous for a brusing brawl between drunken firefighters and cops a few years back.
Now, Sheri Dew, some Mormon homophobe, is leading the invocation for the GOP convention. They actually found someone worse than Jerry Falwell.
This escalating situation reminds me of a statement of a World War II journalist by the name of Dorothy Thompson who wrote for the Saturday Evening Post in Europe during the pre-World War II years when Hitler was building up his armies and starting to take ground. In an address she delivered in Toronto in 1941 she said this: “Before this epic is over, every living human being will have chosen. Every living human being will have lined up with Hitler or against him. Every living human being either will have opposed this onslaught or supported it, for if he tries to make no choice that in itself will be a choice. If he takes no side, he is on Hitler’s side. If he does not act, that is an act—for Hitler.”
May I take the liberty of reading this statement again and changing just a few words, applying it to what I fear we face today? “Before this era is over, every living human being will have chosen. Every living human being will have lined up in support of the family or against it. Every living human being will have either opposed the onslaught against the family or supported it, for if he tries to make no choice that in itself will be a choice. If we do not act in behalf of the family, that is itself an act of opposition to the family.”
At first it may seem a bit extreme to imply a comparison between the atrocities of Hitler and what is happening in terms of contemporary threats against the family—but maybe not. I just turned 50 years old, and I have never married. That was not my intention, and it has not been my choice. When someone asks me why I have never married, the simple and truthful answer is that nobody has ever asked me. Nonetheless, when I speak about the family, I have a deep, profound and abiding belief that the family is absolutely ordained of God, that it is part of His plan for His children, that marriage is supposed to be between a male and a female, and that children deserve to be born to and raised by two parents, father and mother. That is the ideal.
I will say that because my life has not taken the traditional pattern which I expected and hoped for, that when I speak of the family, in addition to what I know is the divinely-appointed role of father and mother, I also include in my definition of family grandfathers and grandmothers, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, and so on, because I have a deep feeling that an extended family is crucial to the raising of children and to the bolstering of one another.
So if you support gay marriage, you are aligned with the greatest mass murderer of homosexuals in modern history?
What the fuck?
Hey, Log Cabin Republicans, the no faggots allowed sign is in neon. And Bush is leading the parade. Voting for him is like asking to be shoved into the ovens. He's already got his version of the Nuremburg Laws in Congress.
WASHINGTON, Aug. 29 - The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation and is demanding records regarding Internet postings by critics of the Bush administration that list the names of Republican delegates and urge protesters to give them an unwelcome reception in New York City.
Federal prosecutors said in a grand jury subpoena that the information was needed as part of an investigation into possible voter intimidation. Protesters and civil rights advocates argued that the Web postings were legitimate political dissent, not threats or intimidation.
The investigation, conducted by the Secret Service, comes at a time when federal officials have begun an aggressive effort to prevent what they say could be violence by demonstrators at the convention this week and at other major political events. Large-scale demonstrations in New York began over the weekend.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has questioned at least several dozen would-be protesters about whether they knew of any plans for violent demonstrations, and it has directed agents nationwide to identify possible criminal plots. Some Democrats in Congress and civil rights advocates have criticized the efforts, saying the inquiries have had a chilling effect on free speech.The accusations are likely to intensify with the disclosure of the subpoena regarding the Republican delegates.
"People have a right to be heard politically, and the names of a lot of these delegates are already public anyway," said Matt Toups, 22, a system administrator for the Web site under federal investigation. "This is just part of the government's campaign to intimidate people into not saying things."
A senior Justice Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the department was sensitive to First Amendment concerns. But when officials were alerted to the posting of the names and identifying information for delegates, they were concerned about the prospect that delegates could be harassed or become victims of identity theft, and they wanted to know why the information was posted, the official said.
"When you're confronted with something like this, you can't just ignore it," the official said. "I think people would expect us to look into it and find out whether there is anything going on here that goes beyond the bounds of free speech."
The Justice Department issued the subpoena on Aug. 19 to Calyx Internet Access, an Internet service provider in New York City, after a Secret Service agent asked the company to turn over information about postings on a client's site, nyc.indymedia.org. Calyx refused to turn over the information, citing privacy concerns, and a subpoena was issued.
The subpoena seeks subscriber information, and contacts and billing records for the Indy Media site. It says the information is needed to investigate possible violations of the federal criminal code barring efforts to intimidate, threaten or coerce voters.
So if voter intimidation is the issue, when is Jeb Bush going before a grand jury?
Isn't this public information anyway?
So why the scare tactics? Doing Bush's dirty work?
Republican leaders said yesterday that they would repeatedly remind the nation of the Sept. 11 attacks as their convention opens in New York City today, beginning a week in which the party seeks to pivot to the center and seize on street demonstrations to portray Democrats as extremist.
Party aides said the convention would begin with an elaborate tribute to Sept. 11 victims, with speeches by Senator John McCain and former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, reminding voters of Mr. Bush's role in leading the nation after the attacks, which took place a couple of miles from Madison Square Garden, home of the convention.
"Winston Churchill saw the dangers of Hitler when his opponents and much of the press characterized him as a warmongering gadfly," Mr. Giuliani plans to say, according to excerpts from his speech released last night. "George W. Bush sees world terrorism for the evil that it is, and he will remain consistent to the purpose of defeating it while working to make us ever safer at home."
Indeed, the Sept. 11 invocations began even before the convention opened, leaving little doubt of the prominent role the attack on New York will play at the first Republican convention ever held in this city. At a rally yesterday afternoon on Ellis Island, Vice President Dick Cheney recalled the president's visit to ground zero three days after the attack.
"They saw a man calm in crisis, comfortable with responsibility and determined to do everything to protect our people," he said.
At the same time, responding to the sight of New York streets packed with protesters yesterday, Republican officials sought to connect the demonstrations to Democrats as part of a broader effort to paint Senator John Kerry as out of the mainstream. The Republican Party chairman, Ed Gillespie, noted to reporters that the legion of protesters included Peggy Kerry, Mr. Kerry's sister, who lives in New York and attended an abortion rights rally.
And Mr. Bush's campaign communications director, Nicolle Devenish, said in an interview: "Those who support the president are inside the Garden. Those who are opposed to the president's policies are protesting outside the Garden."
Their developments came on the eve of what party officials saw as a potentially tumultuous and politically complicated week. Mr. Bush seeks to accomplish a critical political goal - broadening his appeal to the center - against the backdrop of the biggest demonstrations in New York in 22 years and charges by some Democrats that he is trying to turn the tragedy of Sept. 11 to his political advantage.
When the Republicans chose New York City for their national convention, it was clear that the Sept. 11 attacks would provide an emotional backdrop.
Tomorrow, on the first night of the convention, three victims' relatives will address the delegates. So will former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who is expected to single out family members from the stage.
With the third anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks coming little more than a week after the convention, a survey by The New York Times shows that those with the most personal connection to 9/11 - those who lost a loved one - differ from the public at large on some political and national issues: They are more skeptical about national safety and less impressed with the administration's efforts before and after the attacks.
Their views on the way the 9/11 investigation was handled are also complex. About half of the 339 people questioned faulted the Bush administration for not providing "adequate cooperation," but almost four in five said the administration was taking the commission's findings "somewhat seriously" or "very seriously." A majority said the federal government was still not doing enough to prevent terrorism, and almost as many expressed concern about another attack on New York. About half also said the city was not prepared to deal with one.
Both major parties have tried to form an emotional connection with the victims' families, but the survey indicates that the relatives have seesawing feelings about whom to blame and whom to vote for - feelings that will probably keep them from becoming political props this year.
"The intelligence agencies sit there with their suits and their Rolex watches, and people like my husband and the police and the Fire Department come in and fix up their mistakes," said Francine Raggio of Staten Island, whose husband was working as an operations supervisor at the World Trade Center on 9/11. She said she would vote for President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney even as she added, "Everybody is still cleaning up the mess from the government, the intelligence agencies."
Nor are the victims' relatives pleased that a political convention is about to open in New York. About half said the Republicans should have gone somewhere else. Slightly more than a quarter said the G.O.P. had chosen New York "to capitalize on Sept. 11," about the same number who said that the Republicans' motivation was "to support the city" and "show it's safe."
In a few dozen blocks of the same slender island, two worlds collided yesterday: the Republican convention's calculated claims to patriotism and the presidency met elaborately planned and heavily Democratic street protests that turned those same arguments back at President Bush - in ways that might help, or hurt, both sides.
The demonstrations were New York City's biggest in decades, and the most emphatic at any national political convention since Democrats and demonstrators turned against each other in fury over Vietnam in Chicago in 1968. But the first day was overwhelmingly peaceful, and the demonstrators doused a good bit of Mr. Bush's intended message with television images of dissent.
........
This was not the reception the Republicans had planned. They chose New York to evoke the moment of national unity that rallied Americans to Mr. Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks, only to find protesters claiming Mr. Bush had forfeited that goodwill by attacking Iraq. The marchers carried placards calling Mr. Bush "the next Milosevic" and demanding, "What would Jesus bomb?"
.........
"I left God's country," said Leon Mosley of Waterloo, Iowa, co-chairman of his state party. "They could use a bunch of people from Iowa to come here to show New Yorkers what life is all about, what being patriotic is all about, and what country is all about. I'm as confident about Bush being re-elected as I am that eggs are going to be in New York tomorrow morning.''
This man can kiss my ass. More New Yorkers have died in Iraq than Iowans. We don't need lectures on patriotism from rednecks. Doesn't he have a cow to fuck or something?
.......
"The protests are anti-Bush, with heavy antiwar overtones, but this is Chicago without the fisticuffs, without the fight, without the bloodshed - so far," Mr. Gergen added. "To interpret this politically is hard, but my gut is that large, peaceful protests are not what the Republicans want. The protesters are stealing the story for the first day and drowning out the Republican message. If there's violence, that could all change."
To be sure, a seething anger pulsed throughout the protesting crowds. T-shirts and signs branded Mr. Bush a warmonger, a liar or a criminal, and there were fly-swatters with an image of his face. Two protesters, Jim Higgins and Kathy Roberts, dressed in suits made of duct tape to spoof Mr. Bush's handling of national security.
........
A certain clash of cultures is inevitable when so much of red-state America crams into so few square miles of the blue-state Big Apple. The White House was so concerned that the Republicans be gracious guests that it issued a stern warning to administration officials attending the convention not to misbehave at cocktail parties and turn down gifts worth more than $20, The Chicago Tribune reported.
I spent the day in the Tank, where there is a small set up for the bloggers. It's a performance space on 42nd Street, close enough to the action to see it. Far enough away to avoid the police.
Since it was pushing 90, I decided to forgo the march and collect reports. The thing about marches and other events is that you either go and tell people what you've seen, or you get others to do that and try and make sense of it.
So far, the protests are on scale to minimize the impact of the RNC and any bounce. The mass outpouring of people must be stunning to Rove and company.
And as mg_65 reports, it was a cross section of New York, not just a freak show. She decscribes encoutering the Protest Warrior idiots.
I should tell you what happened with the Protest Warriors. We were standing on the sidewalk on 7th and 29th, watching the march. There was an increasingly violent scuffle in the crowd. There were so many people there that it was hard to see anything and there was no way for the people in the street to get out. Anyway, the cops waded in, and I went running over and stood on the barrier thingy. Some extremely young (fifteen or sixteen year old) bandanna-over-the-face types were trying to tear down these other people's signs, but I couldn't figure out why. Everyone in the crowd started shouting Peace, Peace, and saying to be calm. So I stood up there, telling these young kids to remain calm and not fall for any operative shit. Then I got a look at the offending signs and sure enough, they were these snarky Protest Warrior things, like the picture here of the Founding Fathers signing the Declaration of Independence, with the caption "Right Wing Extremists"--whatever! For their time, those guys were a lefty as ANYONE today... anyway, as the crowd chanted "Free Speech" and "Peace", the cops pulled the Protest Warriors out of the crowd and onto the sidewalk and gave them a talking to. Ha ha ha ha ha.
So I went over to ask them what their point is, what they're trying to accomplish, and they were all, you know, INJURED INNOCENCE, oh the mean lefties are so mean, and I asked why they wanted to disrupt our march and make us look bad and they said we already looked bad and why did we want to take away their freedom of speech blah blah blah. I told my husband to stay where he was because he's a scary badass when he wants to be and I didn't want any trouble. But I never did get an answer and for some reason I didn't get any close-ups of them either. They were from, like, Kentucky or somewhere. My bad--I fed the trolls.
Then the cops escorted them out of the crowd on the sidewalk and around the corner onto 29th.
Later, in front of Macy's, there were more but my husband pulled me away. All the lefties were, of course and as usual, very relaxed and good-natured about it and there wasn't any trouble. I guess everyone was keeping an eye on the young kids.
Another marcher described their signs as highly professional work, printed out and laminated. However, they were blocked from the march by the Legal Observers and then escorted on their way.
This is one of the largest, if not the largest protest New York has seen in decades. The protesters saved a rather shocking picture for the day, a line of coffins representing every dead American soldier.
I have 32 pictures from crb and mg_65 on the following page. You can take a look there.
If people have other pictures they'd like to share, and get credit for, please let me know.
Now, the odd thing about blogging is that you know people you haven't met. So today, I wound up having a nice chat with Kos, sitting two feet from Sam Seder of Air America, who gave me a pen, and watching Joe Trippi fiddle with his pen and get spam on his phone.
Unlike Boston, the bloggers here have so many things to choose from and a central place to hang, grab coffee, a coke or after a suitable hour, a beer, and then chase down events, of which there will be some every day.
Today was crazy, and fun and all I did was stay in the Tank and post. But there is a vibe here which is fun, like a combination carnival, party and giant upraised finger to Bush. While Cheney had a canned rally on Ellis Island, citizens filled the streets is a massive, orderly procession which made the city look better than it should have, after a week of dicking around.
And while the GOP may have wanted to play the disrespect angle, half a million people will provide nightmare pictures for Rove and company.
Oh my God, it's that's pesky First Amendment again
Violent protestor fighting cops in large brawl
So what the fuck was Eric Alterman going on about.
Oh, the protest will embarass us. We can't have people speaking their minds or something like that. We all must make sure we don't offend the GOP.
Fuck this nonsense. I know Alterman lives in New York, so how did he so misread the city. All of the protests have been peaceful. No one wants to mess with the cops. They just really, really, really dislike Bush. And if the GOP was smart, they would take the hint.
Chicago, 1968 and Miami, 1972 was nothing, pikers compared to this mass outpouring of anger and contempt. This is at least a quarter of a million people in midtown, suggesting that they dislike Bush, rather intensely.
There has never been this kind of march against a sitting president and his nominating convention. It is a loud and blunt outpouring of open hostility. New York is a perfect place to express open hostility. And we do it with such style.
New Yorkers usually act with common sense and don't burn down their city,unlike the folks in LA. So why would we let people smash in a few Starbucks and run back to Scarsdale?
Unless the cops and firefighters go off, real violence, not just disorderly conduct, will be the bulk of the arrests.
I do not think, even in the middle of a hot spell, people want to argue with the cops. The beef is with Bush and (insert leftist phrase of the day-imperial regime, et al) not the NYPD. So what would be the point of punishing them?
The irony is that the ANSWER march and rally just fizzled out yesterday and the women's march dominated the news cycle. Whatever they planned to hijack with their march, didn't catch fire and whatever energy was there went to the UFPJ rally today.
I think Bush might find New York was a bad idea for a convention.
I'm sitting here in the Tank, the blogger HQ for hatefest 2004, the RNC. It's interesting, in that you get to actually put faces to names, but the whole vibe is much better than Boston. Why? Because it's better to be on the the outside looking in, than on the inside looking out.
From early reports, the march may be the largest in New York City in 40 years. So many people that movement up and down the march is at a crawl. Which for New York is amazing.
The strange thing about covering an event as massive as the march is that as a writer, you have two choices, do your own walking, or listen to other people's stories. Given the fact that my constitution isn't up for a four mile walk in 90 degree heat, my ass is here, away from the action.
Getting here was two bus rides and a cab ride and that's weird, even for NY. Some protest blocked 42nd Street, and thus began my round about trip.
I'm now arguing with my donut, I've had three, telling it, like Homer Simpson, that it isn't a substitute for lunch. And it it's not. It is not a lunch, forget healthy and nutritious. Journalism,even of the blogger kind, is not good for your stomach.
What I want to do is to have people post here about their protest experiences. I'll leave a protest thread open every day, so people can record their own experiences.
If people want to send me pictures, use the e-mail link with your name, so you can get credit, and I'll post them. The more the merrier.
This thread is open for observations, comments and impressions of the march.
The Road to Resolve A Sober View: He partied hard, then dried out and found a fierce determination. How George Bush was saved—and never looked back
By Evan Thomas, Tamara Lipper and Rebecca Sinderbrand
Newsweek
It is easy to mark the turning point in George Bush's life. It was the morning of July 28, 1986, when he woke up, wretchedly hung over after a night of celebrating his 40th birthday at the Broadmoor, a resort in Colorado, and decided to quit drinking. He did not seek therapy or join Alcoholics Anonymous. He just quit, and joined a regular Bible group. Before Bush gave up the bottle, his life was more feckless than accomplished. After that day, he moved from success to success. Bush has been sober for 18 years (less time than John Kerry has spent in the U.S. Senate); for 12 of those years, he has been running for office or governing. His mature life, then, has been a public one, mastering, despite his occasional inarticulateness, the art of politics. And his relatively brief adulthood may also help explain the roots of the self-confident side of his nature. If a man starts focusing only when he's 40 and finds himself president of the United States at 54, what can't he do if he sticks to the script that got him from the Broadmoor to the White House?
Bullshit.
Bush is still a drunk,dry or wet. You don't just quit drinking. At best, he just transfered addictions from booze to Jesus.
Bush told another friend that his marriage was in trouble, and he blamed himself for risking the loss of Laura and his twin girls. Laura had been after him to quit drinking and go to church more. A lapsed Episcopalian, Bush had been attending a Methodist church with Laura, but he was deeply affected when evangelist Billy Graham asked him in 1985 if he was "right with God." After he quit drinking, Bush began attending a men's Bible-study group with Don Evans and some other Texas businessmen. Bush's religious turn—his decision to "serve the Lord"—was in a sense liberating. As Evans, a fellow born-again Christian, puts it, faith "provides comfort to make decisions because decisions are not about me."
The point here is that people cannot be guided to quit. They have to quit on their own. It seems that Bush has two sides of his personality, amazing slackness and an iron will. Which means he's goal focused, but misses the details, no matter how deeply he gets involved with them. People who call Bush stupid miss the point, Bush is smart, but incurious and lazy, and there is a difference between the two.
Bush will jump into a debate. "I'm a questioner; I know how to cut to the chase pretty quickly," he says. But he rarely explains his decisions to his own aides, much less the American people. Bush can become exasperated when his aides engage in circular wrangling. Calio recalls a tendentious debate in the Roosevelt Room over steel tariffs. Bush interrupted. "He just basically said, 'Enough. I can make this decision. Here's my decision'." (Bush raised tariffs, just in time to boost the steel industry in swing states like Pennsylvania before the 2002 election; the tariffs were later rolled back when they hurt the economies of other swing states, like Ohio. Aides say that Bush disdains polls and decides by instinct, but his instincts can be pretty political.
)
Bush thinks this is leadership, and has personal disdain for Kerry's more deliberative style, which is why Kerry ois able to pick his shots. While Newsweek gussies it up, Bush is intemperate, or more bluntly, a hothead. He can be goaded and he doesn't get the kind of guidance you need to make smart decisions.
Bush's convictions can make him dogmatic and too unyielding. In Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack," the best inside account so far of the Bush administration's lead-up to the Iraq war, it is striking how little Bush talks to his top advisers about whether to go to war. He meets constantly with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his top military commander, Gen. Tommy Franks, to go over war plans. But there is almost no debate over whether invading and occupying Iraq is a good idea to begin with.
Bush thinks leadership is rigid decisionmaking. The fact that he lives inside his own head so much is bad. It means that he has impressions and wants to convince you of his rightness.
Many of Bush's friends, as well as his critics, wonder why Bush failed to consult one particularly experienced and able expert in the field of foreign affairs: his father. "41" often calls "43," but usually to say, "I love you, son," President Bush told NEWSWEEK. "My dad understands that I am so better informed on many issues than he could possibly be that his advice is minimal." That is a pity, say some old advisers to 41, because 43 badly needed to be rescued from the clutches of the neocons, the Defense Department ideologues who, in the view of the moderate internationalists who served in 41's administration, have hijacked American foreign policy.
But the fact is that President Bush did not want to be rescued. To say he has a complicated relationship with his father is an understatement. Bush clearly admires, even worships, his father, says a friend who notes that Bush wept when his father lost political races. But he doesn't want his father's help. To some degree, he is following a Bush family code. According to family lore, Bush's grandfather Prescott refused an inheritance from his father, while W's dad refused Prescott's plea to put off joining the Navy in World War II before going to college. "No, sir, I'm going in," said the 19-year-old George H.W. Bush. In the Bushes' world, real men are supposed to make it on their own, without Dad's looking over their shoulders. After the 1988 presidential campaign, W was eager to shed the nickname "Junior."
While people chide Maureen Dowd for her breezy columns, this is one she has right. Bush and his daddy have this weird sort of relationship where he wants to best his father and has failed it so badly it is shameful. It must suck to be a lesser man than your father.
But George W. hasn't just been independent, he's been defiant. The degree to which Bush defines himself in opposition to his father is striking. While 41 raised taxes, 43 cut them, twice. Forty-one is a multilateralist; 43 is a unilateralist. Forty-one "didn't finish the job" in Iraq, so 43 finished it for him. Much was made of 43's religiosity when he told Bob Woodward that "when it comes to strength," he turns not to 41, but rather to "a higher father." But what was the president saying about his own father?
But then, he's not really like his father, is he.
Several of Bush's friends and advisers commented that Bush is really more like his mother than his father. Barbara Bush, they say, can be more judgmental, more black and white, and more caustic than her husband. Andy Card, who has spent considerable time around the Bushes, observed that he has never seen President Bush argue with his father. The father won't engage or argue back, says Card. Not because Bush Sr. agrees with his son's policies, says an old friend of 41's. "It's an agony for him" to watch 43 make policy on Iraq. "It's doubly frustrating to him because that's not the way he'd run it if he was still in charge."
Because he's getting it wrong. Bush, Sr. for all his faults, knows what its like to have people to try and kill you, when you can take too much risk and pay for it. His personal courage has never been questioned.
In her memoir, Barbara Bush writes frankly of the resentment she felt when she was stuck carpooling kids in the dusty town of Midland, Texas, while her husband gallivanted about the country and the world making oil deals and laying the groundwork for his political career. Young George no doubt picked up on his mother's distress.
And according to Spy, screw hookers.
Bush's temperment is not the one of a succesful man. He is too quick to act, too slow to change. Which is fine in achieveing goals, but bad in managing situations. He has had to be rescued from his own strongheaded behavior over and over, and this was after he "stopped" drinking.
John Kerry's surrogates have failed in one area: linking Bush to a record of lifelong incompetence. Bush has failed at everything that he has ever tried. Even as Governor of Texas, a job with mininmal powers, life got worse for Texans, and they are paying the bill, now. Bush didn't just turn into a failure, he's been one his entire life. Now, there are 972 dead Americans as the result of his lifelong habits and stubborness.
Nero, Caligula. Why not split the difference, because there isn't one given how Bush runs things.
The value of Mr. Bush's involvement in his own campaign - and whether he has the political savvy of some other presidents - is the subject of debate among Democrats and some Republicans who have expressed misgivings about some pivotal tactical moves the campaign has made.
But aides said he was determined not to repeat the mistake of his father, who refused to immerse himself in his re-election drive until late, and was not nearly as combative in his losing effort against Bill Clinton in 1992.
In particular, aides said, Mr. Bush has, along with Mr. Rove, been a driving force behind the attacks that have become a hallmark of his campaign since Mr. Kerry emerged from the spring primaries as the Democratic candidate.
Two weeks ago, after learning that Mr. Kerry said he would have voted to authorize the president to invade Iraq even if he had known that Saddam Hussein was not armed with unconventional weapons, the president jumped at what he described as a political opening, aides said.
"That was a mistake - we need to seize on it," Mr. Bush said, according to aides. The next day, he began hammering Mr. Kerry on the issue, and has not stopped.
At the same time, Mr. Bush was described by aides as consumed with building the get-out-the-vote operation, a front where he and Mr. Rove argue Al Gore nearly won the presidency four years ago, and has frequently warned that the effort could become neglected given the demands of raising money and making television advertisements.
"How are the grass roots, how are the volunteers?" Mr. Bush asked the Ohio Republican chairman, Bob Bennett, a few weeks ago in the middle of what Mr. Bennett described as a detailed conversation on Ohio farming and Ohio politics as the president's campaign bus rolled through his state.
The president calls Mr. Rove most mornings, sometimes as early as 6 a.m., for an update on matters like the latest state polls and what Mr. Kerry said the night before, aides said.
Mr. Bush and his wife, Laura, screen early cuts of campaign advertisements, brought over by his media adviser, Mark McKinnon, in the Yellow Room of the family residence. Campaigning in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a few weeks ago, he spotted two senior aides, Matthew Dowd and Nicolle Devenish, at a rally and called them into his limousine to pepper them with campaign questions.
His conversations with Mr. Rove - often by telephone as Mr. Rove is driving to work; sometimes in the Oval Office before 8 a.m. - amount to two political operatives sharing a take on the lay of the land. The subjects, Mr. Rove said in an interview: "What's the general buzz, state polls, what is out there as major activity in the campaign, voter registration numbers."
And it is not only broad matters. Mr. Rove recently shared the kind of inside-baseball news that could be appreciated only by someone who had run another campaign, as Mr. Bush did for his father: that the Kerry campaign had suspended its advertising in Louisiana and Arkansas.
Mr. Bush makes it a practice as president to speak disdainfully of politics and politicians as he travels the country, presenting himself as an outsider in the city where he lives. And that was a perception he sought to encourage in the interview. He responded vaguely to questions about his political involvement and said he did not recall the conversation recounted by aides in which he seized on the statement by Mr. Kerry on Iraq.
In truth, Mr. Bush has always had a strong taste for politics, and was an important player in his father's presidential campaigns of 1988 and 1992, as well as in his own race in 2000. But his intense involvement this time reflects what aides said was his concern about his prospects, a determination not to repeat the mistakes that he watched his father make in 1992, and lessons he drew from the close election of 2000.
Mr. Bush has put to use the knowledge that he accumulated working on his father's campaigns, like the political dynamics and history of battleground states, and the names of important local Republicans.
As Mr. Bush was flying from Texas to New Mexico on Thursday, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, turned to him on Air Force One and suggested that Albuquerque was heavily Democratic, White House aides said. Mr. Bush responded by saying the city was split politically, and he talked about the importance of its suburban counties.
In an interview, Representative Dave Camp, a Michigan Republican, recounted a campaign trip with Mr. Bush this month on Air Force One to Traverse City.
"We talked a lot about northern Michigan; I was amazed at how much he knew,'' Mr. Camp said. "He's very strategic in the way he thinks. He had an understanding of the makeup of the district, of the nature of the registration and of the voting patterns."
Representative Rob Portman of Ohio, a top campaign adviser, had a similar observation. "He understands the distinction between the Northeast and the Southwest, and he understands that central Ohio is a battleground," Mr. Portman said. "He knows what it takes on the ground to win a campaign. Not every candidate has that feel."
Gambling on the Attack
Whether Mr. Bush's enthusiasm for the nuts and bolts of campaigning translates into the kind of expertise of, say, a Bill Clinton is a matter of debate. Some Republicans have questioned some of the campaign's strategic decisions, including appealing to base Republican voters by emphasizing issues like Mr. Bush's opposition to gay marriage right through the summer. And some of Mr. Bush's own associates cringed when he decided against speaking at the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People because he was annoyed with its criticism of his civil rights record. It provided an opening for Mr. Kerry and reinforced an image of Mr. Bush as a president who played hardball.
Even so, Mr. Bush has brought a focus and intensity that often seemed missing from his father's effort in 1992. One aide said a common scene in the White House these days was Mr. Bush, after reading the morning news accounts of the campaign, shouting, as he did a few weeks ago, "Hit him - we need to hit back."
The Bush campaign is organized - at least most visibly - around two central places, the White House and campaign headquarters in a nondescript office building in Arlington, Va., run by Mr. Bush's campaign manager, Ken Mehlman.
But many of the most significant decisions are made out of the spotlight of either the White House or the headquarters. They are instead reached by the Breakfast Club.
For nearly a year, that small group of senior aides from the White House and campaign headquarters has assembled for what Mr. Rove calls "eggies" - cholesterol-laden concoctions of eggs, butter, cream and bacon fat. He serves them with slabs of bacon. There, they discuss a schedule of attacks on Mr. Kerry, speeches by Mr. Bush, and forthcoming television advertisements and strategic thrusts, according to several aides.
The group typically includes Mr. Rove; Mr. Mehlman; Mr. McKinnon; Mr. Dowd; Ms. Devenish; Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director; Mary Matalin, a senior adviser to Dick Cheney; Ed Gillespie, the national Republican chairman; Mr. Dowd's deputy, Sara Taylor; and Steve Schmidt, the campaign press spokesman.
Ask yourself this question: did Roosevelt direct the Normandy battle?
Why is Bush involved so deeply with his campaign?
There's a saying, that some generals are good division commanders, but should go no higher. This is what seems to be the case here. Bush has the small picture down, but he misses the big picture.
