A Liar, A Greedy Fuck

Time:

Not long after he stepped down as mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani received an intriguing offer. A group of officials from a Florida company called Seisint Inc. asked him to promote a powerful new database technology capable of tracking potential terrorists and other criminals. Their timing was perfect. Giuliani had just opened Giuliani Partners (GP), a consulting shop that planned to specialize in helping companies like Seisint grow. "Nobody knew us; everybody knew him," says Michael Brauser, a major shareholder who negotiated the December 2002 contract between GP and the Boca Raton-based firm. "It was an unbelievable fit."

For Giuliani's new company, it was a remarkably profitable fit too. GP pulled in more than $30 million for just one year's work on Seisint's behalf, company records show. Big paydays have not been unusual for GP, which in just five years has reaped tens of millions of dollars from clients at home and abroad, a business success story closely linked to Giuliani's fame as a hero of 9/11. That same legacy has propelled him to the top tier of Republican presidential candidates.

But now Giuliani the candidate is facing a growing number of questions about the clients, earnings and practices of Giuliani the businessman. Although much of his work has been for blue-chip American corporations, it has been widely reported that GP has also represented more controversial clients, including the maker of the prescription drug OxyContin and the government of Qatar. TIME has also learned that Bracewell & Giuliani, a Houston-based legal and lobbying firm he joined as a name partner in 2005, represents Saudi Aramco, the Saudi national oil company. Thus far, Giuliani has refused to divulge a client list or many details of his work for either GP or Bracewell & Giuliani, and he has maintained his ownership stake in both companies as he continues his run for the White House. Ed Rogers, White House political director under the first President Bush, says the Giuliani campaign has to do better at handling his business situation "to keep it from becoming a real issue and something that may drive votes."

The Seisint deal, details of which TIME pieced together from interviews and corporate documents, seemed like a good match for Giuliani's company. Seisint's founder, Hank Asher, was regarded as a database wizard who used supercomputers to store billions of pieces of information from public records, which, he claimed, were able to spit out the names of some of the 9/11 hijackers before they were publicly identified. The firm's potential seemed endless to GP, and it signed on for what Seisint saw as a heavily discounted fee of $2 million a year, plus a percentage of revenue from company sales to government and corporate buyers.

In the first year, GP earned $6.5 million, Seisint records show, in part for what Brauser and Seisint's in-house lobbyist, Dan Latham, say were commissions for state and federal contracts. Giuliani "came through," says Brauser. "The doors were wide open. It was almost a flood of business opportunities." Latham says GP set up meetings in 2003 at the Department of Homeland Security at which Seisint executives pushed a data-mining program called the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, or MATRIX. The program looked like a promising law-enforcement tool that states could use in partnership with Seisint. The Federal Government spent $12 million to run the program, and eventually 13 states signed up to participate in it.

But the Seisint deal wasn't as perfect as it seemed. One problem: the payment of percentages or commissions to "solicit or secure" government contracts is prohibited by federal law and laws of some states. Tom Susman, ethics chairman of the American League of Lobbyists, says the bar on commissions is intended to eliminate incentives for middlemen to bend the rules to land a contract. A GP official who refused to be named insists that the firm never received "commissions" from Seisint — despite what Brauser and Latham remember and despite the fact that payments to GP are labeled "commissions" in both the minutes of a Seisint board meeting and a key financial statement. Instead, says the official, GP earned "special bonuses" based on the achievement of corporate "milestones." Another problem: Seisint CEO Asher had a shady past. After the statute of limitations made his crimes unprosecutable, he admitted to having been a cocaine smuggler in the 1980s. He stepped down from Seisint's board in August 2003. Giuliani told Vanity Fair in 2004 that Asher's "mistakes are way behind him."

