The Sad Sack Four - Terrorist Masterminds, Or Losers?

There really is a fine line between terrorists and wayward stoners goaded by an informant into hashing out criminal plots. There's a disturbing level of what I would consider entrapment in a lot of these terrorist busts. These guys in NYC who were busted for plotting to blow up synagogues don't seem like model citizens, but they were amateurs, schizophrenics and stoners and at some point, you have to ask yourself why we are putting so much effort into getting low-lifes like this to put together plots they aren't equipped to carry out, for the expressed purpose of arresting them for those plots.

Obviously these four wanted to commit these acts, and by all accounts the informant's actions were legal. But I agree with Moe Tkacik at TPMM:

It's easy to laugh at this gang of goons -- and we've done our share of that. But, frankly, it's also hard not to feel some compassion for what looks like a group of struggling, credulous, under-educated men, existing on the fringes of society, who lacked the intelligence or willpower to avoid getting taken in by a government informant anxious to mitigate his own situation, and by their own vague understanding of radical Islam and the hole it might fill in their lives.

And as for what this might say about the threat of home-grown terror, it's almost reassuring that the biggest terror bust we've seen in a while has this sad-sack group at his center.

You cannot take this stuff for granted, but at what point to we draw the line on how much an informant can lead?

Time To Drop Drone Strikes On Manhattan, I Guess

Four terrorist plotters in a home-grown cell were captured in New York City last night after threatening to blow up synagogues and shoot down aircraft. They were never far along in their plot, and the FBI and NYPD had them surveilled and sussed out the entire time. That's how terrorism is properly defeated, through effective law enforcement and intelligence.

I suppose that now, based on conservative theories about terrorism policy, we should 1) invade New York City because otherwise we are allowing terrorists safe havens, 2) immediately ship these dangerous home-grown terrorists to Guantanamo or a floating plastic island because our Supermax prisons cannot possibly handle them, and 3) start torturing them immediately just to see if they know anything about links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

Peter King, a charter member of FEAR Unit, lies to the New York Times, meanwhile, claiming that somehow this terror cell consisted of "jailhouse converts," an effort to demonize our prisons as breeding grounds for terrorism or something. And somehow, that means we can't close Guantanamo. I don't get the point. But maybe I'm not supposed to - there is no point other than using "jailhouse" and "terrorism" in the same sentence.

Accountability For Random Functionaries

I think you have to admit that, even though Obama fired the guy, that's a pretty dope photo.



Worth terrorizing a major American city over? I don't know, it's pretty damn good. Somebody has an eye.

That White House Military Office guy could get a job designing Macy's windows in a second.

I, for one, am thrilled that George Bush and Dick Cheney are having a nice retirement, but the guy who gave the green light on the cool Air Force One pic resigns in disgrace.

Your Eight Weeks Waiting Tables Don't Matter

This New York Magazine article about the whines of the Wall Street rich officially marks a trend in journalism, wherein a writer finds a bunch of Wall Street guys and turns on the tape recorder while they speak a bunch of cringe-inducing quotes into it. It's not very revelatory after the 5th or 6th article, since by now we know pretty well that these are a collection of Randian jerks with a massive entitlement complex who think they rule the world by selling worthless pieces of paper to one another. Sure, it's good to know that they never gave charity out of a sense of, you know, charity, but for the tax cut and the hope of accumulating more power, and it's telling to recognize that the same people so concerned with being personally denigrated by the White House and the public decided not to publish their names. But all in all, this story has been told, and while I guess I understand why establishment media would want to run the same "poor, poor rich people" story over and over, it's certainly telling that you couldn't find a story quoting all members of the middle class that live in Manhattan (the median salary in NYC is about $65,000, so you have 4 million or so making less) if you sat in front of Lexis Nexis every day for a week.

But this part, as DougJ notes, was crucial to understanding the mindset of these people, and also reveals the nexus between the financial establishment and the DC Village establishment:

Jake DeSantis, a 40-year-old commodities trader at AIG, was an unlikely face of Wall Street greed. Stocky and clean cut, with an abiding moral streak, he’d worked summers for a bricklayer in the shadow of shuttered steel mills outside Pittsburgh; he was valedictorian of his high-school class and attended college at MIT.

He laid bricks one summer as a teenager, and so he simply deserves million-dollar bonuses for a company effectively owned by the federal government. I'll turn it over to DougJ at this point.

It’s striking how much we now see the idea that a working-class childhood justifies an adulthood of careerist whoring. Somerby’s been all over this for years, but I think the most blatant example I’ve ever seen is this bit from a chat with Howard Kurtz recently:

Reader: Much of the scalding tone many of your writers on these chats are subjected to from readers is based on this premise. We know that the Post, the Times, the networks are working to support the establishment at all cost. (In Broder’s famous and haughty dismissal of Bill Clinton “this is not his town”). But the problem is that you guys don’t like to portray yourselves as defenders of the establishment. You are the “little guy.” No you are not. Be honest with your audience.

Howard Kurtz: Talk about sweeping generalizations! Evan Thomas declares himself part of the establishment and suddenly every member of the major newspapers and networks are pillars of that establishment as well?

That would be news to Brian Williams, who was a volunteer fireman as a young man and washed out in his first job at a tiny Kansas station. And news to me, a guy who went to a state university. And news to Katie Couric, who started out on the University of Virginia’s student paper and washed out in her first national job, at CNN. And news to longtime Post editor Len Downie, who went to Ohio State University and started here as an intern. And also news to me, a kid from Brooklyn who never met a professional journalist until my junior year at a state university.