And it makes it extremely hard to believe someone this involved with the campaign knew little or nothing about the Swift Boat campaign.
So far, the Bush campaign has made misstep after misstep going after Kerry. The flip flop meme never stuck in the media and the backlash to the Swift Boat liars is coming hard and fast. Bush is getting hammered inside the beltway for his loyalty oath rallies. People don't like it, not in the public and not in the media. Bush is in a bubble, yet he wants to run his campaign? Which is why the campaign seems so tone deaf. Which is why they're saying stupid shit like the Democrats are behind the protest.
Let me explain something, there is enough anger at the delegates to fill a Rangers-Islanders game. They aren't wanted here, no matter how nice Ed Koch makes. It was a mistake. And instead of acting graciously, they're already acting like pigs.
Bush is running his campaign into the ground like a certain German ran his army into the ground. Bush cares about details when details cannot help him. The GOTV effort is, well, misguided, bordering on insane. Bush is still shoring up his base. His advisors let him turn Max Cleland away. Of course, Bush is ill at ease in unfamiliar situations. And it is reflected in the way he campaigns. In a cocoon. Everything stagemanaged for TV. And it isn't working.
We're gonna start to see Bush collapse after the convention. I get the feeling that delegates will not be singing New York's praises, and the "bounce" will still keep him, to be generous, under 51 percent. Bush will be ready for a knock out blow by the debates. I get the feeling that this race will be done before October. Bush is on a precipice. Things could turn around, but....it don't look good.
A good commander has one quality, the ability to adjust on the fly. He can size up the battleground and strike at weakness with force. Bush cannot. He can't even take the easy opportunities.
What the polling shows is one critical fact, Bush isn't over 50 percent in either the swing state polling or national polling and that spells disaster. Bush should be up in the mid 50's and losing ground slowly. He isn't. Kerry is gaining ground and doing better with veterans and other "conservative" groups than he should be.
More importantly, Bush is violating the O'Neill rule. Tip O'Neill was canvasing for votes, and he ran into a neighbor. After some small talk, he asked her if she voted for him. She said "well, you never asked me for my vote". Bush is not asking a lot of people for their votes and Kerry is. What boggles the mind is this: so what if 4m evangelicals come out to vote if 5m new Democratic voters show up? I think the idea is that Zell Miller will show people that dems are useless and they all need to vote for Bush. Well, besides being chided for his disloyalty, the switch ads from Move On lie in wait, and they are powerful stuff. What is amazing is that Republicans usually do that kind of thing, and Bush doesn't seem interested.
I am loath to give campaign advice, but I know I would jump on Miller like the rat that he is. It's not critical, but I would remind people how many former Gore supporters now support Bush and the legions of disgusted Republicans voting for Kerry or staying home.
By ignoring the middle of the GOP for his base, they may well either stay home or vote Kerry. Polling isn't indicative enough of this.
Also, listen to Tad Devine's aural smirk when he says "this is a close election". We both know that's bullshit. It's about to be a rout. He sees internals and he knows Bush's suck ass. Kerry isn't shoring up his base. He isn't forming last minute 527's. He's going after Republican voters with a vengence. There's a tipping point coming, whether it's an arrest or a flub, or something, the clock is running on Bush and one of the many problems facing him will explode.
You don't think Sistani wants Bush to lose and knows he can make that happen? And my bet is that Mr. Sadr will be taking over another town, sooner rather than later.
Oh yeah, Australia's election in October 9, and guess what the issue is: the war. If Labour wins, they pull the troops out, just like Spain. And that's a dagger at the Bush Administration's heart. The Aussies provide a LOT of the Special Ops muscle. Without them, you have a real problem. You can bet Aussies, unhappy with the Gitmo and the war, well, the polls are even now, but my bet is that they won't be for long. And if the Aussies go, Britain's stay becomes far more difficult.
WASHINGTON - An FBI probe into the handling of highly classified material by Pentagon civilians is broader than previously reported, and goes well beyond allegations that a single mid-level analyst gave a top-secret Iran policy document to Israel, three sources familiar with the investigation said Saturday.
The probe, which has been going on for more than two years, also has focused on other civilians in the Secretary of Defense's office, said the sources, who spoke on condition they not be identified, but who have first-hand knowledge of the subject.
In addition, one said, FBI investigators in recent weeks have conducted interviews to determine whether Pentagon officials gave highly classified U.S. intelligence to a leading Iraqi exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, which may in turn have passed it on to Iran. INC leader Ahmed Chalabi has denied his group was involved in any wrongdoing.
The linkage, if any, between the two leak investigations, remains unclear.
But they both center on the office of Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, the Pentagon's No. 3 official.
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Feith has long been close to Israel. In 2000, he helped author a paper, "A Clean Break," that advised incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to adopt a much tougher approach to the Palestinians and Israel's Arab neighbors.
A former Feith employee, Karen Kwiatkowski, has described how senior Israeli military officers were sometimes escorted to his Pentagon office without signing in as security regulations required.
The thing about Philby, besides his treason, was the fact that he played the old boy network from Cambridge like a fiddle. He was "one of us" so the idea that he could be a traitor never occured to anyone until the bodies piled up.
Douglas Feith may well have at least one traitor in his office, and maybe more. And given Chalabi's bragging about his contacts, those traitors may include Feith himself.
Kos goes into the intelligence disaster of the Bush Administration, but he left out the worst one, and the one that can be laid directly at Feith's feet. The lack of actionable, reliable intelligence in Iraq. Feith has been an utter failure with his GOPCPA and his utter lack of understanding the nature of the Iraqi resistance.
Besides being one of the most hated men in the Pentagon, he was clearly out of his depth in dealing with a live, ongoing Iraqi insurgency. So what does he do? Push Chalabi as the solution to Iraq's problem. This feathermerchant con-man doesn't even have the thug credentials of his cousin, Allawi.
In a normal administration, Feith would have been fired for his rank incompetence. Not with Bush.
Everyone was wondering what the CIA had to use against Bush? Well, someone tripped over some document which led back to not only Israel, but AIPAC as well. Which could be a fatal blow to them as well, to the resulting joy of CIA and State Department Arabists and not a few experts on Israel.
What this means is that US policy towards Iran is in a shambles at a time when they have a serious interest in seeing us fail in Iraq. The Israelis and Iranians, through proxies, have been battling to set US policy towards Iran.
If Feith was competent, he would have realized something was going on, but he's not and he didn't. But the length of the investigation indicates more than just some random curiousity about Feith. While he managed to allay fears that he was under Mossad control, someone was watching his office like a hawk, waiting for something to go wrong. And when it did, they pounced. The Agency has suspected Feith of being 'friendly" to Israel, if not under Israeli control since the 1980's.
How did he get his job? The same way Kim Philby did, the old boys network. The neocons protected him and since they didn't trust the Agency anyway, any warning would have fallen on deaf ears. So he was allowed to gain a position of trust at least one person in his office betrayed, because he said the right things and had the right friends.
Meanwhile, the US is locked in a nasty colonial war with no chance of victory. It was Doug Feith's job to prevent that, not protect his Israeli friends.
For weeks now, Republican Party leaders have signaled that they plan to blame Democrats for any mayhem stemming from protests during the convention in Manhattan, with the G.O.P.'s chairman, Ed Gillespie, saying there is a thin line between labor, environmental and antiwar protesters and the Democratic Party hierarchy.
Many groups planning demonstrations do have a close affinity to the Democratic Party. But as protest organizers scrambled through their last week of preparations, two major themes emerged: the leadership of the protest effort is deeply fractured, and the many groups flooding New York's streets are poorly coordinated and under no central control.
Members of the largest antiwar coalition, for instance, could not agree on how to settle arrangements for its demonstration, set for today, and many other groups are practically tripping over one another with competing news conferences, attention-grabbing events and overlapping political messages.
On Wednesday, for example, as the War Resisters League was downtown announcing plans to march from ground zero this week for a "die-in" at Madison Square Garden, Al Franken, the comedian and radio host, was in Midtown, amusing reporters with his "shout-out" project.
At the same time, a protest billboard counting the dollars spent on the Iraq war lighted up in Times Square, sandwiched between a Sean John clothing advertisement and a Baby Phat billboard showing Kimora Lee Simmons wearing nothing but sneakers and bling.
Even though most protests are aimed squarely at the Bush administration, there is little evidence that Democratic Party officials are at the helm. Indeed, Democratic leaders have been worrying that angry images of demonstrators shouting, clashing with the police or damaging property will be used to tar their party, as historians say occurred after the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, when violent antiwar protests were seen as hurting the party's cause. As a result, party officials say, a focus of the spin operation they set up last week about 10 blocks from the convention site at Madison Square Garden will be to counter Republican efforts to link them to protest mishaps or violence.
"We have no connection to any of the protesters," the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Terry McAuliffe, said on Thursday in announcing the party's war room. "I have implored everyone to make sure that the Republicans have a peaceful convention."
But the Republicans see it differently, even warning delegates that Democratic protesters will try to make it hard for them to get around the city. "Many of those organizing the protests were involved in the Democratic National Convention and are strong John Kerry allies," said Ray Sullivan, a former press aide to George W. Bush who is working with the communications team for the convention. "We expect their message to be very similar to the message coming out of Boston."
Mr. Sullivan said he would not speculate on the political ramifications of potential disorder, but he added, "The people behind many of the protests and many of these groups are seasoned Democratic operatives and allies and should be able to put on their events in peaceful and safe ways."
Nevertheless, while few people say they expect a repeat of the mayhem of 1968, the events of the past week suggest that there will be disruptive demonstrations. Already, the protesters, some naked, some on bikes, have been snarling traffic - and signs, banners and fliers are cropping up throughout the city. On Friday night, in the first major clash between demonstrators and the police, more than 250 people were arrested for biking through the city in an anti-Bush protest. And today, law enforcement officials are girding for protesters expected to descend on Central Park, many of them in defiance of bans on political rallies on the Great Lawn.
But Democrats say that the people who are likely to cause trouble are not the party faithful.
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Law enforcement officials, while emphasizing that the vast majority of protesters are peaceful, say that organizers have no way of controlling how many or which people show up at their events and what their motives may be. ................
But some protesters interested in making their own statements, whether antigovernment, anticorporate, antipoverty or pro-civil liberties, are unconcerned with whether they will undermine the Democrats.
"If we don't get out there and protest the way we want to and as forcefully as we can, then we lose our rights and it doesn't matter who's president," said Eric Laursen, who is organizing a day of civil disobedience on Tuesday with a group called the A31 Action Coalition.
Referring to how protesters could be portrayed in the news media, he said: "You don't even have to be doing anything violent. All you have to be doing is looking like a bunch of angry people behind metal barricades and people think, 'Well, the cops have to deal with that.' If you follow it out to its logical conclusion, the only thing you can do is stay home."
Let's thank the Times for getting this in print. So when the lies start, we can whip this out and say: "Nope, they were citizens, not Democrats, sorry."
It's hardly our collective fault if anarchists and Green Party members detest Bush's policies. Most of them have little use for Kerry as well. If there is an Anarchists Democratic Collective, let me know.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 28 - While American troops have been battling Islamic militants to an uncertain outcome in Najaf, the Shiite holy city, events in two Sunni Muslim cities that stand astride the crucial western approaches to Baghdad have moved significantly against American plans to build a secular democracy in Iraq.
Both of the cities, Falluja and Ramadi, and much of Anbar Province, are now controlled by fundamentalist militias, with American troops confined mainly to heavily protected forts on the desert's edge. What little influence the Americans have is asserted through wary forays in armored vehicles, and by laser-guided bombs that obliterate enemy safe houses identified by scouts who penetrate militant ranks. Even bombing raids appear to strengthen the fundamentalists, who blame the Americans for scores of civilian deaths.
.......................
The national guard commander and the governor were both forced into humiliating confessions, denouncing themselves as "traitors" on videotapes that sell in the Falluja marketplace for 50 cents. The tapes show masked men ending the guard commander's halting monologue, toppling him to the ground, and sawing off his head, to the accompaniment of recorded Koranic chants ordaining death for those who "make war upon Allah." The governor is shown with a photograph of himself with an American officer, sobbing as he repents working with the "infidel Americans," then being rewarded with a weeping reunion with his sons.
In another taped sequence available in the Falluja market, a mustached man identifying himself as an Egyptian is shown kneeling in a flowered shirt, confessing that he "worked as a spy for the Americans," planting electronic "chips" used for setting targets in American bombing raids. The man says he was paid $150 for each chip laid, then he, too, is tackled to the ground by masked guards while a third masked man, a burly figure who proclaims himself a dispenser of Islamic justice, pulls a 12-inch knife from a scabbard, grabs the Egyptian by the scalp, and severs his head.
The situation across Anbar represents the latest reversal for the First Marine Expeditionary Force, which sought to assert control with a spring offensive in Falluja and Ramadi that incurred some of the heaviest American casualties of the war, and a far heavier toll, in the hundreds, among Falluja's resistance fighters and civilians. The offensive ended, mortifyingly for the marines, in a decision to pull back from both cities and entrust American hopes to the former Baathists.
The American rationale was that military victory would come only by flattening the two cities, and that the better course lay in handing important government positions to former loyalists of the ousted government, who would work, over time, to wrest control from the Islamic militants who had emerged from the shadows to build strongholds there. The culmination of that approach came with the recruitment of the so-called Falluja Brigade, led by a former Army general under Mr. Hussein, and composed of a motley assembly of former Iraqi soldiers and insurgents, who marched into the city in early May, wearing old Iraqi military uniforms, backed with American-supplied weapons and money.
But the Falluja Brigade is in tatters now, reduced to sharing tented checkpoints on roads into the city with the militants, its headquarters in Falluja abandoned, like the buildings assigned to the national guard. Men assigned to the brigade, and to the two guard battalions, have mostly fled, Iraqis in Falluja say, taking their families with them, and handing their weapons to the militants.
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The videotapes showing the killing of the guard commander, the humiliation of the governor, and the beheading of the Egyptian all display the black-and-yellow flag of the Zarqawi group as a backdrop, and the passages of the Koran chanted as an accompaniment to the killings are drawn from passages of the Muslim holy book that have accompanied some of the videotaped pronouncements by Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden. Iraqis who have watched the Falluja tapes say the Egyptian's executioner speaks in a cultured Arabic that is foreign, possibly Jordanian or Palestinian.
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Sabotage by Humiliation
In the case of the provincial governor, Abdulkarim Berjes, Mr. Zarqawi's group, Unity and Holy War, appears to have decided that it could achieve its ends, nullifying American efforts to build governing institutions in the province, by humiliating him - a punishment many Iraqi men regard as worse than death. They then passed the videotape to the Arab satellite news channel Al Jazeera, the most-watched channel in Iraq. "He cried like a woman," one of the Iraqis who watched the tape said, after viewing the governor's reunion with his kidnapped sons in a militant safe house.
At the end of June, Mr. Berjes, a former Anbar police chief under Mr. Hussein, complained in a discussion at Camp Falluja, the Marine base, that his government was riddled with agents of the resistance. "I can no longer trust anybody," Mr. Berjes said in a farewell meeting with L. Paul Bremer III, the departing leader of the American occupation authority. "I don't know if people are working for me, or for the resistance."
Mr. Berjes was visibly shaken, having survived an insurgent ambush on his motorcade as he drove in his old American limousine to the Marine base from Ramadi.
In fact, Iraqis in Anbar say, the governor had become a despised figure, for the same reason as Mr. Alwan, the Anbar police chief - because he too enthusiastically embraced the Americans and took to calling the resistance fighters "terrorists." Following a common ritual among the resistance, militants sent him a note of formal warning, paraphrased by those who say they had been told about it as saying: "We are watching you. Remember that we consider anybody who cooperates with the Americans a traitor, to be killed under Islamic law."
On July 28, assailants entered the governor's residence in Ramadi, snatching his three grown sons and setting fire to the house. The governor got his final warning: repent and resign, or your sons die. His capitulation was broadcast on Aug. 6, in the video now circulating in Anbar markets. Standing under the Zarqawi group's flag, he glumly recites: "I announce my repentance before God and you for any deeds I have committed against the holy warriors or in aid of the infidel Americans. I announce my resignation at this moment. All governors and employees who work with infidel Americans should quit because these jobs are against Islam and Iraqis."
As the governor is reunited with his sons, a voice on the tape recites the Zarqawi group's attacks on public officials in the past three months. "We killed the president of the Iraqi Governing Council, and then the deputy minister of the interior," the voice says. "The minister of justice survived our attack, but we killed the governor of Mosul. And now we have captured the governor of Anbar. The list is just beginning, and is far from finished.'' More than three weeks after Mr. Berjes resigned, the government of Ayad Allawi, seemingly hard put to find anyone to take the job, has yet to appoint a successor.
Yeah, we're not about to lose control of Al Anbar Province. Nope.
You would need 3-5 divisions to kill enough people to end the resistance. We don't have that kind of force available.
Does anyone think the French Foreign Legion and some Pakistani Paras can solve this?
We're losing the war, but the resistance hasn't jelled just yet.
When the Republicans chose New York City for their national convention, it was clear that the Sept. 11 attacks would provide an emotional backdrop.
Tomorrow, on the first night of the convention, three victims' relatives will address the delegates. So will former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who is expected to single out family members from the stage.
With the third anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks coming little more than a week after the convention, a survey by The New York Times shows that those with the most personal connection to 9/11 - those who lost a loved one - differ from the public at large on some political and national issues: They are more skeptical about national safety and less impressed with the administration's efforts before and after the attacks.
Their views on the way the 9/11 investigation was handled are also complex. About half of the 339 people questioned faulted the Bush administration for not providing "adequate cooperation," but almost four in five said the administration was taking the commission's findings "somewhat seriously" or "very seriously." A majority said the federal government was still not doing enough to prevent terrorism, and almost as many expressed concern about another attack on New York. About half also said the city was not prepared to deal with one.
Both major parties have tried to form an emotional connection with the victims' families, but the survey indicates that the relatives have seesawing feelings about whom to blame and whom to vote for - feelings that will probably keep them from becoming political props this year.
"The intelligence agencies sit there with their suits and their Rolex watches, and people like my husband and the police and the Fire Department come in and fix up their mistakes," said Francine Raggio of Staten Island, whose husband was working as an operations supervisor at the World Trade Center on 9/11. She said she would vote for President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney even as she added, "Everybody is still cleaning up the mess from the government, the intelligence agencies."
Nor are the victims' relatives pleased that a political convention is about to open in New York. About half said the Republicans should have gone somewhere else. Slightly more than a quarter said the G.O.P. had chosen New York "to capitalize on Sept. 11," about the same number who said that the Republicans' motivation was "to support the city" and "show it's safe."
Kos's site has a story about this, but I will add this: James Wolcott, in his new book Attack Poodles, uses a phrase, a dark room in our head, to describe how New Yorkers think about 9/11. If the GOP tries to use this as a campaign ad, the reaction, as it was with the first Bush commercial, will be fierce.
9/11 is a special place in the New York mentality. It is shielded by a bodyguard of memories. To risk defaming it is to insult the city and its residents.
Tragedy doesn't change most people's politics, but I would advice the GOP to tread lightly. New Yorkers are already far angrier about this than I would have imagined. Not that the GOP has been popular here, at least the national GOP, but the open, rank and fulsome hostility to Bush is remarkable. You would think Stalin was visiting Warsaw in 1946.
New York has become a carnival of protest against Bush. A lack of gratitude is not a New York trait, and people should ask why there is so much anger towards Bush and the GOP.
As the Times story points out, it is the rawest of emotions that people feel when this comes up. And any attempt to exploit it, especially by Giuliani, would be political suicide.
Juan Cole is asking who won in Najaf, but that's the wrong question. The question is why the US Army cannot force a battle to the conclusion against lightly armed, barely trained guerillas.
The better part of a combined brigade of US heavy armor and Marines could not defeat an insurgency of pissed off ghetto teenagers. Think a pissed off group of bloods and crips with high explosives and religious support. The US could not close and kill with them, even before they got to the Imam Ali shrine.
Now, they're back to Sadr City, bloodied but unbowed.
There was little sign of militiamen still on the streets, despite a US checkpoint set up on the northern side of the cemetery, an AFP reporter said.
Nevertheless, the Mehdi Army has refused to surrender its weapons to Iraqi authorities, defying one of three conditions laid down by the caretaker government for halting its US-backed assault on the militia.
Instead, fighters hid their Kalashnikov rifles at home, while mortars and rocket-propelled grenade launchers were stashed in safe houses in the Old City.
"They will hide their weapons but will not hand them over to the police or to the army," Sadr spokesman Sheikh Ahmed Shaibani told AFP.
"The Americans thought that they could exterminate the Mehdi Army, but our fighters are still here. They will be able to go back to their work whilst remaining an army."
Weapons were also hidden after a deal in June that ended Sadr's first uprising against US-led troops. Fighting broke out again two months later.
Hastily agreeing to Sistani's five-point deal and evacuating his shrine bastion, Sadr made no commitment to surrendering his arms to the authorities.
The point of this is simple. We have no ability to even face down some teenagers without restaging Kharkov in the sand. When people say the Army is stretched thin, this is what they mean. In the last week, I've posted about an ANG member impressed into convoy duty, and a jobless cook impressed into the infantry. One committed suicide within 24 hours of his return, the other was killed in Iraq.
The Army has to basically press gang soldiers psychologically untrained to deal with infantry combat into infantry combat. There is a large social and mental gap between the 11 Bravos and their elite cousins and the rest of the Army. The infantry (11 Bravos-Army, 0300's- Marine riflemen) are the hardest of the hard. Even though most are apple cheeked 19 year olds, they're the reason the Army exists, and other soldiers, the vast majority, are wary of them and not too eager to enter their world. And the recruiters tell them any story that they want to hear. Like the poor cook turned grunt. He wasn't told he was going to Iraq, his poor mother didn't even consider it. Now, he's dead.
What people don't get, Michael O'Hanlon of Brookings is especially dense on this point, is that the US is facing the best armed guerrilla movement in history, one with a substantial grounding in basic military tactics and no small inventiveness. The US public is not being told about the insane level of hostiliy US troops face on a daily basis. Like children spitting at US soldiers on patrol.
In any other war, the poorly trained Mahdi Army would have been sent packing within days. Instead, they withstood artillery and air attacks. The US cannot even use airmobile tactics for manuever, for fear of the highly sophisticated, expensive, and hard to use RPG. So complex that every motivated teenager can pick one up and use it.
They can no longer risk million dollar helicopters to $100 grenades.
Which is a tremendous advantate to the Iraqi resistance. Helicopters should have trapped the Mahdi Army and blocked their retreat, but only a lunatic would send 20 Blackhawks over Najaf.
What needs to be understood is that the US and Iraqi resistance are roughly parallel in combat power, since the US is politically and tactically hamstrung in using its weapons. And while neither were trained in urban warfare, Iraqis proved to be the faster learners.
The US have limited manuver and force options and the Iraqis are willing to go toe to toe in infantry battles. US tactics rely upon forcing the guerillas into combat. But unlike the FLN in Algeria, who were hunted down by the French, the US cannot hunt them down. There aren't enough "boots on the ground".
Why?
Because to root out a guerrilla force like the Madhi Army, you need divisions, both to provide security, and to provide quick reaction teams to hunt down the enemy. The US cannot provide security, and that is where the lack of Pakistani infantry hurts. They were our barbarian legions, supplimenting our centurions and doing the less glanmorous work of foot patrols and provding security.
Now, the US has to rely on the untrustworthy and prone to betrayal Iraqi auxilliaries to enforce their will and that is a risky venture at best. They would have either collapsed outright or switched sides if they were asked to actually storm the mosque.
The scary part is that without heavy weapons, the Mah di Army had all the advantages, including the ability to make more soldiers like a chikcen farmer could make egg salad. Just add mayo and you can get the egg salad of your dreams. Call for men, and they show up armed and with ammo. The Mahdi Army is as large as they want it to be. Imagine LA where the Bloods and Crips could bolster their ranks with a sermon "The LAPD is coming to rob you and rape your mothers. You must defend your homes". How many kids are going to miss the chance to play hero.
The return of Sistani did two things, one save the shrine and create a strategic defeat, the other, save the US from a major tactical defeat. His intervention provided the strategic defeat. The coming "last stand" at the Shrine would have provided the other.
How screwed up is US policy in Iraq? We're now fighting Shia insurgents linked in a nationalist struggle with Sunni guerillas. The leading Shia family is now a nationalist icon to Sunnis in the most fundamentalist part of Iraq.
Despite the big talk, the US is unable to get close to Sadr, much less capture and jail him. While that would be an insane policy on its face, forcing Shia to take sides, it can't even be executed. There isn't a move that the US could make against him that he wouldn't know about in minutes after it happened. They show up at his house, the place is ghosted. He's now chilling back in his base at Sadr City and there is no way in hell the US can move there at all. They show up, the kids tell the resistance.
The US is between a sharp, jagged cliff face and a steep drop. Killing Shia is a gross and pathetic failure. Leaving would set the country off into civil war, and a totally failed state. But staying there ensures that the next government will have President Sadr at it's head, or someone with the Sistani stamp of approval. Allawi has been exposed as a puppet with his fake tough talk and inability to control the US. His ability to make sure the US does anything, like not shelling the ceremony revered by Shia world wide, has been exposed to be farcial.
It goes without saying that Sadr shouldn't have dragged Najaf into this fight, and his actions are grossly irresponsible. Stocking guns in the mosque is an offense. But, the fact is that he's wearing the mantle of both state and God and people will forgive his transgressions, but they will forever hate the US for ours.
Over-the-edge ads seeking billboard space are in stark contrast to earlier days of Miss Rheingold and image of local brewer.
Rheingold has gotten itself into a first-class brew-ha-ha.
The Brooklyn-based brewery with a hankering for an edgy image, wants to welcome Republicans this weekend with a profane new ad campaign that has tempers boiling over.
Rheingold planned to launch a series of controversial billboards - one portraying three men sitting on a city stoop, greeting GOP visitors with a one-finger salute above the words "Here's to a great convention."
Another shows a female hand spanking an underwear-clad man, while a third has a party-goer sporting a T-shirt emblazoned with the words "Orange Alert."
The problem developed when Rheingold tried to post them in some strategic locations.
The most prominent display was scheduled to run on the enormous digital billboard on the Queens side of the Midtown Tunnel, where Rheingold leases space from the owner - online grocer Fresh Direct.
The others were planned for 33 phone kiosks throughout Manhattan, which are owned by ad sign broker Titan Outdoor.
Both have balked at the campaign.
They've been anti-Bloomberg since the campaign started. This takes it to a new, more vicious level. Which is fine by me.
They seemed like brothers and sisters in arms. Pleasantries were exchanged. But their stories were vastly different. The group of rappellers, called Operation Sibyl - in ancient Greece, a sibyl was a fortuneteller - but also known as the Plaza Four, said they had had a tough 25 hours in jail before they were arraigned on felony and misdemeanor charges of assault, reckless endangerment and criminal trespass. Judge Gerald Harris released them on their own recognizance yesterday despite the $2,000 in bail that the prosecutors had requested from each.
The other group, Act Up, blocked traffic, naked, on Eighth Avenue in front of Madison Square Garden, the convention site. They were arrested on misdemeanor charges and given desk appearance tickets. Two were held for close to 24 hours, but most did not spend the entire night in jail. Nonetheless, the protesters seemed ecstatic about being pictured on the cover of The Daily News and inside other papers yesterday. "We were so excited," exclaimed Kaytee Riek, 20. (A public health student from Washington, Ms. Riek said she wants more financing for the global AIDS crisis.)
One woman got an early morning e-mail message from her parents expressing their anger about seeing her naked on television.
The difference between the charges faced by Act Up and Operation Sibyl comes down to this - the police said an officer had been injured on the Plaza's roof while trying to arrest the rappellers: Terra Lawson-Remer, a graduate student at New York University studying for a law degree and a doctorate in law and society; Cesar Maxit, an architect from Texas; Rebecca Johnson, a seminary student from Oakland, Calif.; and David Murphy, a teacher at a Manhattan trapeze school.
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Mr. Maxit, 28, and Mr. Murphy, 31, who have been arrested at protests before, said it had been their worst experience in the criminal justice system. They said they were robbed of cash in the middle of the night while in a general-population holding cell next to the court. Mr. Maxit said a man had punched him in the face because he looked at the man after the man had instructed, "Don't look at me."
Mr. Maxit and Mr. Murphy said they were shocked by other prisoners' drug use and felt too frightened to sleep. They complained about the correctional officers, calling them angry and uncaring.
Ms. Johnson, 25, and Ms. Lawson-Remer, 26, said they had it easier in a jail cell with women who were mostly supportive.
And the cops are in a grumpy, City Hall-ordered mood:
Thousands of cyclists rode through the streets of Manhattan last night in an anti-Republican, pro-environment display of bike power that ended in more than 100 arrests by the police after the ride blocked some streets.
Despite tension over police warnings to obey traffic laws against blocking traffic and running red lights, the cyclists - numbering 5,000, the police say - did just that in a meandering course that started at Union Square and wound its way to the West Side, Central Park, Midtown and the East Village.
As of 11 p.m., Paul J. Browne, a police spokesman, said that officers were still processing people who were detained, but that he expected more than 100 people to face charges, mainly for disorderly conduct.
The arrests, two days before the convention starts, seemed to herald a busy period for the police, who must patrol a stream of demonstrations large and small, several each day. The police on Thursday made 22-convention related arrests, more than three times the number during the entire Democratic National Convention in Boston.
