kickycan wrote:Finn, was that a shot at Joe's writing? From you? Ha! Thanks! That's the best laugh I've had all day.
I'm sure Joe will appreciate your support.
Bush is 'exploiting 9/11 for re-election'
New Yorkers braced for violent protests aimed at Republican party convention next weekend
Quote:The invasion of the Big Apple is coming, and its residents could not be less delighted. From next weekend, about 50,000 delegates and their guests will pour into town for the Republican Party Convention. They may be joined by up to a million political protesters, some very noisome.
Why us, is the cry of many New Yorkers who are dreading the confab of Republicans that starts on 30 August. Never before has the party of George Bush chosen New York as the host city for a convention. This is Democrat territory: fewer than one in five New Yorkers voted for Mr Bush in 2000.
Solidarity is the answer. The Republicans settled on New York soon after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre. Coming to town in 2004 would be the perfect gesture, they thought, but Democrats see it differently. They say that the President is trying to exploit the tragedy of 2001 and use the backdrop of a maimed Manhattan to cast himself as the tough leader who can crush terrorism.
For Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a Republican himself, the four-day gathering is an opportunity for his city to sell itself. But he is concerned that it could go horribly wrong. How nice will New Yorkers be to their guests? And how violent may the promised protests become?
With only a week to go, the city is in a stand-off with an activist group called United for Peace and Justice that expects as many as 250,000 people to turn out for an anti-Bush rally next Sunday. The group is suing for the right to hold the march in Central Park. The city is refusing, citing probable grass damage.
"I am afraid this Central Park thing is really going to blow up," said Gary Ferdman, director of a business consortium that persuaded Mr Bloomberg to announce last week a discount programme for protesters who behave. Any activist who promises to protest peacefully will be rewarded with a badge entitling them to discounts in restaurants, hotels and theatres.
Scores of other groups are planning their own demonstrations, including Planned Parenthood, which will stage a march across the Brooklyn Bridge in defence of a woman's right to abortion. Only a tiny number of permits have been issued for demonstrations outside Madison Square Garden, the sports and concert area where the Republicans will be gathered.
complete article
Yes, that's apparent and at the same time exploiting he the victims.
Those who accuse the GOP of exploiting victims are off the deep end.
911 happened! Why try to sweep it under a rug?
It was a moment like no other in our history. We should NEVER forget it. This country came together in a way that still gives me goosebumps. As awful as it was--it provided such a far-flung, ideologically divided (in a weird way), diverse union of states with a sense of oneness and empathy for one another.
Why pretend like it didn't happen?
I was surprised the Dems didn't put aside some time for it.
Mention of the event--discussion of the GOP's response to it-- how is this a bad thing?
Sofia wrote:Those who accuse the GOP of exploiting victims are off the deep end....
Why pretend like it didn't happen?
I was surprised the Dems didn't put aside some time for it.
Mention of the event--discussion of the GOP's response to it-- how is this a bad thing?
I don't think you really want to go there:
http://www.takebackthemedia.com/condosleeza.html
Ramped up security starts today in New York, armed guards on every train, auto-weapons slung over the shoulders. At Penn Station itself, preparations for locking down certain doors have been made, but as of late, no published reports as to which ones will be locked, closed or otherwise blocked off to the public.
The scene will be a bit like just after 9/11 but without the smoke and sirens constantly in the air. I'm sure that will bring New Yorkers a few memories of those days and no small bit of resentment. The question I hear in the Starbuck's : Why the hell are they coming here instead of Houston or Dallas or Miami?
So, I am not taking the A or the 1/9 for the next two weeks past 59th Street and I won't be going to Au Bain Pan for my cinnamon rolls at Penn Station.
Joe
I guess I was alone, all that togetherness didn't even give me goosebumps even then. I just remember being shell shocked that something so horrible happend.
Lets say that someone in your family is cruelly murdered by a thug on the street that everybody is afraid of, in some kind of horrible way that is forever indented in the neighborhood's memory. The whole neighborhood gets together to mourn and the mayor comes to pay his respects. Then a few more years go by and it is time for relection. The mayor comes back to that neighborhood to hold a big speech for a campaign speech to be relected for mayor in memory of that time that everyone came together to mourn that terrible day that a person was cruelly murdered.