Meanwhile, Seisint's premier product — MATRIX — had proved controversial. The databases it searched contained personal histories of millions of Americans, their relatives, past addresses, property records and credit ratings. Civil-liberties groups said MATRIX would create detailed data profiles of innocent Americans. Georgia and Utah, which had signed up for MATRIX, launched investigations into the privacy concerns raised by the program's vast data files.

Seisint wasn't the only GP client to receive government scrutiny. In 2002, Giuliani's firm agreed to represent Purdue Pharma, the maker of the painkiller OxyContin, after the Drug Enforcement Administration began looking into thefts of the highly addictive drug from company plants. Purdue Pharma ended up agreeing to pay a $2 million fine for lax security at some of its plants. Sunny Mindel, spokeswoman for GP, says the firm helped Purdue balance the need to produce a "lifesaving medicine ... with the need to make sure that this vital medicine did not get diverted by criminals for criminal use."

Giuliani's international clients have also attracted controversy. Last summer the firm dropped Citgo, the oil company that is majority-owned by a company nominally controlled by Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez, after news reports uncovered the relationship. (Maria Comella, a Giuliani campaign spokeswoman, says the candidate "continues to provide general guidance to the management of the firm," and adds, "But he doesn't participate in any client matters or in the day-to-day operation.") The security firm within GP has provided advice and training in counterterrorism to the government of Qatar, an emirate on the Persian Gulf, though Qatar's Interior Minister, Sheik Abdullah bin Khalid al-Thani, is a controversial figure whom several former U.S. officials have suspected of protecting major al-Qaeda suspects. The head of GP's security arm, Pat D'Amuro, says the firm is helping protect American service members and private citizens in Qatar. Of al-Thani, he says, "We've never met him; we've never dealt with him. Our contract is not with him. He's not involved at all."

In most cases, it's impossible to say how much a specific contract has been worth to GP or Bracewell & Giuliani. That's one reason the Seisint case is interesting. By December 2003, Seisint was positioning itself to go public or be bought out. GP, according to Seisint's financial statements, agreed to waive $2.2 million of accrued commissions from its total bill of $6.5 million. In return, the firm received $5.5 million in cash and a much reduced exercise price on 1.7 million stock options that had been granted in the contract.

But however promising MATRIX's future appeared, it was unable to escape the concerns of privacy watchdogs. In early 2004, a commission appointed by Utah's Governor recommended dropping MATRIX over privacy concerns. One commission member, Elizabeth Dunning, said the program's accumulation of personal data on innocent Americans was "shocking" and "outrageous." Shortly thereafter, however, Seisint was sold to the British-Dutch firm Reed Elsevier. The sale netted GP $24 million, records show, with half of that made possible by the lower stock-option price. "A lot of people made a lot of money on the sale of Seisint," said Latham. "[Giuliani] was one of them." Did law enforcement benefit too? Hard to say. By mid-2004, fewer than half the states that had originally signed up for MATRIX remained in the program, and by the end of the year the rest had quit. Less than two years after Giuliani signed on to market MATRIX, the program was dead.

A Holiday Reading List

It's here.

Just More Wingnut Dishonesty

Just the latest example of the inherent flaw of this administration: The refusal to let reality or facts have any effect on shibboleth-based policies.

In this case, there have been gays in the military for years. Rightist blindness prevents them from acknowledging that. So waht is Hunter really getting at?

Via RawStory, the Huck's prospective Secretary of Defense shares his pearls of wisdom:

The US military does too much hard fighting to "experiment" with allowing gays to openly serve in uniform, according to dark horse GOP presidential contender Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA).

Appearing in a 60 Minutes segment focused on the apparently waning enforcement of the US military's 15-year-old "don't ask, don't tell" policy as it struggles to retain service personnel, Hunter said that the American armed services couldn't afford to mimic the fighting forces of European nations, which let gays serve.

"We aren't the Brits, we're not the Europeans, we're not the Swedes," said Hunter, citing other forces that permit gays in uniform. "The Fallujahs of the world, the Ramadis of the world that require heavy combat and lots of firefighting capability -- those are the places the Americans go."