If you want to say these are big corporations, if you want to criticize what they do, be my guest. But let’s not assume that everyone in the business grew up in the bosom of the establishment.

An even more amazing example is George Bush’s claim (from a 2000 Nick Lemann piece that’s subscription only) that the biggest difference between him and Al Gore is that Bush went to San Jacinto Junior High.

How did this idea of humble, or humbler, beginnings become so important? It’s worth noting that it’s Randian as well—her heroes usually come from the working class, even if they spend their adult lives spitting on it.

It's mixed up with the idea of virtuous selfishness, that if you "picked yourself up by your bootstraps" that it's necessary and good to cut the bootstraps of everybody else. After all, if they can't make it they lack character. And this imagined "rough childhood" gets used by the establishment to delude themselves into thinking they are jus' folks, in touch with the needs and concerns of the people and just like everyone else. There was a study a while back (can't find it now) showing that something like 80% of the public considers themselves middle class, which is functionally impossible. But these biographical data points have nothing to do with present circumstance. As far as I know, robbery remains robbery whether or not you preceded that robbery with a stint landscaping in the heat.

In fact, we have a grossly unequal society, with little upward mobility, and dangerous implications from such inequality, creating the bubble-based economy which is now bursting. In the past 25 years, top salaries have increased by 256% while low-income salaries increased by 11%. In real dollars that's an obscene difference in income. It's also a major difference in access to media and raw power, which is why we have to endure multiple waves of articles about the persecuted overclass.

Somebody spare us.

The Return Of Rudy

You'd think that when you embarrassed yourself so totally as a Presidential candidate, possibly running the worst campaign in modern history, you'd spend the rest of the year in hiding, dodging the laughter of children on the street. But not so for Rudy Giuliani, who has decided to reappear as a surrogate for John McCain on national security. The ensuing reaction from the Obama campaign and the DNC almost makes me wish that St. 9-11 had won the GOP nomination.

The Obama campaign and the DNC struck back at Giuliani for criticizing Obama for pointing out the handling of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial as an example of how to deal with terrorists in American courts.

In an e-mail, entitled, “Giuliani v Giuliani: 1993 World Trade Center Bombing Case,” the Obama campaign points out that in 1993, Giuliani said at the time, per the New York Times, March 5, 1994: “Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani declared that the verdict ‘demonstrates that New Yorkers won't meet violence with violence, but with a far greater weapon -- the law.’”

Also from that day’s Times: “Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said he hoped that the verdicts would lessen tensions rather than increase them. ‘It should show that our legal system is the most mature legal system in the history of the world,’ he said, ‘that it works well, that that is the place to seek vindication if you feel your rights have been violated.’”

The DNC takes its shot at Giuliani with an e-mail with a title, parroting Joe Biden’s Greatest Debate Hits: “Rudy, ‘Noun, verb, 9/11’ Giuliani returns.”

“Democrats are not going to be lectured to on security by the mayor who failed to learn the lessons of the 1993 attacks, refused to prepare his own city’s first responders for the next attack, urged President Bush to put his corrupt crony in charge of our homeland security, and was too busy lobbying for his foreign clients to join the Iraq Study Group,” DNC spokeswoman Karen Finney said. “Rudy Giuliani, can echo the McCain campaign’s false and misleading attacks, but he can’t change the fact that John McCain is promising four more years of President Bush’s flawed and failed policies on everything from energy security and the economy to the war in Iraq.”

TPM Election Central has been digging up quotes all day from McCain advisers who repeatedly suggested during the primaries that he failed New York City on 9-11 and that he has no revelant national security experience whatsoever. It's been fun.

I don't think the McCain camp expected Rudy to get pounded so effortlessly. But since the campaign, the bloom is WAY off that rose.

Checking In From Gotham

Hey all, so I've been bumming around New York City for a couple days, as I'm in the area for a wedding. The city really appears to empty out on holiday weekends, so contrary to what you might think it's a good time to be here. Just got out of the Whitney Biennial (guess what, this year the curators decided to highlight self-referential "art about art"! Because it's such an undercovered subject in the modern art world), and now we're hanging at a coffee shop.

On the Hillary/RFK thing, I do think she was making a general point about nomination fights being protracted in recent history, but at Doris Kearns Goodwin pointed out today on Meet The Press, even that premise isn't true. In 1992, Clinton had wrapped up the nomination by April and Jerry Brown was just hanging around without any hope of catching him. And in 1968, Kennedy didn't enter the primaries until mid-March, I believe, and when King died on April 4 RFK was campaigning in his first primary test in Indiana. So comparing pre-1992 primary fights with post-1992 ones is just spurious. This is heavily front-loaded and the math becomes more apparent earlier.

That said, she has every right to stay in the race. But the reference to the Kennedy assassination, which she's actually done several times, is bad form, and I think she really ended up blowing it. I sensed some movement toward a unity ticket in the past few days before the comment, and now I don't think that's going to be at all possible. And it's really all her fault. The blind ambition on display is typical of anyone running for President, but there's something very wrong about an allusion to the assassination of a candidate in the context of a justification for staying in the race. And a Vice President just shouldn't ever draw the kind of attention to himself or herself that she clearly would, and she hasn't shown a lot of tact in the spotlight. So that's done. The unity ticket is dead.

