Raw Story Breaks One

Betty Ford Photo Downloaded from The Library of Congress

Cindy McCain Ain't No Betty

First let me say, I have a personal connection with Betty Ford. Before I sobered up I was kicked out of her treatment center. I had it coming. They were right, I was disruptive and not at all interested in living my life clean and sober. They did the only thing that they could do to protect the integrity of their program and the fragile sobriety of their other patients. They kicked my ass out.

I have attended, and still attend, meetings at a little AA club in north Palm Springs that was donated by the Fords. I have gone to meetings with Betty. She was a great member of AA. She helped a lot of folks while she was alive, and through her foundation, and the clinic that bears her name, still continues to help people live lives free of the scourge of alcohol and drug addiction.

I loves me some Betty. When I was approaching five years of sobriety, Betty herself invited me to speak at the clinic. I reminded her that a part of my story was getting kicked out of her clinic. She said that was one of her favorite parts of the tale. Well, that and some of the wilder stories of being loaded on tour. . .


Nick Juliano at Raw Story has an interview with Tom Gosinski, who was at the heart of the squashed and ignored scandal that surrounded Cindy McCain's "charity" which was being used, along with forged prescriptions and dummy names, to supply Mrs. McCain with a steady flow of prescription painkillers.

John McCain, as a U.S. Senator, used his influence to get Cindy McCain, a prescription drug abuser, a diplomatic passport, thereby avoiding any messy searches of her luggage by Customs. John McCain, as a U.S. Senator, used his influence to hamstring the DEA investigation that, had it followed its normal course could have resulted in mandatory sentences, which Senator McCain supports, of close to seven years in prison.

John McCain as a husband, and loved one of a junkie, enabled, abetted, and covered up his wife's drug habit and behaviors.

When Betty's own behavior grew to be unignorable, Betty went totally public. She told on herself, which, by the way, is the essence of AA. Telling on yourself. Knowing who you are and what you have done, then, resolving to live your life in a better way is the heart of the program. Once she had changed herself and her own life, Betty devoted a considerable amount of time and a not inconsiderable amount of money to helping others with the same problem find their own healing and recovery.

John and Cindy McCain just wanted the shit to go away.

Speaking from my own experience, the shit never goes away. I used heroin. That shit never quits talking to you. I need to spend a certain amount of time out of every single fucking day making sure that I do not go back into that life and that world. I'm not afraid that using drugs again would kill me. I'm not the slightest bit afraid to die. I'm afraid that it wouldn't kill me and I'd have to go back to that shabby and tawdry lifestyle that is the lot of the addicted.

My personal experience with the process of recovery leads me to believe that by trying to ignore the problem and wish it away Cindy McCain is either still loaded or worse, still very sick without any medicine.

The behavior of the McCains, especially when set up beside the open, honest, and noble good works of the Fords is a perfect window on what kinds of behavior to expect from a First Family bearing the name McCain.

Like they say in the movies Go Read The Whole Thing.

On a personal note:

This afternoon and evening I will be at our local mosque. Five years ago on 9/11 some racist assholes decided to "honor the dead heroes" by vandalizing the mosque. Since then, every year on this day, folks of all faiths, and some of us with no faith at all gather to be at this place. Those who pray, pray. Those who play, like me, play a set of music.

Mostly we are simply there, with our eyes and hearts open, and a plate full of stuffed grape leaves.

For any of you who lost friends and family in the tragedy seven years ago, my thoughts are with you. Today I am standing with my Muslim friends protecting them from the self proclaimed "real americans." My set list includes Palestrina, Bach, Mozart and the immortal Turlogh O'Carolan, maybe even some Bob Marley. (No Woman, No Cry is a beautiful harp song)

UPDATE:

Matt Stoller at Open Left is all over this one too.

There's more...

RNC uses 911 Imagery. Olbermann Apologizes

Keith Olbermann Calls Shame On the RNC

The only line the RNC did not cross last night is Godwin's Law.

Showing direct graphic 9/11 imagery for political gain. Fucking Republicans.

What's next? Headless corpses in the street? People jumping to their death?

They already showed a FAKE military funeral as convention background -- stock footage from Getty Images without a real soldier in it, but boy did it make those Republican eyes swell with tears.

Total cost? Under $5 grand for world-wide commercial use in all formats for ten years. Cheap.

No need to deal with all the ugly mess of an ACTUAL military death, where you know, real grief and shit might fuck up your camera shot, or the pure raw emotion of it all might make the delegates re-think their position even for a moment.

Paying under $5K is CHEAP at that price.

But tonight... tonight those fucks showed 9/11 imagery.

Swear to the Gods, if there is one truth the last eight years have taught me it is this... EVERY FUCKING TIME I think there truly is no lower for George W. Bush and the Republican Party to go, they go lower.

Boston Globe

The death of a taboo
Posted by Sasha Issenberg September 4, 2008 08:41 PM

ST. PAUL -- One of the most enduring taboos in American politics, the airing of graphic images from the September 11 attacks in a partisan context, died today. It was nearly seven years old.

The informal prohibition, which had been occasionally threatened by political ads in recent years, was pronounced dead at approximately 7:40 CST, when a video aired before delegates at the Republican National Convention included slow-motion footage of a plane striking the World Trade Center, the towers' subsequent collapse, and smoke emerging from the Pentagon.

The September 11 precedent was one of the few surviving campaign-season taboos. It is survived by direct comparisons of one's opponents to Hitler.

There is that which is good, that which is alive, that which is moral and that which is right.

The Republican Party is the enemy of aliveness, and with no irony, the Republican Party is the enemy of truth, justice, and the America Way, of 232 years of generally forward progress by Americans since the Declaration of Independence.

We are going to win in November.

This doesn't let anyone off the hook from working their ass off. Working our asses off is how we're going to win. However this kind of bullshit is too obvious, too mean, and doesn't appeal to enough people.

I'd like to say there's always room in the sewer for more shit, but in the last eight years we've seen that with bad management, infrastructure thought reliable can fail when run way past capacity by incompetents.

Again, part of why we're going to win.

They really ran 9/11 imagery at a political convention. *shakes head* What fuckheads. They have NOTHING left.

Only fear. And trying to divide people.

Back to work.

Keep breathing, and get back to work.

Two months and counting. Goodnight.

H/T The wonderful Diane -- GREATSCAT!

There's more...

And now for my next impersonation...Jesse Owens!

“Run, run Rudolph! Got to cover your be-hind!”

"Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you."—Satchel Paige










“The past lies upon the present like a giant's dead body”—Nathaniel Hawthorne (House of the Seven Gables)









MR. BURNS: Quick Smithers. Bring the mind eraser device!

SMITHERS:You mean the revolver, sir?

MR. BURNS: Precisely.
—C. Montgomery Burns






I was tempted to use a “Have You Seen Me?” milk carton graphic with this post. Why? Because the post's subject has been hiding out for almost a week—a helluva thing when you consider that the Iowa caucuses said subject's participating in are about a month away.

But when you've had as bad a week as Rudolph W. (“And the 'W' is for 'What the fuck hit me?'”) Giuliani, hide out like an off-his-meds, late-60's Brian Wilson is what you'd better do. Lest the press keep dogging your steps, asking about...well, you signing off on the NYPD's secretly walking your mistress's dog on the city's dime and lying about it.

Ohhhhh, what an awful week. Just an Off-Broadway, avant-garde production of “Murder On The Orient Express” kind of week for dear, sweet (like an almond-scented drink) Rudy. There, in that pivotal scene at the end, the train's riders walk one by one into the hushed berth...

NYC Comptroller William Thompson:

Questions just seemed to mount Thursday about the way Giuliani or his aides handled the security bills. Auditors for City Comptroller William Thompson uncovered the problems in 2001, and he says Giuliani's men slammed the door shut on them.

“"The Giuliani administration just refused to provide answers,” Thompson said.

“Shluk!”, goes the bent, serrated bread knife.


Former New York Mayors Ed Koch and David Dinkins:

Joe Lhota, a deputy mayor in Giuliani's City Hall, told the Daily News Wednesday night that the administration's practice of allocating security expenses to small city offices that had nothing to do with mayoral protection has "gone on for years" and "predates Giuliani."

When told budget officials from the administrations of Ed Koch and David Dinkins said they did no such thing, Lhota caved Thursday, "I'm going to reverse myself on that.

“Shluk!”, goes the rusty steak knife with the busted tip.


New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly:

"I don't recall anybody, any statements about delay," Kelly told reporters.

He said all bills for the police details for Dinkins and now for Mayor Mike Bloomberg are handled directly "through the police department."

“Shluk!”, is the sound as paring knife makes when shoved in past the hilt...


Former Giuliani appointee NYC Procurement Policy Board head, Brendan Sexton:

“The cover-up of this and the explanations for it have been so disingenuous,”

-----------------------------

“He didn't want anybody to know what he was doing. That's the truth. I don't care about his personal life - it's not shocking to me that he wanted to visit his girlfriend...”
-----------------------------
“The part that's disturbing to me is that my organization or any government organization could be used to conceal from the public how their money was being spent.”

