Oct. 29th, 2002

just stuff

Oct. 29th, 2002 12:44 am
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NEW YORK (AP) -- Filmmakers are going to Canada to make a movie about former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, angering industry officials who say the film belongs in Giuliani's hometown.

Damn straight. They need the money out there on Long Island.

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Aguilera Sheds Teen Pop Image

It's not clear if her fans will follow. One, Giselle Ascencio, 23, of the Bronx, says she isn't impressed with Aguilera's new look: ``I think she went a little too out there now. The clothes are too much for me -- the lack of clothes is too much.''

Aguilera sees a double-standard in such criticism, noting that videos by male artists often feature nearly naked women dancing suggestively. She also says there wasn't as much of an outcry when Lil' Kim showed up at an MTV awards show a few years ago with a pasty on one breast.

``It's almost a color double-standard that's not fair,'' says Aguilera.

Jamieson says the ``Dirrty'' video is ``no different than what Madonna has done, or what Cher has done. The greatest artists in our lifetime are artists who in many ways are controversial and outspoken.''


Lighthearted teenagers who have been dressing like heroin-addicted hookers from the less-well-lit streets outside the Javitz Center, tragically bummed to discover that they're, like, so over, rushed out to buy...

I'm not sure what. Strategically placed smears of motor oil or something.

I'm sorry, I just couldn't go for the reverse racism thing or the great artist angle. Some things just have to stand or fall on their own.

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Poets' Daughter Feuds With Stepmom

LONDON (AP) -- The daughter of poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath has accused her stepmother of withholding money Hughes wanted her to have.

Hughes' will left all of his $2.2 million estate to his widow, Carol Hughes, when he died of cancer in 1998.

But the onetime British poet laureate's daughter, Frieda Hughes, wrote in The Sunday Telegraph that her father also left a letter instructing Carol Hughes to share proceeds from sales of his books with his two children and his sister, Olwyn.

``I walk into bookshops and see my father's astonishing works on the shelves, and have to acknowledge that I now feel they have been disconnected from me,'' wrote Frieda Hughes, 42 and also a poet.


Boy, that Ted Hughes was deft with women, wasn't he?

You would have at least thought he would have left the girls the rights to that last book of poems-a-clef, "My wife Mylvia Blath was a neurotic no-talent who let herself go and drove me to infidelity and killed herself and all I got was this damn t-shirt" and the posthumously published follow-up "I left Mylvia for her but my second wife was also a neurotic no-talent who let herself go and drove me to infidelity and killed herself and our kid and all I got was this damn t-shirt, even though the selfish bitch knew I already had one."

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Somebody at the AP is a crankypants

NEW YORK (AP) -- Nearly 40 years after teenagers stood and screamed for the Beatles on ``The Ed Sullivan Show,'' an even younger crowd sat happily and murmured just a few blocks from the old Sullivan theater for a dance tribute to the music of George Harrison.

The American Ballet Theatre staged a hour-long children's concert Saturday at the City Center in midtown Manhattan, with the first two numbers set to Harrison's ``Something'' and ``Isn't It a Pity?'' and performed in tank tops and pants.

The dances were introduced as tributes to ``love and peace,'' although a nitpicking adult could argue that the material didn't quite live up to its billing, that ``Isn't It a Pity'' is a protest against cruelty that leaves cruelty intact, that ``Something'' is as much a question mark about love as a declaration of it. (Harrison would later divorce the woman, Patti Boyd, who inspired ``Something'').


The ruthless bastard. No sense of commitment.

I remember that year. We were all young, all hopeful, all listening to the plaintive strains of Harrison's best friend on his classic Eric Clapton and the Pseudonymous Pickup Band album "I'm fucking Patti Harrison and her husband doesn't know"

er, Layla.

oh, damn.

Oct. 29th, 2002 04:14 am
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first Rittenhouse made me cry yesterday,* then MWO posted this.



dammit, dammit, dammit.