The Actual National Conversation on Race

I meant to write about the acquittal in the Sean Bell case, which is tragic. But this video does a better job of it, and reports on the numerous demonstrations in New York City over this, which got little to no play in the traditional media - probably because they weren't violent, and only violent demonstrations by black people get media coverage.



Sean Bell is a symbol but not isolated. And police brutality is not just an issue in New York City but nationwide. And this is also a racial issue, and the Obama comments are interesting, as well as how African-Americans react to his double-bind of how he is constrained by national political forces to remain less angry or militant.

It's a complex issue, but it needs to be addressed openly, and not just among black people but everyone.

Mommy And Daddy Are Fighting!

When, oh when will the partisan bickering end?

Testifying in Albany, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said today that Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s state budget unfairly shortchanges New York City out of millions in promised financial support for health care and education, among other things. If not reversed, he said, the broken promises could force the city to further squeeze taxpayers and deepen cuts in programs.

“This year, as we do every year, we’ve made budget decisions in the city based on the expectation, and even the expressed assurances, that Albany will honor its commitments to us,” Mr. Bloomberg said during his testimony at a joint legislative budget hearing in Albany.

I don't know who's right and who's wrong, and I don't care. I just want everyone to stop fighting so we can listen to the obscenely rich guy and move forward to wherever he wants us to go!

Doesn't Eliot Spitzer know his place?

Mike, You're Stupid And Ugly And Nobody Likes You

Turns out that people who endlessly prattle on about how everyone should stop with the democracy and just allow a billionaire plutocrat to rule us aren't very well-liked by anyone.

Yes, someone who does not need voters, donors, or political parties and who will instead act entirely in the interest of media elites is the only person who can truly pull this country together. It is a good thing he doesn’t need voters, since they don’t like him very much [...]

Michael Bloomberg is less popular than the top three Democrats and the top three Republicans running for President right now. He even has lower overall favorables than Ron Paul. Fortunately, since he doesn’t think appealing to the voters is a worthy activity for elected officials, it actually seems like this low favorable rating was one of his goals.

Meanwhile, in his actual job, Bloomberg is preparing for massive budget cuts across city agencies, including $180 million out of the education budget, while keeping property tax cuts for the rich intact. He doesn't have any new ideas. Just the same tax-cut, spending-cut, callous conservatism, and no ask for sacrifice on the part of the taxpayers, no discussion that America is worth paying for.

He's just another stooge, and an unaccountable one at that.

The Recession Cheerleaders

With Unity 08 morphing into Bloomity 08, with a grassroots movement transformed into an astroturf movement (and the ground is lined with Bloomberg's $1,000 dollar bills), I'm really struck by this new line of argument from the post-partisan folks:

Two founders of the bipartisan Unity08 effort launched a new campaign to draft independent New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg into the presidential race Tuesday, saying he is the right candidate to overcome bitter partisanship and oncoming economic problems.

Former Republican consultant Doug Bailey and Gerald Rafshoon, a former communications director to President Carter, argued that Bloomberg is the answer to a “severe economic recession” that is threatening the country.

They said Bloomberg would be a non-ideological candidate, in large part because the billionaire business mogul can self-finance his entire campaign.

Buying the White House is now seen as a public good! (By the way, they said the same thing about Schwarzenegger, he said "I can't be bought," and then he had all his travel financed by corporate interests and has fundraised more than any governor in California history, so give me a break.)

But I want to pinpoint this idea that Bloomberg is the answer to a "severe economic recession." This was reiterated in an LA Times article this morning.

Um, guys?

If the US economy is in a recession, doesn't it also follow that New York City is likely to be... also... in a recession? Let me answer that for you.

America's lackluster Christmas in 2007 may have been a precursor of bleaker days ahead. New York City foresees gloomy clouds ahead as the city's leaders forecast a slower paced Wall Street, flat real estate prices and budget deficits.

A doomsayer projects only 500 new jobs to be created in 2008, although official estimates from the Independent Budget Office said jobs to be generated in the city will go up by 20,800, a paltry number compared to 41,100 new jobs in 2007.

If the city's financial center continues to lose money, the new jobs may further downsize to 8,700, and granting the U.S. economy does not experience worse recession, the figure may go up to 15,000 new jobs in 2009.

IBO spokesman Doug Turetsky said to Daily News, "The fiscal picture has dimmed considerably." He added, "There is a fairly significant risk that things could get worse."

And if you want to hold up Bloomberg as this supremely competent fiscal manager, shouldn't the fact that New York City faces a $3.1 billion dollar budget deficit be up for discussion? Shouldn't the fact that the city's housing market is slowing and it's become a playground for the rich, with anyone but the upper class priced out of the market, be a topic? Shouldn't the fact that so many of the mortgage lenders and major banks that are writing down billions as a result of their flawed system of mortgage-backed securities ORIGINATE in New York City, be a factor?

If you're going to root, root, root for recession because you think it makes Mike Bloomberg more electable, and if you're going to bring in his experience of economic stewardship, at some point you're going to have to recognize that the two are in conflict. An economy built on Bushonomics cuts both ways. And we know that Bloomberg's tax cuts have been almost entirely regressive.

The elimination of the 4 percent city sales tax on all clothing in the 2008 budget is marginally progressive, since clothing expenses as a percentage of income will be slightly lower for low-income households. But the loss of tens of millions of dollars in high-end taxes on clothing like the outfits touted in the recent fashion shows is a reminder of how much the modest gains for low-income New Yorkers have cost us.