“Shluk! Shluk!”, goes the spork melted into a crude, jailhouse shiv.


And the present (unmarried) NYC Mayor's girlfriend, Diana Taylor:

Taylor, 52, takes the bus every day to her midtown office and rides the subway to business appointments. In the six years Taylor and Bloomberg have lived together, she said she has never had reason to want or need personal NYPD security.

“I don't have security in Bogota or Nairobi or Moscow when I travel there on business, why would I need security in the safest city in the world?” Taylor told the Daily News yesterday.

“Shl-u-u-u-u-u-uk!”, is the sound a melon-baller makes as it plunges into a sucking wound.


When the high point of your week as a politician is the battle between names for your sex/money/corrution scandal, it has been a rough seven days. (Driving Miss Judi, The Shag Fund, Fornigate, America's Playa, and 69/11? Sex ON The City won out.)

And when the low point is your poll numbers cratering to where a Keane-eyed, bible-thumping, ethically-compromised crazy has eliminated your double-digit lead to pull even with you...well, the word abysmal comes to mind.

You would think that maybe with Huckabee's newfound limelight—and the scrutiny it's brought, exposing partisanship-fueled pardons of serial rapists who go out and rape again, and kill on his watch, and Mitt Romney's gardeners becoming a campaign issue along with his declaration of “faith”, and diss of non-faith (¡Azaleas, Si! ¡Atheism, NO!), that somehow Giuilani could manage to sneak his way back to a semblance of respectability by flying through all of that “chaff”

You'd be as wrong as a supermarket selling holiday hams as “Delicious For Chanukah”.

The bubblin' crude keeps a' comin up through the ground. (Via Attaturk at Atrios)

Judith Nathan got security earlier
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS—Friday, December 7th 2007, 4:00 AM

Judith Nathan got taxpayer-funded chauffeur services from the NYPD earlier than previously disclosed—even before her affair with then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani was revealed, witnesses and sources tell the Daily News...

Thursday, Giuliani aides changed their story. They said Nathan had received previously undisclosed "threats" earlier in 2000, and that protection was provided at those times.

They refused to provide dates, describe the nature of the threats or confirm—as witnesses and a law enforcement source now contend - that the protection began before she was publicly identified as the married mayor's girlfriend in May 2000.

Blub-blub-a'-blub!

It's juicy! It's got sizzle! And it's kicking him in his ass, for as Trapper John said over at Kos's place:

“Two things capture the American attention like no other: sex and money. Only scandals involving sex or money garner any serious public interest. Even then, a money scandal without sex leads most Americans to yawn. And dogged persistence can outlast most sex scandals (see Vitter, David). But when you combine the two -- when you add adultery to misappropriation of taxpayer money -- magical things happen. It's like that beautiful chemical reaction when heat, yeast, and sugar meet. There's an unusual smell, then lots of hot air, and then everything blows up real big.”

Damn straight. But the world's a funny place. The indestructible Achilles was felled by an arrow to his vulnerable heel. The nearly untouchable Al Capone went down on tax evasion charges. And Rudy could well be a'-swirlin' down Le Crappéur himself thanks to this petty thievery and cover-up, but...

There's a bigger story.

Salon's Joe Conason pointed this out when he said last week,

...“When the nation's news executives decided which of two highly embarrassing Giuliani stories to feature, nearly all of them made the wrong choice. While they lavished enormous attention upon a Politico story dealing with adultery and bureaucracy, they should be devoting at least as much time to yet another in the long series of Wayne Barrett scoops in the Village Voice, because this one involves business and terrorism.”

And what was that story? It's the one that forced him to quietly—rat-piss-on-cotton-in-a-vacuum-room-quietly—step down as chairman of the shady-fuck “firm” that bears his name?

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani has stepped down as head of his consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, after months of refusing to disclose the firm's clients or the role he played.

--------------------------------

While insisting the firm's client list was confidential, Giuliani has noted the media have named a number of his clients.

Published reports have identified one client as the Persian Gulf country of Qatar, which was accused of sheltering suspected September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, although that country today it is a U.S. ally.

Keith Olbermann picked up the ball on the story the day “Sex On The City” broke—reporting on the tawdry fun, and the more serious story, with it's negative September 11th implications for the supposedly “impervious on 9-11” Giuliani.

There are countless what ifs about 9/11, hundreds of events, maybe thousands of lives, any one of which if just altered slightly might have preempted the attacks. But this one involves a man identified tonight as a close business associate of Mr. Giuliani‘s. A man accused of having harbored in, then helped 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheik Mohammed escape from the Gulf nation of Qatar hours before the arrest that would have been affected by an FBI team.

The war on terror candidate looking tonight, a lot more like the ties to terror candidate. Wayne Barrett of the “Village Voice” reporting that Mr. Giuliani‘s extensive business contracts with the nation of Qatar tie him directly to the man who kept Khalid Sheik Mohammed out of American hands. He is Abdullah Bin Khalid Al-Thani, he was Qatar‘s Islamic Affairs Minister at the time and its Interior Minister since 2001 when the FBI was hours away from closing in on Khalid Sheik Mohammed in 1996, Al-Thani who was harboring the suspect is widely accused of tipping him off to the FBI agent‘s imminent arrival as well as giving him 20 blank passports. Former CIA case officer, Robert Bayer says he did so with the blessing and probably the direct orders of this man, the Emir of Qatar.

You may remember, Sheik Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani from his trip to New York City during the 9/11 aftermath, offering to make a $3 million donation, most of it to go to the families of the victims. Mayor Giuliani more than glad to take that check and to serve as Emir‘s personal tour guide during his visit and to be his fellow guest on the Larry King Show on CNN. That, it seems, was only the beginning of their alliance. Years after his mayoralty had ended, Mr. Giuliani was to begin a far more lucrative partisanship with the government of Qatar, specifically with the Interior Ministry run by, you guessed it, the fellow member of Qatar‘s royal family, Abdullah Al-Thani.

If letting the 9/11 mastermind go were not bad enough for that man, Al-Thani is also said to have hosted Osama Bin Laden on two separate visits to his farm. It is with this terrorist aider and abettor that Mr. Giuliani‘s security firm, a subsidiary of Giuliani Partners has worked on undisclosed number of contracts, reports the “Village Voice,” some of which Giuliani himself and his employees openly have acknowledged. Mr. Giuliani telling a South African newspaper in June 2006, that he, quote, “Recently helped Qatar to transform Doha in advanced of the Asian Games, an Olympic style competition that his firm oversaw for last December.

--------------------------------

OLBERMANN: Even if Rudy Giuliani did not know about the central role that Qatar has played as a facilitator of terrorism, if he didn‘t know that in October of 2001 when he hosted the Emir and was his, you know, tour guide, television pal, was there enough evidence making the case against Qatar by the time the Giuliani Partners started doing business with that country in 2005?

BARRETT: Keith, he would have had to have been deaf, dumb, and blind not to know it because he then in 2005 had running his security unit, two of the FBI agents who had been pursuing the Qatar relationship. In fact, Ali Sulfan (ph) who was the lead FBI investigator in both the Khobar towers case and the Afghan - no excuse me, in the Cole case, he was the lead investigator and the investigation of the embassy bombings in Africa, he was the lead investigator and Qatar. I have a hard time with the pronunciation of it but a Qatar charitable society that the Emir directed the funding of this—they participated directly in the funding of the bombing in—of the African Embassy. So, if he just looked around and listened to his own staff he would have known.

“Sex On The City” is merely the smoke—choking, acrid smoke at that, but smoke nonetheless. This client list for his firm is the fire. He fought the release of their names and affiliations, but what with all the newfound super-scrutiny (The Daily News' relentless digging out the damning, earlier-than-stated police/chauffeuring is a big, flashing alarm to the Giuliani camp that “Gold Fever” has struck the press corps.) into his dealings, for him to ditch the company means he's running scared.

That client list is slowly being unearthed, and my guess is that his firm was starting to get calls from reporters for confirmation of this and that—with this and that being damaging info about the nature and provenance of those clients. The kinds of things that could freeze the lifeboats to their moorings as the S.S. Rudiana takes on water from an hull-ripping iceberg hit.

Run...Run from your past, Rudy! Quick as you can in your orthopedic shoes—run,—if I may paraphrase gen. George S. Patton—you malevolent son-of-a-bitch!

But remember what former heavyweight champion Joe Louis said...





“You can run...but you can't hide.”













And speaking of “run”, the buttah from all this...popcorn is runnin' all over the floor!

There's more...

“Our” Friends

Whither(ed?) Moral Authority?

This past weekend, we saw Presidential candidate Barack Obama get rightfully steamed at a wingnut disruptor at one of his Iowa “Town Hall” meetings. The grumpy agent-provacateur/windbag tried to hammer Obama with a 28-cent, Russert-esque conflating of two very different issues—tying freeper fanaticism over border security to the war on terror and the 9-11 attacks.

The normally unflappable Obama became visibly agitated at the incessant needling and outright misinformation the admitted opposition supporter breathlessly kept yammering about.

