“They should just have a unity government and be honest about it,” said Barry when I mentioned the news report this morning that Senate Democrats are saying that they won’t oppose the Goss nomination. Read the NYTimes story and weep.
Category: War
Central Park IS the rally site
peace and goodness in the park before 9/11 – and after 8/29
I’m not going to any rally on the West Side Highway. I am not a car. After marching past Madison Square Garden I’ll be in our great Central Park on August 29th, and I expect a million others will be with me. Bloomberg, Kelly and all the Republican invaders be damned.
See the latest stories in the local paper, from yesterday and today.
This is an excerpt from an email received this afternoon from United for Peace and Justice:
WE ARE MARCHING! On August 29, United for Peace and Justice will hold a massive, impassioned, peaceful, and legal march past Madison Square Garden, the site of the Republican Convention, to protest the Bush Administrations deceit and destruction.
But we will NOT be rallying afterwards on the West Side Highway. As we announced in a press conference today, exiling us to a remote stretch of sun-baked highway makes a mockery of our right to assembly: The deal is off.
Our medics have told us that the West Side Highway isnt a safe place for seniors, children, and people with disabilities to rally. Our sound engineers have told us that its not possible to set up a quality sound system there. Many of our members have told us that they simply will not go to such an awful and marginal location. And our common sense has told us that this deal was a set-up by a Republican mayor openly hostile to free speech.
Central Park is the only sensible place for us to rally. We filed a new permit application today with the NYC Parks Department to rally in Central Park on August 29, using the Great Lawn, North Meadow, and East Meadow. We will keep you informed of the Citys response.
These guys (who are actually all of us) need help to pay for what has been and will continue to be a costly legal fight. If you can help, here’s where to go:
You can donate in several ways:
* Using a credit card online at http://www.unitedforpeace.org/donate
* By calling in a credit card donation to 212-868-5545
* By mailing a check or money order to UFPJ, P.O. Box 607, Times Square Station, NY NY 10108
[image from galanter.net]
Porter Goss would be disastrous
To head the most imprtant part of an intelligence community already disastrously overly-politicized, the President whose party already contols the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, has proposed, yes, a Republican politician.
And Porter Goss is not just any politician but the one who currently chairs the House Committee on Intelligence, the Congressional watchdog which has rolled over for the Administration for more than three years.
A few minutes ago I heard him on NPR, speaking since his nomination. He says the CIA needs more muscle, that the U.S. shouldn’t be loved around the world, but rather respected (read, feared), and that if, within the U.S., it’s to be a question of Big Brother or dead brother, he would see to it that there are no more dead brothers.
Doesn’t sound like intelligence to me.
Digby has more.
Let’s just say that when push comes to shove, old Porter is a partisan Republican first and a guardian of the CIA second. Be warned.
[image from Capitol Shopping Mall]
Kerry says he’d vote for the war again
not thinking
The man so many people hope will lead us back to sanity and save the Republic told us yesterday that he would have voted for the (current) war in Iraq even if he had known what he knows now about the absence of WMDs or a connection to Al Qaeda.
Is this the man we’re told we’ve all chosen as our standard-bearer? Is this the man we must follow blindly, without questions, to the point where we excoriate or gag any who would demur? This is a man who himself blindly followed, without questions, an idiot and his cynical handlers, and now says he would do it again!
I’m thinking for myself, and I do not hope.
[image from Hermes Press]
Moon furnished N. Korea missile with subs a threat to U.S.
Yowza! That’s showing some really faith-based initiative!
It would seem that, a few years ago, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon purchased a small fleet of Russian ballistic missile submarines with the missile-launching hardware intact, then handed the subs over to North Korea. Now, according to Jane’s Defense Weekly, the North Koreans have used that hardware to develop missiles that can threaten the United States.
Your tax-free cult’s dollars at work.
Thanks to The American Prospect, linked above, Atrios and Jane’s Defense Weekly.
Julia Scher’s security check
detail from Julia Scher’s video, “Guard”
The third of White Box‘s planned nine weekly curated (RNC-oriented) shows opened tonight with a video and window installation by Julia Scher curated by Michael Rush.
Everything is on the outside of the gallery for these summer shows. This week the window reveals a real chain link fence topped with the ubiquitous razor wire, but this time everything is in pink, the whole threaded with a blue text welcoming the Republican National Convention to New York. The video installation next to the window is composed of two looped tapes (43 minutes total) each showing a solitary pink-uniformed security guard stationed, presumably, in front of a bank of monitors showing images of the viewer.
Scher has worked with surveillance issues for years. In 1991 she wrote, “The monitors of surveillance are the eyes of a social body gone berserk.” Today we cannot even imagine an escape from that insanity.
It’s a very good show. It’ll be there for only six more days, but the real surveillance is only getting started.
no election
. . . until, whatever
I wrote these three paragraphs as part of my ruminations on the eve of the last Congressional election, in 2002, prior to the monstrous Iraq War but just in time to see Hussein used as the bogey from which we needed the Republicans to defend us. The post was titled, “rigging the election.”
Almost two years ago, in the months after the 2000 elections, I bored or frightened my friends with my prediction that we would never have another Presidential election, and we would very likely be relieved of the messiness of another congressional election as well. I believed that the Republicans would never give up what had been so ill-gotten in the winter of 2000-2001.