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*btw, this is as perfect a description of life in fin du millénium Manhattan as anything I've read in a long time. A three paragraph tour of how a horde of incoming aspirants turned my lovely city into the sandpile in the playground in someone else's neighborhood that well-toned people let their dog piss in because they have to save their energy for the stairmaster.

And why this has been a sad weekend.

With his hyperkinetic poses and irrepressible zeal, Wellstone droned incessantly about affordable housing, education, health care, senior citizens, living wages . . . “labor stuff,” “poor-people issues,” the things I cared little to nothing about as an aspiring 20-something and then 30-something professional.

Since then, of course, I’ve grown older and I like to think I’ve matured. In the intervening years I have lived more than a little and observed much, and as one’s life proceeds, things happen. It sounds simple enough, but things happen that you never expect will happen, at least to people you know. I watched perfectly self-reliant and individualistic people become mired in circumstances not of their choosing -- terminal illness, unemployment, family tragedies, crushing debt, lost savings, sudden death. No, life isn’t fair, but it doesn’t have to be so wretchedly unfair. Watching such as these suffer, these smart and successful people with their safety nets of family and friends, sparked wonder at how those truly less fortunate manage in difficult times, the times that make up the entirety of their lives.

And so, eventually, many of Wellstone’s greatest concerns became mine. I cared that too many children grow up in untended squalor. It mattered that too many senior citizens grow older in, well, untended squalor. And those concerns grew exponentially while living in turn-of-the-century New York, a city of unselfconscious class division where the exceedingly rich and even the merely affluent treat clerks, secretaries, waiters, and public employees as their very own servant class, downtrodden and maintained in a permanent state of steerage as if it were God’s plan to exalt this over class, this uppermost rung of society that subsists on -- and prospers by virtue of -- unfettered greed, unrestrained selfishness, and unmitigated gall.

Yeeeow.

Oct. 29th, 2002 05:08 am
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They had the SC senatorial debates

Forget mudslinging. Try "cockfight" or "bloodbath" if you want to describe Friday's fifth - and final - U.S. Senate debate between Democrat Alex Sanders and Republican Lindsey Graham.

Take this slap early in the debate, during a discussion about whose friends are more liberal:

Sanders said Graham was the one running a TV endorsement from Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City.

"He's an ultra-liberal," Sanders said. "His wife kicked him out and he moved in with two gay men and a Shih Tzu.

"Is that South Carolina values? I don't think so."


...

At his turn, Graham asked whether Sanders would vote for a Thurmond proposal to allow student-led prayer in public schools.

Sanders said students are praying now in schools. The former president of the College of Charleston said his school always had blessings at meals and prayers at functions.

"I am four-square for prayer in public schools," Sanders said. "What I'm not in favor of is the federal government taking over prayer."

Graham bristled, saying the measure would only allow prayer at school functions, not prescribe it. "For anybody to think that Strom Thurmond would offer an amendment to allow the federal government to take over and dictate prayer doesn't know Strom Thurmond very well."

...

Sanders pressed Graham - five times - on whether he favored a plan to extend the state sales tax to gas. The idea is a key plank in the platform of Graham's close friend, Republican gubernatorial nominee Mark Sanford.

Graham said Sanford would lead, a needed quality in the governor's office. He did not answer the question about the gas tax in spite of Sanders' probing.


...

Cigarette tax: Sanders said he supports taxing cigarettes to pay for rising Medicaid costs for the poor. Graham said he opposed it: "To have a tax system where you rely on people who are smoking is bad public policy."

Said Sanders: "If you don't believe in taxing something that hurts people, what do you want to do, tax something that helps people?"


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OK, I gotta say, I'm not comfortable with the nod to South Carolina homophobia, and I'm not at all comfortable with prayer in public schools, and I think the Shih Tzu reference is flat out weird, but the man is running for Strom Thurmond's seat here, and he just put the Republican on the wrong side of school prayer, tobacco, taxes and family values (and of "America's mayor," as a New Yorker may I just say - if you people want him, I'll pay for the stamps to ship him and whatever cousin he's sleeping with this week right out there to you).