The police apprehended riders in several spots, including more than 50 on Seventh Avenue at 36th Street near Madison Square Garden, where the Republican National Convention will be next week. Riders had chanted "No more Bush" as they passed, and participants in the ride, a monthly fixture for several years, said that many more people than usual took part, out of animosity toward the convention.
The two-hour ride began about 7:15 p.m. in Union Square with a cacophony of bells, whistles, hooting and howling, and the police seemed to tolerate it.
An hour and a half into the ride, the police patience appeared to grow thin, as helmeted officers dragged netting across Seventh Avenue and 14th Street to block the ride.
Hundred of cyclists at first gathered by the net and then most turned west on 14th Street and south on Greenwich Street and kept riding toward the East Village.
As the ride backed up, the police arrested dozens of people on Seventh Avenue near the Garden on charges of blocking streets, saying some riders had stopped traffic on side streets to let the larger mass through.
More arrests took place at the end of the ride in the East Village, including along Second Avenue outside St. Mark's-in-the-Bowery Church, where cyclists gathered for a celebration of the ride and shouted abuse at the police who were arresting their companions.
The Times was early, they arrested 250 people at least.
Now they plan to force hundreds of thousands of people to walk on the sidewalk to get to Central Park.
It seems the city is provoking people by relentlessly stupid acts for a hated president.
Party Girls In a city where their dad is an interloper, the Bush twins are totally at home.
By Vanessa Grigoriadis
Lauren and Barbara Bush at Zach Posen's fall 2004 show, next to director Vincent Gallo. Jenna Bush at an Iowa campaign event.(Photo credit: AP photos)
On August 2, day two of the summer terror scare, Jenna and Barbara Bush had to go to midtown. They were said to be staying with friends in Battery Park when the First Lady asked them to accompany her to the Citigroup Center tower, which had been identified a day earlier as the site of a possible Al Qaeda attack. It would be the Bush twins’ first public appearance in the city that has been their nocturnal playground for the past few years. They stood there as their mom told a few hundred Citigroup employees that there was nothing to fear. There were more photos as Jenna and Barbara stopped at Cucina, a coffee shop in the seven-story Citigroup atrium. Then they were off to dinner with Laura at Nobu—their favorite restaurant. An hour and a half later, they went off to meet their friends.
This was the day’s real event. At the sleek, dark bar on the first floor of BondSt, a Noho restaurant, they met up with their friend Maggie Betts, the quick-witted African-American daughter of Roland Betts, the developer of Chelsea Piers and President Bush’s closest New York connection. Betts was hanging out with two guys Jenna and Barbara didn’t know but who had famous dads of their own: Chris Miller, the portly, jovial son of the Miller Gallery owners, and Jamie Johnson, director of the documentary Born Rich and an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune. Fabian Basabe, the handsome son of an Ecuadoran businessman who made the front page of the Daily News in February dirty-dancing with Barbara at a Chelsea club—and who was subsequently rumored to have been banned from the White House—was on hand, too.
Barbara—friends call her Barbs—text-messaged some other people to come meet them, friends they hadn’t seen since their graduation trips abroad (Barbara experienced the postcollegiate bohemian life in Eastern European cities; Jenna hiked the Pyrénées). The twins once talked about how much they hated doing “political stuff,” how they wished they didn’t have to have a role in their dad’s campaign but felt obligated to do so. “People want us to be political, like Karenna Gore, but we’re not,” a friend reports Jenna as saying.
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They’re both free spirits and, like lots of women their age, want to live hard, be constantly surrounded by a pack of popular friends, and embark on adventures with handsome guys they hardly know—kind of like the night they went back to Ashton Kutcher’s house after partying at a club and, according to Kutcher in Rolling Stone, let a friend of his smoke them out on his hookah. Manhattan being Manhattan, it’s a perfect place for such behavior, especially for two 22-year-olds who are currently boyfriend-less. Barbara weekended in New York regularly during the four years she was at Yale. Jenna’s sojourns here have been more intermittent. While many New York publicists and nightclubbers would like to claim them as part of their circle, the truth is that neither one has made much of an effort to become a social-scene fixture. They’ve left that to Lauren Bush, the regal, much-photographed daughter of Neil and Sharon Bush and an Elite model, who conveniently chose to take a semester abroad in Australia last month, the better to avoid the publicity surrounding her parents’ vicious divorce. Recently, she became a spokesperson for the World Food Program.
That’s the kind of thing Jenna and Barbara would like everybody to think they’re doing. Both Jenna and Barbara announced earlier in the summer that they intended to work on humanitarian pursuits after graduation—Jenna as a fourth-grade assistant teacher at the Harlem Day Charter School, where 90 percent of the students live under the poverty level, and Barbara as an assistant on a pediatric AIDS program at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston—but they’ve put those plans on hold. The official word from the First Lady’s office is that they decided to participate in the campaign instead, but it’s just as possible they simply changed their minds. (In Jenna’s case, it’s not clear that her plans were ever firm; Harlem Day chairman Ben Lambert says that she did not complete an application.)
A more likely scenario is that the Bush twins will move here after the election and secure comfortable jobs in the industries in which they’ve already made inroads. Like Lauren and cousin Billy Bush, the hyper Access Hollywood anchor, Jenna and Barbara have been drawn to glittery pursuits (Ashley, Lauren’s 15-year-old sister, recently completed a summer acting program at Lee Strasberg). Jenna worked as an intern at Harrison & Shriftman, a fashion-and-beauty public-relations firm, where she worked the door at events like a Mercedes Maybach party and made many photocopies. The canny principals also reportedly invited her to movie premieres and events like Bridgehampton Polo as a VIP guest, even though other interns were banned (Jenna never took them up on the offer). “
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In July, Jenna invited about ten friends from UT to the White House for the weekend. Friday was movie night. One friend joked: “Fahrenheit 9/11?” Jenna didn’t think that was so funny. George W. and Laura showed up to play horseshoes the next day on the lawn, and then there was a costume party. The twins love dressing up—their 21st birthday at the Crawford ranch was a cowboys-and-Indians costume party—and Jenna even had a bunch of getups for their guests. The last person to arrive, a male friend, got the outfit no one else wanted. He had to dress up as a monk.
NORTH CASTLE, N.Y., Aug. 25 - When Yolanda B. Cuming envisions her son's funeral, she sees flags and generals and soldiers in regalia. She wants riflemen firing a salute. She hopes for a cortege with a police escort and a ceremony with full military honors commemorating the life of a proud soldier. This is her wish for her fallen son.
Pfc. Kevin A. Cuming, 22, was killed last Saturday while on patrol in Baghdad when a rocket-propelled grenade slammed into a Humvee he was driving. He was the second Westchester resident to die in Iraq since the start of the American-led invasion.
Mrs. Cuming said she expected to bury her son on Sept. 3 in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, following a two-day wake and a Roman Catholic funeral Mass. His body, transported from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, was to arrive in Westchester on Friday.
"I want the whole enchilada,'' she said in an interview earlier this week. She was seated on the deck of the family's modest two-story house in North White Plains set on a wooded hillside above a reservoir in this suburban town. "The full kit and caboodle," she added.
Mrs. Cuming smiled gamely, and her eyes, puffy from tears and no sleep, brightened momentarily. Her grief has become commingled with anger over a war she does not support, and she is full of indignation and blame for the president and the events that landed her son in Iraq.
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Mrs. Cuming placed the son's e-mail messages and letters from Iraq on the glass-top patio table, and laid out dozens of photographs from his abbreviated life, mostly from his years in the military. In the photos, he is a good-looking young man with the dusky beauty of his mother, and he appears confident and happy - standing with his sister at her high school graduation, with his best friend from boot camp, dressed for war in the desert in Iraq.
He was an average student at Valhalla High School, a small public high school. "What comes to mind is, what a great kid," said the principal, Jerry G. Salese. "He wasn't the best student - he had a solid academic record - but what people remember was a very kind, gentle kid."
After graduation, he enrolled in SUNY-Oneonta but, his mother said, he was expelled because he missed too many classes and partied too hard. He entered Westchester Community College, where he took classes in culinary arts, but left after a year. Jobs in local restaurants and the delicatessen at the nearby Stop & Shop did not last long, either.
Mrs. Cuming picked up the phone and called a military recruiter - a fact that has filled her with guilt since the son's death. She and her husband, William A. Cuming, thought the military might give their son some discipline. Mr. Cuming served in the Vietnam War, where he won a Purple Heart; Mr. Cuming's father was in World War II.
Accepting his parents' plan, Kevin enlisted in the Army in April 2003 but never expected to go to war, his parents said. He signed up to be a cook and he was assigned to the First Calvary Division at Fort Hood, Tex. But last April he was deployed to Kuwait and discovered that all the cooking duties had been given to outside contractors. At first he was given the responsibility for monitoring the kitchen staff in his base camp.
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In Iraq, his responsibilities came to include the administration of the camp's motor pool. His phone calls and correspondence became less frequent. "I can't believe we are supposed to hand over the country back to the Iraqis in less than a month!" he wrote in an e-mail note on June 6. In a rare indication of the stress he was under, he added, "I try not to think about the attacks cause there is nothing you can do."
Mrs. Cuming, 51, who is a teacher's assistant at an elementary school in White Plains, shipped her son packages every few weeks: phone cards, chocolate-chip cookies, powdered lemonade, comic books, pictures of the family's home.
Mrs. Cuming said that her son never had a girlfriend and that she wanted him to experience that. In their phone calls, she would tell him of candidates she had spotted while walking through New York. But she avoided watching television news or reading the newspaper for fear of what she would learn. "I feared for my son's life always," she said.
She said she had never supported the war in Iraq.
"I am very against the war," she said sternly. "I don't think we should be there." It is one of the reasons she is opening her home to visitors and speaking out, she said. She plans to write a letter to President Bush.
Her son, however, never talked with his parents about the morality of the war or whether he supported it - "He was doing what a soldier was told to do," Mrs. Cuming said - and his letters home continued to reflect the resolve of a maturing young man determined to carry out his duties.
The family received the news of his death on Saturday morning. Mrs. Cuming was packing to go to Cancun, Mexico, when the doorbell rang and she spotted a car out front that she did not recognize. Then she saw the two military men at the door.
"All of a sudden I had the horrible feeling in my stomach," she recalled. "They said, 'Ma'am, we're from the United States Army.' I said, 'This is a mistake.' They said, 'No, ma'am, this is not a mistake.' "
"I cried and screamed, I cried and screamed," she continued, head down, as she absently fingered a photograph in front of her. "You feel anger, you feel hate, you feel sorrow, you feel numb. Every feeling goes through your head and heart."
Bush's America, 2004. Some are born lucky, some die unlucky.
For months, I have been working with my colleagues Paul Glastris and Josh Marshall on a story for the Washington Monthly about US policy towards Iran. In particular, it involves a particular series of meetings involving officials from the office of the undersecretary of defense for Policy Doug Feith and Iranian dissidents. To that end, we have pursued and cultivated numerous sources with knowledge of those officials, those meetings, and more broadly, Feith's office's seeming attempts to forge a rogue US foreign policy to Iran out of the Pentagon.
As part of our reporting, I have come into possession of information that points to an official who is the most likely target of the FBI investigation into who allegedly passed intelligence on deliberations on US foreign policy to Iran to officials with the pro-Israeli lobby group, AIPAC, and to the Israelis, as alleged by the CBS report. That individual is Larry Franklin, a veteran DIA Iran analyst seconded to Feith’s office.
Here is what I was told in the days before the FBI investigation came to light.
A source told me that some time in July, Larry Franklin called him and asked him to meet him in a coffee shop in Northern Virginia. Franklin had intelligence on hostile Iranian activities in Iraq and was extremely frustrated that he did not feel this intelligence was getting the attention and response it deserved. The intelligence included information that the Iranians had called all of their intelligence operatives who speak Arabic to southern Iraq, that it had moved their top operative for Afghanistan, a guy named Qudzi, to the Iranian embassy in Baghdad, that its operatives were targeting Iraqi state oil facilities, and that Iranian agents were infiltrating into northern Iraq to target the Israelis written about in a report by Seymour Hersh. According to my source, Franklin passed the information to the individual from AIPAC with the hope it could reach people at higher levels of the US government who would act on it. The individual from AIPAC told me that AIPAC presented the information to Elliot Abrams in the NSC. They also presented the part that involved Israelis who might be targeted to the Israelis, with the motivation to protect Israeli lives.
A couple weeks ago, my source told me, he was visited by two agents of the FBI, who were asking about Franklin. My source couldn’t tell if Franklin was being investigated for possible wrongdoing, or if the FBI was visiting him because Franklin required some sort of higher level security clearance or clearance renewal, perhaps in order to get some sort of new position or posting abroad. My source soonafter ran into another official from Feith's office, the polyglot Middle East expert and Bernard Lewis protege, Harold Rhode. My source mentioned the FBI meeting and asked Rhode if Franklin was in trouble. “It’s not clear,” Rhode allegedly told my source.
[Indeed, I have since learned that Rhode has been interviewed by the FBI, but not as a subject of the investigation.]
Oh, he's in some kind of fucking trouble, as is the entire OSD.
Let's break it down, carefully.
Franklin allegedly betrayed US state secrets to save Israeli lives, potentially. Without any thought to compromised US assets in the region. The Mossad has done what was in the Mossad's best interest from time to time, and people forget that. They rely on US marks to give them information they should not have and use in any way they see fit, even if it harms Americans.
What this means is that there was someone close to the Office of the Secretary of Defense who felt no compunction in revealing US sources and methods to a foriegn power. He had assumed that the Israeli interest was the same as the US interest.
Put simply, this is the third allegation of treason alleged to be connected to the OSD and it's neocon allies.
For those needing a scorecard:
1) The Plame case. Valerie Plame was an expert in WMD in the CIS, the former Soviet Union, and her cover was revealed by someone close to the OSD and the White House.
2) The Chalabi investigation of infomation being leaked from OSD to the Chalabi and his Iranian handlers.
3) The current investigation.
Is the OSD a nest of traitors? Who are the Neocons really loyal to? The US or their ideology? Are they really the comintern of the right?
Why would someone betray his country like this?
If Franklin is guilty, he needs to share a cell with the infamous American traitor, Jonathan Pollard.
I know you and I have had our differences in the past, and I realize I am the one who started this whole mess about "who did what" during Vietnam when I brought up that "deserter" nonsense back in January. But I have to hand it to you on what you have uncovered about John Kerry and his record in Vietnam. Kerry has tried to pass himself off as a war hero, but thanks to you and your friends, we now know the truth.
First of all, thank you for pointing out to all of us that Mr. Kerry was never struck by a BULLET. It was only SHRAPNEL that entered his body! I did not know that! Hell, what's the big deal about a bunch of large, sharp, metal shards ripping open your flesh? That happens to all of us! In my opinion, if you want a Purple Heart, you'd better be hit by a bullet -- with your name on it!
Secondly, thank you for sending Bob Dole out there and letting us know that Mr. Kerry, though wounded three times, actually "never spilled blood." When you are in the debates with Kerry, turn to him and say, "Dammit, Mr. Kerry, next time you want a Purple Heart, you better spill some American red blood! And I don't mean a few specks like those on O.J.'s socks -- we want to see a good pint or two of blood for each medal. In fact, I would have preferred that you had bled profusely, a big geyser of blood spewing out of your neck or something!" Then throw this one at him: "Senator Kerry, over 58,000 brave Americans gave their lives in Vietnam -- but YOU didn't. You only got WOUNDED! What do you have to say for yourself???" Lay that one on him and he won't know what to do.
And thanks, also, Mr. Bush, for exposing the fact that Mr. Kerry might have actually WOUNDED HIMSELF in order to get those shiny medals. Of course he did! How could the Viet Cong have hit him -- he was on a SWIFT boat! He was going too fast to be hit by enemy fire. He tried to blow himself up three different times just so he could go home and run for president someday. It's all so easy to see, now, what he was up to.
What would we do without you, Mr. Bush? Criticize you as we might, when it comes to pointing out other men's military records, there is no one who can touch your prowess. In 2000, you let out the rumor that your opponent John McCain might be "nuts" from the five years he spent in a POW camp. Then, in the 2002 elections, your team compared triple-amputee Sen. Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden, and that cost him the election. And now you are having the same impact on war hero John Kerry. Since you (oops, I mean "The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth!") started running those ads, Kerry's poll numbers have dropped (with veterans, he has lost 18 points in the last few weeks).
Some people have said, "Who are you, Mr. Bush, to attack these brave men considering you yourself have never seen combat -- in fact, you actively sought to avoid it." What your critics fail to understand is that even though your dad got you into a unit that would never be sent to Vietnam -- and even though you didn't show up for Guard duty for at least a year -- at least you were still IN FAVOR of the Vietnam War! Cowards like Clinton felt it was more important to be consistent (he opposed the war, thus he refused to go) than to be patriotic and two-faced.
The reason that I think you know so much about other men's war wounds is because, during your time in the Texas Air National Guard, you suffered so many of them yourself. Consider the paper cut you received on Sept. 22,1972, while stationed in Alabama, working on a Senate campaign for your dad's friend (when you were supposed to be on the Guard base). A campaign brochure appeared from nowhere, ambushing your right index finger, and blood trickled out onto your brand new argyle sweater.
Then there was the incident with the Crazy Glue when your fraternity brothers visited you one weekend at the base and glued your lips together while you were "passed out." Though initially considered "friendly fire," it was later ruled that you suffered severe post-traumatic stress disorder from the assault and required certain medicinal attention -- which, it seems, was provided by those same fraternity brethren.
But nothing matched your heroism when, on July 2, 1969, you sustained a massive head injury when enemy combatants from another Guard unit dropped a keg of Coors on your head during a reconnaissance mission at a nearby all-girls college. Fortunately, the cool, smooth fluids that poured out of the keg were exactly what was needed to revive you.
That you never got a Purple Heart for any of these incidents is a shame. I can fully appreciate your anger at Senator Kerry for the three he received. I mean, Kerry was a man of privilege, he could have gotten out just like you. Instead, he thinks he's going to gain points with the American people bragging about how he was getting shot at every day in the Mekong Delta. Ha! Is that the best he can do? Hell, I hear gunfire every night outside my apartment window! If he thinks he is going to impress anyone with the fact that he volunteered to go when he could have spent the Vietnam years on the family yacht, he should think again. That only shows how stupid he was! True-blue Americans want a president who knows how to pull strings and work the system and get away with doing as little work as possible!
So, to make it up to you, I have written some new ads you can use on TV. People will soon tire of the Swift Boat Veterans and you are going to need some fresh, punchier material. Feel free to use any of these:
ANNOUNCER: "When the bullets were flying all around him in Vietnam, what did John Kerry do? He said he leaned over the boat and 'pulled a man out of the river.' But, as we all know, men don't live in the river -- fish do. John Kerry knows how to tell a big fish tale. What he won't tell you is that when the enemy was shooting at him, he ducked. Do you want a president who will duck? Vote Bush."
ANNOUNCER: "Mr. Kerry's biggest supporter, Sen. Max Cleland, claims to have lost two legs and an arm in Vietnam. But he still has one arm! How did that happen? One word: Cowardice. When duty called, he was unwilling to give his last limb. Is that the type of selfishness you want hanging out in the White House? We think not. Vote for the man who would be willing to give America his right frontal lobe. Vote Bush."
Hope these help, Mr. Bush. And remember, when the American death toll in Iraq hits 1,000 during the Republican Convention, be sure to question whether those who died really did indeed "die" -- or were they just trying to get their faces on CNN's nightly tribute to fallen heroes? The 16 who've died so far this week were probably working hand in hand with the Kerry campaign to ruin your good time in New York. Stay consistent, sir, and always, ALWAYS question the veracity of anyone who risks their life for this country. It's the least they deserve.
Yours,
Michael Moore
mmflint@aol.com
www.michaelmoore.com
P.S. George, I know you said you don't read the newspaper, but USA Today has given me credentials to the Republican Convention to write a guest column each day next week (Tuesday to Friday). If you don't want to read it, you and I will be in the same building so maybe I could come by and read it to you?
Payback is a bitch, especially when delivered by the media
This is how we deal with lying Republican scum US Navy
Welcome to New York, GOP
Dirty Tricks Disappearing Hosts, Shadow Volunteers and Agents Provocateurs at the RNC
By Andrew Chang
ABCNEWS.com
Aug. 27, 2004— The Republican National Convention hasn't started yet, but both opponents and supporters are already engaging in treachery and double-dealing worthy of Spy vs. Spy.
Don Hajicek, a 36-year-old graphic artist from Wyoming, was planning to travel 2,000 miles to New York City to join the anti-GOP protests and stay at an apartment belonging to a sympathetic New Yorker.
But then he learned that the person who had offered him accommodation had tricked him, and the shelter he had been promised was a lie.
When planning his trip, Hajicek found an offer of housing on an Internet bulletin board for would-be protesters, CounterConvention.org.
The host — describing himself as "an architect who specializes in low income housing" — was so accommodating that Hajicek became suspicious. "I'm originally from Chicago, so I didn't just fall off the turnip truck," Hajicek told ABCNEWS.com by telephone.
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Both Sides Guilty
Double-dealing isn't limited to one side of the political debate though. For weeks, opponents of the convention have been threatening to stage a "Shadow Protest" — signing up en masse as volunteers and disappearing when they're most needed.
The protest Web site RNCnotwelcome.org contains a "tactics" section with headlines asking "Why not sign up now to volunteer to work for the convention and then miss your shift!" and touting, "Activists infiltrate RNC events".
The Web site contains a caveat: "Listing of tactical resources does not imply an endorsement of said tactics for any or all circumstances. They are here for informational and historical reasons."
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Trend Apparent?
After Hajicek posted his warning on DailyKos.com, one respondent said, "This sort of sabotage isn't new." The respondent recounted signing up for a locally-organized screening of the anti-Fox News film Outfoxed in Washington, D.C. "When I arrived, there was a crowd of people on the sidewalk and the address didn't exist."
Some discussion members expressed fears that a coordinated effort was under way to disrupt the protesters.
Mark Libkuman, a developer at CounterConvention.org, says the site's organizers have removed 30 to 40 listings they suspected were fake offers for accommodation in New York. "Some were very witty," he said, "but they didn't do much for the usefulness of our site."
....................
On the other hand, members of the FreeRepublic.com discussion board discovered Hajicek's frustrated trip to New York and were buoyed by the account. One applauded the hoaxer: "If you did this on purpose, this is truly 'Hall of Fame' material. Beautiful!"
A Poorly Conceived Prank
For Hajicek though, taking an early bullet in this secret war hasn't turned out so badly.
After ABCNEWS.com sent an e-mail to Hajicek's purported host asking to speak to him, Hajicek's purported host sent a contrite e-mail to Hajicek to "profusely apologize for any inconvenience."
Bet he wasn't laughing when the media contacted his ass.
Idiot.
Glad it worked out and the guy had to grovel an apology.
The only words to describe how the city handled the main anti-war protests. By denying the right to use the Great Lawn, extended to HBO, Disney and the Philharmonic, with mystery rules known to no one outside the private Central Park Conservancy.
ANSWER is going to the park tomorrow, and UFPJ will wind up there on Sunday. Why? Because the city wants to save the grass. Yeah, right. Bullshit reeks in the air with that answer.
The thing, the smart thing, would have been to allow the people to dissapate their anger in a rally, smoke some dope, eat lunch and go home. Instead, you'll have no discipline, no marshalls, no order and you expect to solve the problem by offering free craptacular food from Applebees.
Bloomberg tries to finesse everyone, but especially his peers. He throws on the jockstrap for the people who work for a living, but when it comes to standing up for the city, he manages to not do it, over and over and over.
This whole debacle with the marches could end very badly for the city.
Why?
I can't even describe how I feel about this
This is the crap that ran in the Daily News today:
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly called on leaders of peaceful protests yesterday to publicly shun anarchists and other agitators bent on igniting chaos at the Republican National Convention.
"Protest organizers have an obligation to condemn the vandalism and disruption advocated by the minority," Kelly told the Daily News.
"The organizers could perform a public service by telling the extremists to stay away," Kelly said. "Instead, they obfuscate on this point."
Hundreds of thousands of protesters are expected to converge on the city, and large rallies and marches are planned for this weekend and each of the convention's four days.
Police believe the vast majority of those flooding the city will be peaceful and law-abiding. But they are disappointed nonviolent protest leaders haven't taken more steps to purge their ranks of troublemakers.
As The News revealed yesterday, police believe 50 of the country's leading anarchists will be in the city for the convention.
Cops are on guard for people blocking buses or even throwing bricks or Molotov cocktails.
..............
Bruce Bentley, an attorney with the New York City chapter of the National Lawyer's Guild, agreed. "Our concern is the violence the police are going to use against the protesters who are overwhelmingly peaceful," he said
Fahrenheit 9/11" director Michael Moore - a virulent enemy of President Bush - has been hired by USA Today to write four opinion columns during the Republican Convention.
Word is that party officials aren't happy that the pugnacious Moore - wearing the credentials of a legitimate journalist - will be the skunk at their garden party next week, traipsing around Madison Square Garden and maybe even causing trouble.
But get a load of what some of the delegates have to say:
Alabama delegate Terry Butts: "I'm from South Alabama, and we're used to dealing with jackasses, and so I look forward to making his acquaintance. In Alabama, there are probably a few good ol' boys who would know how to put a good knot on his head."
Louisiana delegate Carey Holliday: "I would be delighted if he slapped me. Because then I could defend myself. And it would all be on camera. He'd be hit from so many angles - he'd never even catch me. Four hundred-pounders move very slowly and with no wind at all. I'm 53 and in good shape."
Alabama delegate Rick Sellers: "I think I'm going to contact the officials with the convention and have his media tag pulled. This is ridiculous!"
North Carolina delegate Jim Cain: "The bomb squads and drug-sniffing dogs should give him a thorough once-over before letting him into Madison Square Garden."
Nebraska delegate Rod Krogh: "I doubt he's going to want to provoke people - I would assume he's a better judge of his body than that. I'm 6-foot-2 and 175 pounds. If we went to the mat, that's one match that I know my limits."
South Dakota delegate John Teupel: "If he's going to show up at the GOP convention, hopefully he has the sense and tact to act like a civilized human being. If he wants to get in my face, I'm plenty capable of getting back in his."
Mississippi delegate Field Bryant: "I was a deputy sheriff for five years, and I've dealt with a lot of people who have that mindset. But if he listens with his heart and his mind, he'll come out of there a changed man. Lord knows he needs some redemption."
Moore's spokesman, Mark Benoit, told Lowdown yesterday: "I think these people are speaking out of bravado....I think cooler heads will prevail. Once people talk to him, he's an intelligent, likable guy. I think anyone who's said those things, after spending five minutes with him, would come away with a different impression."
I think that these are overt threats of violence against a journalist. Is this the kind of thing Kelly is going to tolerate while talking to pacifists about a few angry kids. Moore says things they don't like, and they want to harm him physically.
I think they would be surprised to see how big Moore is. Having seen him in person, he's at least 6'2", 250, more like a former football player who didn't learn to eat less. He's no tiny wimpy Upper West Side Liberal. I think if any of these people actually tried to touch Moore, they might find themselves on the bad end of an asskicking.
I didn't know grown men liked the language of thuggery. This is the wrong city to try it in.
If this is how they're gonna act in my city, Moore is the least of their problems. No one is in the mood to take these people's ignorant shit. We don't want them here and if they act out, they may have problems.
Organizers of two large protests against the Republican National Convention planned for this weekend said yesterday that they would not directly encourage supporters to go to demonstrations in Central Park. But the leader of one group said she would be in the park, and the other group began handing out fliers spelling out legal ways to gather there.
The groups toed a fine line between not defying court rulings upholding the city's refusal to grant permits for the use of the Great Lawn and acknowledging what appears to be a mounting effort among large numbers of people to gather there tomorrow and Sunday. City officials have refused to make the Great Lawn available for large demonstrations, saying they have to preserve the lawn's grass.
United for Peace and Justice - the group that is organizing what is expected to be the largest demonstration related to the convention, an antiwar march on Sunday - announced an agreement with the city yesterday about a march route. Starting at noon, the group will head up Seventh Avenue past Madison Square Garden, where the convention will begin on Monday, then head east on 34th Street and turn down Fifth Avenue and Broadway to Union Square. But organizers made clear that after the march, supporters would head to Central Park despite the lack of a permit, and seemed to at least tacitly encourage it.
Leslie Cagan, the national coordinator for United for Peace and Justice, which expects more than 200,000 people at the march, said she would have a picnic on the Great Lawn after the march dispersed.
"I will be going to Central Park after the march is over," Ms. Cagan said, adding that she would invite other people to accompany her but not under the group's banner.
Another group that was denied permission for a large rally on the Great Lawn, the Answer Coalition, began passing out leaflets yesterday alerting New Yorkers to their right to peacefully assemble there. The group's application for a rally at 1 p.m. tomorrow, filed jointly with the National Council of Arab Americans, was rejected by the city, a decision that was upheld by a judge.
The flier does not explicitly urge people to gather, but it reminds people that "casual visits" to the park are allowed, and it includes reminders about the right to drum during daytime hours and the size of signs allowed without a permit (up to 2 feet high and 3 feet wide).
So what you have is an ill-supervised "gathering" which may well damage the grass anyway and not have a security bond in place. What they wanted to do is prevent the picture of 200,000 people gathered to protest Bush and his war, and that's wrong, and we'll make sure it's an issue next year, when Bloomberg runs again.