I was certain that some pretext would be invented to distort the electoral process, or even entirely suspend the Constitutional niceties providing for the election of a Congress and a President, in order to protect us from enemies at home or aboad.
If they get away with it this fall, a Republican executive, a Republican Congress and a Republican judiciary will virtually guarantee their success with a frightened and gung-ho citizenry in 2004. Dictatorship accomplished.
If some were ever bored by cries about the sky falling, none of us are today, but we are all certainly frightened.
Going forward, I expect to append certain posts with the seven words, “We will never have another Presidential election.” I would be delighted to have to admit I was wrong, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.
[image from ICSC 2001]
postpone the election?
Dictatorship will be the answer.
Why of course we can’t go on as a constitutional republic if a terrorist act occurs within our borders – or so the Administration would have us believe. Essentially it’s what has already happened since September 11, but now the only people who profited politically from the events of that day now want to make it official.
U.S. counterterrorism officials are looking at an emergency proposal on the legal steps needed to postpone the presidential election in case of such an attack, Newsweek reported on Sunday.
The Democrats will probably sign on of course. Perhaps someone should first point out, as Barry did this afternoon, that even during the Civil War there wasn’t an interruption in the election process.
Still, one way or another these people will see to it that there is no real election, this November – or ever.
rigging another presidential election
where will your vote go when you leave the booth?
We observed the 4th of July holiday yesterday by watching Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” [I just can’t imagine how anything traditionally celebratory could be appropriate just now.]
Because I haven’t been tied up in a cellar for four years, I think I can say I did not learn anything new during those two hours, but when the film’s chronological sequence reached the moment that the United States bombed Baghdad I just lost it.
My only thought then was that if we were being watched by a wrathful, Old Testament god he would have instantly crushed our nation for its selfishness, its stupidity and its cruelty. More privileged than any people which has ever enjoyed the bounty of this planet, we have no excuse for the evil we have unleashed upon others. [And no, since we have absolutely chosen ignorance (we have the media we want) there will be no absolution there.]
We are very lucky that old god isn’t out there. It now appears that we’re waking up and don’t like what we have done. I really believe most of us will not vote for Bush in November, but I also firmly believe Bush will be declared winner of the election. They aren’t going to let go.
How will this happen? Nothing has been done in Florida to repair the system responsible for that state’s abominations in the 2000 election, and meanwhile the possibilities for mischief have expanded elsewhere. But the decisive assault to our voting rights is the introduction in many jurisdictions of electronic voting machines which leave absolutely no paper trail and whose programming remains secret to all but their large Republican-dominated corporate makers. Sophisticated push-button control of the ballot box: the dream of every modern tyranny.
Why are we trying to raise millions of dollars and raise up millions of people, if in the end the election can be fixed? Especially after what happened four years ago, why aren’t we hearing about this horrible threat? Even the most energetic opponents of the Administration are not pointing out the danger. Other than to suggest the most cynical of possibilities, I don’t have an explanation for that silence.
Because of his film’s brilliance and because of its huge popular success, Michael Moore seems to have awakened his audience in time, and he should soon enjoy the highest honors available from a grateful nation. But I’m afraid he has one more job to do, and I say it is his because I cannot imagine anyone else who could get the voters’ attention, anyone else who could save us from another, even bigger fix in November.
We’re going to have to ask him to help, and we’re also going to have to talk it up with anyone else who might make a difference.
Everything depends on it.
It’s no longer enough just to pick the right candidate in the voting booth. We have keep our eyes on what happens afterwards.
[image from Dangerous Citizen]
let’s not make their nice
Herds of Republicans in New York?
Can’t wait for the excitement of the Republican Convention, still eight long weeks away? Start celebrating this coming Wednesday, and again on each of the next eight Wednesdays, with the people at White Box. They’re putting together more than two months’ worth of creative events in recognition of the extraordinary significance of this . . . this thing coming to New York. There will be a new curator and a new art installation each week.
The Republicans of course have only one installation, it’s hardly art, it’s definitely not a hit and the whole set will be struck later this fall.
MAKE NICE will be the theme of the fifth edition of White Box’s annual summer series, Six Feet Under. As in previous years, MAKE NICE will consist of exhibitions mounted by critics and curators who will take possession of White Box’s exhibition space for the duration of one week each. This year the topic specifically addresses the Republican National Convention, to be staged in New York from August 29 through September 2, 2004. The premise is that the curators, and the artists they select, respond to an ad-campaign featuring Ed Koch in which he tells New Yorkers: “The Republicans are coming, Make Nice.”
Meanwhile, it looks like Koch has had real trouble finding New Yorkers to volunteer holding Republican hands. Are we surprised?
Many of the tour guides for this summer’s Republican National Convention will be tourists.
The nonprofit committee in charge of making Gotham hospitable to the 4,000-plus delegates has hit its benchmark of recruiting 10,000 volunteers.
But only 42 percent of the unpaid convention guides are New York City residents. The rest are from other areas, including upstate, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Virginia, according to statistics released yesterday by NYC Host Committee 2004.
10,000 guides for only 4,000 delegates? They should be able to spare at least a few of those volunteers for work toward a cause worthy of a human being. I expect that some of those 4,200 or so New Yorkers are in fact spies or moles, so this could get more interesting than the event planners might have imagined.
[image is logo from White Box site]