As for the other nations, Hunter suggested their forces had it a bit easier.

"The other countries tend to go to the so-called peacekeeper zones, where they have fewer firefights and less contact with the enemy," he said. "And the European nations show little will to send large contingents of their military people into dangerous places."

But, on the contrary, Admiral Sir Alan West, the former head of the British Royal Navy, said that the 2000 decision to let gays serve openly actually improved the effectiveness of England's forces.

"I don't believe for a second it's affected the fighting capability of our forces," said West. "I think it is better. Because people feel they can be open about who they are, and they can really throw themselves totally into what they want to achieve with your force."

He went on to say that American and British definitions of machismo differed.

"I think American troops are very brave and I think British troops are very brave, but we do it in a little bit of probably a quieter way generally," he said. "We don't know have to...shave our heads off and shake hands very hard. You can still kill someone without having to do that...you read about the Spartans, they were all homosexuals, the whole lot of them -- and I don't think anyone would suggest for a second that the 500 Spartans fighting against the Persian army were not pretty macho."

Hunter, however, warned that with the US military only recently beginning to meet recruitment goals, it was no time to adopt new policy.

"When we risk doing away with this system that works, where American families sit around the dinner table and they make a decision that their young men or young woman is going to go into this military because they share the values of that military?" asked Hunter. "Or should we experiment at a time when our military is totally volunteer, when it's extremely capable, and perhaps lose that capability or perhaps lose those numbers, perhaps lose those reenlistments, and perhaps lose that effectiveness?"

WTF With Us (Our Leaders) And Iran?

Fox Bidness Journal:

A Pentagon report will accuse Iran of continuing to funnel weapons and training personnel into Iraq, adding fuel to a heated debate among U.S. policy makers about whether Iran deserves any credit for the steep declines in Iraq's once-unrelenting violence.

***

On Iran, the report also will reiterate U.S. accusations that Iran is sending sophisticated explosives, rockets and mortars into Iraq, these people said.

"It's not arguing that Iran's behavior is getting worse, but it's also not arguing that Iran's behavior is getting better," said one U.S. officer familiar with the report.

I think this is part of what you could call Operation Tar Baby: Let Iran do what it will in Iraq and hope it gets bogged down there the way we did. Or God (or Allah) forbid, improve things (other than becoming an actual ally of Iran). If Iran gets as fucked up there as our nation is, it would be a significant success. So first step is to chill the rhetoric....

India: At The Cutting Edge Of The Modern World

One wonders: How are the burgers here?

In India, death is a part of life — and, at one restaurant in western India, a part of lunch. The bustling New Lucky Restaurant in Ahmadabad is famous for its milky tea, its buttery rolls, and the graves between the tables.

Not that you need it, but more's here.

Today's Lesson In How To Advance Your Spirit, Find Inner Peace, Whatever

More info.

Our Allies' Love Of Democracy And Freedom; Today: Russia

Link.

Exposed: Yet Another Of His Lies

It's the old joke about Beloved Leader's Poppy: You know he's lying because his mouth is open. That's all you need to know....

Today: How he became a great prosecutor (over than by grandstanding for the media).

ON “Meet the Press” a week ago, Rudolph W. Giuliani attempted to deflect criticism of his close relationship with his former police commissioner, Bernard Kerik, by saying that his misjudgment of Mr. Kerik had to be weighed against his other accomplishments. “How can I not have pretty good judgment about the people who work for me and not been able to turn around the United States attorney’s office?” he asked. But Mr. Giuliani’s claim to have turned around the Manhattan United States attorney’s office is not only untrue, it is an insult to the outstanding men and women who have served in that office over the last 50 years.