The biggest part of the 2008 cuts – the across-the-board property tax rate cut and residential owner ($400) rebate -- no doubt eased the tax burden of many lower- and middle-income homeowners who needed it (and many wealthy residential owners who didn’t), but the bulk of the rate-cut benefit went to large corporate property owners.

Further, the one significant progressive idea in recent years never made it into the adopted budget because the mayor rejected the City Council’s proposed $300 rebate to low- and middle-income renters. That’s a missed opportunity.

There's something unseemly in staking one's political future on hoping for a recession. Not to mention that New York City isn't this island of calm among a sea of economic troubles. Not that it's totally Bloomberg's fault: he's a mayor subject to the policies of the federal government. But let's not be so ridiculous to suggest that he can take credit for the positives and brush aside the negatives.

UPDATE: There's another thing: nobody knows who Michael Bloomberg is and those that do aren't particularly interested in him being President (he never polls over 13%). He doesn't beat Hillary Clinton in New York City.

G(iuliani)NR Lies

By spinning in ten different directions at once with regard to the Shag Fund, the Giuliani campaign is simply reinforcing the now well-established image of them as fabricators, which The New York Times finally blows the whistle on today.

Discussing his crime-fighting success as mayor, Mr. Giuliani told a television interviewer that New York was “the only city in America that has reduced crime every single year since 1994.” In New Hampshire this week, he told a public forum that when he became mayor in 1994, New York “had been averaging like 1,800, 1,900 murders for almost 30 years.” When a recent Republican debate turned to the question of fiscal responsibility, he boasted that “under me, spending went down by 7 percent.”

All of these statements are incomplete, exaggerated or just plain wrong.

When a campaign has earned a reputation as flat-out liars, explaining away a story of the magnitude of the Shag Fund gets even more difficult. And really, it's about time that somebody noticed how Team Giuliani operates, although the Times pretty much confines it to statistics about his record in New York City, rather than the other examples, like making up stats about England's record on prostate cancer.

The point is that today is the day when the lying catches up to Rudy Giuliani.

Shag Fund Explodes

Today brings us a load of media stories about Rudy Giuliani's taxpayer-funded adultery. And Rudy's campaign clearly can't keep the story straight. They appear to have settled on the idea that the expenses were reimbursed by the NYPD and there's nothing to see here. Of course, this is a non-answer. Unless there's some wealthy benefactor named "NYPD," mayor's office and police department funds are all paid by taxpayers. It's irrelevant to the main issue: why did Rudy stash these expenses in obscure portions of the budget in the first place?

One explanation blames anonymous bookkeepers. Then they tried to claim it was a longstanding practice, leading to one of the funniest attempts at spin I've ever seen:

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. I'm just going to talk about the Giuliani era," Lhota said. "I should only talk about what I know about."

That's priceless.

As more and more gets unearthed, it looks like these Shag Fund expenses were only a part of Giuliani's living off the public dime.

It seems more likely in his final years and months as mayor Rudy was living larger and larger on the NYC dime. And a look at the book-keeping details that are emerging suggests a very conscious effort to use these squirrelly accounting techniques to hide Rudy's high-living ways from public scrutiny. Some of it was Shag Fund spending, but not all, probably not even most.

The problem is that even though the accounting techniques were part of a general effort to hide Rudy's living the high-life on the city's dime, it's now shined a bright light on the Shag Fund. And the Shag Fund was evidently spread more widely than the stuff accounted for with the squirrelly book-keeping.

Who paid for the city car and driver given to Judi while she was still Rudy's mistress?

Who paid for her security detail?

Why did she have one?

Does the city have to pay for travel and expenses for Rudy's wife and his mistress? Can't the budgeting be monogamous even if Rudy's not?

The NY Times has more on this element of the story. The attempts to conceal this from public view until well after his potential Senate run, and his stonewalling of investigations into these practices by auditors in 2001 and 2002, back up the accounts.

(City Comptroller William C. Thompson) said auditors working under his predecessor first raised questions about the travel costs during the Giuliani administration. Their requests to the Giuliani administration for details and justification went unanswered, Mr. Thompson said.

Indeed, while Mr. Giuliani and his aides provided extensive responses yesterday to the reports about the billing practices, they did not, according to the Politico report, offer any explanation before its publication.

You know you're in trouble when Bernie Kerik has to vouch for you.

This story and one other are dominating headlines today. More on that one in a separate post.

Rudy Appearance Fights, Loses Battle With Rudy Reality

In a surface primary election featuring one cardboard cut-out candidate against other cardboard cut-out candidates, Rudy Giuliani may look slightly more three-dimensional than the others. But go just an inch past that surface and there are some troubling realities. Time Magazine, which lauded the former NYC Mayor in late 2001, has actually looked into the matter now and found the truth more uncertain:

Before 9/11, Giuliani spent eight years presiding over a city that was a known terrorist target. A TIME investigation into what he did — and didn't do — to prepare for a major catastrophe is revealing. In addition to extraordinary grace under fire, Giuliani developed an intimate knowledge of emergency management and an affinity for quantifiable results. On 9/11, he earned the trust of most Americans; one year later, 78% of those surveyed by the Marist Institute had a favorable impression of Giuliani. This magazine also named Giuliani its Person of the Year in 2001. Assuming he can keep it, trust is a priceless resource in psychological warfare.

The evidence also shows great, gaping weaknesses. Giuliani's penchant for secrecy, his tendency to value loyalty over merit and his hyperbolic rhetoric are exactly the kinds of instincts that counterterrorism experts say the U.S. can least afford right now.

