but what kind of complex?
Anyone who is familiar with the basics of his career knows that Bernard Kerik’s nanny story is a red herring, but is there any evidence that there even was a nanny, or at least a nanny whose immigration status would have been problematic for Kerik?
I think not, but I’m sure we’ll find out soon.
[ugly image of an ugly sign citing an ugly man for an ugly career, found on the New York City Department of Corrections site; the illustration is from an archived story on the re-naming of the Manhattan Detention Complex, just three months after September 11, while Kerik was still Police Commissioner]
Category: War
fight the proposed MTA photo ban!
They’re still trying!
Trying, that is, to outlaw photography in the New York transit system. Last June I wrote about a fantastic zap I had participated in called by “The Photographers Rights campaign.” That same group has called another zap for December 18th in response to the MTA’s continued ill-conceived intention to remove cameras from users of the system in the name of security.
Remember that token clerks have already been removed from many stations altogether, and more will eliminated in the future, ultimately abandoning the platforms to Metrocard machines and the public’s own devices for ensuring their safety. There are also plans to ultimately remove conductors, and eventually drivers as well, from every train, removing all MTA employee presence from the public areas where millions of New Yorkers find themselves confined every day.
The removal of cameras will have precisely the opposite effect of security from terrorism. Anywhere else they call them “security cameras,” for Pete’s sake!
From the group’s site:
Many of us are determined to not let this go by unnoticed and without protest; Join us, plan on taking your camera out for a day of photography that won’t ever be forgotten, with a flash mob photo session that will even make the MTA board want to be there with cameras. It’ll be one of those Only in New York things you’ve been hearing about…
Meet December 18th on the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal, and bring your photo apparatus of course. It shouldn’t be hard to spot all the other people with cameras, especially with the even larger crowds expected this time.
Oh, yes, and this time let’s wear signs. People should be able to see the point.
On a related note, the same officials who want a photo ban also want to make it impossible to move from one subway car to another. Think about that one the next time you read about someone going berserk inside a moving train.
Talk to or write your Councilmember about both these issues.
[image from my June 6, 2004, post]
bad donut!
I just learned that the donuts I love to hate are more distasteful than I had thought.
Krispy Kreme* contributed $90,260 to the Republican Party and only $1,842 to the Democratic Party during the 2003-2004 election cycle, according to data assembled by the creators of a new (and very interesting) website, Choose The Blue, designed to help consumers identify the politics of the corporations whose products and services they patronize.
So not only are these donuts bad for their patrons’ health and bad for at least one of the communities in which a plant/store is located, but they subsidize the regime which threatens the nation and the world.
But maybe the relationship is about to come apart. Yesterday’s donut star is also in trouble and even their Republican friends may not be able to bail them out.
The corporation’s earnings are sharply down, the result, according to the NYTimes, of “slipping sales and underperforming franchise operations.”
The disappointing news is the latest in a string of troubles for Krispy Kreme. It is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for the aggressive manner in which it accounted for franchises that it bought back and for the prices paid for some of these franchises. Last month, the investigation was upgraded to a formal inquiry.
This year, the company’s stock, which once traded as high as $50, has been in free fall.
But what do I know about this financial esoterica? I admit that my relationship with the un-donut company is on a personal level, and it bagan just after they first opened a New York location. I tasted their incredibly-hyped product and found that I really hated it. For this kind of sugar and fat, if I’m going to support a chain store, I’d rather follow the example of the gentleman in the picture at the bottom of my previous post: He’s licking a cone just purchased at the neat little Ben & Jerry’s shop to the right of the Krispy Kreme. Now there’s a politically-wholesome treat I could support!
* According to Choose The Blue, “Corporate totals are based on donations from PACs, employees, subsidiaries and affiliates for the 2003-2004 election cycle.”
[thanks to Barry for the Choose The Blue site tip]
M26 justice – developments
Sentencing of the four remaining M26 defendents, until now scheduled for November 18, this Thursday, has been stayed pending the New York State Court of Appeals decision on whether or not it will review the unsealing of their older dismissed cases. This means that unless there is a last minute change there will not be any significant activity in court this week other than an announcement of the rescheduled date.
The defendents will know in four to eight weeks whether the Appeals Court will consider their petition. If the Court of Appeals agrees to review the petition, the defendents expect that sentencing will continue to be stayed in the interim. The review decision itself would not come until next string at the earliest.
If it decides not to review the petition, there will be no higher recourse and the D.A.’s sentencing memorandum will stand. They will be sentenced as Judge Stolz sees fit, which could mean anywhere from zero to 365 days in jail. If it decides in their favor, it will be, as Steve Quester writes, a great victory for the entire civil rights community in New York, and these defendents could be sentenced only with jail time effectively off the table altogether.
I will post more developments as they happen, including of course any and all future court dates.
Ah, how the sledge of justice does plod on.
Colin Powell, may he not enjoy this retirement
He’s gone. Colin Powell’s finally gone, and under the most cowardly of circumstances, just slipping out the back door quietly to no good purpose, and not three years ago, not two years ago and ultimately not at any time before November 2, but instead only days after the apparently successful election campaign of the man for whose stupidity and insane belligerance he destroyed whatever reputation he may* have assembled years ago.