“I want to know specifically what you would do to protect this country from terrorism,” said the woman, who later introduced herself as Jane Svoboda, 64. “And are you going to close the borders and get rid of the illegal immigrants?”

“Those are two separate questions,” Mr. Obama said.

“Probably,” she replied. “Maybe three or four.”

So Mr. Obama launched into a long answer, arguing the United States took its eye off the biggest terrorist threat by waging war in Iraq and allowing Osama bin Laden’s network to prosper in Afghanistan. He said the United States must forcefully pursue radical Islamic terrorists who are intent on launching an attack on America, but also work to build goodwill around the world to change minds of those who revile the United States.

The answer seemed to not sit well with Ms. Svoboda, who interrupted Mr. Obama. Later, she wondered whether Democrats were as equipped to protect America as Republicans.

“This is a part of the world that I’ve studied deeply,” Mr. Obama said. “This is part of the misinformation that’s been coming out of this administration.”

As they exchange continued, the volume and intensity increased in Mr. Obama’s voice.

“My job as commander-in-chief is to keep the American people safe,” he declared. “I’ve got a 9-year-old daughter and a 6-year-old daughter. Don’t think that I care any less than Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney about making sure that my daughters don’t get blown up.”

Now, this little exchange in itself is I guess a sick “fun” for those who sit around salivating about how “life is a campaign”, (it isn't...it's just fucking life, and those navel-gazing obsessives really need to hear that thrown back in their blotchy, barking faces) but it speaks to a bigger issue I think, about America itself. About our grossly misplaced priorities insofar as foreign policy, and why some of us feel the need to apologize, or flat out repudiate the way our government conducts itself as those now besieged American bridge players did.

“Hey, wait! It was just some batty wingnut sniping at Obama! Where do you get all that geopolitical shit from?”

Well...let's take a look at what Obama said, again:

He said “the United States must forcefully pursue radical Islamic terrorists who are intent on launching an attack on America...”

--------------------------------------

“This is a part of the world that I’ve studied deeply,” Mr. Obama said. “This is part of the misinformation that’s been coming out of this administration.”

And then take a look at this disturbing piece of news breaking big over the last 72 hours or so—via Jessica at Feministing:

Rape victim in Saudi Arabia sentenced to 200 lashes

Let's file this under the what-the-fuckety-fuck-I'm-going-to-cry files:

A court in the ultra-conservative kingdom of Saudi Arabia is punishing a female victim of gang rape with 200 lashes and six months in jail, a newspaper reported on Thursday.

The 19-year-old woman -- whose six armed attackers have been sentenced to jail terms -- was initially ordered to undergo 90 lashes for “being in the car of an unrelated male at the time of the rape,” the Arab News reported. (Emphasis mine)

There's no word fit to describe the ugliness of that story. None whatsoever.

Now...bear with me as I ask you to look again at the trenchant little snapshot from the recent past that graces the top of this post—a favorite of Steve's as it speaks volumes—yet again:



If you don't quite remember who that gowned and burnoosed fellow on the right (quite appropriately) is, who Bush appears to be tenderly escorting to the Georgetown Park Mall for a TCBY date, it's Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia—a top dog in his oil-soaked country, America's biggest oil supplier, and close family friend of the Bushes—the elder and the lesser.

Now let's go back to Obama's frustration with that haranguer of his, because the above picture perfectly encapsulates what he was saying in response to her. People like that mock-high dudgeoned questioner have no clue—either via ignorance or simply willfully ignoring the facts at hand as to thing the first about a real Goddamned “war on terror”. Wingnuts scream about the terror threat, and how Iraq is so key to it, but the truth is as Obama said to the woman during their exchange: Saddam Hussein and Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11.

It's a simple statement I myself have had to say to a wide variety of frothing GOP crazies once they get their inner Wurlitzer cranked up—although I hit them with this super-salient, extra bit of detail.

Of the 19 9-11 attackers, 14 OF THEM CAME FROM SAUDI ARABIA—the land of those government-funded religious madrasas—cultish, hyper-fundamentalist “Islamic” schools where hatred of all things Western is taught alongside a brass-knuckled, highly-oppressive version of al Islam.

Why did our government put NO pressure to bear on the land where the vast majority—3/4 of the 9-11 attackers hailed from, and were taught their hate at government-funded academies?

In the back—can we get that slide again, please?




Thanks!

Clowns like that questioner, and this present government she backs haven't the right to a sliver of self-righteousness or a dollop of dudgeon about a Goddamned thing involving terror, and consequently not a shred of moral authority on anything worth a tinker's damn when they look the other way on the documented coziness of Bush, Big Oil and those backward, oppressive regimes that so nakedly mean us no good.

They do not get to cry about “spreading democracy” when they go on about the oh-so-cool, purple-fingered “freedom babes” in Iraq and Afghanistan, but flat-out ignore the human rights debacle that is the case of the aforementioned Saudi woman, so abused multiple times—first by her attackers, and then again by the “Friends of Abdullah and Bandar”, and by extension—Bush, in the Saudi “judiciary”.

The people who who financed the schools where the 9-11 attackers double-majored in Backwardness and Hate, and the people who back the Saudi “justice” system that has so grievously punished this woman—a victim— are one and the same.

These are “our friends”. A star chamber of spoiled, inbred petro-princes who according to Bush and his hardcore minions, like Obama's weekend annoyer (she of the “24%”)—can do no wrong. The right's level of understanding about what we're dealing with over there goes no further than what they can glean from a scratchy 45 of “Ahab the Arab” and TNT's reruns of “The Mummy Returns”. They know nothing, and want to know even less, while braying confidently about right and wrong. But you see, when I go off about the Saudis and their fingers in various pies of perfidy, I actually can speak with a certain level of moral authority.

I don't just have a passing, post 9-11 acquaintance with al-Islam. I have been a Muslim for most of my life, and I know for a fact that the lunatic Wahabbism practiced and supported by Bush's friend Abdullah is just a freaky, twisted version of Islam designed to keep people dumb and time-locked. Far away from any practice of democracy that would threaten present controllers of those precious oil-dollars, and the wee-souled man who amorally profit from them—be they the aforementioned spoiled, inbred petro-princes in gowns abroad or the ostrich-skin cowboy boot-sporters here in America.

What tenuous moral authority we may have had, burned to a cinder shortly after 9-11 when the value of selective American “palliness” trumped doing the right thing, and then loudly pancaked like the Twin Towers two years later when we stupidly embarked on a “war on terra” against a non-aggressor.

The old saying goes, “You are known by the company that you keep.”



This is the company we keep.

To that nattering wretch who bedeviled Obama about the great, brown-skinned bugaboo, dimly equating it with terror, and her fellow eye-averters who effectively support the world's leading financier and exporter of terror to our shores, as well as the number one stumbling block to democracy in the Mid-East...you have signed off on their purchasing...lock, stock and slippery oil barrel the “friendship” of your President...in addition to his silence and yours for their their every vile transgression. And you apparently have absolutely no problem with it.

So please...fucking spare us progressives, your convenient enemy of choice—your disingenuous...and sanctimonious bullshit.

As you lay down talking-point covering fire for our so-called “friends.”

Begging your pardon...your so-called “friends.”

Fate will not be kind to you for your craven moral relativism...and I can only hope...we can only hope—that our nation as a whole somehow survives in spite of it.

For all of our sakes. Even a few of you dumb-asses.

There's more...

WORLD PREMIERE—Surprise! Your Credit Purchases Qualify You For A Free Screening—It's Another New Group News Blog Video Production!

This latest little exclusive video tidbit deals with the classic marketing saw of... “membership having its privileges”, if you will.

But what “club” would that be? What selective grouping is it that ascribes the rare gifts and levels of, well...“special attention” and deep emotions we're talking about here?

Is it a club you want to be down with? Is it worth it? What does it take to join?

In order of asking, the answers are:

1.) Yeah, if your desired in-crowd is petty tyrants and hate-mongers.
2.) Since no one else'll have you, why not?
And 3.) Every shred of human decency you have—which wouldn't be much.

Some would call the folks who populate this special realm of of society utterly “worthless”...but hey! Since we're about the positivity here, and would hate to be classified as one of those “mean, angry” bloggers, let's just call the particular fella the video looks at—well...let's just call him “priceless”.

So here it is, for your viewing pleasure at The Group News Blog...

“Rudy Giuliani: Priceless!”

And oh yeah...“Hmmmmph!”

There's more...

Rudy -- I Don't Know Nukes

Not Qualified On Foreign Policy
Rudy Admits Lack of Knowledge on Nukes!


Genuinely Not Qualified To Be President
Rudy's Sentences -- A Noun, A Verb, and 9/11


Senator Joe Biden may not have much of a chance at the Presidency. Fine. Maybe he's heard -- there's a writer's strike on. Perhaps Joe wants work as a scab? ...Oh, no wait. Bad, bad idea. But he sure can turn a phrase.

(What the hell was I thinking? Anyway, the great line Joe used during the debate -- noun, verb, 9/11 -- no way he came up with it himself. A moonlighting professional comedy writer wrote it, someone like LM. It actually could have been LM. Seriously. But not anymore. 'Cause now, the Writers Guild of America is on strike. Including moonlight gigs.)