Giuliani's limitations are in fact remarkably similar to those of another man who has led the nation into a war without end. Some of the Bush Administration's policies, like improved intelligence sharing between countries and our own agencies, have made the U.S. better at fighting terrorism. But others, from the war in Iraq to the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, have actually made the task much more difficult. The challenge for the next President will be focusing on and adapting the good tools and jettisoning the bad. Whether you conclude Giuliani can win this war depends ultimately on whether you think we are winning now.

And we all know how many Americans think we're just peachy these days. That whole article is worth reading.

Giuliani's economic policy is similarly negative, once you actually take a look at it and you understand that the surplus he was touting can only be seen that way if you were holding the chart upside down.

Rudolph W. Giuliani has been broadcasting radio advertisements in Iowa and other states far from the city he once led stating that as mayor of New York, he “turned a $2.3 billion deficit into a multibillion dollar surplus.”

The assertion, which Mr. Giuliani has repeated on the trail as he has promoted his fiscal conservatism, is somewhat misleading, independent fiscal monitors said. In fact, Mr. Giuliani left his successor, Michael R. Bloomberg, with a bigger deficit than the one Mr. Giuliani had to deal with when he arrived in 1994. And that deficit would have been large even if the city had not been attacked on Sept. 11, 2001.

“He inherited a gap, and he left a gap for his successor,” Ronnie Lowenstein, the director of the city’s Independent Budget Office, a nonpartisan agency that monitors the city budget, said of Mr. Giuliani. “The city was budgeting as though the good times were not going to end, but sooner or later they always do.”

With realities like these, it's no wonder that Rudy has hired the media team behind the racist anti-Harold Ford ads. He's going to need some slash-and-burn politics to distract from the awful record.

Rudy The Lion Tamer

Have people seen this? (Unfortunately, the video's in a proprietary format so i can't embed, but believe me, you'll want to go over and see it.)

It's a clip from the movie Giuliani Time, showing a 2000 "parody" video from a press roast with Rudy acting as, no joke, an AFRICAN TRIBESMAN admonishing a Bronx Zoo lion for being lazy and on welfare. When he tells the zookeeper to release the lion and "send him to a job center" and the zookeeper resists, he goes after the guy with his spear.

So, Rudy is a) comparing welfare recipients to animals, b) dressed up in blackface (or at least war paint) a la Al Jolson, and c) threatening to kill anyone who doesn't agree with him.

It's a trifecta. Wow.

The Turning Point For Rudy

I think this latest comment from Rudy Giuliani, where he showed his true narcissistic colors and equated his photo-ops at Ground Zero to being a rescue worker, is really going to hurt him. This would have been a bad weekend anyway, with Mitt Romney sucking up all the good press from the Straw Poll he bought. But now, Rudy's 9/11 bona fides are getting some scrutiny. And while this devastating article in the Village Voice won't get national press attention, enough people have seen it to give them a blueprint of Rudy's vulnerabilities on his self-created mythology.

The story, by Giuliani biographer Wayne Barrett, details five big lies that Giuliani has been spreading on the campaign trail about his response to September 11. As John Kerry leaned on his Vietnam experience to provide a campaign narrative in 2004, so too is Giuliani leaning on his 9/11 story; it's told on practically every stop on the stump. There is no real policy apparatus to the Giuliani campaign, so his entire argument for being President seems to be "I protected you on 9/11, Democrats are bad, vote for me." But this theme is littered with inconsistencies and outright lies. Here's just one example.

1. 'I think the thing that distinguishes me on terrorism is, I have more experience dealing with it.' This pillar of the Giuliani campaign—asserted by pundits as often as it is by the man himself—is based on the idea that Rudy uniquely understands the terror threat because of his background as a prosecutor and as New York's mayor. In a July appearance at a Maryland synagogue, Giuliani sketched out his counterterrorism biography, a resume that happens to be rooted in falsehood.

"As United States Attorney, I investigated the Leon Klinghoffer murder by Yasir Arafat," he told the Jewish audience, referring to the infamous 1985 slaying of a wheelchair-bound, 69-year-old New York businessman aboard the Achille Lauro, an Italian ship hijacked off the coast of Egypt by Palestinian extremists. "It's honestly the reason why I knew so much about Arafat," says Giuliani. "I knew, in detail, the Americans he murdered. I went over their cases."

On the contrary, Victoria Toensing, the deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department in Washington who filed a criminal complaint in the Lauro investigation, says that no one in Giuliani's office "was involved at all." Jay Fischer, the Klinghoffer family attorney who spearheaded a 12-year lawsuit against the PLO, says he "never had any contact" with Giuliani or his office.

That's just a small example. Giuliani blew the only terrorism case he ever prosecuted (most of the charges were thrown out); he never really discussed terrorism in the 8 years leading up to 9/11; he waited 6 years to even create an Office of Emergency Management; he put the HQ in the World Trade Center complex instead of a secure site in Brooklyn, even though the WTC was hit in 1993 (mainly so he could walk to it easily); he didn't change the non-functional radio systems that caused hundreds of firefighters to never hear the evacuation order, or make them inter-operable with the police radios; he assured rescue workers that the air was safe at Ground Zero for cleanup; he hid the results of his own Administration's field studies showing dangerous levels of toxicity; and then there's this:

The mayor was so personally focused on the siting and construction of the bunker that the city administrator who oversaw it testified in a subsequent lawsuit that "very senior officials," specifically including Giuliani, "were involved," which he said was a major difference between this and other projects. Giuliani's office had a humidor for cigars and mementos from City Hall, including a fire horn, police hats and fire hats, as well as monogrammed towels in his bathroom. His suite was bulletproofed and he visited it often, even on weekends, bringing his girlfriend Judi Nathan there long before the relationship surfaced. He had his own elevator.