That same cowardice, in the line of his duty as Secretary of State, is responsible for the deaths of perhaps over a hundred thousand Americans and Iraqis.
Powell’s legacy will, and not incidently, include his argument that the U.S. armed services couldn’t (shouldn’t?) be integrated – for homosexuals, that is. I’m sure however that he would have made the usual exception for times of war like the present, when they are needed for cannon fodder.
A very small man indeed.
*I’ll leave it to others, who know much more than I do, to comment on Powell’s early, very problematic career in the Viet Nam war (a Mai Lai cover-up is apparently only part of it) and in the Iran-Contra affair (coordinating the sale of missiles to Iran), and I’m sure they will.
[thanks to Elise Engler for the reminder about Powell’s early days]
Reno knows
We spotted this wonderful, much-used Toyota last night while walking to the E train Spring Street stop. I had already taken this shot before I walked around the side of the car and saw the door emblazoned with a large “Citizen Reno” sign. Of course!
Inside on the dashboard was a small stack of her DVD, “Rebel Without a Pause.” Is our hero tempting the culturally and politically savvy thief, or just advertising?
do you know how to get to Tiananmen Square?
Practice, practice, practice.
this tank is one of two which circled the block and then parked in front of a modest anti-war demonstration in Los Angeles yesterday evening.
This is on Wilshire Boulevard, in Westwood, people! I can’t think of anything more useful for generating civic anger and destabilizing an uneasy civil peace than the appearance of tanks in our own neighborhoods. In the 1920’s and 30’s they sent thugs out on foot with clubs, but they didn’t have a mandate then. Actually, the National Socialists never did win anything close to a majority.
For more see Bloggy.
[image from MyDD]
slain on the altar of our national suicide
I don’t know what to say about this story, but it has moved me more than I thought possible.
November 6, 2004, 4:39 PM EST
A 25-year-old university worker from Georgia shot and killed himself at ground zero Saturday morning, authorities said.
The man, Andrew Veal, of Athens, Ga., was found atop the structure housing the 1 and 9 subway lines after a hotel worker spotted what he believed was somebody sleeping inside the site around 8 a.m., said Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
A shotgun was found near the body, Coleman said. No suicide note was found, he said.
Police were investigating how Veal entered the former World Trade Center site, which is protected by high fences and owned by the Port Authority.
Veal worked in a computer lab and was planning to marry, friends said Saturday.
I used to live just blocks away from the Trade Center and for over six months even here on 23rd Street I lived with the acrid smell of the fires which destroyed it on September 11. I watched out the front windows and I heard hundreds of police motorcycle-escorted ambulances speed down the street to a temporary morgue on the East Side which is still there. For a dozen years I worked at the Trade Center, each day entering and leaving the 1/9 subway line through the concrete structure on top of which Veal took his life; it’s the only part of the original complex remaining above ground today. I made repeated heartbreaking trips to the site beginning two days after its destruction. The neighborhood was my first home in New York.
I’m still in New York today and I’ve grown to love it even more than I did when its wonders first brought me here. This also means, strictly speaking, that I’m still in the country where I was born, but I no longer feel that I am. If this was true before the election on Tuesday, the results which were announced have confirmed my exile.
Andrew Veal felt that dispossession more deeply than most. His despair brought him to the site which is still cynically being used to feed the agony in which so many of us share, and there Veal at least was able to end it.
actually, the Republicans stole the election again
Why were the exit polls so completely “wrong” in Ohio, Florida and certain other states this year? Was it because of massive election fraud?
The administration didn’t need an October surprise; they knew it was already wrapped up – by their own people strategically placed where they really counted. And we were all fools to imagine otherwise. We’ll be even greater fools if we let them get away with it a second time, but we’ll have to hurry if it’s going to be resolved without civil war. The Electoral College meets on December 13, and Congress counts their votes out loud on January 6.
My own representative, Jerrold Nadler, is one of the three Congressmen who asked on Friday that the General Accounting Office immediately begin an investigation into irregularities with voting machines used in Tuesdays elections. [Incidently, Nadler won re-election handily on Tuesday (80 points) against the stealth Republican, Peter Hort. Hort would presumably not have seen anything irregular about his leader’s second “victory,” and I expect that at some time in the near future his brethren will reward his sacrificial candidature with a juicy patronage appointment.]
showing Iraqis American freedoms up close
Why don’t we just order everyone (except males under 45, meaning “the enemy”) to leave Iraq altogether? We’re going to level this city of 300,000 people (since a ground battle would mean too many casualties for the good guys, that is, the ones belonging to the country which invaded theirs), and Ramadi, where there are 600,000 more people hungering for our freedoms, is obviously going to be next. The logic of our scorched-streets policy will require that we go on to do the same thing in every city of Iraq, so why prolong the agony for these people?
Iraqis have obviously given Bush the same unqualified mandate he got from me.