My buddy, V., sent me this weblog cum report called Is Bush Wired?. At first it looked like utter nonsense but, if you visit this site, take a good look at the photographs — be sure to scroll down.
Granted, it could be doctored but it seems plausible that the President was repeating back words that had been spoken to him through a (ostensibly encrypted) wire. Of course, the logic of his poor performance last Thursday may be that the repeater was somehow turned off and he was left without a feed. I don’t know. But if this turns out to be a real lead, it could upset the election.

I don’t by any means desire to turn this weblog into an all-politics-all-the-time affair. However, it seems only fair that if the RNC is attacking the credibility of Mr. Kerry, with Mr. Kerry refusing to fight back, sites like onegoodmove.org are doing their small share with funny movies (broadband connection desirable):

1. Bush On Tribal Sovereignty
2. Daily Show “advanced copy” RNC ad
3. Bush on Gynecology
4. Michael Moore on the RNC Convention (I saw this one on TV and it further solidified Mr. Moore’s humble hilarity in my small mind)

I’m from Pennsylvania. I was born in Philadelphia and I have a heartfelt attachment to the state.
But I learned today that the Very Big Three for Mr. Kerry an Mr. Bush are the states Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida. These are the states “up for grabs,” the states that don’t know what they want, the states that somehow can’t distinguish between a mandate for larger wars and economic uncertainty and a call for change in the way the rich seem to get richer.
What is the problem with these states? Is their ambivalence a sign of insecurity? Does these states’ political ambiguity signify a population of stupidity or perhaps noble defiance of preditability? Do these states represent the best or the worst of America and its supposed United States? And, finally, will the upcoming massive visits by both candidates to Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida really matter when the rest of the states will be ignored for the next eight weeks?

I’m sorry to continue to focus on politics this week, but what else is there, really, right now?
I have some mutual funds at Citizens Funds and today received their Annual Report for 2004. Typically, these reports are fluffy nonsense about the power of investments over time, calls to “heed the course,” and half-apologies for funds performing poorly or not well enough.
This report is different and I’d like to quote President Sophia Collier’s “Letter from the President” in part:
Dear Shareholders,
My blood is boiling. As I watch oil flash to $49 per barrel and the stalling of hte most anemic economic recovery in my memory, I feel the urgent need for a change in national leadership. In the last three years our nation has lost 1.2 million jobs, the worst economic performance since Herbert Hoover presided over the start of the Great Depression.
It is time for persons of good will to rise up in a collective act of self-help and demand change in policies that are clearly not working…

I’ve noticed a few good pieces of agitprop in the past few days. The best of the lot so far are:

• More Trees. Less Bush.
• The Labor Union. The people who brought you the weekend.
• Lick Bush.

And the best of them all (mine): W

The Republicans are coming and, while I’m not as hateful as many of my fellow New Yorkers may be, I’m thrilled that Wayne Barrett took the opportunity to write the Village Voice cover story called The 10 Ways Bush Screwed New York. I see Wayne regularly and I can’t wait to congratulate him on this piece.
In fact, I’ve been waiting for a piece like this for a long time; why it’s so difficult for other New York-based media magazines and newspapers to rush to the defense of New York City, which gets pennies to other states’ dollars in spending after it went through a massive attack and an ugly financial implosion — it’s truly beyond me.
Briefly, here are Mr. Barrett’s Top Ten:

1. Osama is at large thanks to the war in Iraq.
2. The 9-11 investigation was shamefully resisted by President Bush for no good reason.
3. The Bush team, armed with the knowledge that something was coming down the pike, did nothing to even try to prevent 9/11.
4. The Bush Deficit, now at $500 billion, will have to hurt domestic programs in NYC.
5. Bush has been cheap when it comes to going the extra mile for New York’s struggling economy
6. NY is ranked “35th in anti-terrorism per capital funding and 50th in bioterrorism.” Egh.
7. Ground Zero workers (and maybe all of us in Brooklyn under the WTC plume in September 2001) probably inhaled too much crap, but the EPA is partisan and disassembling.
8. Government educational funding cuts have hit NYC super-hard.
9. Bush is proposing to cut $107 million for the city’s housing vouchers – a first!
10. Bush, alienating his allies overseas and international treaties generally, has made NYC far and away less safe.