Regardless of whom is writing his lines, Joe Biden is just nailing Rudy. 'Course, Rudy's really a sucker's target.

Night. Going back to sleep now.

Quick personal note: I'm posting fairly lightly the rest of this week, as my day job is massively busy right now, therefore I need to manage my own well being by resting lots and lots, as well as not let down my colleagues at work.

There's more...

Emergency Ops v Rudy

Command Center - The Lies


Fire Fighters - Dead Because of Rudy


Radios - Dead On Arrival



This man wants to torture Muslims, deport Mexicans (and who gives a damn if they're here legally or not), and absolutely doesn't give a FUCK about black people, except as a way to gain political power by getting the cops to kill them now and then.

Many if not most of the deaths of 9/11 can be laid at his feet, due to his lack of emergency preparation.

Rudy really screwed the fucking pooch.

Like all Bush Republicans, Rudy's most at home telling the BIG LIE.

Take it from one who has actually worked car wreck after bus wreck after shooting after stabbing after beating after rape after home assault after child abuse after murder after motorcycle accident after train v car after helicopter crash after fire after explosion after head crushed in half after head blown off and after it all, one part becomes blindingly crystal clear...

On 9/11 Rudy was in a state of constant panic, being told what to do by his staff, with absolutely no command and control, operating out in the fucking street like a goddamn amateur, winging it.

Pro's DON'T wing it.

Rudy did, because the same radio's which had been for shit were still for shit, his fire department got blasted to hell when they couldn't talk to anyone on the shit radios, and his command center was destroyed in the one location Rudy demanded it be set up (WTC 7), overriding all rational advice and placing C&C in the same complex the bad guys had attacked before and said they'd attack again.

Rudy is running as Mr. 9/11 super-competent.

Rudy is a fake. Rudy is a liar.

Rudy is directly responsible for hundreds to thousands of deaths.

Watch the videos. Judge good ol' 9/11 Rudy for your self...

Would you really trust him with your life? Your families?

There's more...

All About The 9-11s

Hey Rudy, You Missed a Coupla' Gold Fillings In a 9-11 Cadaver Back There...

I have a friend here in NY who works in broadcast journalism, as well as doing a little stand-up comedy on the side. He and I were sitting in an editing suite about a month ago when we saw Rudy Giuliani yammering on about something on a monitor behind a glass door. We couldn't hear what was being said, so my friend joked, “Oh wait, lemme turn Rudy up so we can hear him better...” He mimicked turning up a volume knob and then said what he figured Rudy was saying, his volume rising with the knob twist.

“Nine eleven-nine-eleven-nine-eleven-nine-eleven-nine-eleven-nine-eleven! “Nine eleven-nine-eleven? Nine-eleven-nine-eleven-nine-ELEVEN! Nine-eleven-nine-eleven-I beat n*gger squeegee men upside the fucking head for fun! Nine-eleven-nine-eleven! Thank you very much!”

I believe that Rudy owes my friend a hefty paycheck or two as a campaign consultant, because after the last few days, it seems that Giuliani absolutely cribbed my boy's jokey shpiel and is seriously tear-assing away with it like a shattered-braced Forrest Gump.

First, there was this piece of sordid, money-grubbing news from his camp—and no, the reporter who got a hold of this has not had his ass kicked like a dusky squeegee man...yet...

The union — already a vocal critic of Giuliani's — said Tuesday that the fundraiser's "$9.11 for Rudy" theme is an abuse of the image and symbols of the 2001 attacks.

"It is nothing short of disrespectful to the legacy of the thousands of civilians and 343 brave firefighters who died at ground zero," IAFF president Harold Schaitberger said. The campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Chris Dodd called the theme "unconscionable, shameless and sickening." The firefighters' union has endorsed Dodd. Another Democratic candidate, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, said the event was "overdoing it."

"You know, we shouldn't use a tragedy for politics," Richardson told New Hampshire reporters on a conference call.

A Giuliani spokeswoman said the $9.11 idea was selected without the campaign's knowledge. "These are two volunteers who acted independently of and without the knowledge of the campaign," Giuliani spokeswoman Maria Comella said. "Their decision to ask individuals for that amount was an unfortunate choice."

Understand what went on there. A Giuliani booster held a fundraiser for his razor-lipped idol, using the keen as fuck donation angle of the attendees paying the amount of NINE DOLLARS AND ELEVEN CENTS apiece to gain entry. Kewl! And when busted on the exposure of the creepy amount requested—and as you can tell by everyone's denial of knowledge of who sanctioned the number, that EVERYBODY probably signed off on that number—Rudy's people didn't cancel the event, nor did they turn the ill-gotten money down. They pocketed that shit like a crackhead left alone in a DEA evidence room.

Okay?

The man who blanches at the mention by critics of his profiting from his “BMOC” strutting around in the immediate hours and days after September 11th, has got his “old friends” running about with donation baskets asking people to pony up “$9.11” apiece for him. Gotta get that gas money for the SUVs to drive to those $25,000-a-pop “speeches” from somewhere, right?

But then...just when you thought he couldn't pimp 9-11 so much that it'd become grotesquely loose and floppy from overuse...well, Ol' Mayor Silky tosses his big-feathered hat into the ring, slips his goldfish-filled, orthopedic shoes on, and steps hard, baby—right into a pile of steaming, runny, political dog-shit.

This was no emergency call. His cell phone rang in his pocket during his speech, which is itself unusual; most public officials turn theirs off during events, if only out of courtesy for the audience. Mr. Giuliani went on to answer it and carry on a routine “love you” and “have a safe trip” exchange with Mrs. Giuliani while the crowd (and those of us watching on C-Span) wondered what in the world that was all about.

His campaign aides spun the episode as a “candid and spontaneous moment” illustrative of the couple’s affection. We might believe that if we hadn’t heard stories of similar behavior by Mr. Giuliani as he has campaigned around the country. During one event in Oklahoma, we’re told he took two calls, at least one from his wife, and chatted for several minutes as the audience waited. That episode followed Mr. Giuliani’s eye-popping disclosure earlier this year that, if he’s elected, his wife would sit in on Cabinet meetings. He later downplayed that possibility...


“That was just weird,” one NRA audience member told the New York Post about the phone interruption. Mr. Giuliani doesn’t need more weird.

Okay, we have several levels of “up-30-points-in-the-4th-quarter” cheap-ass point scoring here. The first is the inane, contrived, and trotted out once too often, “call from bug-eyed wifey at an inopportune time” routine. Turns out, Der Rudester's played that card a few times before, alá Bush's oft-repeated, Yakov Smirnoff-quality quip about his inability to deal with words having lots of “syllables” (pronounced by him as “sill-ah-bulls”...oh teh funneeey ). It just seems that Judi has this amazing, Radar O'Reilly-esque power to tune into Rudy, and always manage to catch him just as he's delivering a key point in a speech somewheres. And he, bless his loving, shriveled, black-ice heart—simply can't let the whip-wielding Ilsa's call just go to voicemail like the other 99% of the planet's busy inhabitants. He must speak to her, professing his love in gooey Fletcher's Castoria-sweet tones—while at a podium, in the middle of campaign/policy speeches—to waiting, confused-as-hell crowds.

What's the dilly with dat? Easy. Some fucknut campaign advisor, wedded to decimal points in focus group data has apparently told this hollow-hearted devil that the numbers are bad for him on the empathy/caring tip, and he has to do things to make him seem more...well, “human”, and appealing to demographics he's got huge problems with (WOMEN!). So, it's bye-bye to “Herr” Giuliani, the snarling martinet, and “Hello!”, to Li'l Rudy—the sentimental, empathetic, ersatz Alan Alda, circa 1982. Of course, a majority of women—at least the freep-ettes who aren't just blindly in his camp are more than hip to his “my political power is the ultimate penile enhancement” ass-grabbery with women other than his last wife, Donna Hanover. So realizing the limits of the play to “devotion”...Rudy went to defend the cell-phone idiocy using the only thing he has in his bag of bullshit.

“And quite honestly, since Sept. 11, most of the time when we get on a plane, we talk to each other and just reaffirm the fact that we love each other,” he said.

Yeah...that tattered, nick-marked, set-on-a-spring-lever-up-his-cheap-suit's-sleeve 9-11 card.

To put what he's done in these two instances in perspective, you need only look at the facts involved.

Rudy's campaign needs money? Use $9.11 as a fundraising prompt.

Screw up badly in an attempt at image makeover? Use 9-11 as an excuse to cover for the gaffe.

The “Because of 9-11, me and my spouse talk a lot more on our cellys” excuse/line is pretty cold comfort to a spouse of someone who didn't make it home that day, Rudy. And the $9.11 pitch for campaign moolah is sitting like rusty nails in the gut of those same people. They're hearing about it. Because in spite of your poll numbers, or rather, because of them Rudy, your enemies from the right are helping to spread the stories to hurt you, and help their hard-core fundie candidates. It ain't even the left dogging you out on these craven blegs. It's the base, baby. The GOP base. And while you've gotten by thus far thanks to media focus on the more interesting Democratic candidate field, as the days get short, and you have to open your reptilian mouth more and more—you won't be able to help yourself. And you'll keep going on just like my buddy joked that day...