The emergency management center was a freakin' love nest!

The harm here is that this is the ultimate oppo research document, a story from which a thousand TV ads can be culled. And they have the added benefit of being true. Rudy has scrupulously created a hagiographic reading of his role on 9/11 through the years that simply doesn't match the facts. And this slip-up this week is the crack that was needed to call his entire story into question.

A Tornado Grows In Brooklyn

I've been working on one of those "extreme-weather" shows, and we've proposed every scenario under the sun, and I don't think we even got around to New York City tornado.

National Weather Service Confirms Tornado Touched Down in Brooklyn National Weather Service meteorologists, investigating storm damage in the Bay Ridge area with New York City Emergency Management officials, have confirmed that a tornado did in fact touch down on parts of Brooklyn Wednesday morning. The tornado's heavy winds, estimated to have been up to 111 to 135 miles per hour, tore through sections of Brooklyn, damaging roughly 40 buildings and downing dozens of trees. Residents in the Bay Ridge, Flatbush and Sunset Park neighborhoods reported damaged houses and hundreds of crushed cars along several blocks.

I hope somebody had a camera, because that will be valuable footage for Michael Bay or Roland Emmerich down the road.

The planet is kind of freaking out with the natural disasters, no? Wasn't there a cyclone in the Middle East earlier this year? And then there was that Robin Williams movie where he played the priest...

I wonder if a certain rising of temperatures and changing of sea levels can account for this rise in extreme weather events...

The Walls Are Falling Around Us

I opposed last year's infrastructure bonds in California, and I still oppose the way in which they were funded, but after yesterday's incident in Manhattan, it's clear that our infrastructure is crumbling and that 30 years of free-rider conservatism is to blame.

Wednesday, in New York, a pipe installed in 1924 finally gave way and ended up killing someone. Imagine that. They built things to last in those days, but I doubt anyone ever dreamed that they would have to last for nearly a century.

Rick Perlstein has been writing about what he calls "E. coli conservatism" for a while over at his blog the Big Con, where, among other things, he's chronicling the increasing incidence of ... sinkholes. That's right, these days it's quite common to be driving or walking along a street in Anytown USA and be suddenly sucked into the ground because of the neglected infrastructure of our towns and cities. You can read about it in local papers every day. Wednesday he wrote:

We've warned here again and again about the decrepitude of our underground infrastructure, about what happens when a nation consecrates itself to no higher domestic goal than the cutting of taxes. New York had a Republican mayor, in fact, who now spends his days boasting that he cut taxes 23 times. Cut spending, too, he's proud to say.

This is the legacy of the past 25 years of neglect. We shouldn't be relieved when we see a huge cloud of smoke and dust and find that it isn't "terrorism." It's a warning as important as a magenta terror alert or the rumblings of Michael Chertoff's gut. There is a price to pay for this free lunch the conservatives have been selling for the past 30 years and the bill is coming due.

America is in desperate need of a massive building program that it can't afford without shared sacrifice. And there's a robust minority political culture that believes everything is fine and we don't have to worry about it as long as we cut taxes. As if such an action will magically transform our infrastructure and make it all shiny and gleaming.

Conservatives would RATHER these things go to hell, so they can blame "irresponsible government" as use it as a pretext for privatization. Only they're the ones who have been irresponsible. As we know, all the privatizers do is rip off the government treasury, whether for work here or in Iraq (and thank goodness for our freshman Senators, who finally want to take a look at the out-of-control Iraq contracting). There's money for conservatives in handing out contracts to friends and allies, but no money in actually DOING THE WORK. We are on the verge of stories like yesterday's in New York all over the country, and something must be done - through the auspices of good government - to ensure public safety.

Christine Todd Faces The Music

Christine Todd Whitman, yet another disgraced Republican from her time in the Bush Fourthbranch Administration, had quite a day on Capitol Hill.

Ex-EPA chief Christie Whitman was bombarded by boos and a host of accusations Monday at a hearing into her assurances that it had been safe to breathe the air around the fallen World Trade Center.

The confrontation between the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency and her critics grew heated at times. Some members of the audience shouted in anger, only to be gaveled down by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., who chaired the hearing.

For three hours Whitman faced charges from Nadler and others that the Environmental Protection Agency's public statements after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks gave people a false sense of safety.

Whitman maintained the government warned those working on the toxic debris pile to use respirators, while elsewhere in lower Manhattan the air was safe to the general public.

The government "warned" people to use respirators, that was the whole problem, even if her story is true. They ought to have mandated it to protect the volunteers. But the EPA and the city of New York clearly wanted to project an "everything's normal" sensibility, and didn't even keep tabs on who was going in and coming out of Ground Zero during the cleanup. The directive was to get it done as quickly as possible, and damn the consequences.

There was at least a measure of accountability today, with Whitman not only facing Congress but dozens of Ground Zero rescue workers, 70% of whom contracted severe illness as a result of breathing in that fetid air. What Whitman and the Admnistration did, their claims that everything was fine and nothing was toxic in the days after several 1970s-era buildings were reduced to dust in Lower Manhattan, is nearly criminal.