If people are hurt, blame City Hall, because they could have prevented it.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The FBI believes there is an Israeli spy at the very highest level of the Pentagon, CBS News reported on Friday. The Israeli embassy immediately denied the report.
The network said federal agents believed the spy may have been in a position to influence Bush administration policy on Iran and Iraq.
"The FBI has a full-fledged espionage investigation under way and is about to ... roll up someone agents believe has been spying not for an enemy but for Israel, from within the office of the secretary of defense," the network reported.
God loves John Kerry in ways he doesn't love other people.
If one of the clown princes of OSD, Wurmser, Feith, or even Wolfowitz were a traitor to the US, and that's what it is, treason, Bush's campaign would take a serious body blow.
But my question is this: why would AIPAC and the Mossad confirm every nasty anti-semitic canard ever said about either? Why would they run an agent in the most pro-Likud administration ever to run the US, and why would they drag AIPAC into it? That seems so dumb as to be beyond belief. Why would they even want to endanger someone who could have risen higher in a second Bush term. Spying for another country, then the arrest and trial can only hurt Bush in a serious way. It's as if they never learned from Jonathan Pollard and then only upped the stakes.
Let's see which of the neocons defends treason because it was only Israel and not Saudi Arabia.
Come here you nasty right-winger. You've been a bad boy and need discipline
To try to lure the politicians proper, though, some New York sex professionals are offering limited-time discounts. Veronica Vera, owner of Miss Vera’s Finishing School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls, is promoting a special deal at her cross-dressing academy during the convention. For $395, her “Delegate’s Delight” is a one-and-a-half-hour private class with a Polaroid portrait (imagine how much a tabloid would pay for that photo). “Have you dreamed of clicking your high heels through the corridors of power?” reads the pitch she posted on missvera.com. “The Delegate’s Delight is a new class designed for tourists on tight schedules or any visiting Republicans who long to be in ruffles. Miss Vera invites you to take advantage of this fast and fun way to bring out your femme-self. This quick but total transformation offers long-term benefits, reviving and rejuvenating your spirits. Come share our platforms. Vote Yes to Cross-Dress for Success.”
Vera, a gentle middle-aged brunette, points out that there is a long tradition of cross-dressing politicians. The J. Edgar Hoover rumors have become legends, and 64-year-old Texas Republican Sam Walls recently lost his bid for the State Legislature after photos of him in women’s clothing were found in a trailer registered in his name. “Republicans are in positions of power but have had to give up a lot to get there,” says Vera. “Along with that power, they’re in an emotional straitjacket. They want to be pampered and protected and be desirable sex objects.”
Another sex professional, 25-year-old Eve, says, “I don’t want to single out the Republicans, but they are majority male and a fairly wealthy group of people.” The on-again-off-again prostitute with streaked pixieish hair looks less like a hooker than a bartender at Galapagos—which made her ideal for one politically charged client last year. He’d asked her to show up at his apartment wearing a black hoodie with patches and no perfume or deodorant. “I said, ‘Do you want me to dress like a protester?,’ and he said, ‘Yeah.’ He tied me down, spanked me, and wanted to yell at me a lot. He said, ‘You bad girl! You smashed the Starbucks!’ He was a very conservative Wall Street banker, and he basically wanted to fuck the movement.”
...................
Mary, a stripper who works farther south, at Ten’s Cabaret on East 21st Street, disagrees. She’s convinced that visiting pols will have their eyes on the shiny poles. It’s early, around eight, and I have just purchased a $20 dance from her—a slender, small-breasted 28-year-old who resembles Parker Posey. As she writhes down my chest, I ask what she thought of Fahrenheit 9/11. “If I had to marry a rich man,” she says, “I would marry Michael Moore.”
When she finishes her dance, she slithers back into her lavender gown and tells me she has been attending anti-RNC meetings at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery and plans to protest the convention. But at night she’ll be working, since she danced in Philly during the 2000 RNC and made good money. “Everyone here expects it to be really crowded,” she says. “The girls have been talking about it literally since June.” Though she has strong political opinions, she tries not to bring them into work. Political talk at a strip club is reverse Viagra. “This whole occupation is based on the idea that you’re a blank slate,” she says. “One of the rules is that we’re selling a fantasy.”
..................
As the sex workers tell it, the consensus is that Republicans demand more outrageous acts. Mistress Natasha estimates that her clients are half Democrat, half Republican, but says, “Republicans are way freakier, probably because they’re way more repressed. They can’t be kinky with their wives.” She thinks it’s the submissive tendencies that create the conservative political identity, not the other way around: “In their everyday professional life, they are so scared that anybody would ever think they were submissive that they overcompensate and come across as this demanding, hard person. I believe that well before they knew whether they were going to be a Democrat or a Republican, they knew they wanted to be tied up and beaten.”
Eve, the sometime escort, says conservatives “are really interested in receiving anal sex or being spanked, or fetish or role play. I’ve often found that people who lead a more liberal life have already done all that or it’s not something they’re so fascinated with.”
One Republican speculated recently on an escort review site: “I’ll bet the providers [escorts] do a lot better at the RNC than the DNC event. Look at the difference in the average delegate, R (rich or comfortable male away from home looking to have fun) versus D (elderly or female looking to hold hands, bitch about Bush, applaud reverend Al, maybe a few verses of Kumbaya). We’re a fun bunch, Republicans, and we like women a lot. I bet we prove it.
What the fuck kind of freaks are coming to my city? Why don't they do their freaky shit at home. Why do they have to polliute my city with their hypocrisy.
The perversion is not the sex, but their desperate need for bizarre behavior. They want the right to get their freak on, but when you ask them to let couple marry, they put in language just short of the Nuremburg Laws in their platform.
Now, they want the right to jam cocks into every orifice while away from home, but want to make life hell for people who want the right to live as they choose.
They should be exposed and their wives should find out. Goddamn freaks. Save your pervisions for home.
[I couldn't make this up ... direct from the Republican National Committee website ....]
"NEXT WEEK, people who hate Republicans plan to release swarms of mice in New York City to terrorize delegates to the National Republican Convention.
"Republican-haters plan on dressing up as RNC volunteers, and giving false directions to little blue hair ladies from Kansas, sending them into the sectors of New York City that are unfit for human habitation.
"They plan on throwing pies and Lord knows what else at Republican visitors to the city. Prostitutes with AIDS plan to seduce Republican visitors, and discourage the use of condoms ...."
I do hope the RNC can stop these evil doings in the Big Apple: the idea of people dressing up as Republicans gives me the creeps. And denying Republicans condoms only encourages them to reproduce.
For GOP-gazers who want more pop-eyed paranoia in party hats, go to
/www.rnc.org/ rncresearch/read.aspx?ID=4576 and click on "protesters supporting Kerry." [Alert! Thursday morning, the RNC took down the AIDS warning after thrill-seeking GregPalast-dot-commies cruised the Republican Party site. However, we kept a screen grab of it -- which we'll post today. And here's a link to the source of the Republican Mickey Mice attack info: a column in the New Hampshire Union-Leader: www.theunionleader.com
/Articles_show.html?article=42692&archive=1
Thanks to Richard Luckett of Agitproperties.com for tipping me to the RNC's helpful warning.
No, they are volunteers. Not posing as. This is a Democratic city, and well, shit happens.
But how will mice terrorize anyone. Rats would be more effective.
Oh, someone reposted this crazy screed from the Union-Leader.
My advice: don't fuck hookers or strippers while in New York, and you can't catch AIDS. Oh yeah, stay out of the bathhouses. People WILL be watching. I mean the party of morailty shouldn't have these problems, right?
Benedict Arnold. His moral heirs runs American companies today
Kos has a story about Dick Cheney visiting a farm and shorting the poor farmer by giving him a $10, shortchanging him.
You can read the story there, but there's a larger point.
Bush runs around like some common man, a pose as phony as anything done on the stage, the man shits his pants when a horse gets near, pretending to care about ordinary people,like he's ever been around them. Even when he worked, he was a lazy SOB who barely put in a decent day's labor.
You want to judge a man, judge him by his kids. Vanessa Kerry just won a Fulbright Scholarship to study medicine in London, Alex Kerry makes documentary films.
The Bush girls are planning a nice summer of club hopping and cheap sex.
But it goes beyond any facile comparison.
Yesterday, a man saw a Marine van pull up to his door. He knew his son, only 20, had been killed in Iraq. The Marines don't send people to your door to tell about scratches. So, he goes into the garage, takes a can of gas, breaks into the van, pours the gas all over it, and light it. By the time the Marines, stunned beyond words, pulled him out of the inferno, he was burned over half his body.
Now, that kid and his family believed in all the verities, so much so, the son decided to become a combat Marine. And he died doing it. And it may have killed his father.
George Bush has never had a day like that, made a sacrifice like that. None of these people have.
But it's not even that. In a volunteer military, some volunteer, many do not.
It's that we have created an entitled class of CEO's and their children. People paid millions a year, to the point that their kids will never have to work.And that would be fine, except these people have no obligation to anything. Not this country, not themselves, not even their own dignity. Barbara and Jenna can sign off on that idiotic letter, not because they believe in their father, because it is one more chore. If they cared, they wouldn't go along with such drivel. No one is telling Vanessa Kerry what to say. They might shape it, but one would think a Harvard Med School student who just won a Fulbright can write in English.
MoveOn PAC has a series of switch ads by Errol Morris, I've mentioned them before, and the winning entry is by a former Marine who served in Iraq. And he talks about being betrayed.
Well, we have a class of people betraying this country. With outrageous salaries, opulent mansions, outright theft and then they hide behind religion and the GOP when things get bad. We have a class of traitors, people who destroy this country for personal greed and ambition.
Why should Dick Cheney care about a farmer. His family never has to lift a finger in work. Other people do the dying, so why should he worry. It's not like the self-immolation of some poor Marine private's father is going to cost him a second of sleep.
WASHINGTON (CNN) - The number of Americans living in poverty jumped to 35.9 million last year, up by 1.3 million, while the number of those without health care insurance rose to 45 million from 43.6 million in 2002, the U.S. government said in a report Thursday.
The percentage of the U.S. population living in poverty rose to 12.5 percent from 12.1 percent -- as the poverty rate among children jumped to its highest level in 10 years, the Census Bureau said in an annual report. The rate for adults 18-to-64 and 65-and-older remained steady.
The bureau also said the share of aggregate income for the lowest 20 percent of Americans fell to 3.4 percent from 3.5 percent.
"Four more years of an administration that puts the narrow interests of the few ahead of the interests of most Americans, or new leadership that will serve as a champion for the middle-class and those struggling to join it," he said in a written statement.
Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., released a statement noting that the Census data covered the year 2003 and "does not include the full effect of the president's tax relief."
Gregg, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, took aim at Kerry, accusing the Massachusetts senator of planning to raise taxes and increase government spending and regulation.
Kerry has argued Bush's economic stewardship, including three rounds of tax cuts since 2001, has done more to help wealthy Americans than the poor or middle class.
But analysts have said the poverty rate typically tracks the broad economy, rising during a recession and falling in boom times. America has struggled to recover from the 2001 slump, and job creation has lagged behind overall growth.
Jen
It just keeps getting worse. It also goes to show that even more people have "dropped off the grid" workwise--if household incomes are the same, it goes to show that there are more households not on the grid. Also check out the numbers on Blacks and kids--sounds like everyone's happy!
One of the groups denied a permit to rally in Central Park this weekend says it will hold the demonstration anyway.
The ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) says thousands of people will assemble on the Great Lawn Saturday to protest the Bush administration's foreign and domestic policy, two days before the Republican National Convention opens in the city.
On Monday, a federal judge ruled against ANSWER and another group, the National Council of Arab Americans, which sued the city after it denied permission for the protest. The estimated crowd of 75,000 fell below the maximum capacity set by the city, but the city said the groups did not negotiate and did not set a rain date, as required. The judge also said allowing the protest on such short notice would create a security problem.
On Wednesday, a state judge also sided with the city in another suit filed by an anti-war group that wanted to hold a much larger rally on the Great Lawn the following day. That group, United for Peace and Justice, still plans to march on Sunday, but it is unclear what will happen afterwards.
The judge said UPJ was “guilty of inexcusable and inequitable delay” in filing a lawsuit with little more than a week to go, after months of negotiating with the city. The judge said there is not enough time for police to plan security for a crowd the group estimated would number 250,000.
...........
UPJ says it will proceed with an authorized march past Madison Square Garden on Sunday, but the rally planned afterwards is officially canceled. However, Cagan says she hasn’t ruled out an appeal.
The fun and games have already begun. ACT UP had naked people stop traffic in the middle of 8th Avenue, and it took the cops some time for them to arrest them, to the point that the reporters were stunned by their lack of speed. Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not. After all, they were naked and that contract deal is going slow.
Oh yeah, someone hung a banner from a balcony at the Plaza Hotel. It's only the start of making the GOP feel right at home. If home was filled with anger, baiting and dysfunctional silences. Hope they like the Bronx. While I think people are more likely to do civil disobediance than outright violence, this is going to be fun, fun, fun.
What I am worried about is the end of the anti-war rally on Sunday. It is a serious mistake not to offer the UN or the Park as a way to dissapate that anger. I could see delegates being confronted on the street in the NY manner, and being verbally abused. I don't see people challenging cops, but with the march ending near the West Side hotels, it could lead to some really nasty confrontations. Especially if the delegates start it. And I can see the clueless saying nasty things about the protesters.
Not an angle the media is planning to cover, but if you see groups of people shouting at each other, well, blame Bloomberg.
If you've never had a cup of loose leaf tea, you are missing out on one of life's sublime pleasures. I had discussed my interest in the subject a couple of weeks ago, but I got my order yesterday.
While I would recommend anyone in the Havard Square area stop in at Tealuxe, and get some of their loose leaf tea, I didn't place an order there. While I liked the tea, their prices were a bit too steep for me compared to other online places. While others recommended a NY local shop, Porto Rico, I had associated them with coffee since I was a student at NYU. I even have a black and white shot of the store in my personal archives. But they're coffee people, and I wanted tea from tea people.
Why the difference?
Well, I am indifferent to coffee. I like freshly ground, but to be honest, I drink it twice a week at the most. The best up of coffee is never going to do more than make me say "yes, that's good coffee".
But tea? I come from a family of tea drinkers. My sisters tend to drink coffee over tea, but they live in Boston, where children are trained from the time they can gum a donut to drink coffee and eat donuts. My niece knew Dunkin Donuts before she knew McDonalds.
Tea, well, tea is different. While I had known that tea came in more than Lipton, I hadn't gotten much beyond Twinings in my tea sophistication. And while I like their website, they are pretty much the two buck chuck of tea. As Alton Brown said, "there is only so much good tea in the world" and none of it goes into teabags. Now, I like Twinings, but it isn't cheap and unless the tea is loose, well....If you're going to spend money on tea, you want tea from people who know it like the back of their hand.
What I did do was order from a company called Upton Tea. A reader sent me an e-mail recommending the company. Others recommended another company, but navigating a tea website is difficult. Like wine or beer, there are hundreds of choices, and it is best to get their newsletter/catalog and read it, then make youtr choices. It took me days to figure it out. Because there are a ton of choices. Black teas, white teas, green teas. And they come from Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Vietnam, Indonesia, Kenya, India, China, Japan. The regions matter a great deal.
Now, I like Irish Breakfast, which is a blend of Assams, like most of the popular teas are blends. I just had a cup of Scottish Breakfast, which is a maltier version of Irish Breakfast, obviously, but the kind of heavy tea light years away from Lipton.
Real loose tea is so different than the stuff that comes in the tea bag, it is simply amazing. Upton Tea has a number of expensive, first flush, which means picking the first leaves of the season, from specific estates. Just like a fine bordeaux. Except for the fact that vintners don't sell samples unless they let you into the vinyard.
I bought two Kenyan estate brand samples as a comparison. The dried leaves are nothing special, but after they hit boiling water, they bloom into these wonderful brown leaves which turned into a nice brown liquid. It had a subtle, as all teas do, but distinct, taste. It certainly didn't taste like Lipton. Now, a 125g sample of this was like $13, and unless you serve a lot of tea, it's a LOT of tea. Even the samples, which cost a dollar, is six-15 cups, Which to me is at least a week of tea drinking. So you could order a lot of tea for a little money. They also come in nice silver bags with your name on it. So they make nice gifts, especially in gift baskets for house warming gifts.
But exploring the world of tea is as satisfying as exploring the world of beer beyond Budweiser or soccer. There's an entire world out there which isn't just what they sell on the local store shelves, and tea is cheap. I bought four 125g packages, one for Jen, and five samples. It was $20 and will last for months. Try that with beer or wine.
Twinke and Turquoise hit the town, teenage soldiers die horrible deaths
They party, your kids die in Iraq. America, 2004
On the town with
'Twinkle' & 'Turquoise'
How the Bush twins paint the city red
By HELEN KENNEDY
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
A dishy profile in the upcoming edition of New York magazine tells how the President's rambunctious twin daughters have been carousing all over Manhattan in recent months - knocking back tequila shots and closing down clubs with some of the city's richest kids.
The two 22-year-olds are known to their Secret Service agents as Twinkle (Jenna) and Turquoise (Barbara).
And they're seen out on the town most nights, with the agents in tow as a very, very secure car service.
Among the stories the magazine tells:
One night Barbara and a group of her friends were partying at an apartment well into the wee hours.
A Secret Service agent knocked and told the guest who opened the door: "We're checking on Barbara. Do you know if she will be spending the night?"
According to one person who was there, "The guest came back in the living room and asked, 'Is there someone named Barbara here? Your dad's at the door.'"
Another time, at Bungalow 8, the hip West Side club, Jenna approached an actress from "Legally Blonde 2," who didn't recognize her.
"My daddy's the President," Jenna explained to general befuddlement.
Someone at the table wondered whether she meant president of Bungalow 8.
The mag also recalls a story from Rolling Stone that quoted actor Ashton Kutcher as saying they went back to his house after a night of partying, where he "let a friend of his smoke them out on his hookah."
...............
It paints Barbara, a Yale graduate, as the more sophisticated and outgoing twin. "Barbara is very engaging and open," a friend is quoted as saying. "Jenna couldn't care less if she meets anyone new."
Friends predict that both will live in Manhattan after the election, whether their father wins or loses.
Meanwhile, Deborah Norville interviewed a soldier who was burnt over 80 percent of his body, including his face. He was all of 20, not old enough to drink with the Bush girls.
This is the kind of thing which can enrage you on certain days.
If the liberation of Iraq was so important, why are the Bush girls swanning around with the rich and useless and not leading patrols in Iraq. If it's good enough for other people's kids, why not the Bushes? If this war on terror is so all-fire important, why are the Bush girls not doing their part? Why do I read about them being socialites instead of serving their country in Iraq.
See, patriotism is a scam for Bush, he says the right things, but then he turns away a real vet like a drunken bum from his door. He says we're fighting for freedom, but his girls get drunk every night. If it isn't important enough for his daughters to serve in Iraq, why is it important for our children, fast reaching 1000, to die and be horribly maimed there?
Or is it that they are simply too good for military service. Now, no one is saying they have to enlist. But why are they getting drunk every night instead of doing something useful. A lot of other kids have no choice in the matter.
David Hencke, Westminster correspondent
Thursday August 26, 2004
The Guardian
MPs are planning to impeach Tony Blair for "high crimes and misdemeanours" in taking Britain to war against Iraq, reviving an ancient practice last used against Lord Palmerston more than 150 years ago.
Eleven MPs led by Adam Price, Plaid Cymru MP for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr, are to table a motion when parliament returns that will force the prime minister to appear before the Commons to defend his record in the run-up to the war. Nine of the MPs are Welsh and Scottish Nationalists, including the party leaders, Elfyn Llwyd, and Alex Salmond, and two are Conservative frontbenchers, Boris Johnson, MP for Henley and editor of the Spectator, and Nigel Evans, MP for Ribble Valley.
A number of Labour backbenchers are considering whether to back the motion, though it could mean expulsion from the party.
The MPs' decision follows the commissioning of a 100-page report which lays out the case for impeaching Mr Blair and the precedents for action, including arguments laid down in Erskine May, the parliamentary bible, on impeachments dating back to medieval times.
The authors are Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Newnham College, Cambridge, and Dan Plesch, honorary fellow of Birkbeck College, London.
Under the ancient right, which has never been repealed, it takes only one MP to move a motion and the Speaker has to grant a debate on the impeachment. This means, at the least, Mr Blair will have to face a fresh debate on his personal handling of the war and there will have to be a vote in parliament on whether to institute impeachment proceedings
Ok, this will probably fail, but the real goal here is to give Blair a clue that he needs to step down and let Gordon Brown lead the party into the next election. Because you have to figure Bush is going down in flames (see: refusal to be nice to cripple) and unless Labour wants to go down in flames with it, they better get rid of the albatross which is Blair. If more than a couple of Labourites join this, Blair is in real deep shit, because the LibDems will be next on the plate to hammer him and you could see a coalition of anti-war people moving against Blair. He would probably retain enough party loyalty to survive, but people clearly don't support the war and Labour has been losing seats ever since the war started.
TAMPA, Fla., Aug. 24 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Nadia Naffe, who worked as a Field Director in Southwest Florida for the Republican Party of Florida (RPOF), filed a lawsuit today in federal court alleging race discrimination and retaliation on the job. Along with the RPOF, the lawsuit names the Republican National Committee and Bush-Cheney '04 as defendants. The complaint is available at http://www.findjustice.com.
During August 2003 until April 2004, when Naffe worked for the Republican Party, she was the only black Field Director in Florida. Her lawsuit claims that she was required to perform job assignments against her will that concentrated on black organizations, events and issues. Naffe alleges that she complained to the party's officials about this illegal practice, known as "race matching," but that her complaints were ignored. Instead, Naffe was told she was being "insubordinate" and "not a team player."
After seeking and failing to get assistance from the Republican Party, Naffe contacted the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in March 2004. The lawsuit alleges that shortly afterwards she was verbally threatened with firing by the RPOF's General Counsel, Robert Sechen. As retaliation, Naffe was fired a month later for reasons that her lawsuit alleges were fabricated.
Naffe is represented by Cyrus Mehri of Washington, D.C. and Charles Burr and Sam Smith of Tampa. Mehri won two of the largest and most sweeping race discrimination settlements in history against Texaco and Coca-Cola for $178 million and $192 million respectively. Burr and Smith represented the class of female employees of Publix Supermarkets who won an $81.5 million settlement in 1997. They also represented a group of black college students who sued the Adam's Mark hotel chain for discrimination in the accommodations provided during the Black College Reunion in Daytona Beach.
The lawsuit alleges that Naffe was subjected to racially insensitive and stereotypical statements by RPOF Executive Director of Party Development Terry Kester including the following:
-- Instructing Naffe to contact African-American Republican Clubs to discourage their members from attending an NAACP march because "The last thing (the RPOF) want(s) to see is some black guy on television wearing a Republican shirt and responding to the press in an ignorant way."
-- Routinely referring to African-Americans as "you people" or "your people."
-- Telling Naffe that she was being given race-matched job assignments because "you understand your people."
-- Showing Naffe a portrait of the late Senator Strom Thurmond and boasting that he believed Thurmond was "the best Senator who ever lived."
The lawsuit alleges that when Naffe complained to the Chairman of the RPOF, Carole Jean Jordan, about the discrimination she was experiencing, she was told that the offending supervisor could not help the way he was because "he comes from a redneck part of the state."
The lawsuit alleges that when Naffe complained about being required to perform job assignments because of her race, the RPOF's Deputy Director of Party Development, Christina Sheppard replied, "Well, you are pigeon-holed, so just deal with it."
The lawsuit further alleges that after Naffe informed the RPOF that she had contacted the EEOC and retained an attorney, the General Counsel for the RPOF, Robert Sechen, called her and yelled, "You don't have the right to an attorney. You don't have the right to speak to the EEOC. If you do that, you will lose your job."
The lawsuit alleges that Mr. Sechen was true to his word. The RPOF terminated Naffe's employment on April 2, 2004 within weeks of her filing an EEOC charge.
"Ms. Naffe rallied behind the Bush-Cheney campaign hoping to find compassionate conservatism," said Mehri. "Instead of true conservatism, she found herself faced with discrimination and intolerance. And instead of compassion, she found retaliation."
"The Republican Party just doesn't get it. They should have known that race matching in the workplace has been prohibited for years," added Smith. "By filing this lawsuit, we intend to stop the Republican Party from continuing these illegal practices."
What was that about the GOP being open to blacks again?
See, you try to work with them, and they kick you right in the crotch.
Thousands of Parisians have marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Paris in World War II.
People turned out to watch the military parades, and later attended concerts and street parties.
Later, at the main ceremony held at the city hall, French President Jacques Chirac paid a solemn tribute to those who lost their lives in the uprising.
Sixty years ago, the Nazi troops who had occupied the French capital for four years, surrendered.
The city's liberation of Paris came less than three months after the Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy.
It was a hugely symbolic event after four years of collaboration with the Nazis.
But Parisians paid a heavy price for their 10-day uprising against the Germans. More than 1,000 civilians - including members of the French resistance - were killed.
Unlike D-Day, this anniversary was a largely French celebration - a tribute to the men and women whose courage restored France's national pride, says the BBC's Peter Biles in Paris.
For the younger generation, the liberation of Paris still matters, he says.
"Paris is of course the capital of France, and for me it's a symbol of the liberation of France as a whole. What people remember the most I think about the liberation of Paris is the images of the people so happy to be liberated," 23-year-old Gabriel Mougere told the BBC.
I posted a story about the Senegalese who served with the Free French Army in WWII about a week or so ago. The reason it was one of the best moments of their lives and that the liberation of Paris mattered so much was not military. Rome was liberated on June 4, but it was never fully under the heel of the Nazis. Paris was and is different. It was a free capital in a free country and it had to be liberated.
Eisenhower was going to bypass Paris to the north and south and force the Germans to surrender. A combination of the communists and the cops led an uprising against the Nazis. For about 10 days, while the FFI (the French name for the Resistance) held off the Germans and begged for the allies to save them being crushed like Warsaw.
Instead, he gave permission for LeClerc's 2nd Armored Division, which had survived hard fighting in Normandy, to liberate Paris. Of course, DeGaulle, having found out about the uprising, had already given the order for the division to move, regardless of what Eisenhower wanted. But with Eisenhower's OK, the 2nd Armored Division rolled on the roads to Paris, bypassing closer US divisions. Hard on their heels was the US 4th Division. By the time they got to Paris on the 25th, Ernest Hemingway had liberated the bar in the Ritz, and they were rounding up collaborators (mostly young women with a taste for German men and money).
Ironically, Paris would be a real pain to Eisenhower. There were nearly 10,000 deserters attracted to the whores and lights of Paris, and the Services of Supply would set up headquarters there. Between the blackmarket and deserters, Eisenhower would come to regret liberating the city, even as GI's were forever grateful.
But with a government which now sneers at our oldest and dearest allies, the French, it's good to remember that once we were more than allies, we were true friends.
It's Their Party And they’ll write checks if they want to. Young Republicans in New York—a besieged bunch—are feeling feisty. Emboldened by Bush, and undeterred by Bush-bashers, they’re even talking about turning the Upper West Side into (gasp) GOP country.
By Alex Williams
It’s a strange time to be a New York Republican—a strange enough thing to begin with. Republicans have got their man in the White House, in the statehouse, and in Gracie Mansion, but here in the city, they’re still outnumbered five to one. What’s more, the city is more stridently politicized than at any time since Reagan. Anger—over Iraq, over Ashcroft, over everything—is suddenly in vogue. New York Democrats simply can’t stop themselves from telling anyone who will listen just how much they hate the president.
And local Republicans trying to defend the Bush administration aren’t helped by how little their party seems to care or know about the city. (Tom DeLay’s cruise ship, anyone?) The inescapable message is that Bush clearly doesn’t need New York.
Yet far from feeling besieged (remember the Alamo?), the city’s Republicans are fighting back aggressively with a fierce barrage of checks. After D.C., New York is now the most important fund-raising stop for the GOP. For young Republicans—whose New York was shaped by Giuliani—the city represents an enticing possibility. It may still be a city-state of liberalism, but to local Republican opportunists already dancing at the thought of hosting the convention this year, that also makes it the country’s next conservative frontier.
The Rainmaker
I’m cool,” says Lolita Jackson, a bit defensively. “i sing in a jazz-funk band. I’ve sung at CBGB Gallery! I wear leather pants. It’s all good.”
Like she says, she’s black, she’s female, she’s a Republican. Get over it.
Jackson, 36, will be the first to tell you that she’s made it her life’s mission to puncture the stereotypes. Since college, she’s worked in investment banking and lives on the Upper East Side. This year, she was named president of the Metropolitan Republican Club, an organization headquartered on East 83rd Street.
As a child growing up outside New Brunswick, New Jersey, she found herself a guinea pig of expensive and, as she says, painful liberal efforts to integrate public schools. “Education is a big reason I’m a Republican. I was a victim of tracking, busing, you name it,” she says. “I went to school with all these white kids from the farm. We were all black kids in the bus. It was horrific. I escaped in spite of the education system.”
By the time she entered the University of Pennsylvania to study engineering, she had firmly turned against her family’s strong Democratic leanings. Now, once again, she’s a symbol, but a willing one—like Condoleezza Rice, she says. “A black woman with her finger on the button? You gotta love that,” she says, laughing.
But Jackson’s real value to the party is more than demographic. She’s a “Maverick,” a spinoff of the high-flying Rangers and Pioneers fund-raising programs, launched during the 2000 campaign. A Maverick is anyone under 40 who commits to raising $50,000 ($2,000 at a time, the individual campaign-contribution limit). The New York chapter of the Maverick program launched just this past spring. Jackson, a charter member, expects to meet her commitment by June.