“Nine eleven-nine-eleven-nine-eleven-nine-eleven-nine-eleven-nine-eleven! “Nine eleven-nine-eleven? Nine-eleven-nine-eleven-nine-ELEVEN! Nine-eleven-nine-eleven...”

And some of those pissed-off families of the victims you're scuffing your feet on as you dance on their graves are gonna say something that'll leave you stammering thrice as hard as when it got out that your daughter backed the Othello to your Iago. You'll think that's nothing compared to the narrative that's being laid out. A narrative that says...

As surely as a grave-robber unearthing of a victim of that horrible day to pry gold fillings from his mouth, you, Rudolph W. Giuliani are just as despicable in your repeated pimping of the deaths of those 2974 people—for attention, as a dodge/excuse for PR screw-ups, and yes, for COLD, HARD CASH you either put in your pocket to buy people tiaras, or use to further your ego-fueled campaign.

If there was ANY doubt—so much as a sliver of a sand grain's scintilla of a doubt that not only is 9-11 your ONLY selling point, but is also the one thing you will use to defend, deflect, and deploy regardless of the triviality of any hiccup you may face in this campaign...and in life, it was utterly erased with these two shameless break-dances in the graveyard of September 11th's victims.

It is nothing but the awful truth to say that September 11th was the luckiest day in your misbegotten, amoral life, Rudolph W. Giuliani. And you have behaved accordingly, poaching, and selling the poisonous, golden eggs from a dead-eyed, ghostly goose.

What next, Rudy?

Will you and Judi trendily adopt a child from some Eastern European country, (not Africa...that's too trendy for your racist ass.) and name him “Nine-Eleven”, alá George Costanza's idea of naming his child “Seven”?

Ooooh! Maybe you'll tailor your cross-barn-burning GOP convention speech so that it times out to run exactly nine minutes and eleven seconds long?

Or will you ditch the usual, barge-like campaign bus for your whistle-stop tour to meet Americans, and tool about from the purple mountains, to the fruited plain in snug, intimate style with your beloved Judi...in a red, white, and blue painted Porsche 911?—courtesy of your car-dealer ex-roommate Howard Koeppel?

As irony is dead...and you have all the shame and tact of Rip Taylor on a crack bender, I probably shouldn't put those ideas out there as jokes. One of em's liable to come true.

My money's on the speech length...with the adopted baby a thisclose second.

There's more...

Our Saudi Friends

0

Number of Saudis charged with terror financing since 9/11.

There's more...

Five Years, Eleven Months, Twenty Some-Odd Days And Counting.

It has been an odd week in New York City. Counting from last Thursday, the days have been peculiar mini-revelations unto themselves as the days until September 11th—the mathematically true anniversary of the attacks, as those were on a Tuesday, and this one as well, thanks to time's passage on the Gregorian calendar, melted away one by one.

Ride the trains. Walk the streets. Breathe the oddly temperate air here, and your mind inexorably does its own synaptic walkabout. Going where it goes.

And ending up...there again.

Thursday, September 6th—8:41 a.m.: I know the time because in getting ready to head out the door, I chronically check the cable box for the time display. The phone rings .

I walk over and see on the caller I.D. that it's my wife—on her cell phone. It rings again, and in between rings, the mind flies.

She left here an hour ago. It's 8:41 a.m.—not far from the time of the first plane's impacting six years ago. The sun shoots through the vertical slats, painting odd, late summer gold on the couch. A bright, warm day disturbingly much like the fateful one in question. She never calls here once she's gone...she waits and calls me at my desk every day at about a quarter after eleven. I don't have the TV on—what's going on?

“R-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-riiiing!

I snatch the phone up, and I hear her take a quick breath. Before she can speak, I'm several questions in.

“What's up? What's going on? Everything okay? What's the problem?”

“Turn on the news.”

My heart sinks as my eyes sweep for the remote.

“What's...happening? Where are you?”, I ask , straining for calm.

“I'm at Kingston Avenue. There's no trains into Manhattan—”

“Ohhhhhh, shit.”, I'm thinking—almost aloud as I spot the remote.

“—It's a police action they're saying. That somebody jumped in front of a train.”

I stop. “Somebody jumped...in front of a train?” My shoulders un-tense. “That's what it is?”

“Yeah...I need to know if I have to walk over and get the A—oh... Wait. Ohhhh...were you thinking...?”

“Look at the time. I mean...look outside.”

“Yeah. I thought about that just before I went down in the subway. Sky's really blue, out. Can't help it.”

“Do me a favor...hang there. I'm out the door. I'll meet you and we can walk crosstown.”

She agreed, and we hung up the phone. One should not breathe a sigh of relief because another person has opted to end it all under the deadly wheels of an onrushing subway train...but damned if I didn't. Damned if I didn't.

And as I walked out the door...I looked up at that blue sky, and frowned a bit—and then looking west, I smiled a bit. Clouds and haze were rolling in—changing that pretty, but discomfiting late summer color palette. Thankfully. Thankfully.

Friday, September 7th—11:25 p.m.: I'm walking south on Broadway, after celebrating at a bar, the first win of my co-ed softball team's fall season. The drinks are flowing verrry freely, and as it's Friday night, the crew is verrrry loosey-goosey. Especially the women. I can't be down. I'm married...so I punk out and leave. But the Friday night streets are full of beautiful women as the club and bar-filled blocks toward Union Square go by. I'm buzzed, and basically walking through a hothouse of dazzling, rare orchids. All I can do is look on this warm night at the scads of lovelies sporting the city's official evening “party” attire—snug Von Furstenburg, patterned rayon dresses. Blue Triangles on this one, orange and cocoa teardrops on that one.

And the lovely stopped in front of me, in green and white concentric circles. Raven hair and black patent heels. Legs...magnificent. Lush, maned head craned upwards as she talked quietly on her cell phone. Lord, the Kristin Davis “clone’ is cute, but Goddamn, girl! Get outta the middle of the sidewalk there, yappin'! You're in the way!

“What the hell are you standing there looking up at?”, I'm yelling with my body language as I near her and start to sidestep. And then? Then, I look up.

And see them.

I'd forgotten about them this year—the commemorative light display from Ground Zero some seventeen blocks south. The pit. Ghostly, and ultimately intangible twin tent-poles of remembrance holding up an inky night sky. The air is still, and I realize that others have stopped to look. The girl. Me. Other people standing in the cutaway entrance into Union Square Park. All silently looking. The Asian man at the newsstand looks heavenward, and shakes his head ruefully.

And grabs a fistful of ice from the bin holding the spring water, rubbing it all over his face as he quietly sighs into his hands, “Oh lordy.”

Just like that...there are no pretty girls anymore...at least...I can't see them anymore. There's just people standing about, mouths turned downward, looking up at the two columns of light.

And they're not strong enough to hold back the weight of the dark—the dark, and what it carries with it.


Sunday, September 9th—7:35 p.m.:

I'm vacuuming the living room, and the whine of the machine white noises everything in the house. Voices, phone rings, and very nearly my own thoughts. The TV is on and I'm watching—I can't hear—the award ceremony for the U.S. Open. Roger Federer smiles his wan smile, laughs at something and is given a huge check. Over the din, I can hear the faint whoop of the crowd, and then it's over. Right into CBS' “60 Minutes”.

Still, no sound...but the images scream as if piped through a hundred speakers. There's a chopped together montage of shots—people running through the streets of Lower Manhattan, organic clouds of ash, pulverized building, and...bits of just-alive people...billowing, roaring and practically chasing the panicked masses through the financial district's canyons. An overhead shot of the grey devil-cloud, seeming to breathe and exhale, and then, grow outward, gobbling a bit more of the city's southern end. Shots of newly statue-gray survivors, coughing and throwing up. Firefighters doing the same—sucking oxygen from masks. Folks and Firefighters both, staggering away from the awful, hellish precipitation.

Then...a shot of Rudy Giuliani from that day, “heroically” directing passersby and the rapt cameramen to and fro as he strode his tin-pot “MacArthur” stride into pundit lore.

And finally, a talking head shot of the blinking, mendacious wonder that is former EPA boss, Christine Todd Whitman—GOP apparatchik, and pre-Brownie, “Brownie”. saying something I cannot hear, but know is an ass-covering lie as surely as I know gravity holds me to the floor.

The vacuum goes off. I'm gonna watch this.

The report is a mock-tough, Katie Couric reputation-rehab piece, where she feigns high-dudgeon at the farce that was the government's handling/massaging of information about the air quality in Lower Manhattan in those days immediately following September 11th. Couric clucked her tongue and dipped her head. She lowered her voice for pretend-grave intonations in asking Whitman difficult questions about the “mishandling” of information and willful disregard for the lives of the rescuers and survivors.