When he became the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York in 1983 (I was his immediate predecessor), Mr. Giuliani did not take over a moribund prosecutor’s office; he became the head of the premier United States attorney’s office in the country, with a tradition of excellence stretching back 30 years under the leadership of such legal luminaries as Robert M. Morgenthau, the current Manhattan district attorney, and Robert B. Fiske Jr., the original Whitewater special prosecutor. Mr. Giuliani took over an office staffed by a group of the finest young lawyers in the country.

To Mr. Giuliani’s credit he made no major changes in the staff or leadership group he inherited. He retained William Tendy, a career prosecutor, as chief assistant, and Lawrence Pedowitz, a former Supreme Court law clerk and partner in the firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, as chief of the criminal division. It was primarily the outstanding lawyers Mr. Giuliani inherited who investigated and prosecuted the important cases.

This is not to say that Mr. Giuliani was not a good trial lawyer and that he did not provide effective leadership. But the important cases prosecuted during his tenure did not result from some unique initiative or insight on his part.

Mr. Giuliani claims that he came up with the idea of prosecuting the leaders of each of the major crime families in a single case under the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. While that may be his perception, the idea was first broached by the head of the criminal section of the F.B.I.’s New York office in a meeting with me and my staff approximately a year before Mr. Giuliani took office. By the time he was sworn in, the office was laying the groundwork for that case and had in place wiretaps on three of the five organized-crime families in New York City. Among the lawyers already assigned to those cases were Louis Freeh, later the director of the F.B.I., and Barbara Jones, later the chief assistant district attorney for Manhattan and now a United States district court judge.

While the United States attorney’s office under Mr. Giuliani prosecuted a number of high-profile securities fraud cases, including those against Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, the original information from which these cases developed came from Merrill Lynch, whose compliance staff had spotted what appeared to be insider trading in an account in the Bahamas. This account turned out to be owned by Dennis Levine, a leading Wall Street investment banker who, when confronted with the evidence against him, agreed to cooperate with the United States attorney’s office.

The principal case that Mr. Giuliani personally tried during his six-year tenure, that of Stanley M. Friedman, the Bronx Democratic leader accused of corruption, had its genesis in an investigation conducted by the F.B.I. in Chicago. A person who had been caught paying bribes to Chicago city officials revealed to the F.B.I. that he had also been paying bribes to an official in the New York City Parking Violations Bureau. That official, Geoffrey Lindenauer, in turn cooperated in the investigation, and this led to the indictment — and ultimately the conviction — of Mr. Friedman.

There is no question that Mr. Giuliani is an able lawyer. It is unfortunate, however, that he feels he must denigrate the accomplishments of others to advance his own political interests. What has made the office of the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York an example of what a great prosecutor’s office should be is its tradition of hiring the best lawyers available, without regard to party affiliation, and allowing them to do their job free from political influence. Mr. Giuliani did not have to turn the prosecutor’s office around; he simply had to keep it moving forward.

John S. Martin Jr. was the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York from 1980 to 1983.

Link.

Ohio's E-Voting Disaster; Or: The Triumph Of State-Sponsored Greed Over Free Elections

Ars Technica:

The results are now in from a thorough, $1.9 million test of the voting machines that Ohio has used in elections over the past few years, and they paint about as awful a picture of the state's electoral apparatus as one would expect given the stead stream of grim news out of counties like Cuyahoga. The two private-sector and three academic research teams that carried out the Evaluation & Validation of Election-Related Equipment, Standards & Testing (EVEREST) study of Ohio's e=voting systems did not mince words in the 86-page Executive report that they released this past Friday (or, if words were minced, then one can imagine that the unminced version wasn't family-friendly): "The findings of the various scientists engaged by Project EVEREST are disturbing. These findings do not lend themselves to sustained or increased confidence in Ohio's voting systems."

Ohio e-voting review makes a mockery of "recounts"
New California e-voting measure uses hackers to test voting machine security
ES&S e-voting system used in California cracked wide open
Congress finally considers aggressive e-voting overhaul
Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brenner, a woman whose recent and spectacular bungling of a Cuyahoga County recount gives ample reason to doubt her commitment to fair and accurate elections, didn't even bother trying to sugarcoat this report.

