March 29, 2006
Mayor Bloomberg, who periodically bucks the Republican system, gave what was for him and impassioned speech in Washington regarding the House's recent sneaky move to include pro-gun legislation in a bill. At issue is a bill that protects gun manufacturers and gun dealers from civil suits (NYC has pursued this avenue in an attempt to cut into the huge number of illegal guns on city streets).
Bloomberg declared the Republican-drafted bill “coddles criminals and endangers police officers and citizens,” and also that the legislation would further protect the criminal from implicating the gun dealer. Bloomberg went on to say that “The next time an officer is attacked by an illegal gun - and I say next time because until Congress gets serious about illegal guns, more police officers and many more citizens will be murdered,” and that “There can be no denying that those who vote for this bill will bear some of the responsibility.”
While some may not see his trip to Washington as enough (the very far left is already bemoaning this trip), others see it as a slap in the Republican face (Tom Feeney, Rep., Florida). It seems quite likely that this bill will pass and that, like other such legislation written and passed in the dark of night, we will all be regretting later.
THe gun lobby is certainly not happy about a Republican with such a high-dollar profile asking for evsiceration of their carefully crafted, self-preserving bill.
Who loses here? The millions of Americans who are victims of gun-related crimes, the vast majority of these crimes committed by criminals with illegally obtained guns.
Tags:
bloomberg, gun control, gun lobby
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Posted on 3/29/2006
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March 27, 2006
As Bush continues his uphill battle of convincing the world that all is well in the vast space between his ears, and continues to try to sell us the war, or to put it on lay away for the next poor sucker who becomes president, his neo-con Master, Donald Rumsfield, is taking some heat of his own. It seems that all those words that used to drop like golden pearls from his thin lips now just sound flat and pathetic. Nevertheless, he still manages to circumlocute whenever the topic of ending the war comes up, largely because he really doesn’t want it to end; he has not yet finished his work.
The news from the Front is that the war is not going the way that Rummy promised it would. He had conceived of an easy-to-win campaign whereby the US would have secured not only the whole of Iraq and its oil supplies but also the border between Iran and Iraq, and thus Iran. It has always been the goal of Rummy & the rest of the neo-con cadre to control primary resources if not from afar via faceless corporations then up close and personal via war. But the realities on the ground really are at odds with the slick, action movie images that he and his cadre sold to Bush, via Cheney. Still, they march onward, declaring that it is the duty of the United States to spread Democracy, even if it means people have to die and states have to lose their autonomy.
If all of America shared Rummy’s vision for an Imperial American State, he might have been able to pull off at least part of this madness. But the fact is that most Americans are good people, and they really do not want to make a habit of going around invading other countries. Americans really do not want to spend that kind of money. They don’t want to give up social programs for the elderly and the underclass in order to provoke another decades long war. And that is precisely what the news on the ground is: it will take decades to subdue the Iraq people and break them so that they no longer disobey.
In the meantime, the reality of Iraq is that it is an expensive experiment in re-creating for the modern age the Imperial ambitions of empires now lost forever. Since history does repeat itself, we can only wonder how long it will take for the Neo-con Empire to go down in flames. There is no other direction for it to go.
Tags:
bush, cheney, iraq, rumsfeld
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Posted on 3/27/2006
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March 15, 2006
Mayor Bloomberg can certainly give one pause whenever he has access to a microphone. I am sure that other Republicans worry each time he has access to the media.
Yesterday, he staunchly defended Umar Abdul-Jalil's right to free speech, declaring that this prison chaplain be allowed the same rights to free speech as anyone else.
The shocker is not that Umar Abdul-Jalil was the subject of comment, but rather that Bloomberg said it all.
How can the same Mayor who worked so hard to suppress free speech during the Republican National Convention, going so far as to tell citizens that this right is really a privilege, and one that they might soon lose if they abuse it, do such a sudden about face? Interesting, isn't it?
Bloomberg stated that : “...the great dangers that we are facing are not people saying things, it is our reaction in this country to when people say something that we don’t like..... We are forgetting what distinguishes America from every place else and it’s something that I have felt very strongly about and get more and more worried about with time..."
He was willing to shut down free speech for the Convention, but not willing to shut it down for a city employee who has made some highly inflammatory statements over the past few years. And who does he mean by "everyone else"?
These definitions are all tricky and legalistic. Who has a right, when does a right convert to a privilege (like a drivers license), what is free speech, who decides what it is, who decides who has the rights, who decides who gets to decide any of this?
The Mayor should be worried. We should all be worried.
Were his recent statements just another roll down Bluder Boulevard, or is he feeling that he might be next? What does he know that rest of us do not?
Just thinking out loud...
Tags:
bloomberg, blunder boulevard, free speech, umar abdul jalil
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Posted on 3/15/2006
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March 07, 2006
Are we blind to fascism?
Having just returned from Granada (the city in Spain, not the island that Reagan secured for the English), I have had the opportunity to review the Monuments.
Granada – El Parque Garcilorca – named after Garcia Lorca, a Spanish patriot and poet who resisted the Fascist movement in Spain until his last drop of blood. A real "chien andalus"...
No one remembers it now, the fascist dictatorship – except the Spanish. Fascism was the rule of law under Franco, the Dictator.
I ask myself, if Franco were alive now, would Bush invade Spain? Would Cheney want to depose the evil dictator? I think not. What’s in Spain that Cheney could possibly benefit from? Oranges? Sunshine? Jamon Serrano? Rioja? No, the Bush-Cheney invasion force is only interested in evil-doers who have oil. It matters not how much blood is on anyones hands, just how oil is under their land.
There is a monument to Franco, at the crossroads of the olive grove just above the Alhambra – it is dedicated to Franco, and aside from the periodic graffiti it remains there under the current open democracy. It is truly a monument to the Spanish people that they, after the death of their brutal leader, they decided for themselves to be a democracy. They decided for themselves. No foreign government stepped in to tell them how. They alone decided and they did it without shedding a single drop of blood.
I ask myself, if Franco were alive today, would Bush invite him to dinner and pat him on the back? Would Bush see Garcilorca as a terrorist, and destroy him? Would the many Spanish who died trying to rid themselves of a tyrannical ruler be considered terrorists and executed? Would Picasso have been considered a subversive? Would his hands havwe been cut off so that he would be heard from no more?
It seems to me that neither Bush nor Cheney have ever read a history book that wasn’t approved of by the Neo Cons, that they have never been to a modern art museum, that they have no idea what it truly means to live in an authoritarian state, and yet they are hell bent on creating one.
Todo para la Patria…. Aqui estamos.
Tags:
bush, cheney, fascism, franco, garcilorca, granada, neo cons
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Posted on 3/7/2006
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