And Christie Whitman blinked, and stammered, and triggered a power in me that manifested itself as soon as my kids learned to talk. The power...to instantly see when someone is prancing about like Rip Taylor, madly scattering confetti when on the hot seat, for what it really is—a liar scattering bullshit. Having kids and seeing them lamely try to wheedle their way out of “Who finished off the Cheez Doodles?/Who broke the remote I found behind their bed?,” trains you to sniff out lies with ease. Watching Whitman quaveringly deflect Couric's questions about her craven spin in those fateful days infuriated me.

“Lie. Lie. Obfuscation. Buck pass. Lie. Lie. Dodge. BIG lie. BIGGER lie. Play dumb. Lie.”

Couric later notes that Rudy Giuliani was asked to appear to defend his statements hurrying people back into Ground Zero—and he refused to come on and answer questions. He would only give a terse “Those people down there were heroes, and we must do everything we can to help them now.” P.R. statement. When Rudy Giuliani—Presidential Candidate, opts to duck a 9-11 photo-op within 48 hours of the anniversary—a day that is morning sunlight to the flower that is him—he is afraid of something, or someones.

“Mr. Bravery” is running from the firefighters who are dogging his every step while he continues to pose callously atop 343 of their corpses. Who would have thunk it?

Couric's ineffectual questioning infuriated me—and my wife. We changed the channel and landed on MSNBC, to find them promoting their broadcasting in real time on Tuesday, the September 11th, 2001 episode of “Today”—as it happened.

“Are they-”, my wife asked, “-gonna just show that day's episode of Today? Why? Only a masochist would wanna watch that!”

“I dunno what the fuck that's about.”, I replied.

“I can't think of anybody I know who'd wanna watch it!”, she hissed. “I mean...I was down there! 3000 people got vaporized down there—do their families wanna tune in and catch a three-hour flashback?”

“In real time, too.”, I said.

“A retrospective I could understand. You do that.”, she railed. “But a Jesus!...Whaddyacallit...um...encore presentation? An encore presentation?! Grrrrrrrrrrrr!” Forgetting herself for a minute, she actually asked me “Would you watch something like that?”

It's an easy mistake for her to make. She was down there that day, in the midst of it. My day is an abstraction for her as I wasn't there with her to share in the direct events. But I'd sooner eat broken glass-laced pig entrails than have that day played out for me again in real-time on TV.

You see, the actual memories are bad enough.

I was in front of the Twin Towers the night before on the 10th, having walked up Whitehall Street from a freelance gig. I wanted a fish sandwich and the McDonald's on B'way was packed, so I stopped at the Burger King on the corner opposite 4 WTC on Liberty Street.

I called my then-fiancée from the pay phone on the corner—I didn't own a cell phone yet. Just to say “Goodnight”, and shoot the breeze before heading to my mom's house to help her out with a school project and spend the night. The thing I'll always remember about that night was how still the air was—how perfect the temperature. And how quiet that area gets around 11 p.m. It was...beautiful.

The next day, the train in to work sat at 23rd Street & Ely Avenue in Long Island City for way too long—one stop outside of Manhattan. And then, an announcement from a frazzled-sounding platform worker: “There are no trains entering Manhattan at this time. NO TRAINS ENTERING MANHATTAN AT THIS TIME, DUE TO POLICE ACTIVITY!”

As one cloying white-collar fella brusquely queried the worker, I was on my way up the stairs and out of the station to call my job. I heard the worker snap oddly, “WHAT ABOUT NO TRAINS ENTERING MANHATTAN DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?”

Getting upstairs, I was outside a luncheonette/ newsstand waiting on line to use the pay phone, when I could hear from within the store a rising murmur of agitation. As I was at the end of the line, I drifted back to the store's door to see what was going on—and an overhead TV told a disturbing tale. There, on the screen, I could see the smoldering top of WTC1—just hit, as I would soon hear the panicked people leaving the store saying. My pulse quickened. My wife-to-be was employed in WTC2, and what I was looking at onscreen was to say the least—worrisome. I had to reach her, to tell her to get the fuck out of WTC2 and get the fuck out of that area immediately, as the building next to it looked perilously close to an area-dangerous total loss. So, I hurried back out to the now empty phone and dialed it—only to get an “all circuits are busy” message. I dialed three, four, FIVE MORE TIMES, and got that damned message again every time, only to hear a passer-by say, “No phones, man—nobody can get through.” I was panicked now, knowing the fire would get no better, and I tried to figure out a plan. I could hear gasps in the newsstand again, and see people with their hands over their mouths now. I ducked back in to see on TV two towers ablaze now. Had it spread? What? What was all that confetti-like stuff falling down? And where was my fiancée?!

I stumbled outside knowing I couldn't get a train into Manhattan, and would soon discover that NO TRAFFIC AT ALL was being allowed into the city. No cars, no buses, no cabs. But the area was crawling with cabs, as there were about five different cab “depots” within eyeshot. I figured I should get home. Perhaps my fiancée had called there. No way of knowing, but I had no choice. Me and two other people grabbed a cab back to Southeastern Queens, and pleaded with the driver to hot-foot it—which he did, with the radio giving the awful blow-by-blow of what was happening—in real time. As the cab flew through the Queens streets, my mind reeled. I became very anxious. The wife-to-be liked to get to work early nowadays—especially as we were a month away from getting married. The earlier she got out of there, the more wedding planning she could do. She was generally at her desk at 8:45, and liked to get to the Morgan Stanley cafeteria 10 floors up after 9 a.m.

People next to me in the cab futilely dialed inoperable cell phones. I just wanted to get to my mom's house to use a phone—or maybe have a message there for me.

I got there and cleared the twelve steps in three bounds. I was in the door instantly, and the news was on. Mom was sitting there—chased back from her work sojourn by the non-operating trains as well. My brother was there as well, having heard the news and coming to check up on mom. No messages...and no operational phone, either. Not for my lack of trying, though. I wore that phone out—dialing my beloved's job, where there was no answer, and no voicemail, then her home, where I couldn't get through, and too many times, most actually, where I heard the dreaded “All circuits are busy.”

My panic ramped up as I worked the phone feverishly—the towers were now twin spouts of flame and smoke.

“Why hadn't I heard from her?” She's fastidious—she'd have called me to let me know if she was at least okay. “Please God, don't let her have gone to that Goddamned cafeteria...please...”

We'd dated for three years in college, broken up, and gone our separate ways fifteen years before. Married other people, had kids....still cared for one another ...and after our respective marriages ended, fate brought us back together in the summer of 2000. I proposed in January of '01. The wedding was scheduled for October.

And here I was about to lose her. Again.

Still, no phone—and I could hear my brother saying “Man...those buildings are a total loss...they can't fix that. They're gonna have to knock 'em down...if there's anything left to knock down. Oh shit. Oh shit! They're...jumping. They're fucking JUMPING!””

I'm “shhhhhhhhh-ing” him because his words while true aren't helping. People are jumping. Some of what appeared to be simple “confetti/debris” falling is people, making the grisly choice to fall rather than burn.

WHERE? IS? SHE?!!!!!

And then? Then, as I'm watching footage of Tower Two's flaming upper floors (they've switched to this strangely benign feed) a commentator says that he's been told that Tower 2 is “beginning to list” several degrees, and could collapse. Still, no word, and I have to wait 30 seconds for a dial tone to come up. Tom Clancy's on via phone—WHY IS HIS FUCKING PHONE WORKING?—talking about his eerily prescient book scenario of a plane being flown into the U.S Capitol building, when...

When...something surreal happens.

WTC2 shudders for a moment, and just falls out of the picture. in a cloud of smoke. Period. I follow it down in disbelief, tilting my head like a confused cat. “That didn't happen—I'm dreaming. I must be—because they'd be saying something!” The commentator and Clancy go on for about 10 seconds—unaware in the horriffic change in the live feed—and then there's a change in the chyron on-screen, from “WTC2 Tower Attacked”, to “WTC2 Tower Has COLLAPSED.”

Cut to ashen newscasters on the set—stammering...

And cut back to me—losing it. It's a blur now when I think of it. But I recall dropping/throwing the phone. Stumbling into the hall, and falling on a hamper? Crawling and running and falling down the steps and then—I'm outside—the beautiful weather , the sun hitting me full in the face, as I turned this way and that, yelling something. I'm on the lawn, and I can't remember what I was saying, but I do recall feeling my heart pounding, my arms flailing—and everything spinning. Something's roaring in my head.

It's me I guess, screaming.

And then, I'm knocked on my belly—pinned, as a voice whispers in my ear “Come on...come on. You've gotta relax. Re-laaaxxxxxx...” It was my brother. He'd practically tackled me on the lawn—as I'd lost it, totally. He lay there on top of me until my senses came back enough to feel the grass against my face. He wouldn't let go of me until we were back in the house, my mother standing at the steps, arms outstretched with the phone, and saying “Keep trying! Keep trying!”

And I did...through a veil of tears until around 1 p.m., when the phone rang and it was my sister-in-law to be. Somehow, local calls weren't working, but my fiancée had managed to get a call through to her sister in Jersey, who then called me. She was okay. Trapped in a building, and covered with dust a block from Ground Zero, but okay. I burst into tears of happiness and thanked God—Jesus, Allah, Yahweh, Jehovah, rocks, trees and the Goddamned sun that she was apparently “okay”.