You don't suppose he has a shot, do you? I'd really like a Democrat to pass Strom on his way out.
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My mind hath been as big as one of yours,
My heart as great, my reason haply more,
To bandy word for word and frown for frown;
But now I see our lances are but straws,
Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,
That seeming to be most which we indeed least are.
Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,
And place your hands below Karl Rove's foot;
In token of which duty, if he please,
My hand is ready, may it do him ease.

Presidents of the United States do not buy discount airfares.

This fact, though hardly surprising, is an endless source of outrage in the nation's capital. During the Clinton administration, the Republicans expressed fury that taxpayers spent $42.8 million, not including security, for President Bill Clinton and his entourage to go to Africa.

Now it's the Democrats' turn to voice shock and dismay. Harry M. Reid (Nev.), the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, has asked the General Accounting Office to investigate how much taxpayers are spending on President Bush's trips around the country for GOP fundraisers.

Figuring out how much presidential trips cost is a murky business. Even when the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, tackles the subject, it must ignore security costs, which are classified. For the public and the press, which have no standing to demand the information from the administration, it's even more difficult.

Still, while waiting for a comprehensive GAO study, it's possible to make a ballpark estimate of the cost of presidential travel. An analysis based on interviews with current and former government officials and calculations of the number and distance of Bush's trips, indicates it has cost roughly $15.7 million for Bush to attend the 59 out-of-town political events he had done this year as of last week.

To be clear, the $15.7 million is a back-of-the-envelope calculation based not on actual travel records, but on the guesswork of those who are or have been involved in presidential travel. Nor was any attempt made to track who pays -- or should pay -- which costs (most trips were a mixture of political and official functions, with the bulk of the cost covered by the government just as it was in 1994 when Clinton pursued a slightly more aggressive political travel schedule).


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So, let's see. The lede on this story is how much we spent on a diplomatic trip overseas that Clinton made while he was in office while we were not in a state of war and during which he did not campaign.

Compared to this and below the lede, we have the terrible difficulties in ascertaining how much this stuff costs (although Dana doesn't quite explain how it is that he has the figures on the Clinton trip - sounds to me, given the provenance, like a republican guesstimate, and therefor, go know, a tad high, perhaps).

Well, looka here. from the US Senate Republican Policy Committee.

Just those three trips cost the American taxpayer at least $72 million -- with the Africa trip alone accounting for $42.8 million. Not only did they seriously affect the taxpayer's wallet, these three trips seriously affected America's defense. Fully 84 percent of the $72-million price tag came from the DOD budget. For example, the cost per hour to fly Air Force One, the president's personal plane, is $34,400. Of course, the $72-million price tag paid for a lot more than just flying President Clinton. It also paid for 297 military missions largely for the ferrying back and forth of some 2,400 people and necessary equipment working -- sometimes months in advance -- to assure smooth travel for the President. The trip to Africa alone involved 10 advance trips by military planes and the travel of 904 DOD personnel -- the equivalent of a U.S. Army battalion. [Note that GAO generally defines a "mission" as including either a round-trip flight between the home base and the foreign destination, or travel that includes multiple flight segments, such as from points A to B to C and back to A.]

Dana "assumes" that every one of Bush's trips involved Air Force One and one cargo plane.

Aren't you relieved to learn further down still that Bush spent far, far less money? Of course, he was on a non-stop partisan fund-raising campaign trip in time of war, which isn't quite the same thing, and we have only Dana's word for the figures, which the Bush administration, he points out, did not cavil at, as one would assume they would have had the estimate been somewhat higher.

Clinton, parenthetically, was nowhere near as aggressive about his campaign travelling as Bush has been. Nowhere near. I assume that Milbank is factoring in the amount of presidential business Clinton got done in the three months a year Bush spends on vacation.