“I’ve been out on the street, getting signatures on petitions in front of the Food Emporium on 83rd Street, and have had white people scream at me, ‘You’re not a self-respecting black person,’ ” she says. The cries of protest—traitor!—are even stronger in the black community. “A lot of very educated African-Americans, unfortunately, have a herd mentality,” she says. “They are probably Republicans in their heart, if you ask them what they believe, but they just can’t vote Republican. They want to believe that Jesse Jackson is going to lead them to the promised land.
“In New York City, people think that if you’re to the right of Bill Clinton, you’re a loony,” Jackson adds. “We don’t have horns. My motto is, ‘I’ll stay out of your bedroom if you stay out of my wallet.’ You start making some money, you’ll come over to the other side.”
The Contrarian
Andrew Sreniawski has been arguing with everyone for as long as he can remember. If that seems unusual for a bookish young Columbia law student, one must consider how adept he’s always been at putting himself at odds with his surroundings. A staunch family-values Republican and a devout Catholic, Sreniawski grew up in a liberal family in a liberal town outside Buffalo. He’s also gay.
“The Republican Party just fits my views pretty well,” he explains. “I’m pro-life. I also agree with the party’s fiscal policies. The tax cuts are already starting to pull us out of the Clinton recession.” Sreniawski, who wears a BUSH-CHENEY ’04 button on his backpack, brightens considerably at the thought of the president.
“I’m a huge Bush supporter. I think he’s done a great job in the war on terrorism— such a strong president, standing up to the terrorists and the dictators of the world. Freeing the Iraqi people is such an accomplishment, I think he’s going to win in a landslide.
“People are slowly realizing that the Democrats haven’t had a new idea in 40 years,” adds Sreniawski, 24. “The inner city is still impoverished. Kids still aren’t learning. My main focus is on social issues—prayer in school, sex ed. I’m conservative on the full range of social issues—except, of course, my being gay.
Yeah. Wonder how the master's health is? We be doing good, right?
Nah, most black folk know who their enemies are, and you can spell that GOP. Money doesn't have much to do with it. It would have to do with dignity. Even if you take race out of it, just how Bush has treated New York is enough for me.
Damn, hating yourself must make you fucking crazy. Gay, black, jesus, didn't they get the no niggers, no faggots memo from GOP headquarters. These people are all crazy, just loopy, even by New York standards.
CRAWFORD, Texas - Former Democratic Sen. Max Cleland tried to deliver a letter protesting ads challenging John Kerry's Vietnam service to President Bush at his Texas ranch Wednesday, but neither a Secret Service official nor a state trooper would take it.
The former Georgia senator, a triple amputee who fought in Vietnam, was carrying a letter from nine Senate Democrats who wrote Bush that "you owe a special duty" to condemn attacks on Kerry's military service.
"The question is where is George Bush 's honor, the question is where is his shame to attack a fellow veteran who has distinguished himself in combat?" Cleland asked. "Regardless of the political combat involved, it's disgraceful."
Encountering a permanent roadblock to Bush's ranch, Cleland left without turning over the letter to anyone.
"I have a letter signed by nine members of the U.S. Senate, all of whom have served honorably and I'd like to hand it to a responsible officer here on the gate," Cleland said as he tried to deliver it to security personnel at the roadblock. He accused a member of the president's security detail of trying to evade him.
"I am just going to return the letter and make sure it gets in the mail," Cleland said as he returned to his car.
In their letter, the senators said, "This administration must not tacitly comply with unfounded accusations which have suddenly appeared 35 years after the fact, and serve to denigrate the service of a true American patriot."
A Texas state official and Vietnam veteran, Jerry Patterson, said someone from the Bush campaign contacted him Wednesday morning and asked him if he would travel to the ranch, welcome Cleland to Texas and accept the former senator's letter to Bush.
"I tried to accept that letter and he would not give it to me," said Patterson. "He would not face me. He kept rolling away from me. He's quite mobile."
Bush is a gutless bitch.
Yes, this was a campaign stunt, and yes, Cleland has his own grudges against these people, but a real man would have invited Cleland and Rassman up to the ranch house, gave them some sweet tea, taken the letter and let them go.
So he hides behind some lackey. Just like he's hidden behind women's skirts his entire life. And he calls himself a Texan. I didn't know Texans were pussies. His father must be cringing. He's done his share of dirt, but personal courage was never something Bush Sr.lacked. His son, sadly, has no courage, no character, and no guts. He talks big, but he's hiding from a triple amputee. It's not like he wore a horse's head.
If Rove had a brain in his head, he would have NEVER let Cleland be turned away. It looks shameful, cowardly.
Now, let's be real. Cleland probably owes Kerry a $20 because one of them had to have bet Bush would live down to character, and the other bet that he couldn't be so stupid as to turn away a triple amputee from his home. But make no mistake, they knew what Bush would do, and they bet on him doing it.
Yet, once again, the Bush campaign walks into a trap set by Kerry. Two decorated veterans show up to you door and you hide from them? That's just stupid. It's bad politics if nothing else.
Do they not see how shitty Bush is looking, going into the convention?
It seems that blogger Melanie Mattson has finally found a new job and wonders what to wear as business casual. Being both a guy, and a writer, business casual has a very loose definition to me, one could say, almost informal definition.
However, this isn't going to help her, not one bit.
My advice was to look through LL Bean/Land's End catalogs and buy cheaper versions at Target or Kohls. However, I don't have to wear women's clothing and go to work. Land's End has a very nice virtual model system which I've tried out.
But I'm at a loss as to what people find acceptable at work, having been a freelancer and then home recouperating (it's going well, btw), so I don't know what people wear casually.
Therefore, as a service to a friend, I'm throwing the question open to our readers.
What do you wear to work?
Now, I'm a big beleiver that clothes matter to make an impression. I think being neat matters, and if I didn't Jen would remind me.
Anyway, any suggestions or ideas you have would be useful.
Declaring "the front line of the war against terror once again involves the citizens," Republican Alan Keyes said Tuesday he believes the U.S. Constitution grants properly trained private individuals the right to own and carry machine guns.
"You're not talking about giving citizens access to atom bombs and other things," the former presidential candidate said. "That's ridiculous."
But the GOP nominee for U.S. Senate argued the founding fathers intended the Second Amendment to allow people to carry the types of weapons "customarily carried in those days by ordinary infantry soldiers."
"And, yes, does that mean that in this day and age people would have the right to have access to the kind of the weapons our ordinary infantry people have access to? With proper training and so forth to make sure that they could handle them successfully, that's exactly what was meant."
Keyes made the remarks at a news conference he called to attack the "ideological extremism" of his Democratic opponent, state Sen. Barack Obama
NEW YORK - In case their discontent isn't already clear, protesters are spelling it out. "Stop Bush Now" signs and other anti-GOP messages are appearing throughout the city well before delegates arrive for the Republican National Convention, which begins Monday.
Bright blue tarps, painted with glaring yellow letters, are going up on dozens of rooftops in Brooklyn, under the flight paths into busy New York airports. Thousands of delegates and convention guests peering down at the city might see messages like "No more years" and "Re-defeat Bush."
"We just hope that they'll look down and ask themselves, 'Why, why do they feel so strongly? Why is it that New York feels this way?'" said Genevieve Christy, who has painted more than 80 banners since thinking of the idea a few weeks ago.
The movement is so popular in her neighborhood that Christy, a 57-year-old consultant, is putting orders on a waiting list. She even brought supplies with her on vacation so she could keep working.
The banners and signs, Christy said, are a form of safe, silent protest that many New Yorkers prefer over the dozens of rallies planned throughout the week of the convention.
Five blocks from convention headquarters at Madison Square Garden, where President Bush (news - web sites) is to be nominated Sept. 2, a 25-by-75-foot banner screams "Save America. Defeat Bush."
The sign hangs from the offices of the Unite Here union, which represents 440,000 workers from various industries, including hospitality, gaming and textiles.
It's not just the views from above that are being used. For months, protest groups have been slapping stickers and posters on subway platforms, train cars, traffic signs, park benches, light poles and anywhere else they can find space.
And why is there going to be masssive security? A threat from Al Qaeda?
The New York Police Department and the largest armada of land, air and maritime forces ever assembled to provide security at a national political gathering are being deployed in New York for the Republican convention, according to federal, state and local officials. They said yesterday that they were planning an intentionally huge response to intelligence that Al Qaeda hoped to carry out an attack to disrupt this year's elections.
The country's terror alert level, which was raised early this month, will remain at orange status, or high alert, throughout the Republican National Convention and probably well beyond, according to several senior intelligence officials. They said they were increasingly concerned about an attack, even though there was no specific intelligence indicating a strike during the convention, which begins Monday.
"Have we collected intelligence that there is going to be a hit in the financial district during the Republican National Convention?" said Pasquale J. D'Amuro, the assistant director in charge of the New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. "No. But intelligence we have collected indicates that Al Qaeda still desires to attack both domestically and abroad. They want to kill Americans."
With the alert level ratcheted up, even in the absence of a specific threat, thousands of Republicans arriving in New York are likely to be subjected to a new round of potentially confusing public warnings about the risk of attack alongside soothing official exhortations to enjoy the party, which will take place inside a security envelope surrounding Madison Square Garden.
"Attacking Madison Square Garden would be like pulling a bank job at Fort Knox," a senior counterterrorism official said, referring to the security measures being put into place this week. "It will be the hardest target in the world."
So what are militants doing to prevent that possibility? If you e-mail the contact address for the Don't Just Vote Take Action (dontjustvote.com) protest contingent, you might get a call back, as I did, from Rae Valentine, who says she's been involved in activism for "several years," though she's only 19, and who dismisses the concern: "When you become overly paranoid you allow them to win, even without agent provocateurs."
The site displays the kind of language whose vagueness might get hapless souls like Valentine put on 24-hour surveillance. It sounds innocent to write, "We must defend ourselves against possible attack like family and keep our spirits high." To Valentine, that means "just looking out for each other and taking care for each other." I point out that it might be interpreted differently by police intelligence—and that the importance of protesters' intentions not being misconstrued by paranoid cops is one of the reasons, as morally compromising as it might seem, to consult with authorities before a demonstration. She responds with self-satisfied cleverness: "We should not have to ask permission from the very people we're trying to protest."
There is a certain logic to the formulation. Here is a deeper logic: Politics is about communication. If you leave questions of what you are communicating—to the cops, to the watching public—entirely up in the air, you are not really doing politics at all.
The willful denial of this fact does not infect only 19-year-olds. Ed Hedemann has been working for peace ever since he refused induction into the military in 1969. His group, the War Resisters League, has planned its action with exquisite care, and with a strategic dignity: Figures dressed in white to represent mourning will gather at the World Trade Center site; marching across the city as close to Madison Square Garden as practicable, they will hold a " 'die-in,' a way to graphically represent all those who have been killed by the government's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq." But even an old hand like Hedemann simply turns off his brain when asked about a fundamental problem in political communications: that even the most passive protesters, when arrested, are often perceived by the public—as they were in Chicago in 1968—as bringers of anarchy, and end up hurting the causes they profess to help.
To ask this is not to reject protest; it is just an invitation to strategize—to think about politics. Hedemann deflects it. "We need to do what we think is right to do, and not so much worry about, ah, 'Well, what if this? What if that?' I think we need to do what our conscience tells us is important to do, as long as it doesn't harm other people."
The War Resisters League, like A31.org, cites a Martin Luther King Jr. quote that includes these words, offered as if a taunt: "Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue."
Since the author of the article asked me for comments, I sent him my thoughts on his article.
New York and Chicago couldn't be more different. There is widespread hostility towards the GOP in New York, look at the current issue of then New Yorker. It's not just white middle class kids flocking in from all corners.
Then cops and firefighters are likely to be out in the streets protesting as well. There is much less of a challenge to authority than what was going on in Chicago, 1968. Also, many people were spoiling for a fight, on both sides.
Now, if it was the kids running the show, as it was in 1968, bad things might happen. But the people running the protests here are a lot older and a little smarter.
If the A31 people want to get arrested, fine. Who takes them seriously. After all, Rove has been using that Hitler entry on Move On for months. He wants to use them, fine. The problem for Rove is the Union protests, the organized stuff coming from the black church, NOW, NARAL and the serious people, not rich kids from the burbs. They will just get abused from New Yorkers and laughed at as they go to jail.
The people you quoted can barely shave and bathe, much less organize some kind of protest. Besides, their ranks have cops all over them.
If you had some serious protest planned, would you be in the papers bragging about it? I wouldn't.
Also, as the Yahoo article indicates, the hostility is not just limited to goofy kids with bad fashion sense. It's widespread, from the pages of the New Yorker to people in the street. A sense of betrayal lingers in the air, even if people can't nail it down specifically. There's afeeling that the convention is the reason to let people know exactly how much we don't really like Bush. Some may see this as ingratitude, but it's really anger at being screwed like a plank of wood on This Old House. It's not just angry kids. It's much of the city, and the reasons are hardly obscure.
Wayne Barrett lists 10 ways Bush has screwed New York.
1 Will any convention speaker dare mention the name of Osama bin Laden? What ever happened to Bush's cowboy threat to "smoke 'em" out?
2 Why was Bush so afraid of a 9-11 investigation? As recently as last week's interview with Larry King, Bush tried to tap-dance around his record of resistance to the 9-11 Commission.
3 Was the Bush team awake in the nine months before the attack?
4 Iraq plus tax cuts adds up to a deficit that will force a second-term squeeze on social programs vital to NYC.
5 Bush did OK on the $20 billion, but he's still shortchanging us on the edges of the minimal pledge he made to a city whose economy took an $80 billion hit.
6 Senator Schumer says NY doesn't expect a share of Idaho's farm subsidies, so why does Idaho take a chunk of NY's security subsidies?
7 What could be worse than lying to GZ workers and residents about the air they were breathing?
8 Bush has left most New York children behind.
9 Ten thousand NY families are in jeopardy of losing their housing subsidies and homes.
10 With NYC the No. 1 target of bio and nuclear terrorists, the go-it-alone Bush administration has torpedoed international treaties that would make us more secure.
That's why the GOP will get such a warm welcome from so many New Yorkers.
CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) - Democrat John Kerry will dispatch two fellow Vietnam veterans to President Bush's secluded Texas ranch on Wednesday to press him to condemn television advertisements accusing Kerry of lying about his wartime service.
The move comes one day after it was disclosed that a top lawyer for Bush's re-election campaign has been providing legal advice to the group behind the ads, the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
Kerry is sending to Crawford former Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia, a frequent companion of Kerry's on the campaign trail and a fellow Vietnam War veteran who lost three limbs during the war.
Cleland and former Army Green Beret Jim Rassman, whose life was saved by Kerry during a Vietnam war firefight, will try to deliver a letter protesting the ads to Bush at his heavily guarded ranch, Kerry aides said.
Ah, yes, this is getting better all the time. The GOP is trying to spin this as Kerry being on the defensive, but I get the sneaking feeling that Kerry has been lying in wait for this attack. Because everything is just too neatly lined up for this. Just too neat, too set up. The oppo flowing into newspaper offices is just too clever. Now, Ben Ginsburg is dragged out of the gutter? Too neat.
My feeling is that Kerry and his team timed this perfectly. They let O'Neill spread his lies, and then just ambushed him like he did the VC. Everyone is now all in his shit, looking at his past. I think Rove thought he would jump Kerry, and Kerry would just blow this off as nonsense. Well, he's not Al Gore. He's coming back hard at Bush, and having two decorated Vietnam Vets land on his doorstep to be turned away is perfect. Maybe they can kick Cleland's wheelchair as well.
Bush walked right into a trap, all the idiot nervous nellies who think that Kerry should have attacked weeks ago, have no taste for the finer things in life. Bush is called a liar in the media, Rove's dirty tricks machine is being unraveled as we watch, and he's limited Bush's actions in the future. They really blew their wad with this Swift Boat attack.
Maybe they ought to come on horseback and really scare the shit out of Bush. Too bad they have to go to Central Texas in the middle of August, but that's where Bush is.
Aug. 25, 2004 | DAVENPORT, Iowa (AP) -- Vice President Dick Cheney, whose daughter Mary is a lesbian, drew criticism from both proponents and foes of gay marriage after he distanced himself from President Bush's call for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.
At a campaign rally in this Mississippi River town Tuesday, Cheney spoke supportively about gay relationships, saying "freedom means freedom for everyone," when asked about his stand on gay marriage.
"Lynne and I have a gay daughter, so it's an issue our family is very familiar with," Cheney told an audience that included his daughter. "With the respect to the question of relationships, my general view is freedom means freedom for everyone. ... People ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to.
"The question that comes up with the issue of marriage is what kind of official sanction or approval is going to be granted by government? Historically, that's been a relationship that has been handled by the states. The states have made that fundamental decision of what constitutes a marriage," he said.
................
Those comments drew criticism from the conservative Family Research Council, with President Tony Perkins saying: "I find it hard to believe the vice president would stray from the administration's position on defense policy or tax policy. For many pro-family voters, protecting traditional marriage ranks ahead of the economy and job creation as a campaign issue."
Perkins added that if Cheney sees a problem with activist judges, "then how can he not endorse the same solution the president and his pro-family allies have proposed? We urge Vice President Cheney to support President Bush and a constitutional amendment on marriage."
What do these people want Cheney to do? Turn on his daughter?
Cheney may be Darth Vader, but even Vader loved his son. My God, Cheney has towed the line on every issue dear to these people. Now they want him to turn on his very gay daughter to please them? The one decent thing about the man is that he hasn't turned on her for points.
Maybe Mr. Perkins might turn on his kin, but thank God Cheney sticks by his. If he didn't, you'd have to wonder if he wasn't a cyborg. Hell, he already has the mechanical heart.
I never thought loving your daughter was some kind of felony. Gee, he doesn't want to insult her by condemning her as a sinner, bad Dick Cheney, Bad.
It's here, the Blogger's Guide to New York, especially designed for the RNC. All the handy info you need to figure out the basics of dealing with New York.
It's not comprehensive, and why would it be with Google. But it provides some basic survival tips for people blogging the RNC.
Let me thank Ptolemy and Theoria from Kos as well as several readers here, who's ideas I incorporated into the site.
This should help people out with the absolute basics.
Aug. 24, 2004 | Washington -- Democratic Party chief Terry McAuliffe says his party doesn't need to help the thousands of protesters who will descend on New York in anticipation of next week's Republican National Convention.
He says President Bush's policies provide all the inspiration they need.
"We can't control thousands of people who want to protest the Bush administration," McAuliffe told reporters Monday during a conference call. "They're there solely because of the failed presidency of George Bush."
He denied claims by GOP counterpart Ed Gillespie of a "blurry" line between Democrats and the protesters. He also urged demonstrators to be respectful of the four-day convention that opens Aug. 30 at Madison Square Garden.
"We have nothing to do with the demonstrators. Republicans know that," McAuliffe said. "If they can link us to a bunch of lawbreakers, they think people will not pay attention to the promises they've broken."
An open letter to Ed Gillespie,
Ed, you're probably not a bad guy, probably brighter than the president. But here's the deal;we have a slogan one can see on T-shirts sold in the city, no it's not I love New York. It's Welcome to New York, Now get the fuck out. I know it seemed like a bright idea a few years back, to try and use the dead of 9/11 to bolster the president, but now? No one wants you here, no one likes Bush, except for a few wingnuts, and we're not feeling too warm towards the rest of the GOP office holders. You know, the scumbags who think their fire departments need pork over the security of the nation's largest city. Those people.
Terry McAulliffe doesn't have a fucking thing to do with the protests. Nice attempt to spin what is going to be a disaster for you. In fact, many of the organizers hate McAuliffe, conssider him part of the problem. But we know why you're trying to spin this: because there will be hundred of thousands of oridnary New Yorkers and other Americans to protest the president and his many misguided policies. In fact, New York is turning in to a protest fesitval.
You can see some of America's most talented artists protesting Bush this week. What are your Republican delegates going to see? Cats?
Oh, Terry McAuliffe couldn't have organized this if he had wanted to. Nope. Couldn't even try.
Could Terry McAuliffe get anarchists, pro-choice, anti-war activists and cops and firefighters ALL protesting your candidate. The cops and firefighters are tired of being political puppets. You treat them like whores, you love them when you need them, but when they need something, it's "sorry, line up with the rest of the peons."
Ed, we're New Yorkers. Did you think you could bring your magic show here and not have anyone say anything? Like the morons who wanted their "dippin' sauce" for their pizza crusts, you will quickly find out we're not like other places.
The President lied. He lied about 9/11, Ground Zero and Iraq, and we know it.
Too bad he won't be here to see the vast array of humanity protesting him and what he stands for. But you will. My advice, buy a map. Many New Yorkers are feeling Puckish (You know what that means, as opposed to the President, who slept or was hungover through hhis classes). You know, Puck, in a Midsummer Night's Dream. Because many New Yorkers, some even volunteers, might send you to explore the farther reaches of New York. Even the New Yorker thinks that's one funny fucking idea. After all, living in gated communities shelters a person. Maybe they should experience, oh, Far Rockaway or Bed Stuy. The locals won't bite, honest. They may laugh at you, but they will not bite.
Catching a cab might be hard, with the cabbies handing out free cab rides for emlistment in the Army to Republican delegates.
Why are New Yorkers so hostile to you and your ilk?
Because you stabbed us in the back. After 3,000 New Yorkers died, did you hunt down Osama Bin Laden relentlessly? No, Bush had to settle old family scores like a Mafia chieftain. Did you help protect our city? No, you just issued some stupid color alerts. You did what you could get away with, handed out some money and left us exposed while Wyoming got terror funding. Thanks.
New Yorkers are not bitter about most things, but this, this is different. Don't spit in our food and call it flavoring. We can't stop ypou from coming, but we can let you know exactly how welcome you are.
Let me add this: the protesters, they're standing with us. You are not. So when you are treated with less than total warmth, you'll know why.
With the Republican National Convention about to come to town, leaders of the city's police and firefighter unions are taking advantage of the national attention focused on New York to make their case to the public. In TV ads, on billboards and at sidewalk rallies, the unions' message is the same: because the city does not pay its cops and firefighters an adequate wage, New York cannot attract or retain skilled uniformed workers.
These claims would be serious - if they were true. New Yorkers understand and appreciate the risks facing our firefighters and police officers, especially in the aftermath of 9/11. But union leaders do the city and their members a disservice when they spread myths about the working conditions of the "bravest" and "finest."
The fact is, New York City pays its police and firefighters fairly. Including holiday and overtime pay, first-year police officers earn an average of $44,000. Detectives earn an average of $88,000 a year, while sergeants earn an average of $91,000.
Firefighters do even better. After five years, average total compensation for firefighters is $76,000. Further, more than two-thirds of firefighters fulfill the requirement of working two nine-hour days and two 15-hour nights a week by arranging to work two straight 24-hour shifts.
Union leaders say that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is treating their members like the "paper pushers" in District Council 37, the city's largest municipal union. But this union's members earn, on average, $30,000. The average uniformed worker earns more than twice that salary, with far more generous pension and benefits.
Perhaps that's why so many people are eager to join the ranks of the police and firefighters. ...... More than 7,000 people took the most recent test to qualify as firefighters, although only about 500 can be hired in an average year.
The Police Department also has an abundance of qualified applicants. More than 12,000 new police officers have been hired in the past five years, and the police academy easily filled its July 2004 class of nearly 1,700 recruits, even though the requirements have become more stringent. ..............................
There are limits to what city taxpayers can afford. Increasing the productivity of firefighters and police, as the mayor has proposed, would help to create the savings needed to pay for a modest increase in salaries. And labor harmony, especially on the eve of the convention, would help strengthen the bonds of trust and good will that police and firefighters have built with the public since 9/11.
Mitchell L. Moss is a professor of urban policy and planning at the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University. He is an informal adviser to the mayor.
Aug 24, 2004 4:50 pm US/Eastern
(1010 WINS) (NEW YORK) Families of firefighters and police officers who died in the line of duty went to City Hall on Tuesday as part of their unions' latest gambit to win pay raises.
``It's time to give to them what they gave to all of you,'' said Marge Darcy, whose police officer husband, John Darcy, died in 1967.
Firefighters such as the late Eric Allen, who died at the World Trade Center, ``have to work two jobs, which takes a toll on families,'' said his widow, Angela Allen.
Police officers and firefighters have been working without a contract for more than two years. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said the city cannot give its municipal workers large pay hikes.
``It would be great if we could pay our municipal workers more,'' he said Tuesday.
(1010 WINS) NEW YORK Police and fire unions will enter binding arbitration with the city to help the two sides resolve their contract dispute, according to a published report.
Yet the unions said they would still demonstrate during the Republican National Convention next week, hoping to pressure Mayor Michael Bloomberg to raise wages before arbitration begins, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
``Even if we're in the middle of arbitration, up to the very last moment the city can still make a better offer that we might accept,'' Al O'Leary, spokesman of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, told the Times.
The arbitration would be overseen by a three-member panel, to be named by the two sides.
In recent weeks, union members have trailed the mayor to his public events seeking a significant pay raise, and last week dozens of off-duty police officers and firefighters staged a noisy demonstration outside the mayor's house at 1 a.m. Their leadership planned to file a lawsuit in federal court on Tuesday seeking to stop police from using barriers and other tactics to prevent pickets from coming within 30 feet of the mayor and his home.
The police and fire unions have not ruled out staging an illegal strike or sickout during the Republican National Convention. The convention, during which President Bush is to be renominated, will be held at Madison Square Garden from Aug. 30 to Sept. 2.
Mitchell Moss should be ashamed of himself. He sits at a desk all fucking day long, while cops risk their lives and he thinks they deserve the same as DC 37 members? Which is bullshit on it's face. Even the largely minority members of DC 37 don't agree with that. Only Moss, who is now sucking up to the mayor, after years of calling Giuliani onn his bullshit.
Moss should do their jobs for a while and see if 88K is enough to face crackheads with guns. And his use of overtime and holiday pay is deeply dishonest. Those are fungible things. Don't have a shift which allows for overtime, you don't get that money. And it's not predictable either. Moss knows exactly what his paycheck will look like every two weeks. Cops do not. Firefighters do not. And working 2 24 hour shifts is not exactly fun, either.
We ask firefighters and cops to risk their lives. We can at least pay them a decent salary. And New York does not. What Moss doesn't say is the following, New York City loses experienced cops to surrounding counties. Sure, we can get rookies, no problem, it's a stable job. But when these guys hit their 10 year mark, Nassau starts to look mighty sweet, especially with the higher salaries.
Someone asked me to say something about the cops, so that our friendly neighborhood protesters would understand them.
While cops can be assholes, most try to do their job in a reasonable manner. The last thing they want to do is arrest you. They want to settle the problem and get away. They're not the LAPD, in that you can expect a negative interaction.
You can ask them for directions, assistance and help and get a reasonable response. This varies, depending on how cute you are, but the days of the all-white NYPD are long gone, It's a diverse workforce and all have some college education.
The two things you can do to awoid trouble with the cops is to:
1) Not argue with the cops. Don't yell, don't wave your hands, don't sneer at them. Cops, especially New York cops, are hypersensitive to condescention. And contrary to popular opinion, the people they like the least are snooty middle class white kids from the 'Burbs. Act civilly towards them at all times. Now, I know people will blather about their rights, but argue that with the judge. You do not want the cops pissed at you. Be polite. It will shock them.
2) Not tell them their job. If they ask for ID, show them. If they ask you to move along, do so. The last thing you want to do is wind up with a nightstick across your skull, and they will do that if you piss them off. Also, cops can only arrest you when you break the law. So don't break the law.
And a note for the few violent or wanna be violent people out there: your fellow protesters WILL point you out to the cops. You wanna tear shit up, go to Darien. There is an unspokenn rule in New York: do not start shit in other people's neighborhoods. Go smash your Starbucks. Real New Yorkers have a decent job there. So if you want to do civil protest, fine. Get arrested to your hearts content. But if you want to challenge cops or spook police horses, well, the Tombs really suck. And since you'll be facing assault charges, well, Rikers will be interesting.
Also, the cops and firefighters are pissed. Giuliani at least had kind words for them. Bloomberg treats them like servants. How dare they ask for more money.
So that cop you insult may well be a fellow protestor. Solidarity forever.:)
I got this spam from the Bush girls today. These idiots treat these girls like it's 1964 and they're nice little debs. Yeesh
Dear Steve,
We're sure that you have no doubt who we'll be voting for in November.
Kerry, of course, but you know we have to do this or Grandma will disinherit us as if we married negroes.
But you should also know that we would be voting for our Dad in this election even if he had not raised us, loved us, tutored us, coached us, and even listened to a few excuses from us for late curfews.
Which had us staggering in seven ways fromm fucked up. Knee-crawling drunk, just like dad
We have been privileged to know our President personally and we know he is the right person to lead our country - especially when there are so many important issues at stake.
Yeah, like alienating allies and losing wars
Our Dad has qualities that are needed in a good President - loyalty, humor (embarrassing as it sometimes may be), compassion, and, most importantly, integrity.
Well he won't fire anyone. I guess that's loyalty. Integrity? Sure, let's ask John Kerry about his integrity. "So you did three tours in 'Nam, and you say Kerry buggered little boys while in 'Nam? Wow, you're lucky to have survived three tours.