Hours later when I actually heard from her, I would find that she missed being in the building by 15 minutes that morning because she was delayed by voting, and dropping off pants at the cleaners, and that she'd heard the roar of the too-low jet turbines, and felt the heat of the explosion burn her neck as she called upstairs to warn her co-workers to "GET OUT!", 'cause the sister tower was ablaze— just as WTC 2 was hit.

That close. That... close. That's my real-time memory. On the phone telling her the way out of downtown and home, as she was in shock and brain-scrambled. The days afterward are etched into my mind because I worked 11 blocks north of it, and remember that dank stink of torn-open earth and yes...death.

Rat traps every 40-60 feet in the area because the vermin were wild with post-massacre activity.

I didn't need the Today Show's “retrospective...and neither did anyone else.


Tuesday, September 11th—10:00 a.m.: I finally hear from Giuliani on the radio—during the commemorative ceremonies. He speaks for about 30 seconds and is gone. Thankfully. Still I can't help but think about his scarceness in recent days. Hell hath no fury like firefighters trashed.

The sky darkens in the early afternoon—black nearly, and the heavens dump a deluge on Manhattan, thankfully. It's a welcome weather distraction from the day's events, and it washes the “any-other-day-of-the-year-perfectly-fine” blue out of the sky. “Shit! I need an umbrella!”, and “Urrrrrgh! Look at my suede shoes!” is a welcome respite from the peculiar quiet.

No one's “Singin' In The Rain”...but nobody's crying either.


Wednesday, September 12th—10:30 a.m.: Just got off the phone with my wife. She's headed uptown to bring her mom her glasses and some magazines at the nursing home. She asks me what the weather's like outside. I tap “Dashboard” on my computer, and the temp reads at 69ª degrees—with a high of 76ª predicted.

“Nice day.”, she says.

“Sun's out, big time. Not a cloud in the sky.” I reply.

There's a silence. Because of that weather. And this time of year. We don't call it “Indian Summer” anymore in New York, when the sun blazes bright and perfect, and warms, but doesn't burn.

You call it one of “those days”.

Eleven months, twenty-nine days and counting.

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Peekaboo, I See You

photo: caribb

Jet Delayed Overnight: Iraqis Speaking Arabic

American Airlines Flight 590 was delayed overnight in San Diego Wednesday night after a woman traveling with two children expressed concern about 6-7 Iraqis speaking Arabic, after the plane had started to taxi to the runway. Due to the lateness of the hour the flight was rescheduled for the following morning.

Houston Chronicle

The Iraqis had been training Marines at Camp Pendleton and worked for Defense Training Systems, a unit of International Logistics Services Corp. of Anchorage, Alaska, said Dave Stephens, the company's chief executive officer.

"They did nothing wrong," Stephens said Wednesday. A company press release called it "an unfortunate situation for all flight passengers."

Local law enforcement questioned the men, who were quickly released, said American spokesman Tim Wagner. The Transportation Security Administration did not get involved.

"9/11 changed everything." Yes, it did. Now any damn fool can turn a jet around with irrational fears of dark people talking in another language. And because of 9/11, no one can say "Hey Lady, that's crazy talk." Every report has to be checked out. People have to be "careful" how they behave. There's a chilling effect.

In this case an entire plane-load of passengers was stopped from reaching their destination. Hotel reservations were broken. Appointments were missed. Plans were rescheduled. Romantic plans were blown. People on their way to meet people had to wait an extra half-day in Chicago to meet them. In Chicago.

How much money and aggravation did this delay cost? At what point do we give up useless security theater? Can't we agree it's not worth it any more when all we've got is a woman from highly conservative San Diego with her two children who is afraid of the dark men with the funny foreign language?

When is enough enough? When can I have my country back?

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Busted.

And I'll bet most of your time was spent down there scuffing around for those monogrammed towels from your collapsed bunker/fuckpad.

On Saturday, 'round about five o'clock, I was puttering around the house, cleaning up to the strains of my “Jazzy Moments” playlist on the computer. Just diggin' on the grooves, kinda spring-boarding off the Max Roach post from earlier in the day.

I had the house to myself, as my wife was out headed to Wall Street to her job to nab her laptop. She'd left it there for an overnight online tech upgrade, and needed it for a little cursory work from home the next week when she'd be out on vacation. I was gathering up stray shoes tucked under the couch's edge and listening to Nat “King” Cole croon “A Little Bit Independent” with the King Cole Trio when my celly rang.

Saw it was Mrs. LM's number and answered it quickly.

“Yeah, babe.”

“Turn on New York One (The local all-news cable channel) NOW! Something's going on down here! There's a fire!”

“What? Where?”, I asked. “In the subway? What?”

“No!, she nearly screamed. “It's the building! The bank building they're tearing down! It's big! Turn on the news and find out what's going on!”

“How about you getting the fuck out of there?”, I blurted, as she has a tendency to freeze when panicked. “You need to not be lingering down there if shit's jumping off.”

“Oh my God, I can't believe this!”, she moaned. “This fucking area is cursed.”

“Honey, get the hell outta there! Did you get your computer?”

“No! The upgrade didn't take, so I have to wait until Monday! Oh, man, look at this...”

By this time I had NY1 on and they were in the thick of coverage of what she was seeing in person—a seven-alarm inferno was roasting what was left of the already damaged, and in-the-process-of-being-demolished Deutsche Bank building that sat across from the fallen World Trade Center. Those falling towers had ripped huge gashes in the bank tower, and human remains were scattered all over and throughout the sundered husk of a building. Mold and all manner of pestilence had invaded it post 9-11, and now—at long last the city was taking the blighted behemoth down, floor-by-floor. From my wife's office window two measly blocks east, she could see the thing shrinking day after day as it was being dismantled. But on this day, she stood there, near Chase Plaza, looking at flames gorging on the partially stripped tower, with bits of flaming debris falling down in spastic, windblown paths.

And for her, it was 9-11 all over again. Ugly, gray billows of smoke pouring from the flaming open wound of the building—just like that day almost six years (It has been that long—six years, people.) ago.

The news report was tense, but encouraging. It wasn't a terror attack. It was a simple, but still, amazingly destructive fire. Later, we would learn that that this building, that my wife and her co-horts in the area called “The Widow” (as it was the closest, high-rise survivor of 9-11's carnage) would claim two more firemen's lives in that haunted zone. I told her to stay east. Fuck the computer. Fuck work. Get on the 2 train and get home—NOW! I intentionally kept her on the phone until her signal faded as she entered the Wall St. station, just to make sure she was getting the hell away from that snake-bitten area.

Now, it was me who was tense, as I waited for her to get off the train near home and call me. She did, after about 45 minutes or so, but she was quite shaken on the phone, and even moreso after she got home about five minutes after that. It didn't help, with September 11th being right around the corner, and the day being eerily reminiscent of the day six years ago—cloudless and temperate. Cheery climate for tourists, but an oddly unsettling reminder for those of us who were here that day.

And her neck craned upward, watching flames and smoke gouting from a just-across-the-street, high-rise?

I had to settle her down. Made her a drink. Distracted her. And turned off the TV. It took awhile, but she cooled out, and eventually took a long nap—one strong drink and a rich meal—broiled salmon, put her away until about 10 p.m. As she slept, I checked the news, and heard about the two firemen who died. I wasn't gonna let her hear about that that night.

So in those quiet hours, I let my mind drift a little. Thinking about September 11th then, and the September 11th coming. I looked in on the wife, curled up in the sofa's corner. I took her empty tumbler away, and sat down at the computer, exhaling.

And in my wan clicking around, I remembered something that made my blood boil when I saw it a day or so before. So I searched for it again. Found it...and my blood went from hot, to dangerously corrosive upon reading it.

(Via Atrios)

And I Landed on the Moon, Too


Rudy said:

"I was at ground zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers ... I was there working with them. I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to. So in that sense, I'm one of them.

-----------------------------------------------

Time Rudy spent there as mayor:

29 hours

The link within, from TPM got to the nitty-gritty, lying bullshittery from Rudy.

From the NY Times:

A complete record of Mr. Giuliani’s exposure to the site is not available for the chaotic six days after the attack, when he was a frequent visitor. But an exhaustively detailed account from his mayoral archive, revised after the events to account for last-minute changes on scheduled stops, does exist for the period of Sept. 17 to Dec. 16, 2001. It shows he was there for a total of 29 hours in those three months, often for short periods or to visit locations adjacent to the rubble. In that same period, many rescue and recovery workers put in daily 12-hour shifts.

When Giuliani first floated the toxic lie about his being down there "as often, if not more, than most of the workers”, the smackdown was immediate from the first responders who were there for ungodly lengths of time. They called bullshit on Rudy's braggadocious claim of heroism. But it was Atrios I remember, who said:

“I highly doubt Rudy! was really "sifting through toxic debris" 40 hours a week for a year, or even too close to those who were, but someone can go back and check the mayor's public schedule...”

Which is just what the Times did in the report noted above.