Do you not find it at all crass and untasteful? I think it is sick.
Anarchists Protesters Promise To Take Central Park
Quote:In response to Mayor Bloomberg's reluctance to grant protesters permits to use Central Park and the recent report that the FBI has been questioning political demonstrators, members of Not In Our Name (NION) held a press conference Monday morning on the steps of City Hall.
"Central Park will be our gathering place," declared Tanya Mayo, National Coordinator for the Not In Our Name project. "We will battle for Central Park. We will not be silent."
Last week, Mayor Bloomberg emphatically denied a Central Park rally permit for demonstrators seeking to protest the Republican National Convention.
Taking umbrage at the mayor's edict, United for Peace Justice, which representatives of NION said was part of a coalition planning to protest the RNC, reneged on a compromise with the city to hold the rally on the West Side Highway after a march past Madison Square Garden. According to the city, Central Park's Great Lawn cannot handle the expected crowd of 250,000, because grass planted in a recent renovation would be trampled.
"Mayor Bloomberg said this isn't about politics," Mayo said in a press release from NION, "but the whole battle for a permit couldn't be more political."
Heidi Boghosian, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, told reporters that the demonstrators had every right to protest the convention. "Suppression of their First Amendment rights will only perpetuate an atmosphere of violence," she said. Lawyers from the NLG will be providing pro-bono representation for those arrested, according to the NLG website.
Other speakers at the press conference, including members from Refuse & Resist, told of friends who have been questioned and subpoenaed by the FBI as part of an initiative that began before the Democratic Convention in Boston last month. "But we will not be intimidated," said Sunshara Taylor of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. She denounced the Bush administration and its so-called war against terror. "The Bush administration has no legitimacy."
According to several reports, FBI officials have reportedly urged agents to look for information about planned disruptions and have come up with a list of people who they think may have information about possible violence. The bureau maintains the investigation is focused on possible crimes, not political dissent.
Some activists are fearful that agent provocateurs may be among protesters with the purpose of fomenting conditions that might lead to mayhem.
"We have a right to protest in this country and we will be in Central Park on August 29," Mayo said during the question and answer phase of the press conference. "No, we do not plan to have acts of civil disobedience. We want a peaceful rally."
The Republican Convention will be at Madison Square Garden from August 30 to September 2.
Link
It will be in NYC a heat debate....
Quote:Those who accuse the GOP of exploiting victims are off the deep end.
No, we're not. Read up on what the RNC wanted to do before they got massive amounts of protest from 9/11 families, Sophia...
Cycloptichorn
I'm not really the protest type, but it sounds like a hell of a shindig they're planning. I'd go just for the spectacle of it if I wasn't afraid of getting arrested or beat up by a cop, or both.
Cool link, Squinney, thanks! I love the Commitments and, of course, those are my sentiments, too: either prior knowledge or gross incompetence.
Finn wrote:
Quote:They didn't happen to gather at the Democratic convention, but it seems certain they will be there in New York. These are unaligned extremists?
We're all lumped together in disdain for the politics of your leaders.
Enemy of my enemy, and so forth. I think the fact that there was basically NO protest at the DNC might have more to do with the fact that the Democrats aren't supporting policies that people want to protest against....
Cycloptichorn
The Democrats supported the war in Iraq, the 87 million, the tax cuts, the Patriot Act... Bush and the Republicans didn't do any of this alone.
Bah. The democrats didn't have the numbers, or the political might, to stop a lot of things from happening in a post 9/11 world.
After all, when the president scares the crap out of your constituents, what the hell are you supposed to do? During the early days after 9/11 there was no chance of going against the herd - it would have been political suicide. It took a while for that to wear off.
Cycloptichorn
What it took to oppose any of those issues was a man or woman of conscience, and a different opinion.
Guess there were none.
Oh, they were there. There have always been a few senators, in every one of those topics you listed, that were stringently against it. I can go back and look if you like, but I'm pretty sure your memories will serve if you think about it.
In fact, the tax cuts and 87 million you speak of (isn't that billion?) had significant opposition from the dems. But when your party is in the white house AND has a majority in congress, it is difficult to stop....