We're not the only ones who see it. In fact, our friends - from varying political backgrounds - are supporting our Dad in November. Not only because of his decisions to liberate the women of Afghanistan or bring freedom to the people of Iraq, but because during the last ten years they met a man whose title was Governor or President, but who was always happy to be known as "our Dad." He made everyone feel welcome and comfortable in our house (except for the occasional boyfriend) and our friends got to know him as a really good guy.
Except when his friends are slandering Kerry for fun, I think the Iraqis don't considern rape and murder freedom,
We know that when you get to know his record as President, you too will feel compelled to participate in this year's election - and hopefully get involved in the campaign, too.
Yes, I'm sure you will. Contributions can be given to ACT, Move On and Media Matters. They need money to make sure dad finally goes into rehab in his retirement
We know it can be hard to find time to think about politics. We just graduated from college and are perfectly aware that schoolwork, parties, and extra-curricular activities keep students busy, away from campaigns and voting booths.
As opposed to that yearlong tour in Iraq some college students got as part of their National Guard duty. No parties for them. I bet they think about politics a lot. Now, me and Bar were gonna get commissioned and join the MP's, but we failed our physicals. Besides, minorities got all the best spots
In the last election, less than half of 18- to 24-year-olds were registered to vote, and only 32% of them actually did vote. Sadly, many Americans our age did not take advantage of their right to vote.
Except for those pesky negroes in Florida and Uncle jeb took care of them uppity darkies.
We are asking you to get involved with this campaign not only because it is the most critical election of our lifetime, but also because we have the ability to positively change our future. Please encourage your friends to sign up on the campaign's web site (www.GeorgeWBush.com) and register to vote online. At the web site you'll also find a lot of information about how to get involved in our Dad's re-election campaign. It's an easy process, and it's the best way to have a say in this year's election.
Unless they're negroes and we have a second plan for them, called Operation Scare the Darkies into not voting
Thanks for taking a few minutes to think about some big issues. This is a really important election, and we know that with your help our Dad will win in November
You mean like a threesome with twins?
This letter is an insult to the Bush girls. Come on, they went to Yale and UT Austin. They may be drunken idiots, but that doesn't mean they're stupid. And this letter should have come with hearts over the letters it's so juvenile. Just because we mock their personal habits, this is ridiculous. They're treating these girls like 10th Graders. Our dad, late curfews. Uh, you're 22 and sexually active, please let's treat these girls like young women. Which means the staffers writing this crap should be fired on the spot. This kind of thing is subliterate.
Office Sugar Spice Microwave Popcorn and Other Odd Office Snacks
What would wind up in the microwave at some offices if it was around Okay, now that I have your attention, I'll use this somewhat cute/offensive picture to start another "food" thread. I was working a tad later than usual tonight, and I got up for another cup of Machine Green Tea. Basically, we have a machine that accepts little envelope-thingies of about 12 different kinds of coffee, and 5 or so teas, and it makes stuff one cup at a time. As an accompaniment, the business provides the usual fixings--sugar, creamer, milk, etc...and someone also donated a cheap shaker-can of cinnamon.
So...as I enter the pantry area, I notice a strong but unfamiliar smell. It was not unpleasant, just...heavy. A few seconds later I hit on it--someone had made microwave popcorn (someone else had abandoned a box of instant-popcorn earlier that day), and put sugar and cinnamon on it. It was inspired, gacky-buttery-swee-smelling, and almost funny in an Office Space kind of way. Only the smell remained; I assume the budding chef ate his/her creation. One has to wonder what kind of hunger or sugar craving would make someone make such an ersatz "pastry," especially since there's a Cosi AND a Starbuck's downstairs in the same building.
My question to you all then...what is the most creative "office minimalist cooking" that you've seen? Remember, you're only allowed to use one "primary" common ingredient. Poaching good stuff left over from other departments' meetings doesn't count. :D
Other acceptable examples: Impromteau "garlic bread" from a bagel with leftover garlic from ordered-in pizza, items involving extra soy sauce or duck sauce packets from Chinese takeout, etc...Bring em on!
CRAWFORD, Texas — President Bush denounced TV ads by outside groups attacking both John Kerry and himself today and called for a halt to all such political efforts.
"I think they're bad for the system," he said.
The president made his comments as the Kerry campaign fought back against charges made by an outside group that the Democratic senator had lied about wartime events in Vietnam for which he received five medals.
In a conference call with reporters arranged by aides to the Democratic presidential candidate, Navy swift boat officers Rich McCann, Jim Russell and Rich Baker said Kerry acted honorably and bravely and was well qualified to be the nation's commander in chief.
"He was the most aggressive officer in charge of swift boats," Baker said.
Additionally, crewmate Del Sandusky said at a news conference in Harrisburg, Pa., that he personally witnessed the battle action for which Kerry received Silver and Bronze stars and two of his three Purple Hearts.
"He deserved every one of his medals," Sandusky, a retired computer repairman who drove Kerry's boat for nearly three months.
The attack on Kerry's war record has dominated the presidential campaign in the days since Swift Boat Veterans For Truth began airing its commercial in three states.
With polls suggesting Kerry's standing was beginning to slip — at least among veterans — the Democrat last week called on Bush to call for the ads to be pulled from the air. He also accused Bush of allowing front groups to "do his dirty work."
Bush's campaign heatedly denied any connection with the anti-Kerry group, and called on the Democratic challenger to join the president in a call for all outside groups to pull their ads.
Look, the difference is simple: Move On is a membership organization which gets the bulk of it's funding from contributions from the public. No GOP 527 meets that standard. Why should Move On, which is a membership organization, be compared to a Bush-funded front group?
The fact is that the there is a vast difference, and given the popularity of 527's among liberals, what Bush is really calling for is for the Dems to disarm and give the GOP back it's funding advantage. The Move On commercials are harsh, but based on the truth. Also, there is clear evidence that Move On has little, if any, connection to Kerry. There is no such seperation for Swift Boat liars.
The media is letting apples and bagels be repaired. Move On is closer to the Sierra Club or Greenpeace than a PAC, even though it has one. The Swift Boat liars is connected closely to Rove and one of Bush's main financial backers.
The GOP is scared of Move On, having slandered it over and over, and misrepresented it, time and again. Move On, not Kerry, needs to go on the offensive and explain what it is, and why Bush is afraid of it. I think Bush has tried to leverage the Swift Boat controversy into backing Move On and ACT into a corner and forcing the Dems to denounce their efforts and work against them.
I'm surprised some clown like Joe Lieberman hasn't taken the bait.
If Bush wants to make Move On an issue, please do so. Move On is an open organization which is publicly funded. Find a GOP group which isn't the handmaiden of the rich oligarchs who fund Bush.
But politics and style aside, Kerry did serve with distinction in Vietnam when he easily could have avoided that killing field. His service to his country shouldn’t be diminished by the same despicable, politically motivated tactics visited upon Sens. John McCain in South Carolina and Max Cleland in Georgia, also Viet vets. This kind of gutter-bashing doesn’t belong in American politics, and vets shouldn’t allow themselves to be used as ammo for cheap shots at one of their own.
The stalwart Brown Water Navy warriors who fought at Kerry’s side say he was A-OK, which is good enough for me. The muckrakers such as John O’Neill and his Swiftboat snipers – who didn’t sail on his boat but served anywhere from 100 meters to 300 miles away – are now coming off like eyewitnesses when in fact not one of their testimonies would hold up in a court of law. A judge would call these men liars and disallow their biased statements.
..............
O’Neill and his chorus of haters are still in their get-Kerry mode. I suspect the decades-long fury is still fueled by Kerry’s high-profile anti-war stance when he returned home. That was a position that was taken by hundreds of thousands of other Viet vets, including myself in 1971 – which, according to Joe Califono's recent book, Inside: A Public Life, almost cost me my life.
McCain has already asked President Bush to distance himself from this “dishonest and dishonorable” attack. Advice that Bush should take one step further by ordering Vietnam draft-dodger Karl Rove and the rest of the character-assassination squad who zapped McCain and Cleland to back off. And then publicly stand tall and say that this type of behavior insults every vet who’s served America in peace and war.
As our commander in chief, Bush also needs to bear in mind that the U.S. Navy and its high standards for handling awards are now on trial as well. Hopefully, the president’s righteous actions will expedite that institution’s exoneration along with Lt. John Kerry’s heroism.
Hopefully, too, these angry, troubled vets still haunted by the Vietnam War will eventually find closure. But one thing I know for sure – it won’t come from fratricide.
David Hackworth, hardly a doctrinare liberal, was the distinguished commander of two battalions in Vietnam, one in the 9th Infantry Division, which provided the ground combat units for the Brown Water Navy, as the coastal naval units in Vietnam were called. If anyone knows the conditions of combat in the Delta, it's Hackworth.
This is a man who supported Bush in 2000 as well.
Hackworth became famous when he retired from the Army in 1971, he had lied about his age when he joined the Army as an enlistee in 1946, was given a battlefield commission in 1951 and rose to the rank of captain, and company commander, by 1952.
While some people disagree with him, he's respected by the current military because he's an advocate of average soldiers. But on something like this, Hackworth is a lot more credible than Bob Dole. Because not only was he there, he was a career soldier as both enlisted man and officer.
He also makes the point that this is a sad debate. John Kerry won his medals and these men didn't know anything about how he did it. They want to diminish him, but they only diminish their own deeds. It's a shame, John O'Neill slanders his own bravery and service to harm John Kerry, who seems to have had a reasonably successful life. All these men who served with Kerry risked their lives. They should be respected for that. Instead, they're going to be ridiculed and exposed as liars, and in the end, that is what people will remember, not the fact that they all served their country in a dangerous job.
Because if John Kerry was a fraud, by extension, aren't they all frauds? Aren't all their medals questionable? Even the men that died? Is that how they want to be remembered? Slandering the dead, as well as diminishing their own acts?
Bush's favorite activity, running....from his record
Think about this:
The one weak area that Bush has is his past. Not just Vietnam, but his entire past. Juan Cole hints at it. When you stop at Vietnam, you miss Harken and the rest of it. The insider deals, and the rest of his life of daddy-supplied comfort.
But the fact is that the people who want to wage holy war against Bush would deliver exactly what Rove wants. He wants Kerry to make a mistake. He wants Kerry to get shrill and attack Bush. What Bush has is the legion of surrogates who will tell any lie to win. Any hard Kerry attack will be met with claims of him losing it, getting upset and the like.
I'm tired of people acting out of emotion. It is emotionally satisfactory to engage Bush at his level, but look at the ground Kerry has gained by waiting and then attacking.
Every major newspaper in the US is now calling on Bush to stop his campaign of slander. The Swift Boat folks are tied like a roast to Bush. They can deny it all day long, but they're linked by article after article. McCain was never able to make that connection, despite the obvious ties. Saying Bush is a bad guy didn't work in 2002. People didn't want to hear it. You must show Bush is a bad guy.
How do you do this?
You let the media do it.
And they have been showing clips of Bush allowing a vet to slander Kerry's record.
I think a lot of people think they know more about campaigns than they do. I'm listening to Air America, and they're wailing that Kerry isn't being mean enough.
Did they not see the parts where he keeps calling him a coward? He's forcing Bush to react, he's playing to his temper. Kerry is not speaking to the public, he's flipping Bush out personally. The one thing Bush is afraid of is being exposed as a sissy. He lives in deep fear of it. Kerry knows this.
It's August and the convention hasn't happened yet and Bush is going into the convention being called a coward and liar. Not just by Kerry, but on every editorial page in the US.
This is like all the agigtation for the Second Front of WWII. There were letter campaigns, pressure groups, all screaming for an immediate Second Front. Of course, they had no idea what it would take. But they thought they could just demand that the US Army go to France to satisfy their needs for revenge.
Effective attacks take time. It takes time to dig up facts and to let people make mistakes. Michelle Malkin getting hammered on Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann adding to the humiliation, the Times story on Swift Boats, that isn't a one or two day response. It takes a couple of weeks and Rove shot his wad too early. He gained a little ground, but Kerry has time to recover it. And he is.
Kerry is also using the Bush bubble against him. Bush lives fairly isolated from reality. He doesn't get that the image that he has constructed is being chipped away piece by piece. Bush has two grim choices, denounce the ad and admit they were wrong or not denounce them and look like he's countanancing slander. Ah, somehow, I don't think that the Kerry campaign is upset by this box.
One of the hardest strategies to pull off is waiting for your enemy to make a mistake and pouncing. Kerry let Bush go out too far and he's now slamming into him, hard. And the media is saying "hey, look at Bush's dirty tricks, he's doing it again."
Now, that they have established Bush is a liar, they can work that theme, hard. Bush lies about Kerry, he's lying about the economy, he's lying about Iraq.
So they can now make more sophisticated arguments about how Bush's failed character is reflected in policy. Which is the point.
We're coming for our Overtime, Elaine. Why did you steal it from us?
OT pay: Winners and losers Revamped rules governing who gets time-and-a-half will soon take effect.
August 22, 2004: 12:16 PM EDT
By Krysten Crawford, CNN/Money staff writer
Understanding overtime rules is not as easy as it looks.
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Don't know if you're owed overtime pay? You're not alone.
On Monday, new federal rules detailing which workers get time-and-a-half and which ones don't are due to take effect. The changes mark the first major overhaul of the federal overtime law in more than 50 years. In response, employers and employees alike are scrambling to figure out what they mean.
With some 500 pages of legalese to pour over, the task isn't easy.
In a nutshell, the revamped regulations are easy to comprehend if your yearly income is roughly under $23,000, or if you take home more than $100,000 a year. For middle-income workers, however, understanding the rules can trigger a migraine.
The basic idea behind the Fair Labor Standards Act holds that workers in so-called "white collar" jobs can, under certain instances, earn extra pay for workweeks that exceed 40 hours.
Under the law, there are three primary tests for determining who is eligible ("non-exempt") and who is not ("exempt") from overtime pay.
Pay and job duties matter most
First up is the "salary-basis" test. To be exempt from overtime, workers must be paid a set salary, not an hourly wage. This has long been the rule under federal overtime law. The new rules don't change this requirement.
The second criteria, called the "salary-level" test, has been amended. In order to be exempt from overtime, the new rules require that employees earn a minimum salary of $455 a week, or $23,660 a year. That's triple the prior minimum salary of $155 a week, or $8,060 a year.
White-collar employees who earn more than $100,000 a year are automatically exempt from overtime pay under the new law. That wasn't the case before, although many high-income workers have been exempt for other reasons besides their income level.
Jen
Another way the Rethuglicans are screwing the poor. I know a lot of folks who have a "salary" but fill out timesheets, and used to get overtime until today. Pretty soon they'll start calling janitors "sanitary administrators" just to stop paying them OT
This is going to screw a lot of technical workers.
The last thing employers need is a way to pay less overtime to their employees.As it is they shit all over the law now. This will just make things worse.
The true absurdity of the entire situation is easily appreciated when we consider that George W. Bush never showed any bravery at all at any point in his life. He has never lived in a war zone. If some of John Kerry's wounds were superficial, Bush received no wounds. (And, a piece of shrapnel in the forearm that caused only a minor wound would have killed had it hit an eye and gone into the brain; the shrapnel being in your body demonstrates you were in mortal danger and didn't absent yourself from it. That is the logic of the medal). Kerry saved a man's life while under fire. Bush did no such thing.
What was Bush doing with his youth? He was drinking. He was drinking like a fish, every night, into the wee hours. For decades. He gave no service to anyone, risked nothing, and did not even slack off efficiently. At what point he became addicted to cocaine, in addition to demon rum, is unclear.
The history of alcoholism and cocaine use is a key issue because it not only speaks to Bush's character as an addictive personality, but tells us something about his erratic and alarming actions as president. His explosive temper probably provoked the disastrous siege of Fallujah last spring, killing 600 Iraqis, most of them women and children, in revenge for the deaths of 4 civilian mercenaries, one of them a South African. (Newsweek reported that Bush commanded his cabinet, "Let heads roll!") That temper is only one problem. Bush has a sadistic streak. He clearly enjoyed, as governor, watching executions. His delight in killing people became a campaign issue in 2000 when he seemed, in one debate, to enjoy the prospect of executing wrong-doers a little too much. He has clearly gone on enjoying killing people on a large scale in Iraq. Cocaine use permanently affects the ability of the person to feel deep emotions like empathy. Two decades of pickling his nervous system in various highly toxic substances have left Bush damaged goods. That he managed to get on the wagon (though with that pretzel incident, you wonder how firmly) is laudable. But he suffers the severe effects of the aftermath, and we are all suffering along with him now, since he is the most powerful man in the world.
I would argue that the alcoholism is the result of, not the cause of, his temper. He came from a family of emotional cripples. Bar and George buried their first daughter with no ceremony and then went to play golf. That's insane and it had to warp W intensely. But he was always a coward and a bully, at sport, at play, in life.
The booze was a way to self-medicate, but he was such a drunk in the end that it didn't work.
Bush's judgment skills are scary bad, amazingly bad. And it shows itself every day.
Justin Gatlin upset the odds to take a brilliant 100m gold in one of the greatest sprint races of all time.
The American ran 9.85 seconds to edge Portugal's Francis Obikwelu into second and reigning champion Maurice Greene into the bronze medal position.
Pre-race favourite Asafa Powell of Jamaica tied up and trailed home fifth as four men went under 9.90 seconds for the first time in history.
Gatlin said: "It hasn't sunk in. This is the most special moment of my life."
The 2003 World Indoors champion said he realised before the final that many had not considered him as a serious challenger for the gold medal.
"They were talking about Asafa and my team-mate Shawn Crawford," he added.
"Both were running against each other prior to the Games. I think that going out there and putting myself under pressure helped. I run well under pressure.
The 22-year-old said much of the race was a mental blur to him up until the final few metres.
"I've lived for this moment. It was a very great race, the competition was stellar."
The Olympic champion revealed his preparations for the final were nearly scuppered by an intruder who entered the call room as he was putting his spikes on.
"He wanted a picture of the tattoos on my arms," said Gatlin.
"I was angry, I am not going to lie. This was the biggest race of my life and I don't want anybody that I don't even know taking photos of me."
Maurice Greene would just not shut the fuck up. How this race would prove he was the "greatest of all time". He even has that tattooed on his arm, goat. Oh well, he talked the talk, but couldn't run the race.
Even the announcers wanted to say he was a dick, but that's not done.
Don't do it, Britney! Some day her prince will come, but it's not sleazy fiancee Kevin Federline. The virginal pop tart is finally making her own decisions -- and it ain't pretty.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Rebecca Traister
Aug. 23, 2004 | For a moment this week it looked as if pop singer and rebellious cupcake Britney Spears was about to marry her former backup dancer Kevin Federline sooner than expected. It turned out that she was dressed in wedding white just to shoot a video for her cover of Bobby Brown's "My Prerogative." Still, her face adorned the cover of People magazine, where she grinned desperately next to Federline and his perplexed-looking 2-year-old daughter; the accompanying story was about Hollywood's successfully blended families. Then came word that the lovebirds were being considered for "Newlyweds," now that shiny warblers Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey have grown too long in the tooth for the reality show. The prospect of Spears' opening her hormone-racked heart and home to cameras inspired such delight among bored Web surfers that the New York media blog Gawker soon posted several homemade petitions urging NBC to back up the rumor with a contract.
"Not only will I, the Undersigned, tune in, but millions of others who, like me, will enjoy a front-row seat to the most glorious downward-spiral of the last decade," read one of the petitions.
click here
Oh, it's so not funny.
Usually, I would be the first to wriggle with pleasure at the misfortune of an overpaid affront to feminism. My empathy for former tween celebrities and their reality-show lives usually extends no further than to Tinkerbell Hilton, whose recent abduction was surely staged to compete for press attention with aunt Nicky's Vegas wedding. I'm not a fan of Spears' music, have not paid more than glancing attention to her romantic history or her career. But ever since she took up with this Federline, I have become strangely invested in her personal story.
And not just invested -- downright maternal. Each time I see her face or cellulite-pocked ass cheek staring out at me from the cover of a glossy weekly magazine, I crumple a little bit with a futile desire to protect her, to keep her from exposing yet another of her open, bleeding wounds to an infectious public.
I just feel so sad for her.
And it's not just because Federline is a punchline to that old "Saturday Night Live" ad for Bad Idea jeans. He left his ex-girlfriend, actress Shar Jackson, with whom he had one child, when she was eight months pregnant with their second.
Ok, I've had enough of the Mekong Delta for a while and I've been working on the RNC all night long.
This guy, Federline, is like all your bad boyfriend nightmares come true. He dumped the mother of his child while she's eight months pregnant. I think the word here is scumbag.
But let's get real here, Ms. Spears has a taste for the men of other women. This is the second time she's done this and well, the Salon article is infantalizing her to a ridiculous degree. She's perfectly capable of making her own choices and she wants to marry the archtypal Hollywood hanger on/scumbag. She's neither subtle or smart about such things.
This comes to mind a simple problem with the way we deal with young women and sex. On one end, it's the Bush girls running around like idiots, and on the other it's Maury Povich's women with their mystery baby's daddies.
Men are told to be accountable for their sex lives, be responsible, don't just knock up women, and god forbid, never date someone else's woman.
Yet, women are never told this. I know we have a double standard, but I've heard enough female sex stories to know that only applies when caught.
How many times have you heard, "oh I forgot about him". Unless you're Hugh Hefner, most guys remember in esquisite detail who they sleep with. But there seems to be this clause that sex only counts some of the time with women. Maybe it's because it's some guys suck in bed, maybe it's because they think there are do overs when it comes to sex.
See, the double standard works as a shield as well as a handicap. It's a very serious deal to question a woman's sexual ethics. You call someone a whore, she better be selling her ass for money, or you're a total asshole. While women will be questioned, I think unfairly, for an active sex life, while a man won't, they also have more leeway in their behavior before the lectures start.
Now, if Britney was a guy, this is pretty much the lecture she'd get:
"Why the fuck are you in their marriage? You're gonna marry her? She's already got a kid with that guy. Now, if she dumped him, that's one thing. But she's eight months preganant and the kid isn't yours. Why are you in this shit? Are you crazy?"
But that's how men talk to men. A lot of women want to look for excuses for her behavior, when in reality is that her moral guide is well, lacking. It's not even a gender thing, but a morals thing. No one tells her no, so the fact that this guy wants to cash in and use her is less important than pissing people off. When she gets bored with him, her lawyers will dispose of him like so much refuse.
But the author ignores the fact that Ms. Spears has a history of cheating with married men and is more than willing to make bad decisions on her own. Making her out to be a victim is kinda silly.
Ahem. Okay, this is kinda sorta funny, though it's pissed me off just enough to put it on the front page. Actually, it isn't funny at all. It just shows what a bunch of psychotic assholes those Freepers really are.
Remember that place I had lined up to crash while in NYC? My friend Jeff found it on the counterconvention.org web site. The people were very friendly, giving me wonderful directions to their apartment and telling me that I could crash there until I leave on the 5th. Hmm. That's generous. Too generous, actually.
I have to admit that I fell for it at first, because I was getting desperate about where I was going to stay. My friend Jeff (also a photographer) and I are both pretty broke (and a huge thanks to those of you that contacted me and volunteered to help out with that aspect. I love you guys.) So, here we have two broke dudes flying 2,000 miles from home to make our voices heard (and to take pictures) in NYC, and here we have a couple in NYC that opens their home to these two protesters in hopes of helping out. What a country.
But then, I had that nagging feeling. Wouldn't it suck to fly all the way there and find out that we were being duped? I figured I could Google their email address and see what was up. Well, there was nothing except the aforementioned cc.org housing listing. So I removed the "@hotmail.com" from the email address and Googled the handle instead. Surely if they were not on the level they would be smart enough to not use a handle that would lead to incriminating evidence. Well, I forgot that Republicans in general and Freepers specifically are a bunch of heartless, brainless fucking assholes.
Here is the Freeper homepage for our lovely guests in NYC. Member* since July 11, 2001.
*When I say "Member" I mean DICK.
Anyway, I write this as a warning to others out there who are depending on the kindness of strangers. (I've already notified counterconvention.org) My friend and I are well and truly fucked now, though it certainly would have been worse if we'd actually gone there expecting a place to stay.
I don't know what else to say other than that no Kossack would ever, ever do such a thing to a Freeper. (Oh yeah, he also went on about how much he "loves dailykos.")
2,000 miles from home and no place to stay?
Nice... you fucking assholes.
OK, two things.
One, the freepers are dicks for doing this. They think liberals are softheaded idiots. I doubt they'll be laughing tomorrow.
Second, these guys need at least a lead on somewhere to stay. I don't know what people are doing, but they need a place to stay. We can get them a place to work, but sleep, I don't know about.
And they wonder why we're gonna give the GOP a hard time?
MERRIMACK — A decorated member of the New Hampshire Air National Guard killed himself at his home Wednesday, just a day after returning from a six-month tour of duty in Iraq.
Tech. Sgt. Dave Guindon, 48, of Merrimack was a member of the 157th Air Refueling Wing based in Newington. In Iraq, he and four other members of the unit provided security to Army convoys. They returned Tuesday.
According to the state medical examiner’s office, Guindon died Wednesday afternoon of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
Maj. Gen. John E. Blair, who heads the New Hampshire National Guard, said even after having two days to absorb the shock, the news is baffling.
“The problem is trying to rationalize an irrational act. It’s hard to know how to address this thing, I’m so confused and baffled. I don’t know how to categorize it,” Blair said yesterday.
Blair was among those waiting at Manchester Airport Tuesday to welcome Guindon and his fellow airmen after a six-month deployment in Iraq.
“I spent some time speaking with him Tuesday, and I got quite the opposite impression. He particularly was talking to me about the pride they had in helping our transportation company,” Blair said.
....................
Guard officials praised Guindon’s service, saying his mission marked the first time Air National Guard members from New Hampshire participated in Army combat missions.
Last month Guindon and his team were awarded Army combat honors after carrying out more than 100 missions.
“Dave was an outstanding airman and a good friend to many in our wing family,” said Col. Richard Martial, the unit’s commander. “He continually demonstrated a willingness to embrace new challenges and always performed to the best of his abilities. We are all deeply saddened by his sudden death. Our hearts and prayers are with his wife and daughter during this very difficult time. We have lost a good man and a true patriot.”
Guindon joined the unit’s logistics readiness squadron in 1997 after having served 23 years in the Navy, Naval Reserve, Marine Corps Reserve, Air Force Reserve and New Hampshire Army National Guard.
“Trained by the Air Force as a vehicle operator, he was called upon to perform an Army combat mission in Iraq,” said Maj. Chris Hurled, the squadron’s commander. “In the face of these extraordinary circumstances, Dave displayed the courage and dedication of a true professional. His actions are a testament to his character and his love for his country.”
What can you say about this? Things are so bad that they're bringing in grief counselors to talk to returning vets.
And some (formerly) pro-war assholes want to argue the point.
Ok, fuck Atrios already. He's been relentless in hounding liberals who supported the war, and some gloating is fine, but enough's enough.
a bunch of liberal-to-moderate hawks considered support for the Iraq war to be a testosterone test - whether or not you had the cojones to kill a few people and send someone else's kids off to war for the good old USA.
I laid out my reasons for supporting the war, and I can still say, despite having been lied to, and despite the botched execution of the post-war occupation, that the reasons still seem good to me, and I'm not even convinced that the invasion won't turn out, on balance, to have been for the best.
Now, I might be (or might have been) wrong, but I certainly wasn't irrational, and there's no clear line from my position and my reasons to the base motives Atrios so blithely ascribes to "liberal hawks."
Hey, asshole. You were WRONG. Dead wrong. And now some family has to deal without a dad because he blew his brains out after the little adventure you advocated.
We told you it was going to be a disaster and now you want to run from it. You were wrong, 963 people are dead behind the Dauphin's colonial war. Now you're whining about being called on it? Fuck you. We told you what would happen, you didn't believe it. Now, you regret it. Sorry. Regrets don't mean shit.
This letter is in response to the new attacks on John Kerry's war record by a group calling itself the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth." As for most veterans of any war and as people who know me will testify, it is not easy for me to talk about my experiences in Vietnam. However, because of these new ads and, I understand, a new book recently published by an old Charles Colson "Enemies List" hit man, I feel compelled to speak out. Unfortunately, the veterans featured in these attacks are being used by extreme right wing Bush supporters to spread their lies and malign John Kerry.
I feel that most of these veterans who are joining this attack are against Kerry for what he did after he was home from the war than for what he did in the war. If they are against him for his stance against the Vietnam War, that certainly is their right, but to spread lies and malicious innuendos about his time on the rivers of Vietnam is not morally right and does a disservice not only to Kerry, but to all those who served and were wounded or died in that war. The people who are using these veterans for their own means obviously do not care about that. They did the same thing to Senator John McCain and Congressman Max Cleland in 2000 with no remorse or care for the consequences.
To me what is worse is that by their silence, the current administration has not, with any real meaning, disavowed itself or distanced itself in anyway from any of these scurrilous attacks, past or present. I feel that this truly shows the Bush administration for what they really are and ultimately, who is truly responsible for these attacks.
Since I happened to be along on one of the "excursions" where the boats that we were on were attacked and after which Lt. Kerry was cited for valor, I thought it appropriate to give my recollection of that event. This happened on March 13, 1969. I was assigned as Psychological Operation Officer for the Swift Boat group out of An Thoi, Vietnam, from January 1969 to October 1969. As such, I was on No. 43 boat, skippered by Don Droz who was later that year killed by enemy fire. We were second in line while exiting the river and going through the opening in a fish trap when a mine blew up under the No. 3 boat directly in front of us and we started taking small arms fire from the beach. Almost immediately, another mine went off somewhere behind us. All boats, except the one hit, immediately wheeled toward the beach that most of the fire came from (a tactic devised by Lt. Kerry, I later learned) and commenced showering the beaches with so much lead, that it could probably be now mined there. The noise was of course, deafening.