I hope this will put an end to the little spurt of commentary on our friend Dana's bravery and competence. One moderately objective article and everyone forgets what an unprofessional jerk this man is.

Dana Milbank. Asshole.
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CT Governor's Race

One of the most serious arguments against Governor Rowland is his refusal to provide any real explanation for the loss of almost $200 million in state funds in what amounted to an unsecured loan to Enron from the state's trash authority. Shortly after the loan, Enron made an $80,000 contribution, since returned, to the Republican Governors Association, which Mr. Rowland now heads. Mr. Rowland fired two top aides whose names have surfaced as part of the investigation, but he has denied any connection or any advance knowledge of the loan. It is hard to imagine that he heard nothing about this deal. But not knowing how his co-chief of staff was handing out so much state money is also no way to run a state government. We endorse Bill Curry for governor of Connecticut.
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Iraq Makes U.N. Seem 'Foolish,' Bush Asserts

White House insiders have decided that the reason we're not getting international cooperation is that Our Fearless Leader isn't beating his chest and accusing the rest of the world of lacking manliness loudly enough.

I think they call it a charge display.

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One 'Chief' Commands - Others Are Out of CINC

Hey, speaking of dicksize wars,

For now on, there is only one person in the U.S. military fit to bear the title "commander in chief" -- the president of the United States.

And that's an order.

Lest anyone be confused at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld last week issued a memorandum formally reserving the "commander in chief" title for the president and discontinuing its use, as well as the acronym "CINC," for those four-star military officers who head nine regional and functional unified combatant commands around the world.

Rumsfeld's only dispensation came as a nod to the U.S. taxpayer: The military commanders can continue to use their old stationery until "supplies are exhausted" to avoid "any undue additional cost."


--

This is what the Post came up as to Why Rumsfeld is not a huge honking gooberhead playing petty games to try and humiliate the military for not falling into line behind the President's plans:

--

Michael E. O'Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution, was more sympathetic. He said the military officers who head the European, Central, Pacific and Southern commands have indeed "gotten a little over-glorified."

"And it's not Rumsfeld being a dictator," O'Hanlon said, "since he's allowing them to use up their stationery."

Victoria Clarke, Rumsfeld's spokeswoman, cautioned against over-analysis. "Among the many, many, many things the secretary of defense thinks about is the title 'commander in chief,' " she said. "He's been musing out loud about it for some time, and just decided to put pen to paper."


which you've got to admit is pretty damn sad.

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In Nassau, Campaign Uses 9/11 in TV Ad

The father of a 9/11 victim, who let's be charitable and assume was a rational person before the tragedy, has filmed commercials for Carolyn McCarthy's opponent on the theme of Illegal Immigrants: Carolyn McCarthy's Being Soft On Them Killed My Boy. Well, more or less, but not much. For the record, all of the highjackers were here legally, although two had outstayed their visas.

If you remember, Ms. McCarthy is a registered nurse and a registered Republican who was galvanized into running for office as a Democrat when her Representative dismissed her concerns about guns after her husband and son were shot by a deranged man with a real big gun along with a lot of other folks riding home on the LIRR one night.

I'm pretty sure what the two of them are thinking. What Rep. McCarthy's opponent could possibly be thinking is a huge mystery to me.

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NATION IN BRIEF

The Jersey candidate who was replaced on the ballot past the deadline was indicted on multiple counts.

No, the Republican. More from the Times.

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Rise in 2001 Crime Was First in a Decade, FBI Says

Are you better off now than you were two years ago?

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WASHINGTON IN BRIEF

The salmon debacle in the Klamath River was a result of appointees ignoring the scientific recommendations of Fish and Wildlife Scientists, one of whom can tell us about it because he still, for now, has whistleblower protections.

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This and this are Wellstone ads from his first two campaigns. Really charming. Made me smile.