Cycloptichorn
Yeh, billion.
I'll have to have a look at how many opposed it.
Don't think there were that many. Still, I'll see.
An excerpt from a Washington Post article--
Feingold vs. Kerry on the war
Even Wisconsin liberal Sen. Russ Feingold gets it. How telling it is that Democratic candidates John Kerry and John Edwards don't.
The only senator in 2001 to vote against the USA Patriot Act one month after September 11, Mr. Feingold was also one of 21 Democratic senators who opposed the resolution authorizing force against Iraq in October 2002.
Messrs. Kerry and Edwards ?- unlike Mr. Feingold ?- enthusiastically supported the use-of-force resolution. Also unlike Mr. Feingold, however, Messrs. Kerry and Edwards opposed an October 2003 supplemental appropriation of $87 billion, which provided $66 billion to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those votes by Messrs. Kerry and Edwards, who were pursuing the Democratic presidential nomination, were as cowardly as they were self-serving and opportunistic.
Mr. Feingold recently told the Capital Times of Madison that his party's standard-bearers were "wrong" to oppose the appropriation bill. Sen. Joseph Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told New Yorker magazine that Mr. Kerry's opposition to the supplemental appropriation was a "tactical" move in Democratic presidential politics ?- an attempt, in Mr. Biden's words, "to prove to [front-running Howard] Dean's guys I'm not a warmonger."
Messrs. Kerry and Edwards should have voted "yes to support the troops," Mr. Feingold told the Capital Times. Abandoning the troops in time of war was simply not an option for Mr. Feingold, whom the National Journal ranked as the sixth most liberal member of the Senate in 2003, not far behind Sen. Kerry at No. 1 and Sen. Edwards at No. 4.
Mr. Feingold explained to the Capital Times that he voted for the $87 billion supplemental appropriation because Wisconsin troops serving in Iraq had telephoned his office saying that "their Humvees weren't properly defended [with armor] and they didn't have [body-armor] flak jackets." Mr. Kerry, who had bitterly attacked the administration for failing to provide enough body armor for the troops, knew that the $87 billion supplemental included funds to remedy that problem .
Curiously, Mr. Feingold was one of 14 Senate Democrats who opposed the October 2002 use-of-force resolution but supported the $87 billion supplemental a year later. In an overwhelmingly bipartisan move, the Senate passed the supplemental appropriation by a vote of 87 to 12. Only four senators voted in 2002 to authorize force against Iraq but voted against funding military operations in Iraq (and Afghanistan) six months after Saddam Hussein was overthrown. Two of them were Iowa's Tom Harkin and Ernest Hollings of South Carolina, who retires at the end of the year. The other two were Messrs. Kerry and Edwards.
Mr. Feingold characterized a vote against funding military operations as "irresponsible" and tantamount to "cutting and running." Barely one month before the October 2003 vote on the supplemental, Mr. Kerry was asked if he would oppose the $87 billion funding measure if the Senate defeated an amendment that would have raised taxes to pay for it.
"I don't think any United States senator is going to abandon our troops and recklessly leave Iraq to whatever follows as a result of simply cutting and running. That's irresponsible," the junior senator from Massachusetts responded. Yes, it certainly is.
-------
12. 12 Democrats. 2, running for office. It also appears Kerry lied about it. <Last sentence.>
Sofia wrote:What it took to oppose any of those issues was a man or woman of conscience, and a different opinion.
Guess there were none.
actually there were a few, Ron Paul a noted conservative being the most adament about his opposition.
Cycloptichorn wrote:Finn wrote:
Quote:They didn't happen to gather at the Democratic convention, but it seems certain they will be there in New York. These are unaligned extremists?
We're all lumped together in disdain for the politics of your leaders.
Enemy of my enemy, and so forth. I think the fact that there was basically NO protest at the DNC might have more to do with the fact that the Democrats aren't supporting policies that people want to protest against....
Cycloptichorn
They happen to be your leaders as well, unless you've decided to renounce your citizenship.
In any case, there is a difference between protest and disruption. If the activity is restricted to peaceful protest, then I have no problem with it.
Beyond that, it is simple hooliganism and the perpetrator should be arrested and prosecuted.