Yesterday’s and today’s New York Times had some of the scariest pages within that I’ve seen in a long, long time. It wasn’t articles about nuclear terrorism, or lies and deceptions, or financial crisis, or massive hurricanes, or global warming, or the failure of increasingly popular charter schools, all of which appeared.
Today, two pieces appeared next to each other on the Op-Ed pages: Paul Krugman’s Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Saving the Vote” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/opinion/17krugman.html”>Saving the Vote, which states that, because of electronic voting, the Florida election results in 2004 could call into question the entire election again, and an editorial titled Interrogating the Protesters, which points out the FBI’s interviewing of potential protesters as if they were terrorists.
You just have to read these two pieces and combine this with Bob Herbert’s piece about Florida state police officers currently visiting elderly black voters — and not to bring them meals on wheels. Politically left or right, one gets an icy, cold feeling about the future of American democracy. These need to be read.

Last night I watched with tremendous sadness the rerun of this week’s Now with Bill Moyers, which focused, in the latter half of the segment, on the genocide currently being perpetrated in western Sudan. The story had previously caught the corner of my eye over the past few months.
The powerful interview with Julie Flint (link above takes you there) detailed how the Darfur region of Sudan (a country about the size of Texas) has been entirely depopulated, razed, destroyed, denuded and made “uninhabitable.” The government of Sudan in coalition with local militas have systematically murdered and turned over whole Muslim villages to ensure that that part of the country can no longer rise again.
According to the interview with Ms. Flint, the Sudanese did not just uproot villages — they carefully tore out whole fields, destroyed any water and food supplies and raped women daily.
I ask myself what happened when we, after Rwanda, said (more or less) Never Again; when the UN said it will be ever more vigilent against mass murder; when the world took Bosnia at its word and brought soldiers like Wesley Clark into the maelstrom; when 320,000 dead innocents (at the minimum) would constitute the State Department’s edict of “genocide” and not some mealy-mouthed “internal strife” or somesuch; when ethnic cleansing is staged without benefit of cameras and microphones.

You know there’s some kind of love interest between the national media and the state when the following things happen:

• A search on Yahoo! on the word “Regan” shows up every possible website associated with former President Ronald Reagan. (Google does not do this.)
• Every major news agency and website lists the memorialization of
  Reagan at the top of its stories for a week. Not Iraq, not democracy, not elections, not terrorism even.
• California, seeking to replicate the 1980s, elected a popular actor to its highest office.

By the way, you can send a condolence note to the Reagan family through the auspices of the Reagan Library.

I read with great curiosity Richard Bernstein’s article in today’s New York Times, called International > Europe > The New Europe: Poland Is Worried That Border Controls Create a New Divide” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/25/international/europe/25POLA.html”>”The New Europe: Poland Is Worried That Border Controls Create a New Divide”. Now that Poland will soon be on the good (read: Catholic, capitalist, and calm) side of the European border, the Western Europeans have armed the country to deal with the potential flood of immigrants.
I lived in Poland for a year, and back then (1995), I was fortunate to meet up with the very few minorities living in the country: a few Polish Jews, a few Africans, and a few Koreans. I remember that the official non-Catholic population was about 2%, which included Roma and immigrants from outside of Europa. It was a new time of ethnic anxiety, as described by those I met, and I can see that those worries will continue to be stoked by both Western Europeans and the new security apparatus that is Poland.
Moreover, I can’t get over the incredible irony of Poland, sandwiched between traditionally bellicose Germany and Russia, now the border guard for the wealthy to the West. Called the new “Iron Curtain,” the article above mentions “exacerbating tensions around who is on the inside and who is left out of the new Europe.”