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G.O.P. Candidate Is Treading Warily After Months of Attacking Incumbent

Remember that scene in Airplane where a line of passengers with weapons were lined up behind Leslie Nielson to beat on that hysterical woman because he was too busy to keep slapping her?

We're going to be seeing a lot of that in Minnesota for the next few days.

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A Pataki Overseer of Safety Is Removed at Indian Point

Turns out one of our beloved Governor's chief safety inspectors at the plant, which is roughly spitting distance from midtown Manhattan and the vicinity of which can't be evacuated, was until recently an executive with the company that owns the plant.

--

The Sept. 11 attacks invigorated the movement to close Indian Point, in northern Westchester County, with opponents claiming it could be a terrorist target. It has become an issue in Mr. Pataki's re-election campaign.

In August, Mr. Pataki hired Mr. Witt, former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to review the plant's safety. Since then, the governor, who had previously said the plant should remain open, has said he might try to shut it down if that is what Mr. Witt recommended. Mr. Witt's draft report is due in December.

H. Carl McCall, the Democratic candidate for governor, says the plant should be put out of business. Tom Golisano, the Independence Party candidate, disagreed at first, but then backtracked, saying he was open to all options.

The governor and his aides have said that James Lee Witt Associates is conducting the review, but in fact, it has been a joint effort of that firm and Innovative Emergency Management, or I.E.M., of Baton Rouge, La., which specializes in emergency preparedness studies.

An Aug. 15 I.E.M. news release says the company "has been selected by the State of New York" to conduct the study. Mr. Witt said that I.E.M. was a subcontractor to his firm, hired with the knowledge and consent of the governor's office, an account confirmed by Robert Hinckley, a Pataki spokesman.

The person heading the effort for I.E.M. has been Gary Scronce, according to Mr. Witt and others involved in the project. The company's Web site says that before joining I.E.M., Mr. Scronce was "an engineering manager" at an Entergy nuclear plant in Louisiana.


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All this concern for appearances came after the Times started asking questions.

My favorite part of the evacuation non-plan is the one where we leave our children in school and evacuate by ourselves and go looking for them later at one of several dropoff centers where the drivers will drop them off after driving repeatedly back into the irradiated area to get them.

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Teenagers Told to Turn In Fake ID's

K, this one is a bit complicated.

Jeanine Pirro is a prosecutor in Westchester. She has an admirable record of wins in the area of child abuse and sex crimes, is married to a very rich man and given to wearing somewhat abbreviated skirts. She was considered a shoo-in for higher office.

Unfortunately, it turned out that her husband was charging off quite a bit of their famously lavish lifestyle to his business. The authorities, who apparently didn't have enough umbrage of their own, took some. He went to jail. It didn't seems as if that did her too much damage politically in her prosecutor job, although we haven't heard too much about her inevitability for higher office since then.

Westchester, as you may or may not know, is the suburb just to the north of New York City. The people who live there, if one is to believe the local papers, have two distinguishing characteristics: they have piles of money, and they can't leave their children out in the rain or they'll stand with their heads back and their beaks open and drown.

Such, at least, was the case at a recent party at a home temporarily unemparented where a number of high school students drank far too much alcohol and one of them threw a punch at another and killed him. In fairness, though, we don't know if it was the punch that killed him - he lay on the concrete patio while the children of the house prevented their guests from calling the police, who might have told their parents and gotten them all busted and stuff. They took upon themselves to move him to a car and drive him to the hospital, where they told authorities that he was in an accident in a public park. That didn't help too much either.

The grand jury declined to indict under the guidance of Ms. Pirro, who maintained to be terribly surprised about it. The parents of the dead boy feel that this may have had something to do with the fact that the family at whose house the party took place are neighbors and campaign contributors of Ms. Pirro's. This has some plausibility, because Ms. Pirro has indicted quite a few ham sandwiches in her time. (If only I hadn't already given out a Claude this week...) She called a second grand jury later on which behaved in a more media-friendly manner.