This part was poetic:

Dozens of activists and Sept. 11 rescue workers came to the hearing, and some in the audience hissed when Whitman said she felt former Mayor Rudy Giuliani's administration "did absolutely everything in its power to do what was right" in handling the health concerns.

The truth is he was callous and unfeeling. And if he gets that Republican nomination, there will be rescue workers, volunteers, firemen, and 9-11 families nipping at his heels. As I've said many times, it'll make the Swift Boaters look like a tea party.

I Come To Bury Rudy Giuliani, Not To Praise Him

By now you know that Rudy Giuliani is running for President; in fact, rumors are rampant that he will officially announce while speaking to the California Republican Party Convention tomorrow. He's also planning to hold 14 fundraisers in New York City alone over the next month, so he won't have any problem being competitive in the money primary.

Many liberal bloggers seem to believe that there's no way in 1,000 years Giuliani could ever win the Republican nomination, given the hard-core social conservative tilt of the electorate in the primaries. The WaPo article says it best.

But his support for abortion rights and gay rights puts him sharply at odds with the majority of his party, a situation that many GOP strategists think will present a substantial obstacle to his hopes of winning the nomination.

You can also look at statements by Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council ("Giuliani is known for his impressive leadership in the wake of 9/11, but most pro-family Americans do not yet realize how far outside of the mainstream of conservative thought that Mayor Giuliani social views really are") and Terry Jeffery of Human Events ("Rudy will not win the Republican nomination because enough of the people who vote in Republican caucuses and primaries still respect life and marriage, and are not ready to give up on them — or on the Republican party as an agent for protecting them").

Personally, I think this is an attempt from those who don't like Rudy in the Republic Party to knock him off stride. Because he's clearly formidable. While we're still a long way out, his favorability ratings dwarf any other contender. And more than anything the GOP wants to retain power. I think Digby is making the right point, that the fundies will vote for whoever their leaders tell them to vote for, and they're all snake oil salesman and without morals anyway, so they'll advocate for whoever they think can win. Remember that the leaders of the social conservatives are actually all fiscal conservatives. The issues that they use are just the convenient ones to keep their base in line; what they want to perpetuate are right-wing economic structures. The only candidate, therefore, who's past disqualifies him to win the Republic nomination is Mike Huckabee, because he raised taxes in Arkansas.

The base, meanwhile, will vote with their tribe, and if the tribal elders say it's Giuliani, then it's Giuliani. Here's Digby.

If Dobson and his brethren decide it is in their best interests to back Rudy or McCain, they will do so. Expect a lot of posturing and pandering --- these are political animals and they play the game very well. But at the end of the day this decision has nothing to do with whether the Christian conservative base will flee the party or stay home. They can rationalize anything.

Rudy is a formidable candidate who will have to get past Dobson and McCain and pay homage to southern values in a way that southern conservatives understand that he's acknowledging their awesome power. (Look for some very thinly veiled racial appeals from Rudy --- he's got cred in that department.) But his manly-man authoritarian personality and image is where he makes them all swoon and he may very well finesse his former "liberal" positions.

Those who aren't paying as much attention only know Rudy as America's mayor and tough on crime. That'll play to the pants-pissing fear crowd. Democrats cannot rely on the Republican base to deep-six Giuliani. In fact, it would be dangerous to do so.

That's why it's important to define Rudy now, as the blogs have been doing with McCain recently, to great effect. And with Rudy, there's even more to pick from.

First of all, it's important to note that Rudy Giuliani's ascension to the top of the Presidential ladder is entirely predicated on his performance on one day while Mayor of New York City. His second term in New York was a mess, where he lashed out at things like public art shows, and showed a near-total disinterest in anything but law enforcement issues. And even on that score, the crime rate was falling for a few years under Mayor Dinkins, and continued to fall since Giuliani left office. So I don't know how much the "He cleaned up New York" frame should be attributed to him. In fact, not very much attributed to him after 9-11 rings true if you actually look at his record, not on social issues but on the issues that matter to people's lives.

The attack on the twin towers blew a hole in downtown Manhattan and in our collective memory. Osama bin Laden and company did a better P.R. job for Giuliani than spin ghouls Hill & Knowlton ever did for Dick Nixon. He made everyone but the most grouchy and resentful New Yorkers forget that before planes crashed into the World Trade Center, Rudy was a hyper-authoritarian narcissist with a lust for overkill verging on the sociopathic [...]

Before the planes hit, when he had too much power and not enough to do, Giuliani, like an old soldier who comes home and starts abusing his family in lieu of a real enemy, was pulling a Great Santini on New York, rooting around in our sock drawers with a Maglite, looking for vices to confiscate and sins to punish. By the mid-'90s, Mayor Rudy was abusing authority according to the whims of his own paranoid, hyper-defensive personality disorder in way that would have made Tiberius self-conscious.

As his second term wound down, New Yorkers knew what Rudy was, and they were sick of it. In 1999, they rejected his caudillo-style attempt to amend the city's (relatively new) term-limit law so he could serve another four years. By May 2000, with crime at historic lows, the city's economy still aglow, real estate prices soaring -- the kind of external factors that normally make politicians untouchable -- his approval rating had slid to a Bush-oid 37 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University poll. In December 2001, when Giuliani finally stepped down -- after trying and failing to exploit his post 9/11 popularity by passing a special law that would've added three months to his reign) -- the New York Times interrupted its elegy for the Rudy years with a sober reminder. "The suppression of dissent," noted the Times, "or of anything that irked the mayor, became a familiar theme."