Three things that are forever pictured in my mind since that day over 30 years ago are: (1) The No. 3, 50-foot long, Swift boat getting huge, huge air; John Kerry thought it was about two feet. (He was farther away from it than I). I think it was at least four feet and probably closer to six feet; (2) All the boats turning left and letting loose at the same time like a deadly, choreographed dance and; (3) A few minutes later, John Kerry bending over his boat picking up one of the rangers that we were ferrying from out of the water. All the time we were taking small arms fire from the beach; although because of our fusillade into the jungle, I don't think it was very accurate, thank God. Anyone who doesn't think that we were being fired upon must have been on a different river.
The picture I have in my mind of Kerry bending over from his boat picking some hapless guy out of the river while all hell was breaking loose around us, is a picture based on fact and it cannot be disputed or changed. It's a piece of history drawn in my mind that cannot be redrawn. Sorry, "Swift Boats Veterans for the Truth"- that is the truth.
To say that John Kerry or any of us were on that river to intentionally collect Purple Hearts really does every soldier and sailor, past and present, a disservice. We were going up those rivers (with an ongoing casualty rate of 86 percent at the time) on the orders of the same people who approved of Kerry's medals and who are now joining in the attacks against Kerry. Unbelievable.
I would hope that the American public sees these evil extreme right wing attacks for what they really are and also pray that the veterans being used by these unpatriotic right wing extremist political operatives will divorce themselves immediately from them and speak to the real issues as to why they oppose John Kerry. I just don't understand how anyone can align themselves with those who intentionally and gleefully painted a decorated triple amputee (Max Cleland) from Vietnam as unpatriotic. I think that this is the most disastrous, un-American thing that can be done to our servicemen and women, especially now with another unending war going on. Your ends cannot possibly justify these means. Come on!
Jim Russell
Vietnam veteran,
USN (1966-71)
More witnesses.
They may not like Kerry, they may like him fine. But this is approaching slandering the dead and that is intolerable to many of these men.
You know, John O'Neill wouldn't be famous today if he didn't climb on the backs of his dead comrades to slander John Kerry. Kerry has plenty in his resume that has zero to do with Vietnam. Without his months as a Swift Boat commander, O'Neill would be just another corporate lawyer.
But he has used John Kerry to get on TV and make money, and by extension, all the men who died serving in Costal Division 11. He's managed to convince his former commanders to sully their own reputations and slander a man they regarded as a brave and resourceful officer 30 years ago. It's sad, but some people are scum
This story was reported by
Michele McPhee, David Epstein, Carrie Melago
Leslie Casimir, Celeste Katz, Melissa Grace
and Marie Becker
It was written by Becker
The Staten Island woman who claimed she was gang-raped at a Bronx firehouse is deeply troubled and can't keep her hands off firefighters and cops, her estranged husband said yesterday.
The husband, a former Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority officer, said his wife has struggled for years with bipolar disorder and has gone on and off different medicine.
But she snapped after the 2001 terror attack on the World Trade Center, he said.
"She went off the deep end and she started sleeping with every cop and firefighter in town," he told the Daily News.
.................
The 34-year-old mother of two dialed 911 Friday morning to report that she was raped by three firefighters after having consensual sex with Firefighter Tony DeLuca at Engine 75/Ladder 33 in Morris Heights, authorities said. She later recanted and said the sex was consensual, then flip-flopped and repeated the rape allegation.
DeLuca, 35, and another married firefighter, Christopher Waugh, 32, were suspended after they admitted having sexual relations with the woman, authorities said. A dozen other firefighters were assigned to desk duty as an investigation was launched.
No criminal charges have been filed.
The woman hasn't been able to identify two of the men she says she had sex with, sources said. She also told investigators she had sex with "hundreds" of firefighters, sources said.
.................
He said their marriage was never perfect but it rapidly went downhill after the terror attacks three years ago.
"She's claiming posttraumatic stress," he said of her 9/11 breakdown. "She didn't lose anyone. She didn't see it."
Regardless, the tragedy somehow triggered a downward spiral, he said.
"I guess the bipolar took over," he said.
Look, everyone knows there are cop groupies and firefighter groupies, some work for the city's news organs. That's no secret. But this is really sad. This woman went off the deep end and screwed everything that moved.
But that's almost besides the point.
I went to the Yankees game with my friend Dave last Friday. Now, he's a season ticket holder, and I'm always game to see the Yankees lose. Besides, Yankee is 20 minutes from my house, Shea nearly an hour and two trains away. Besides, his seats are almost behind home plate in the upper deck. Great seats and takes years of buying season tickets to get.
What I realized after seeing the Yankees get smoked 5-0 by the Angels, that beszides the fact that a $7 pint of beer and $4.75 hotdog is criminal when you can't eat outside the park, unless you know the Bronx, was that I hadn't been to a game since 9/11. Now, that's not a big deal, but I had usually gone to at least two Mets and three or four Yankees games a year. TV doesn't do baseball justice AT ALL. But the larger point is that 9/11 changed a lot of things. Not the smug way that Tucker Askew, Bush propegandist means, but in little ways, real ways. I know I haven't been because of the change in security which is now a couple of years old, which surprised me. Having to turn on cellphones and not bringing bags into the Stadium.
I didn't know many people who died in 9/11, but it never really goes away, not here. Now, ordinary people are more than willing to prank GOP delegates.
The Daily News half a neocon Zev Chaifets makes an interesting point today:
New Yorkers may have fun mistreating GOP delegates,but the backlash could hurt alot later
The other day I was the guest on a call-in radio show out of Macon, Ga. Mostly, I was asked about the reception delegates to the Republican convention can expect when they turn up here. Is it true, they wondered, that New Yorkers will greet them like worms in the Big Apple?
This isn't provincial paranoia. For weeks, people all across America have been hearing Manhattanites chortle about the dirty tricks they are planning for visiting Republicans.
Some of these tricks are funny, in a sophomoric way. The New Yorker published a misleading "map" for the delegates. A sweet-voiced lady told a WNYC reporter how she plans to give out fictitious directions ("Just take the H train to Esther Place") to confused conservatives.
.........................
For example, the group United for Peace and Justice - organizer of the big demonstration planned for the eve of the convention - has a Web site dedicated to "10 Things New Yorkers Can Do to Say No to the Bush Agenda During the RNC." Item 6: "Don't Rent Your Apartment to the Republicans."
Ted Rall, a celebrated progressive journalist, published an article on Wednesday that took things to the street. He called for a full-court press on delegates all over town.
"Republicans who venture outside the Garden deserve the abuse ordinary New Yorkers will likely inflict upon them," he wrote. "Republicans are neofascists now, and that's why New Yorkers good and true will be yelling at them to go back home."
..................
So go ahead and send Republican delegates all the way up to the Bronx to see the Statue of Liberty. Hang the "No Dogs or neofacists" sign on your apartment door. Greet the President and the congressional majority - who have pumped billions of dollars into New York since 9/11 - with an upraised middle finger (if they are even smart enough to understand what that means).
Yeah, they might not give us all the Homeland Defense funds we need and refuse to have serious port security. Yep. Or they might expect us to use our tax dollars to fund their programs. They already screwed us, now we screw back. Tom DeLay wanted to charter a cruise ship to use for the RNC. Show us some more love, Republicans.
Is he right? Sure, discouraging tourists, a New York hobby-stay, fine, visit, go back home, now-is financially self-defeating. We should be above this kind of thing. Really. But.....
Fourteen search and rescue dogs have died since their exposure to toxic rubble from the Sept. 11 terrorist attack - including eight from cancer, according to a study by the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. But researchers believe there is no connection between the deaths and the chemicals they were exposed to.
Despite the study's findings, some of the owners whose dogs have died still blame the toxic brew the dogs immersed themselves in during the hunt for survivors and remains.
"We can't find any link at this point that ties the 14 deaths to events of Sept. 11," said Dr. Cynthia Otto, the study's lead researcher. "Some have passed away, but the causes of death are no different than in the control group. That is good news."
Otto's team, which has been monitoring the health of 97 dogs who worked at Ground Zero, the Pentagon and the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, did find "significantly higher" antibodies in the search dogs in the first year after the terrorist attack.
And that's the fucking dogs. What about the firefighters and cops and contrsuction workers? Are they dropping dead too? Yeah, they just died of cancer. Dogs. Who were at Ground Zero.
Yeah, right.
They still don't know what caused Gulf War disease. One hack tried to say the men were crazy, until they found tons of squalone in their bodies. Yeah, crazy.
THIS is why people are pissed at Bush. The lies, the lies about the war, 9/11, they never seem to end with Bush and these people.
So if a few GOP delegates wind up naked in Bushwick, well, they shouldn't have abandoned us when we needed their support. They were all New York is American in September, but when the money was on the table, it was like "Fuck those New York Jews. Either we get money or no one does." Yeah. Like someone was going to blow up bumfuck Idaho. They squabbled over money after 3,000 people died. Unseemly and wrong, and they expect a warm greeting in New York? Not likely.
Dean Mosiman Wisconsin State Journal
August 22, 2004
Joe Lindstrom said he read the letter five times before he exhaled.
The call to serve in the Iraq war effort stunned the 23-year-old UW-Madison student.
One of the city's leading activists for social causes, Lindstrom opposes the Iraq war and will travel by bus to protest outside the Republican National Convention in New York City next week.
But Lindstrom also serves in the Wisconsin Army National Guard to help pay for his education and will dutifully accept his mission.
It's classic Lindstrom.
The imposing, 6-foot, 1-inch and 290-pound Lindstrom always has got a rush pounding people on a football field.
But he's devoted to helping the homeless, alcoholics, drug abusers and the mentally ill.
He's is a fundamentalist Christian who doesn't drink or believe in premarital sex, and he thinks drug use and abortion are wrong.
But his buddies and political soul mates are at the core of the liberal political party Progressive Dane, and he opposes the war on drugs and supports abortion rights.
"There's a difference between personal beliefs and the way you think a society should function," he said. "I'm a Christian but I don't think we should legislate that you must accept Jesus as your savior."
As a fundamentalist, football zealot and soldier, Lindstrom appears to personify conservative America, said his best friend, liberal Ald. Austin King, an atheist. "But he's the biggest flaming liberal I've ever seen."
Lindstrom balances his competing beliefs with a dry wit, like his take on Progressive Dane.
"Sometimes," he deadpanned, "I feel like the only enlisted, Christian fundamentalist in the organization."
This guy is not what some people expect in a liberal, but only the Republicans think military service, faith, and liberalism are contradictions. He grew up poor and wound up going to Wisconsin and doing social work. But to pay for college, well, the Guard did have that monthly check. He never thought it would end up with him going to Iraq. A lot of people never thought that.
But that comes to mind something about Rove's strategy. He thinks he can win if he drives enough evangelicals to the polling booth. Well, the problem with that is people like Joe Lindstrom. Not every fundamentalist agrees with Bush and his theocratic dogma. I would argue that enough don't that refighting the last campaign will lead to a Kerry landslide.
It's a policy based in some kind of weird thought that Bush represents some kind of silent majority. And he doesn't. Just because you are a fundamentalist does not mean Bush and his pro-rich agenda makes you want to vote for him, especially when you don't have decent health insurance and work two jobs. Most Americans are content to leave their faith at the church door and not let influence all of their beliefs.
A thought about the follow-up on the Swift Boat ads.
Today at a rally, John Edwards said, among other things, "This is a moment of truth for George W. Bush. We're going to see what kind of man he is and what kind of leader he is. ... We want to hear three words: Stop these ads."
Okay for today. But no more of this.
We already know what kind of a man he is. He's got a track record.
I'm tempted to say, if we didn't, why run against him? But of course political differences between good men are more than adequate justifications for a presidential contest -- consider Clinton v. Dole in 1996.
But that's not the case here. So, to be frank, this line has some element of disingenuousness.
Far more important, it's whining. Begging. At a minimum, it can come off or be characterized that way. And it sounds weak. This is about hitting back, not flaunting high-mindedness.
I think he's wrong, and here's why.
John Edwards was a teenager when all this happened. He doesn't know Vietnam, except as a bad story. But neither does George Bush, and he chose to do it that way.
But here's why I think he's wrong. Edwards is a decent man, a nice guy. He's not begging, he's asking for Bush to do the decent thing, the right thing. He's an expert in that. This is a man who asked juries to the right thing for little children and their families. He's tossing down a gauntlet, not so much to Bush, but his supporters. What he's saying is "here's the president, riding the back of an awful slander, and let's see if he's man enough to refute it."
This is the kind of thing men, especially NASCAR dads, take seriously. Bush is given the chance to "do the right thing" the thing you would raise your son to do, and he's not taking it. And here's the subtext: if he can't do this, what kind of man is he?
Yet another challenge to Bush's manhood and image of himself as a macho leader. Would John Wayne use a slander against a man's courage for personal gain? Why the idea is unthinkable. So if Bush, who seems to draw his idea of manhood from cowboy machismo, would use the slimiest rich boy frat house trick to impune an opponent, what kind of man he is?
It's so far from begging it's not funny. There's a challenge in those words, and the unspoken part is that "if he doesn't back down, we're gonna show you what kind of man he is. And here is exhibit one."
Lawyers don't tell, they show, and I'd bet that the show part of show and tell is going to come pretty soon.
Ok, I'm doing a guide for bloggers who plan to come to New York. Nothing fancy, just a few pages, which can be printed out. This is the section about getting online. If you any suggestions on what people need to know, comment or send me e-mail. I want to get it up ASAP, so....
Let's start with the basics for blogging while mobile:
A laptop
Wireless Card
Ethernet Cable,
Laptop sleeve
Digital camera
Phone Cord and dial up account
Emergency Disk Recovery tools
These are the absolute basics. If you're going to blog the protests, I would suggest that you leave the laptop at home, and use a notepad or at least transcribe the notes from paper in a safe location. A small digital camera will attract far less attention, and if you cup it in your hand, you should be able to get off a shot or two without drawing attraction. Make sure that when you get to a safe place that you download the shots to your machine every night and upload them. If you lose your camera or have to surrender the disk, your work will be safe. Also, many digital cameras allow you to take video. So, you can get stills or video and no one will notice. Camera phones have the same function. If you have one, it may be the best way to get shots from a protest. People simply won't look at them as a camera. Especially if you plan on attending delegate events. Many of these cameras can record sound as well. And in New York State, only one person, you, need know that someone is recording an event.
Also, not everyone has DSL or cable modems, so dial up may be your only option. Also, you'll need an ethernet cable, at least 6', better 10' to connect to your friend's DSL box or the connection in the hotel.
Using the library
The SIBL (The Science, Industry and Business library) has laptop docking stations in their basement for secure online use. As well as desktops available for a half hour for free. SIBL is located on 34th and Madison and open Tuesday-Saturday 10-8.
The Mid-Manhattan library has internet connected machines and is open 9-9 on Mon, Wed, Thursday, 11-8, Tuesday, 10-6 Friday, Saturday
Cybercafes
There are cybercafes and Kinkos which provide commercial access, but their fees can be upwards of $18 an hour.
The cheapest and easiest to reach Cybercafe is Easy Internet Cafe at 234 W. 42nd St., between Seventh and Eighth Ave., next to Madame Tussaud's wax museum (www.easyeverything.com).At $1 for 21min. of access, it's one of the city's better deals. Beware the machine where you buy your access code: it doesn't give change. Open daily 24hr. The best way to get online is to bring your own machine or go to the library or pay out the ass at Kinkos.
Repairs
For emergency repairs, you might want to overnight it to someplace and have them ship it back the next day. If not, for PC's it's a crap shoot. Here's one company close to the Garden http://www.nycomputers.com/Laptop-Repair-NY.html. With Macs, it's really simple: Tekserve If your Mac crashes beyond repair, Tekserve is where you go. Simple as that. If your machine is still under warranty, better to use it.
Buying supplies
For the basics, Staples sell everything from tool kits to blank media. Comp USA sells everything else. There are several small stores near the Garden which also sell everything from desktops to used laptops, in what is known as Koreatown. Walk along 33rd Street between 5th and Madison on the north side of the street. Another store is on 31st Street and Madison. Their prices are fair, but they're geared towards white box sales.
J&R Music World (on Park Row near City Hall) has both Mac and PC gear, and a lot of fairly new stuff. While spending more than a couple of hundred bucks there might be dicey, if you need anything related to electronics, that is the place to shop and get a fair price. You can get anything from flash memory MP3 players to porn DVD's. It is also close to Ground Zero and major train lines.
Cellphone Service
Verizon is the major provider in New York, but AT&T and T-Mobile are also strong. However, if you lose your phone or it doesn't work, don't rent. Get a Virgin Mobile phone instead. They start at $59 and can be your emergency phone. Once charged, the phones work well around the country and can be paid for with your credit or debit card. Phone rentals cost as much and require credit checks.
You can buy them at Virgin Record stores, Circuit City, Best Buy and other electronic stores. The activation process is quick and painless. It's the best pay as you go phone and while not cheap, will work well in an emergency.
Corporate Squatting: Another Way Wal-Mart Destroys the Competition
This could be a Wal-Mart near you Okay, I know that Wal-Mart bashing is a sort of cheap shot--it's just so shooting-fish-in-a-barrel easy to do--but when I read this article (courtesy of Utne Reader), even my jaw dropped.
Entitled "Wal-Mart, What a Bargain," this gem from the progressive magazine Terrain has the usual list of disgusting facts about the chain that everyone loves to hate--but then I read down to this little-known fact:
"Once Wal-Mart stifles its competition in a region, it consolidates its holdings by vacating many of its stores. To limit competitors in the future, the leases of these dark Wal-Marts prevent them from being used for retail. Other uses for these massive windowless structures are limited.
"As of this February, Wal-Mart possesses 371 dead stores. Half of these buildings have been vacant for at least two years, and 21 percent have not been used for at least five years. Over that time, the number of dead Wal-Marts has risen 38 percent.
"In 1999 California had only one dead Wal-Mart; now it has a dozen. Supercenters would increase that number. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart opens a new store every 42 hours."
Now, even die-hard conservatives would have trouble spouting "free market" rhetoric in the face of this gross abuse of real estate law. Indeed, this is the grossest form of corporate welfare. Wal-Mart has shown that it can and will break every law that it can unitl it's forced to stop. The basic theory seems to be that if you're big enough and do enough bad things, as opposed to only one or two, you can get away with all of your transgressions.
This is a form of corporate malignancy at its worst, and puts a fine point on any "cancer" analogies. A huge store comes into a community, destroys the surrounding businesses, and then deliberatley goes out of business itself--but makes sure that nothing else can flourish in the space that it once occupied. Guess if you don't pay your workers enough to actually shop at your store, and put everyone else in an area out of work, you can't pay your own bills in the long run.
I am beyond even trying to figure out the reason, other than sheer spite, for this business "strategy."
Jen's prediction: The next big Wal-Mart lawsuit will be by a civic group that wants to use a "dark" Wal-Mart for some kind of retail--such as a market or swap area.
Iraq as a team does not want Mr. Bush to use us for the presidential campaign," Sadir told SI.com through a translator, speaking calmly and directly. "He can find another way to advertise himself."
Ahmed Manajid, who played as a midfielder on Wednesday, had an even stronger response when asked about Bush's TV advertisement. "How will he meet his god having slaughtered so many men and women?" Manajid told me. "He has committed so many crimes."
"The ad simply talks about President Bush's optimism and how democracy has triumphed over terror," said Scott Stanzel, a spokesperson for Bush's campaign. "Twenty-five million people in Iraq are free as a result of the actions of the coalition."
To a man, members of the Iraqi Olympic delegation say they are glad that former Olympic committee head Uday Hussein, who was responsible for the serial torture of Iraqi athletes and was killed four months after the U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq in March 2003, is no longer in power.
But they also find it offensive that Bush is using Iraq for his own gain when they do not support his administration's actions. "My problems are not with the American people," says Iraqi soccer coach Adnan Hamad. "They are with what America has done in Iraq: destroy everything. The American army has killed so many people in Iraq. What is freedom when I go to the [national] stadium and there are shootings on the road?
ROTFLMAO.
Damn, Bush stinks of fear. Karl, Karl, Karl, running from Kerry now will not stop the bleeding. Americans weren't important enough to see in person over brush clearing. Now that Kerry is turning into you and attacking, you want to run? Pick up a copy of SI, they don't want you in Greece. No one does, certainly not the Greeks or Iraqis.
Oh yeah, the European press doesn't care about access. Their questions will be tough. Is Bush going to storm off the stage again?
Why I love the Union Square Greenmarket, and Local Produce in General
What I had for lunch when I got back Okay, so here I am, messing around for the first time with the new Blogger engine since Steve got out of the hospital. Yesterday, I had a half-day at the office, so I went down to the Union Square Greenmarket before hitting a music event at the Cooper-Hewitt uptown. I had totally forgotten how great the produce--especially that from Upstate New York--is this time of year. Unfortunatley, I wasn't in a position to schlepp tons of soft, sun-warmed produce to the Upper East Side and then back to Queens. So, I resolved to go to bed earlyish, and make a pilgrimage back to 14th Street this afternoon before the predicted rain came.
I'm glad that I did. Now, granted, much of this food is NOT cheap, but a lot of it is, and it is all very much worth it. And, while heirloom tomatos are three to five times as pricey as the cottony, woody mutants in the supermarket, but taste like another item altogether. Also, I really do feel that we need to preserve the genetic diversity of what we eat, and this is a great way to do it, eat healthfully, and subsidize small farmers.
What you see above is only part of what I munched on--and, I only had half of that tomato, which was about the size of a human brain or a curled-up chihuaha. Now, these tomatos were not supermarket material--I had to carry my bag ginergly, lest it burst before I got it home. This particular merchant had three huge carts of mixed varities, arranged in flats. Another vendor had his piled high, all together:
That tomato, by the way, was fruity and the color of nectarines--yellow, orange, and red--inside. The other half went into some fresh succotash, but more on that later. Here's what I was able to get for the forthcoming few days:
--way too many heriloom tomatos (the only item that caused sticker shock--I gotta say, they're a great idea but not everyday fare) --two bunches of carrots for a buck a bunch, bright yellow ones and deep purple ones. The purple ones are almost sweet, like pickled beets, while the yellow ones had an almost grassy herbish cast to them. --purple basil (seen on the giant tomato, above) --two different kinds of artesinal raw milk cheeses, a blue and a Dutch-style softer cheese, not unlike really good aged Edam --a small, overpriced, but very tasty box of fresh mixed herb and greens sprouts --a very reasonabley-priced bottle of hard cider from Ithaca, NY--and yes, they had samples--this type is a very dry type made from special cider apples.
What I want to get next time:
--mixed variety small eggplants from the same guy I got the tomatos from --honey or beeswax from the Ithaca apiary guy --more cheese --sweet pea sprouts--very sweet, but very perishable; gotta eat em the day you buy them almost --freerange-bred wild-variety ducks (mallards) --pheasant eggs, if they're not sold out again --gorgeous cultivated cut wildflowers --mushrooms from one of the mushroom vendors --another bottle of cider, maybe a different variety. --mixed sweet and hot peppers from this guy:
What I did with all the stuff I got:
Pigged out on half of that huge tomato; had one or two tiny heirloom tomatos of another variety, had that all with bread and tiny slivers of artesnial cheese and a little wine, munched on a carrot afterwards.
Then I cooked some succotach with some okra that I needed to use, a few more of the most over-ripe tomatos, and some corn. It's cooling now on the stove. For the next few days I'll munch on the carrots, and make tomatos with basil for cheese sandwiches.
In any event, the whole episode cost less than a meal at a good restaurant, and it was more fun and hands-on. It's one of New York's more subtle, less-exploited pleasures.
Share your greenmarket stories here!
--Jen
PS--and yes, this isn't a very serious post. But, I figured that it was time for me to tag something up, and why not another food post?
PPS--and yeah, didn't get my prosciutto either. Oh well.
PPPS--and yes, I took all of the pix myself, with my little cruddy 1.5 mp Kodak that I got as an "I'm sorry we f--d your order" gift from Dell, but that's another story....
Chicago Editor William Rood, (r) with John Kerry. Both were Swift Boat commanders in Vietnam. Rood won a Bronze Star in the same action John Kerry was awarded the Silver Star
By William B. Rood
Chicago Tribune
Published August 21, 2004
There were three swift boats on the river that day in Vietnam more than 35 years ago—three officers and 15 crew members. Only two of those officers remain to talk about what happened on February 28, 1969.
One is John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate who won a Silver Star for what happened on that date. I am the other.
For years, no one asked about those events. But now they are the focus of skirmishing in a presidential election with a group of swift boat veterans and others contending that Kerry didn't deserve the Silver Star for what he did on that day, or the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts he was awarded for other actions.
Many of us wanted to put it all behind us—the rivers, the ambushes, the killing. Ever since that time, I have refused all requests for interviews about Kerry's service—even those from reporters at the Chicago Tribune, where I work.
But Kerry's critics, armed with stories I know to be untrue, have charged that the accounts of what happened were overblown. The critics have taken pains to say they're not trying to cast doubts on the merit of what others did, but their version of events has splashed doubt on all of us. It's gotten harder and harder for those of us who were there to listen to accounts we know to be untrue, especially when they come from people who were not there.
Even though Kerry's own crew members have backed him, the attacks have continued, and in recent days Kerry has called me and others who were with him in those days, asking that we go public with our accounts.
I can't pretend those calls had no effect on me, but that is not why I am writing this. What matters most to me is that this is hurting crewmen who are not public figures and who deserved to be honored for what they did. My intent is to tell the story here and to never again talk publicly about it.
I was part of the operation that led to Kerry's Silver Star. I have no firsthand knowledge of the events that resulted in his winning the Purple Hearts or the Bronze Star.
But on Feb. 28, 1969, I was officer in charge of PCF-23, one of three swift boats—including Kerry's PCF-94 and Lt. j.g. Donald Droz's PCF-43—that carried Vietnamese regional and Popular Force troops and a Navy demolition team up the Dong Cung, a narrow tributary of the Bay Hap River, to conduct a sweep in the area.
The approach of the noisy 50-foot aluminum boats, each driven by two huge 12-cylinder diesels and loaded down with six crew members, troops and gear, was no secret.
Ambushes were a virtual certainty, and that day was no exception.
Instructions from Kerry
The difference was that Kerry, who had tactical command of that particular operation, had talked to Droz and me beforehand about not responding the way the boats usually did to an ambush.
We agreed that if we were not crippled by the initial volley and had a clear fix on the location of the ambush, we would turn directly into it, focusing the boats' twin .50-caliber machine guns on the attackers and beaching the boats. We told our crews about the plan.
The Viet Cong in the area had come to expect that the heavily loaded boats would lumber on past an ambush, firing at the entrenched attackers, beaching upstream and putting troops ashore to sweep back down on the ambush site. Often, they were long gone by the time the troops got there.
The first time we took fire—the usual rockets and automatic weapons—Kerry ordered a "turn 90" and the three boats roared in on the ambush. It worked. We routed the ambush, killing three of the attackers. The troops, led by an Army adviser, jumped off the boats and began a sweep, which killed another half dozen VC, wounded or captured others and found weapons, blast masks and other supplies used to stage ambushes.
Meanwhile, Kerry ordered our boat to head upstream with his, leaving Droz's boat at the first site.
It happened again, another ambush. And again, Kerry ordered the turn maneuver, and again it worked. As we headed for the riverbank, I remember seeing a loaded B-40 launcher pointed at the boats. It wasn't fired as two men jumped up from their spider holes.
We called Droz's boat up to assist us, and Kerry, followed by one member of his crew, jumped ashore and chased a VC behind a hooch—a thatched hut—maybe 15 yards inland from the ambush site. Some who were there that day recall the man being wounded as he ran. Neither I nor Jerry Leeds, our boat's leading petty officer with whom I've checked my recollection of all these events, recalls that, which is no surprise. Recollections of those who go through experiences like that frequently differ.
With our troops involved in the sweep of the first ambush site, Richard Lamberson, a member of my crew, and I also went ashore to search the area. I was checking out the inside of the hooch when I heard gunfire nearby.
Not long after that, Kerry returned, reporting that he had killed the man he chased behind the hooch. He also had picked up a loaded B-40 rocket launcher, which we took back to our base in An Thoi after the operation.
John O'Neill, author of a highly critical account of Kerry's Vietnam service, describes the man Kerry chased as a "teenager" in a "loincloth." I have no idea how old the gunner Kerry chased that day was, but both Leeds and I recall that he was a grown man, dressed in the kind of garb the VC usually wore.
The man Kerry chased was not the "lone" attacker at that site, as O'Neill suggests. There were others who fled. There was also firing from the tree line well behind the spider holes and at one point, from the opposite riverbank as well. It was not the work of just one attacker.
Our initial reports of the day's action caused an immediate response from our task force headquarters in Cam Ranh Bay.
...................
My Bronze Star citation, signed by Zumwalt, praised the charge tactic we used that day, saying the VC were "caught completely off guard."
There's at least one mistake in that citation. It incorrectly identifies the river where the main action occurred, a reminder that such documents were often done in haste and sometimes authored for their signers by staffers. It's a cautionary note for those trying to piece it all together. There's no final authority on something that happened so long ago—not the documents and not even the strained recollections of those of us who were there.