The same group of students were busted again for another drunken party on school grounds later on. The young man who threw the punch was there that time too.

So anyway, keep in mind that Ms. Pirro needs some good publicity rather badly just now.

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Westchester County teenagers have 30 days to turn in fake driver's licenses used to buy alcohol, or risk losing their real licenses under a new campaign against under-age drinking announced today by the Westchester district attorney's office.

The district attorney, Jeanine F. Pirro, said that her investigators had compiled a list with hundreds of names of teenagers who had secured fake driver's licenses so that they could illegally buy alcohol at bars, liquor stores and other establishments. She said the names came from recent investigations, including one into a counterfeit driver's license mill.

In many cases, she said, the teenagers used their real licenses as templates for a fake license showing an older age, or what she called a "drinker's license." The minimum age for a driver's license is 16.

Mrs. Pirro said that she planned to forward the list of teenagers to the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles next month along with a request that those teenagers have their driver's licenses suspended or revoked.

She noted that possession of a fake driver's license was a felony, and if convicted, a person could face up to seven years in state prison.

"In New York State, it is a privilege and not a right for a young person to have a driver's license," she said.

Beginning today, Mrs. Pirro said she would give teenagers a 30-day amnesty period during which they could remove their names from the list by coming into her office with their parents and surrendering their fake licenses.

Mrs. Pirro will also appear in a public service announcement to be shown on MTV, BET and Comedy Central starting this week to tell teenagers that they can be prosecuted for having fake driver's licenses. The advertisement was produced with a $5,000 grant from a traffic safety group, Mrs. Pirro's aides said.

Matt Burns, a spokesman for the State Department of Motor Vehicles, said that state officials were still considering the proposal. "We think the gist of the idea is a good one," he said.

He said the department could summon the teenagers for a hearing before an administrative law judge, and depending on the findings could suspend or revoke their licenses for up to a year.


--

Now, how likely is it that this is actually true? Not bloody, I'd say, unless you buy the idea of someone whose business is large-scale felony forgery keeping meticulous picture duplicate records of their product.

On the other hand, there is some possibility that this will fail to occur to the children of Westchester.

At any rate, she made the papers with it.
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BARNES: One of the points that Chief Moose, who did such a wonderful job dealing with the press and everything during this whole thing, mentioned was that he had been a - had killed a diversity of people, you know, white, black, men, women and so on.

HUME: Children. He shot a child.

BARNES: One thing he didn’t kill: a Muslim. He killed a Christian from India.

HUME: That we know of.

Try to believe that he said it! Murmurs of protest were heard from the panel, and Barnes slightly softened his rant:

BARNES: Well, I don’t know how you know from 100 yards.

MORTON KONDRACKE: Exactly.

BARNES: But somehow he managed. That was - he didn’t hit anybody from that group.


via Daily Howler, emphasis mine, untreated mercury exposure apparently Fred's
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and good on them, too

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The family of the late Sen. Paul Wellstone has asked that Vice President Dick Cheney not attend Tuesday night's memorial service in Minnesota, sources told CNN.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, the former governor of neighboring Wisconsin, will represent the White House at Wellstone's memorial service instead.

...

Cheney offered to attend Wellstone's memorial service and the White House made that known to the Wellstone family, according to Scott Stanzel, a White House spokesman. Stanzel said that the family was "very appreciative of the offer," but that Cheney "deferred to the family's wishes."

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer declined to offer details of what he called a private conversation with the Wellstone family.

"This should not be politicized," said Scott McClellan, another White House spokesman.


hawk. spit.
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This country, this system, this election: all fixable, and it's up to you

SAN FRANCISCO -- He was the rarest of all rare breeds -- a mensch from Minnesota. But this is not a column about Paul Wellstone. No one has to wonder for a minute what he would have wanted, "What would Wellstone do?" The answer all but roars back, "Don't mourn, organize!"