Now, why would the revelation of Rudy's less-than-mega-diligent time management in terms of Ground Zero presence set me off so?

Because I recall those days all too well, and how he abused the tragedy for self-aggrandizement and a cheap power-grab. And one aspect I recall verrrry well is the visuals. He was damn sure down there the day of—grandstanding more than a little bit. But I'll be damned if I can remember any images whatsoever of Giuliani anywhere near “The Pile” in the six days afterward. What I saw were repeated news conferences from his “Plan B/Non-Fuckbox” secondary bunker/command center, with his faithful co-ass-wrangler Bernie Kerik looking over his shoulder, brow furrowed with concern—or Viagra discomfort, you choose—but that's what I saw.

He wasn't anywhere near that carnage. My wife was. No thanks to Rudy's trying to hurry businesses and people back into the area, to give a semblance of normalcy in the face of the awesome disruption of everything within 1o blocks square. He and Christie Todd Whitman pushed hard to whitewash the EPA's report on the air quality in the area, assuring folks that all was well, when all was actually quite sickness inducing. Right down to Rudy's pet Negro, “Deputy” mayor Rudy Washington's getting sick shortly thereafter from the vile air. His stupid loyalty to his head-patting master, and standing in as Giuliani's on-site proxy may well cost him his life. It's already badly compromised it.

My wife, who spent much of the first day huddled in a building vestibule with five other people as ash, bits of the dead. and toxic, pulverized, building remains was forced in is in the 9-11 Health Registry, along with countless thousands of others. And she was back at work in a secondary location mere blocks away days later, when the city laid down rat traps every forty feet from the WTC remains down to the Battery, to combat the influx of death-sniffing vermin they knew would come. The pressure was immense on businesses in the area, and those businesses pressured their employees—of which Mrs. LM was one.

Rudy? Posing for photo-ops with Jacques Chirac, to burnish his bullshit, international tough-guy bona-fides, is where he was. NOT on that death-stuffed pile.

My friend D_____ was on the pile. He was there for days on end after 9-11. He worked for a volunteer ambulance corps that was tight with a firehouse down the block in Brooklyn. So when the time came to look for firefighters—his friends, “BOOM!”, homeboy was down there. Day after day after day after nightmare and death uncovering day. For eight-to-ten hour shifts. I wrote this about a week ago:

“My friend D______, from the volunteer ambulance corp, who called me, I remember him begging to use my company gym's shower after a horrific day, where he and his fellow pile-climbers stumbled across...indescribably awful human remains. He didn't want to wait until he got home to wash off, and the large alcohol wipes supplied at Ground Zero just weren't cutting it. He and I drank that night at Fanelli's Bar.We drank a lot—and D______ doesn't really drink, which told me that he'd seen something that he desperately wanted to forget that day. Not surprisingly, he didn't go back down there the next day. Or that Saturday, or Sunday. Monday? Yes. He was back. D______ didn't drink much until that night we hung out. But he does all the time, now. At least, the last time I saw him.

We really don't hang much any more.”

He was there for days on end. Four, five days a week for the first month—again, in eight-to-ten hour shifts. He bathed at my office several times, always asking to go in the back way, because he feared he smelled like death, and didn't want to freak anyone out as he came in.

A few times, he did smell like death. God only knows what he came across or found himself knee-deep in on those shitty days.

That guy, I remember being down there. Tearing through rebar, and steel, and what remained of the drywall to get at a lost someone, or a lost part of someone.

29 hours, Rudy? D_____ was down there for that long by the end of September 13th.

No pretty-boy photo ops for people like him. Who dealt with all the raw, and tangible worst that site had to offer. Touching the awfulness. Wading in it. Lifting it with their hands to get at grislier, uglier layers below. Because that's what the real heroes of that day did down there.

You, Rudy? On the pile? Doing the dirty work? As much the photo-whore as you are, there'd be a picture or two of that, wouldn't there? Not the ones of you up Cortlandt Street a ways, posing and pointing for the cameras like some armchair MacArthur in your nifty, baby blue NYPD windbreaker. In your mind, you were some sort of urban John Wayne in “Hellfighters”, swaggering about and fairly sweating heroism as you dove into the trouble yourself, fixing it and growling “I got this!”, as you lifted hunks and chunks of the fallen towers with your bare, hairy hands.

The reality is something else though.

You've never been a “dirty your hands” guy as long as we've known you. Much as you pretend to be. Grunt work? You didn't do shit. The most you moved was dust as you walked through the streets, making sure to give that cameraman room to get the Goddamn shot. And let's be real—the only thing you “lifted” down there that day was probably your fuck-buddy Judi's skirt, to cop a clumsy, furtive feel while the cameras reloaded.

You've been a ”pretender” as long as you've been prominent on the NY scene. For many of us, our first memory of Rudy Giuliani—Tough Guy™, was a pretty silly, and laughable incident of dress-up. From NYPD Confidential:

“And in 1986, Giuliani dressed up in a Hell's Angel biker's black leather vest, and with his then-pal U.S. Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, stood on a Washington Heights street corner with 30 heavily armed undercover cops and a van full of reporters and bought $ 20 worth of crack vials. Nobody made any arrests, and both he and D'Amato were roundly criticized.”

And from the Village Voice:

(The bike club has long been a target of the law. In 1994, the government tried, unsuccessfully, to confiscate the East 3rd Street building, insisting that drugs were being manufactured and sold on the site. And as long ago as 1986, U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani and Senator Al D'Amato used the Angels as a symbol of the seedy underworld of drug dealers, dressing up in the gang's colors to stage an undercover crack buy for the press.)

Ohhh how I wish I could find a picture of that laughable moment of lunacy and hubris, but alas....local news story as it was in 1985, pics are hard to nab these days. I'm sure some enterprising news tape operator will unearth it, like they did with the police riot footage—but my God, you had to see it. Rudy, his then friend, Sen. Al D'Amato, and Judge Benjamin Barr pulled that sillyfuck stunt for the cameras looking to all the world like stiff bumpkins who fell down a laundry chute at a costume shop, and stood up in the cart at the bottom wearing whatever they landed in.

But “ooooooooh!”, he swore he was tough! And was all “Lookit me! I'm dressed up like something special!”

And now the picture comes into clearer focus. Rudy's issue—if you wanna go all psychological about it, is about discomfort in his own skin. A deep, internal self-loathing that he masks by constantly resorting to costume—to be something different—anything else but the horrid, anti-social little man that stares back at him in the mirror every fucking day.

To-day I shall be a motorcycle tough!

Tomorrow, I shall be a diamond-draped diva!

On Sunday I shall be a leggy showgirl!

Next week I will be a fierce, welfare-hating Masai Chieftain!

His whole schtick is based on costume and artifice. Play acting and puffery. And then, having fixed his superficial exterior, turning that internal self-loathing outward.

On wives. Peers. Subordinates. Minorities. Those who would dare question him.

And if he can't actually. physically wrap himself in the shell of something other than his uncomfortable self—he'll fucking cloak himself in it via lies, as he did with his quickly discounted “Tales From The Pile”.

But understand what we're dealing with here—once and for all. An anti-social lout. A selfish prick. A fabulist, A delusionary. A lying sack of shit who will say anything to either hurt someone else, or make himself look good.

Said he was there at Ground Zero “as often, if not more, than most of the workers ...”.

Turns out he was there in documented time, around 29 hours.

My friend D________ was down there for days. Weeks when you add it all up.

My wife and her friends—trapped that day in the death-clogged air, are again, in the Health Registry, should their health fail like this woman's did.

9-11, and what one did while down there in the days following is nothing to be bullshitting about. Especially if the bullshit can be so quickly exposed as the grand-standing poseur-ity that it is. People died down there—and are continuing to die down there as of this weekend. And too many are permanently scarred by the events of that day, and the after-events, like my wife, who I basically had to sedate on Saturday night.

When she saw the news the following day, and heard about the firefighters who died the night before, she lapsed into a kind of quiet melancholy. There's been a lot of talk from her since, about 9-11. What she's going to do that day. And what she's not. Most of her co-workers aren't going in. Some years they have, some years they haven't. But the Deutsche Bank building fire has taken all the taste out of their mouths for being in the area next month when the day rolls around. No thanks.

It's nothing to play-act about. It's serious business. Not some fucking diorama.

A commenter on the ABC News story on Rudy's “gaffe” said this:

”Giuliani says he's like a 9/11 firefighter. Romney says his kids are like soldiers.

Are these the Republican frontrunners?!?”

Posted by: Marilyn | Aug 10, 2007 4:07:32 PM

Yes Marilyn. They are. And they are cowards as well. Preening, posing cowards. Chicken-hawks...and chicken-shits. Courting a mean bitch named Karma, as they make light of people who've given their lives. Given. Their. Lives.

I'm not gonna sit around and wish ill will on bastards like Rudy. But he's generated enough evil in the past, and felt the karmic cockpunch before. You think he'd learn. “Sigh.”

Made the wife that drink to settle her nerves on Saturday. I didn't have one, m'self.

I'll just save my sippin' for the right moment.

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