But I know that what some people are saying now is wrong. While they mean to hurt Kerry, what they're saying impugns others who are not in the public eye.
Men like Larry Lee, who was on our bow with an M-60 machine gun as we charged the riverbank, Kenneth Martin, who was in the .50-caliber gun tub atop our boat, and Benjamin Cueva, our engineman, who was at our aft gun mount suppressing the fire from the opposite bank.
Wayne Langhoffer and the other crewmen on Droz's boat went through even worse on April 12, 1969, when they saw Droz killed in a brutal ambush that left PCF-43 an abandoned pile of wreckage on the banks of the Duong Keo River. That was just a few months after the birth of his only child, Tracy.
The survivors of all these events are scattered across the country now.
Jerry Leeds lives in a tiny Kansas town where he built and sold a successful printing business. He owns a beautiful home with a lawn that sweeps to the edge of a small lake, which he also owns. Every year, flights of purple martins return to the stately birdhouses on the tall poles in his back yard.
Cueva, recently retired, has raised three daughters and is beloved by his neighbors for all the years he spent keeping their cars running. Lee is a senior computer programmer in Kentucky, and Lamberson finished a second military career in the Army.
With the debate over that long-ago day in February, they're all living that war another time.
WASHINGTON - Military records back John Kerry's account of his service in Vietnam and have backed at least two of his accusers into a corner.
Kerry this week was forced to defend himself against accusations by a group of fellow Navy veterans of Vietnam that he was a liar and a coward. The charges were made in a book and in an attack ad that polls show have chipped away at Kerry's standing with veterans in three critical states - West Virginia, Wisconsin and Ohio.
The long-ago Vietnam War has suddenly become a central issue in the presidential campaign. The attacks by the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have called into account Kerry's conduct during the war, when he volunteered for one of the most dangerous duties - the so-called Brown Water Navy, which regularly penetrated Viet Cong-controlled territory via the maze of waterways in the sodden Mekong Delta.
Although the 15 veterans featured in the attack ad all state "I served with John Kerry," none of them served on the same boat with him. Those who did, such as retired Chief Petty Officer Del Sandusky, 60, of Clearwater, Fla., praise Kerry for his leadership and credit him with keeping them alive to make it home.
"We are really upset at this stuff," Sandusky told Knight Ridder. "They are calling us all liars. They dishonor us and they dishonor all those who died over there. They are getting awfully desperate. Last year many of them were on board with us. Now they are telling outrageous lies."
Kerry has said that members of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth lied when they said he inflated his role in various combat actions in the Mekong Delta in 1968 and 1969 and had manipulated the award of three Purple Heart medals for wounds and Bronze and Silver Star medals for valor in combat.
Kerry released a stack of his military records - including after-action reports, citations for his medals, boat battle damage reports and his officer efficiency reports. These records - and the military records of at least one of his accusers - cast serious doubt on some of the more inflammatory charges raised by the group.
It didn't help the cause of the Swift Boat Veterans group that some of them, including their leader, retired Rear Adm. Roy Hoffman, were on the record praising Kerry for his service in Vietnam.
Kerry's commanding officer in Vietnam, George Elliott, said in an attack ad: "John Kerry has not been honest about what happened in Vietnam."
But during the Vietnam War, Elliott recommended Kerry for the Silver and Bronze Star medals for valor in combat and gave him the highest possible praise in his officer efficiency reports.
"In a combat environment often requiring independent, decisive action, LTjg Kerry was unsurpassed," Elliott wrote in 1969. He went on to rate Kerry as "calm, professional and highly courageous in the face of enemy fire."
Elliott added: "(Kerry) emerges as the acknowledged leader in his peer group." In 16 categories on Kerry's officer efficiency report, ranging from professional knowledge to moral courage to military bearing to reliability, Elliott gave Kerry the highest possible rating - "is not exceeded" - in 11 categories, and the second highest, "one of the top 10" in five other categories.
Elliott in 1996 supported Kerry in his re-election campaign for the Senate and during an appearance in Boston declared that Kerry had earned the Silver Star "for an act of courage."
...........
The Swift boat veterans also have cast doubt on Kerry's account that a second mine explosion damaged his boat, PCF-94, and blew an Army Special Forces officer, Jim Rassmann, overboard. Kerry's Bronze Star was awarded for his rescue of Rassmann, who credited Kerry with saving his life.
Among the records was a battle damage report filed the following day, March 14, which stated that PCF-94 had three windows blown out, radios and radar inoperable, the boat's auxiliary generator inoperable, screws curled and chipped, aft helm steerage control not working. The boat was judged incapable of executing patrols without repairs.
See, Joe Galloway is the only reporter to have won a Bronze Star, so he knows what it takes to win one. Galloway was covering the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley, with the command group of 1/7th Cav regiment, with Lt. Col Harold Moore. The story is chronicled in the book and movie We Were Soldiers. Gallooway helped saved soldiers burned in a friendly fire Napalm attack.
This is shameful. Men died serving on Swift Boats. For some reason, and some of these men once stood by Kerry, they have tried to stab them in the back, knowing their own words would ultimately be used against them. Kerry opposed the war, but did his duty as an officer. It is a shame they would let themselves be used by the coward Bush as an effort to discredit him.
They should have left his conduct in the war alone. John O'Neill is a shit carrier, ready to do anyone's dirty work to get on TV. How do they think the records would support their lies is beyond me.
Here's the difference between 2000 and 2004, the Internet.
In 2000, Al Gore was hammered by the press with no effective counter, Kerry does.
Bush bet more on the Swift Boat attack than I thought he would, given his weakness on the issue. And with no supporting doccumentary evidence, it seems a lot more desperate than you would think they would be in August. This seems like a month early for this kind of nonsense. But they can't really run on the issues and that's what they were planning to do. They were going to undercut kerry on national defense, then run on that, but that game plan died with the convention.
Now, with a week to go before their convention, they're facing serious FEC charges and a discredited debate.
AUGUST 20--The broadside against John Kerry's war record is particularly bizarre in light of what one of the leading bomb throwers had to say about the Democrat while both served in Vietnam. George Elliott, a key member of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth who appears in the anti-Kerry group's virulent TV commercial, recommended Kerry for a Bronze Star in 1969. In the below Navy report, Elliott, a lieutenant commander, recounts how Kerry was "highly courageous in the face of enemy fire" during a fight on the Bay Hap river in March 1969. During that skirmish, Elliott noted, Kerry dodged sniper fire to save a colleague who was knocked overboard when a mine detonated. In a March 1969 evaluation, Elliott reported that Kerry was involved in "several enemy initiated fire fights" and "exhibited all of the traits desired of an officer in a combat environment." A December 1969 fitness report was equally laudatory, with Elliott giving Kerry the highest possible grade available ("Is not exceeded") in most categories, including loyalty and moral courage. (5 pages)
Remember, unless he was lying in 1969, John Kerry was a fine, brave, resourceful naval officer back then.
Of course, these people could all be lying and wrote fiction for an officer they thought was unsuited to lead men in combat.
I don't think people get what the slam is in the title of O'Neill's slanderous book. Unfit for command is a damning, career ending phrase in the military. It may well proceed a court martial, that's how serious it is. Assuming that his commanders lived up to their oaths and duties as naval officers, one would think that if Kerry was "Unfit for Command", he would have been removed from duty immediately. Not given the Silver Star and Bronze Star.
The petition sheets to qualify Ralph Nader for the presidential ballot in Oregon contain so much fraud, forgery and duplicated signatures that it clearly demonstrates widespread corruption in the campaign, according to an investigation conducted by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
SEIU will release preliminary findings of its investigation at a news conference on Monday, August 16th at 10:30 AM. At that time, we will be calling on the Ralph Nader campaign to take immediate action to eliminate the fraud and to report all individuals who have violated state election laws while working on the campaign.
"We were absolutely astounded by what we have found so far," says SEIU International Vice-President Alice Dale. " The evidence of systemic fraud is clear and convincing and goes beyond anything we have seen before in Oregon. We call on the Ralph Nader for President campaign to immediately stop all fraudulent activities and turn over all evidence of fraud and forgery to the state Elections Division for investigation by the Attorney General."
You should see the whining.
Why would SEIU spend money on checking for fraud.
It's UnAmerican to do this.
Basically, the whining comes down to an argument of "it's not fair".
My disdainful reply, "grow the fuck up."
Voter fraud is serious business. I don't care who does it. It disenfranchises people, it gets unaqualified candidates on the ballot, and it is fundamentally unfair. Anyone who would defend Nader after this is insane.
This isn't mere Nader-bashing, one of my favorite hobbies since 2000. Ralph and his desperate GOP buddies are trying to subvert the democratic process.
It is a shame that Nader is either so in his head or so captivated by this bizarre quest to ruin his reputation and harm is supposed beliefs.
I have two words for you, Ralph: Ramsey Clark.
Is that where you want to end up? People took him seriously once, too.
Friday, August 20, 2004 Posted: 8:07 AM EDT (1207 GMT)
BRIELLE, New Jersey (AP) -- An 8-year-old girl who suffers from a rare digestive disorder and cannot eat wheat has had her first Holy Communion declared invalid because the wafer contained no wheat, violating Roman Catholic doctrine.
Now, Haley Waldman's mother is pushing the Diocese of Trenton and the Vatican to make an exception, saying the girl's condition should not exclude her from the sacrament, which commemorates the Last Supper of Jesus Christ before his crucifixion. The mother believes a rice Communion wafer would suffice.
"It's just not a viable option. How does it corrupt the tradition of the Last Supper? It's just rice versus wheat," said Elizabeth Pelly-Waldman.
Church doctrine holds that Communion wafers, like the bread served at the Last Supper, must have at least some unleavened wheat. Church leaders are reluctant to change anything about the sacrament.
"This is not an issue to be determined at the diocesan or parish level, but has already been decided for the Roman Catholic Church throughout the world by Vatican authority," Trenton Bishop John M. Smith said in a statement last week.
Haley was diagnosed with celiac sprue disease when she was 5. The disorder occurs in people with a genetic intolerance of gluten, a food protein contained in wheat and other grains.
When consumed by celiac sufferers, gluten damages the lining of the small intestine, blocking nutrient absorption and leading to vitamin deficiencies, bone-thinning and sometimes gastrointestinal cancer.
The diocese has told Haley's mother that the girl can receive a low-gluten wafer, or just drink wine at Communion, but that anything without gluten does not qualify. Pelly-Waldman rejected the offer, saying her child could be harmed by even a small amount of the substance.
Haley's Communion controversy isn't the first. In 2001, the family of a 5-year-old Massachusetts girl with the disease left the Catholic church after being denied permission to use a rice wafer.
Some Catholic churches allow no-gluten hosts, while others do not, said Elaine Monarch, executive director of the Celiac Disease Foundation, a California-based support group for sufferers.
"It is an undue hardship on a person who wants to practice their religion and needs to compromise their health to do so," Monarch said.
The church has similar rules for Communion wine. For alcoholics, the church allows a substitute for wine under some circumstances, however the drink must still be fermented from grapes and contain some alcohol. Grape juice is not a valid substitute.
Jen
All I can say is...wow. What would Jesus do here? And, I thought the whole idea of transubstantiation was that gross matter became divine anyway...so why does it matter if it's rice or wheat? I'm shocked.
See, we're both Protestants, well, Jen is half-Lutheran, I'm all Methodist, so we don't get it. I could care less about the wheat in a communion wafer, given that I take communion less than once a year, and only in protestant churches.
It just seems cruel. Especially when the local papers were filled with a story of a Catholic priest buggering a then-11 year old boy yseterday. Why would the church be so cruel to a small child? But then, it's not like they have kids.
Thursday, August 19, 2004 Posted: 10:00 PM EDT (0200 GMT)
DENVER, Colorado (Reuters) -- "Shoe bomber" Richard Reid has sued U.S. prison authorities for imposing harsh conditions including isolation and a lack of access to Arabic language religious books.
Reid is serving a life sentence for attempting to use explosives in his shoes to blow up an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami three months after the September 11 attacks.
Reid, a British citizen, wants a judge to order prison authorities to give him "the same rights and privileges as other inmates held in this prison."
Reid has been at the Administrative Maximum Facility in Colorado, popularly known as Supermax, since February 2003
Oh yeah, he wanted to kill himself and a planeload of people? He should be happy to be alive. After all, he's an admitted terrorist. What are they supposed to let him do, write Saudi Arabia for instuctions?
William Tecumseh Sherman, the father of modern strategic warfare
To understand campaign styles, I like to refer to my mental template of military history. Now, I usually disdain the use of history, military or otherwise, to describe how business operates. No, no matter how many books you read, you will never be George Patton or Genghis Khan or Jesus. Most of what happens in business is not relevant to religion or war.
Clauswitz said that war is politics by other means, well, the opposite is true as well. Politics is war by other means.
While, in the US, people aren't being shot in campaigns, how someone manages a campaign is close to how a general runs a battle, or a military campaign. This doesn't mean that you should wear a flight suit and strut around a carrier, but it does mean the way generals have waged war are an easy way to understand how a campaign is waged.
Let's start with Howard Dean.
People used the word insurgency with him, but they didn't really understand it. Dean was like a Hannibal or a Bodicea, a old time warrior who led from the front, sword swinging, bodies flying. The problem came when they had to form an army and it all fell apart quickly. They had the loyalty, but not the discipline. It was more rebellion than organized campaign, and while rebellions can win, they usually fall to organized, discipline forces.
Now, Bush/Cheney/Rove represent some of the darker forces of leadership, what comes to mind is the non-Lee leadership of the Confederacy. None are particularly great leaders, none are particularly skilled. Rove is a lot like his president's brother's namesake, JEB Stuart. Bright to a degree, driven, reckless, but when facing someone who has their act together, falters badly. Forgotten to most people, it was another reckless, but more disciplined calvary officer, George Armstrong Custer, who beat Stuart at the battle he was killed in , Yellow Tavern, in 1864. Cheney is John Bell Hood, stubborn, disliked, distrusted, but capable in some circumstances. Bush, of course, is Jefferson Davis, bumbling, playing from weakness, making bad decision after bad decision. There is no Lee here, no one leader respected, even worshiped by all. McCain is at best Joe Johnston, respected, but ignored.
On the other hand, Democratic candidates styles tend to represent the smarter end of the Union''s leadership.
Clinton was a puncher. He went after Bush Sr. all day, every day. His aides were punchers. They loved to get in the mix and kick ass. Clinton was at his best, like Grant, in a fight. While Grant was derided as a drunk, a great personal flaw, it never affected him in combat. He fixed his goals and he went for them.
Now Kerry, he's tough, tougher than anyone has a right to be with his education and background. He's not gonna back away from a fight, but he's gonna pick his ground and fight HIS battle. Clinton didn't much care for that. He was going to chase Bush Sr. down into hell if he had to. Pick the ground, and he'd overcome it.
Kerry, OTOH, is different. He's more like Sherman than Grant. He's tough as nails, people are intensely loyal to him, but it's different. Kerry's not going to send you on a fool's errand. He's gonna pick the ground, walk it over, get all the info he can, and then fight on his ground on his time table.
He's a big offensive guy. Whereas Clinton would fight every day, stay in contact, Kerry picks his shots like hammerblows and lands them with skill. He also lets his enemy spend themselves in pointless spoiling attacks. Kerry, like some generals, is either blessed or extremely lucky with the sense of good timing. He let the Swift Boat attack run up and peter out, knowing they didn't have the juice for a sustained offensive. After all, he knows these men and they know him. He knew what they would be capable of. And while the DNC and some bloggers, including myself, were staring at this poll which said Kerry was being dinged by the slanders of these folks, Kerry knew he would attack, when and how.
And instead of fighting the skirmishers like John O'Neill, a man willing to always carry other people's shit, he went striaght for Bush and Rove. Whereas Clinton wore down Bush Sr, Kerry wants to break W. He's not seeking just to win, he wants to crush him and the GOP. Which is why they're targeting Republicans likely to vote Kerry, going to Red states and getting big crowds. When Kerry comes after Bush, he comes after him, he's swinging hard.
Now, people want Kerry to jump on Bush for everything. That's not Kerry. That's Clinton, who was at his best in a brawl. Kerry can fight one, but he's not a brawler. It isn't his style or inclination. He likes to stand back, think, and then act. He's not inclined to rush. Clinton could see a weakness, change his plans and drive for it hell for leather. Kerry creates weaknesses. He sees what other people don't. Like Sherman saw the way to end the war was to control the breadbasket of the Confederacy. If they couldn't ship their food north, Lee's Army would go home or starve. Kerry sees that he can not only survive this attack, but turn it on Bush.
He can press Bush to do things that work to his advantage, like insult his wife or not defend his heroism. John Kerry doesn't need Bush to stick up for him, but Bush needs to. Bush's smug denials are going to turn on him.
I said days ago that the longer the Swift Boat story stayed out there, the better it was for Kerry. The Times has proven that right.
After weeks of taking fire over veterans' accusations that he had lied about his Vietnam service record to win medals and build a political career, Senator John Kerry shot back yesterday, calling those statements categorically false and branding the people behind them tools of the Bush campaign.
His decision to take on the group directly was a measure of how the group that calls itself Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has catapulted itself to the forefront of the presidential campaign. It has advanced its cause in a book, in a television advertisement and on cable news and talk radio shows, all in an attempt to discredit Mr. Kerry's war record, a pillar of his campaign.
How the group came into existence is a story of how veterans with longstanding anger about Mr. Kerry's antiwar statements in the early 1970's allied themselves with Texas Republicans.
Mr. Kerry called them "a front for the Bush campaign" - a charge the campaign denied.
A series of interviews and a review of documents show a web of connections to the Bush family, high-profile Texas political figures and President Bush's chief political aide, Karl Rove.
Records show that the group received the bulk of its initial financing from two men with ties to the president and his family - one a longtime political associate of Mr. Rove's, the other a trustee of the foundation for Mr. Bush's father's presidential library. A Texas publicist who once helped prepare Mr. Bush's father for his debate when he was running for vice president provided them with strategic advice. And the group's television commercial was produced by the same team that made the devastating ad mocking Michael S. Dukakis in an oversized tank helmet when he and Mr. Bush's father faced off in the 1988 presidential election.
The strategy the veterans devised would ultimately paint John Kerry the war hero as John Kerry the "baby killer" and the fabricator of the events that resulted in his war medals. But on close examination, the accounts of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth' prove to be riddled with inconsistencies. In many cases, material offered as proof by these veterans is undercut by official Navy records and the men's own statements.
Several of those now declaring Mr. Kerry "unfit" had lavished praise on him, some as recently as last year.
In an unpublished interview in March 2003 with Mr. Kerry's authorized biographer, Douglas Brinkley, provided by Mr. Brinkley to The New York Times, Roy F. Hoffmann, a retired rear admiral and a leader of the group, allowed that he had disagreed with Mr. Kerry's antiwar positions but said, "I am not going to say anything negative about him." He added, "He's a good man."
The story doesn't get any better, for Bush, that is. And it comes with this handy chart outlining the Swift Boat liars ties to the GOP.
What Kerry is willing to do is to accept some attacks and lose a little ground to control his agenda and attack in his way.
Of course, he also knew that the Times had this big story coming out, so the timing was perfect. He got the first day headlines and the reporters get the second day.
What Bush doesn't get is the nuclear level of blowback that could occur when people realize that the AWOL president tried to use a war hero's record against him, based in a series of lies and slanders. He's disgracing himself and his campaign by these tactics, and Kerry will let him continue to make what could be a fatal mistake. Like Hood, who was more concerned with Thomas's Army in Tennessee, while Sherman was making war impossible for the Confederacy, Bush isn't seeing the bigger picture. Denigrate wartime service you didn't perform, while people are dying in Iraq today. It will hurt Bush more than he could imagine.
This new Bush movie will stink like this compost heap
Triumph of the W. Trying to counter the success of Michael Moore, Karl Rove's men in Hollywood are rushing to release a pro-Bush epic, "The Big Picture." But are they violating federal campaign law?
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By Joe Conason
Aug. 20, 2004 | The next salvo in the cinematic campaign war of 2004 is "The Big Picture," a documentary film attacking John Kerry sponsored by David Bossie's Citizens United, the right-wing group that unsuccessfully sued to stop national advertising of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11." But Bossie's latest project could create legal problems for him and his organization -- in part because Lionel Chetwynd, the award-winning director, is working not only on the documentary but also on two shorter films to be screened at the Republican National Convention.
The director's simultaneous involvement in both the convention films and the Bossie documentary raises eyebrows among campaign finance experts, because Citizens United is a tax-exempt foundation legally restricted from "coordinating" its "independent" political broadcasts or messages with the Bush-Cheney campaign or the Republican National Committee.
....................
The mere hiring of Chetwynd to work on both projects may be enough to spark an official probe, says Trevor Potter, a former Federal Election Commission member. "Given the facts here, there's certainly enough for somebody to file a complaint with the FEC alleging impermissible contributions, expenditures or coordination," Potter said. "Whether an investigation would bear out that complaint, it would focus on whether there was coordination between the RNC and the filmmaker on the [Citizens United] film." But Potter, who practices election law in Washington, also pointed out that the FEC rules are sufficiently vague and permissive to allow a "common vendor" like Chetwynd to work for both the RNC and Citizens United under some circumstances.
An outline of the "The Big Picture" obtained by Salon suggests that the Citizens United documentary will offer not only a staunch defense of Bush but also an aggressive attack on Kerry, including a recitation of various smears having to do with his medal-winning military history put forward lately by the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The outline portrays the Democratic nominee as the preferred candidate of such "foreign leaders" as Osama bin Laden, Kim Jong Il and the Nicaraguan Sandinista Party, and as an "appeaser" of European powers deemed corrupt and hostile to U.S. interests -- especially France. Virtually all the world's other nations are solidly behind Bush and the war in Iraq, according to the outline, which labors to disprove allegations that Bush "lied" about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaida.
Chetwynd, widely known as one of the Bush administration's most fervent advocates in the movie industry, serves on the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities. He also happens to be a friend of political strategist Karl Rove. Last year, Chetwynd directed Showtime's "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis," a semi-fictionalized docudrama about the White House response to the terrorist attacks (described in the Washington Post by reviewer Tom Shales as "primitive propaganda" and "a reelection campaign movie"). Now, while he toils on the Citizens United documentary at a studio in North Hollywood, he is also preparing two films to be screened at the Republican National Convention, according to Daily Variety. The first is a "tribute" to the late President Ronald Reagan, for whom Chetwynd once served as a speechwriter. The second is a "toast to George W. Bush."
Can you smell the fear? Is it downrange yet? A cougar would be eating dinner if a deer stank this badly of fear.
Chetwynd's last movie sucked badly. It was a joke. Now, you take a hack, a known political thug, and no time, you have an utter political disaster in the making. Moore worked on F 9/11 for about 2 years. One mistake and he would have been sued. David Bossie is an idiot, but this seems like a horrible idea. Why?
First, Chetwynd is a hack who couldn't even make a movie about the Hanoi Hilton compelling. Second, Mrs. Kerry is a very rich woman. I would proceed with extreme care when attacking her husband. Bossie might be snowed under with lawyers for years to come and Chetwynd find his calls never get returned. Rove is desperate and losing and he knows it. This film may never find release. It will be hard to get in theaters in October, especially when Bossie faces the same hurdle that he tried to erect for Moore. Theaters tend to have lots of films in October
Second, October? Not soon enough. Bush is losing now. By October, it could be over except for the shouting. They needed something in the summer, when a serious film was only competing with teen junk and action films. Some slapped together propeganda film is months too late to have any impact. And it will be competing with World Police, a movie made be people known to be funny, the South Park crew. And it lampoons Bush harshly.
But like Kursk, we're now into high stakes gambles with uncertain outcomes.
One oif the things about politics is that it's a lot like warfare in how you do things. You can guess what an opponent will do and how you will react. Now, there are a bunch of nervous nellies, worried that Kerry might let this whole "controversy" nail him like creating the internet nailed Gore. Except Gore was ambushed by both the media and the Bush campaign and had no protection from the wurlitzer.
This is a very different year.
First, the dems are solidly behind Kerry, which means Bush can't peel them off, or have people sit on their hands. The general agreement is that Bush has to go.
Second, the Kerry campaign doesn't have Donna Brazile running it. Which means it isn't tone deaf. They can improvise, adapt and overcome.
What a lot of people don't get is that once you make an allegation about a presidential candidate, it's going to have a shelf life. The problem for Bush is that the people who went after McCain were talking about perception. Kerry has records on his side and if they say he didn't deserve his bronze star, well, their signatures are on the award recommendations. So as a tactic, it was eventually bound to falter. Clinton was hit with the rumor that he had a black baby. This flooded Democratic circles to the point where the campaign had to call people to deny it. It never made the papers, but it was a serious issue.
Kerry isn't facing anything like that. The Swift Boat people are going to face the kind of scrutiny that McCain's attackers never did. Because they're charges don't make sense. He wins the Silver Star, but didn't deserve a Bronze Star? He shot himself with a grenade? This attack could only last in a country where military service is voluntary. At the end of the day, Kerry will come off a lot better than Bush, because Bush's smug non-denials don't look right. Bush's words are hollow and unlike McCain and Gore, Kerry is not going to play that game. He keeps it up, Kerry will ask where Bush was in 1972 and why he didn't take his flight physical. And that's not a debate Bush wants to have.
But the fact is that the Bush campaign is desperate. Very desperate.
If they can't stop Kerry by September, and the RNC is looking like it will be four days of ugly, they won't stop him. The debates are too late. They have to create doubts about Kerry now. There will be massive protests. They're already starting and while the FBI is throwing the same scare tactics bullshit they did in Boston, but the city cops aren't biting. Why? Because they'll be in the streets with the anarchists, protesting. These weeks, leading up to the convention, are the critical ones for Bush. If he cannot ding Kerry with independents and swing voters now, he will not ding him. Their plan to swamp Kerry with ads over August, done. The 527's blocked that plan.
The GOP made a serious miscalculation in picking New York. The local papers buried the Sierra Club report, but you can bet it's topic number one in construction union halls and firehouses. Bush, intelligently at the time, wanted to use 9/11 to remind people of his leadership. Well, at the end of this month, people will be screaming betrayal, not leadership. While the FBI is worried about a few hundred anarchists, the real threat to the RNC wears badges. It's the sea of ordinary working people marching against the GOP which is the nightmare picture. Not some kids destroying Starbucks.
And let me give the anarchists credit, they're talking a lot of shit, knowing the cops have to react, but my feeling is that it's just talk. I think they're more likely to get arrested for civil disobediance, and it only takes a few folks at rush hour to tie the city up, than real violence. Why? Because the FBI is worried about it, but no one is being arrested for conspiracy. If they had hard evidence of planned violence, people would be in jail. The FBI doesn't usually wait for the terrorist act to arrest people.
My problem with anarchists is that while they are smart people, there doesn't seem to be a point beyond self-indulgent politics. There's a place for pranks and street theater in politics, but you get the feeling that these folks could have a much more serious effect if they were serious about things and challenged the system in ways which work. It's not always pretty, easy or fun, but it does work.
But the idea that the RNC protests are going to degenerate into Miami '72 is silly. Forget Chicago, the real thuggery was in Miami foru years later, while Nixon chortled. There isn't the kind of generational or ideological divide which could make that kind of violent reaction possible. And since the anarchists will be outnumbered, maybe 50 to 1 by other protesters, one can only admire how they get so much attention for doing so little.
But what I think will happen in New York is that a lot of people will see what Bush did to New York and why New Yorkers are so angry at him and his lackies. I think while Democrats worry about a replay of the past, Rove worries about the turnout of non-anarchists. Thousands of working and middle class New Yorkers denouncing Bush is his nightmare.
Why did the Boston protests fizzle? Because the backbone of protests, unions, were inside the Fleet Center. The anarchists are bright, but have zero influence outside their circle. They get a few thousand people, that's a lot. In New York, ANSWER, and the anarchists are minor players. The real players, the churches, the minority politicians, they have their events set and they have real influence. The local news can't blow them off or just show a few raggedy protesters and call it a day.
While Rove was thinking of thre pictures inside the hall, he didn't realize that a packed New York Street looks massive on TV, more than on Washington's wide streets. You get a crowd of 50,000 outside the Farley Post Office, it will look like the world has gathered there. The UFPJ march will go on for at least two hours past the Garden. It's amazing that Bloomberg wants to keep that march in the street, and not in the park, where the visual impact will be far less. Bloomberg sometimes confuses running the city with running a business. Keeping the grass safe will be a poor excuse when people are injured because they couldn't get into the park.
In the end, UFPJ will probably get their park permit because pressure will grow on the mayor and he doesn't have room to move.
Rove has reduced the campaign to a battle of pictures, when it's more than that. Their strategy is coming apart at the seems and they don't have much time to move the race.
Napoleon once said he prefered lucky generals to good ones. Bush has been very unlucky. Just today, the Iraqi soccer team not only denounced a new Bush campaign commercial, but their leading scorer said if he didn't play soccer, he'd be at the Imam ali shrine with Sadr.
Not lucky.
And it gets worse. Errol Morris, famous for The Thin Blue Line, is making a series of commercials which will resemble his switch ads for Apple. While that campaign got more attention than sales, his Republican switch ads are targeted for swing voters in swing states and the early word is that they seem to be really effective.
The clock is really running on Bush, and if his message is blunted by massive protests dominating the news, he doesn't have much more time to change the dynamics of the race. Even Osama's capture may only give him a limited bounce with oil prices set to reach $50 or more in the fall, and that doesn't even factor in heating oil prices, on top of gas prices.
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