The contrast between Paul's passionate populism and this dreary mid-term election is as sad as his death. There's many a contest between political pygmies this year -- we're down to seeds and stems again --- but even in proud Texas we have to admit that this year's palm for nose-holding voting must go to California. Not to overstate, two of the most titanically unattractive candidates in the history of time -- Gray Davis and Chuck Simon -- are vying for the governorship. A new nadir in modern politics. How we got from the Lincoln-Douglas debates to this -- or what we ever did to deserve it -- is unclear. The debate between Davis and Simon raised the always-timely question: Is God punishing us?

Naturally, when it comes to voting, we in Texas are accustomed to discerning that fine hair's breadth worth of difference that makes one hopeless dipstick slightly less awful than the other. But it does raise the question: Why bother?

One sorry excuse for a decent, fighting people's pol or the other; what difference does it make?

Oh, just that your life is at stake.

Politics is not a picture on a wall or a television sitcom you can decide you don't much care for. Is the person who prescribes your eyeglasses qualified to do so? How deep will you be buried when you die? What textbooks are your children learning from at school? What will happen if you become seriously ill? Is the meat you're eating tainted? Will you be able to afford to go to college or to send your kids? Would you like a vacation? Expect to retire before you die? Can you find a job? Drive a car? Afford insurance? Is your credit card company or your banker or your broker ripping you off? It's all politics, Bubba. You don't get to opt out for lack of interest.

In this putrid election season, every television ad seems to announce that the other guy sucks eggs, runs on all fours, molests small children and has the brain of an adolescent pissant. It's tempting to join the "pox on both their houses" crowd. They're close to right, but they're still wrong.

Here's the good news: All of this can actually be fixed. By me, you, us -- no kidding, no bull. Nothing you can do about it? Just one person? As an American at this time, you have more political power than 99 percent of all the people who have ever lived on earth. And should you round up four friends who don't usually vote, you'll have four times that much political power. Why throw that away?
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edit: beginning to sense a theme developing here?

edit: More stuff you can do

OK, I'm posting the volunteer contact information from MoveOn one more time.

There have already been lots of attempts at illegal intimidation, attempts to illegally misinform new and absentee voters so their votes won't count, and my personal favorite, the aspiring Katherine Harris in Minnesota who is trying to throw the election into the courts by ruling that absentee ballots for Wellstone won't count, while absentee ballots for Coleman will.

This is Florida, kids, but it just got real big, and

we can stop it this time.

Sorry, sore subject.

Note: I edited my sidebar to include a permanent (well, until after the election) link to this information. What I know about html would fit in a flea's bellybutton and leave room for six caraway seeds, Otto Reich's heart and every scrap of class the Bush family could scrape together with one of those things you use to deice your windshield. I think the least you can do is click, n'est-ce pas?

Click for a listing of (1) Hot Senate Races, (2) Hot House Races, and (3) Bus rides to hot races. )
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More than half of illegally removed voters in Florida were attempting to VWB

and they've decided not to re-enfranchise any of them until after the Bush-McBride, Harris-human votes are counted. We have to stop this shit before the rest of the fifties come back. I look dreadful in circle skirts.

In 2000, Katherine Harris, Florida Secretary of State, ordered county elections officials to purge 57,000 citizens from voter registries as felons not allowed to vote in Florida. In fact, about 95 percent of these voters were innocent of crimes -- but 54 percent were guilty of being African-American. No guess there: a voter's race is right there on the voter form. So there was the election: BBC Television, for whom I conducted the investigation of this black-out operation, figures Al Gore lost 22,000 votes this way.

But I was wrong. The company that put together racial roster that fixed the election, DBT On-Line of Boca Raton, has now 'fessed up, having been sued by the NAACP for violating Floridians' civil rights. They have turned over to the NAACP's lawyers a report indicating that the state ordered the purge of 94,000 voters and that, according to the company's data, no more than 3,000 are likely illegal voters.
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