The Salon article is devastating. Giuliani hired William Bratton as police chief, watched him use innovative tactics to lower the crime rate, and when Bratton got all the glory for it, Rudy fired him. When New York magazine ran a gentle ad campaign calling themselves "Possibly the only good thing in New York Rudy hasn't taken credit for," Rudy tried to ban the ad from the subway system. In order to look tough on crime, Rudy had citizens handcuffed and jailed for smoking a joint, then set free, as if to particularly humiliate them.

Even Rudy's supporters know about his tendencies (Chris Matthews: "I think the country wants a boss like that, just a little bit of facism there"). He's primarily concerned with personal flattery and making himself rich from $100,000 speaking fees, even for CHARITY events.

But what certainly demands more scrutiny is this mythic status of an American hero because he did what anyone in a leadership position who isn't holding a children's book at the time ought to do: he held press conferences and pleaded for calm. The press conferences, of course, starred him, and he projected this image as if he literally saved the city, and a dazed and dazzled public willingly gave in to this fiction. Meanwhile, his decision-making before and after that fateful day was terrible. As Sisyphus Shrugged recounts in a series of 2002-era posts, Rudy made the decision, ignoring all other advice, to put the emergency response bunker under 7 WTC because he wanted it to be within walking distance of City Hall. At this time, the only other terrorist attack in recent New York history was at the World Trade Center, but no matter. There was another site picked out in Brooklyn (where Bloomberg put it later) but Rudy got his way. And that placement undoubtedly cost American lives.

FYI, a not inconsiderable portion of Mr. Giuliani's fires of hell were fed by the fuel supply for the city's emergency response bunker, which he insisted on locating in 7WTC in the face of universal insistence by the city's security consultants that it wasn't a good idea to locate an emergency response bunker in a terrorist target.

Of course, since the Motorola radios his administration insisted on buying for the firefighters through a no-bid contract, which were never field-tested, didn't work properly, a working communications center might not have gotten the message to the firefighters in the towers that they needed to evacuate.

(by the way, if you want to know why 7WTC blew up, Loose Change viewers, the bunker would be your answer.)

We're talking about over 100 firefighters who never heard the call for evacuation, and Rudy falsely testified to the 9-11 Commission on this fact. He claimed that the two sets of radio frequencies were due to the limits on technology at the time, when in fact these radios malfunctioned during the first WTC bombing and Giuliani failed to heed the calls to change them.

Barbara O'Brien, who's done some of the best work deconstructing this revisionist history, picks up the story from there:

The fact is that Giuliani did little to “lead” rescue or recovery efforts. While Rudy was prancing around on television, a hodge-podge of city agencies loosely — very loosely — coordinated by the Office of Emergency Management went to work deconstructing the remains of the World Trade Center with little input or direction from the Mayor.

Consider also that the World Trade Center was yards away from Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange. Unlike Mayor Nagin of New Orleans, Mayor Giuliani did not have to beg for help getting the debris cleared and electricity hooked up so that the financial district was up and running again as quickly as possible. New York’s business leadership saw to that

She also has a wide collection of examples of Rudy angering city residents, using law enforcement dishonestly and cruelly, presiding over the Amadou Diallo incident without reaching out to the black community, and dozens of other examples of a man literally out of control and drunk on his own power.

Glenn Greenwald sees this as Rudy's selling point to the Republic base:

Giuliani's talent for expressing prosecutor-like righteous anger towards "bad people" -- as well as his well-honed ability to communicate base-pleasing rhetoric towards Islamic extremists -- are underappreciated. I don't think any candidate will be able to compete with his ability to convey a genuine hard-line against Middle Eastern Muslims (see here for one representative maneuver), and that is the issue that -- admittedly with some exceptions -- dominates the Christian conservative agenda more than gay marriage and abortion (concerns which he can and will minimize by promising to appoint more Antonin Scalias and Sam Alitos to the Supreme Court, something he emphasized last night in a highly amicable interview with Sean Hannity) [...]

Rudy Giuliani is, I think, by the far the smartest and most politically talented candidate in the Republican field, a fact to which most residents of New York during his mayoralty - including those who dislike him -- would likely attest. In an overwhelmingly Democratic city, he won two elections, including a landslide for his second term. And he does have in his past many incidents which will uniquely appeal to Christian conservatives, such as the war he waged periodically on works of art and other cultural expressions which offended his religious sensibilities [...]

Giuliani is an "authoritarian narcissist" -- plagued by an unrestrained prosecutor's mentality -- who loves coercive government power (especially when vested in his hands) and hates dissent above all else. He would make George Bush look like an ardent lover of constitutional liberties. He is probably the absolute worst and most dangerous successor to George Bush under the circumstances, but his political talents and prospects for winning are being severely underestimated.

It is crucial that this information is brought to light immediately. Rudy Giuliani's weaknesses in the Presidential race are not his moderate views on social issues. His weaknesses, actually, are the fact that he's completely dismissive of civil liberties, uses the police state as a cudgel, makes horrible decisions based on little other than self-regard, and has a tendency to silence any and all dissent. He's not necessarily unelectable in the primaries, but he ought to be in the general. And raising awareness of these issues is absolutely crucial NOW before the press goes to sleep and uncritically anoints him as "America's Mayor" once again.