"To put it in every-day terms, the tools needed to compromise an accurate vote count could be as simple as tampering with the paper audit trail connector or using a magnet and a personal digital assistant," Brunner said in a statement. Note that Brenner here is describing machines that have been in use in Ohio since before the 2004 presidential election. This isn't some glimpse of how bad things might be in November 2008. It's a look at how bad they've been all along.

Brenner went on to make the following unintentionally funny remark, which was presumably intended to inject a note of confidence into the release of a report that could almost have been titled, Barn Door Left Open; Whereabouts of Horse In Doubt: "It's a testament to our state's boards of elections officials that elections on the new HAVA mandated voting systems have gone as smoothly as they have in light of these findings."

E-voting in Ohio has gone "smoothly"? Really?!

Speaking of damage control attempts, however feeble, Premier released this press statement in response to Friday's report that contains plenty to chuckle at. I thought this gem was particularly priceless:

"It is important to note that there has not been a single documented case of a successful attack against an electronic voting system, in Ohio or anywhere in the United States."

Given the magnitude of the vulnerabilities that the report details in Premier's systems and the impossibility of conducting a meaningful audit with those systems, this is sort of like a blind and deaf person saying, "Despite my habit of cleaning my first-floor apartment in the nude with all of the street-facing windows open, I have no documented evidence that anyone has ever seen me naked."

Almost 1,000 pages of bad news
The voting systems investigated in the study came from ES&S, Hart Intercivic, and Premier Election Systems (formerly Diebold). The researchers evaluated individual components, whole systems, and elections procedures, and the list of detailed reports on each vendor's systems that they produced described technical and procedural problems with almost every aspect of each system. Like so many of their kind that litter my hard drive after years of e-voting coverage, the EVEREST reports list of page after page of flaws, vulnerabilities, and bone-headed design decisions, many of which would boggle my mind were it not already completely boggled out on this topic by said prior coverage.

Ultimately, the voting systems got failing grades in the following main areas tested, according to the "Findings" section of the executive report:

Insufficient Security: The voting systems uniformly "failed to adequately address important threats against election data and processes," including a "failure to adequately defend an election from insiders, to prevent virally infected software... and to ensure cast votes are appropriately protected and accurately counted."
Security Technology: The voting systems allow the "pervasive mis-application of security technology," including failure to follow "standard and well-known practices for the use of cryptography, key and password management, and security hardware."
Auditing: The voting systems exhibit "a visible lack of trustworthy auditing capability," resulting in difficulty discovering when a security attack occurs or how to isolate or recover from an attack when detected.
Software Maintenance: The voting systems' software maintenance practices are "deeply flawed," leading to "fragile software in which exploitable crashes, lockups, and failures are common in normal use."
The EVEREST executive report's conclusions summarize the findings as follows:

Unfortunately, the findings in this study indicate that the computer-based voting systems in use in Ohio do not meet computer industry security standards and are susceptible to breaches of security that may jeopardize the integrity of the voting process. Such safeguards were neither required by federal regulatory authorities, nor voluntarily applied to their systems by voting machine companies, as these products were certified for use in federal and state elections.

In lieu of my typical bullet list of outrageous report highlights—obvious admin passwords, a complete lack of encryption on critical files, a reliance on easily manipulated "security tape" to prevent tampering, the ease with which anyone can boot some of the machines into admin mode, and other typical problems that were there in spades in this report—I'll just highlight one critical flaw in an optical scan machine of the type that everyone wants to replace the touchscreens with.

The EVEREST researchers described a vulnerability in the ES&S M100 optical scanner in which simply flipping the write-protect switch on the device's CF card to "on" would result in a precinct-wide undercount that's extremely hard to detect.

If this switch is activated after the polls are opened and reset before the polls are closed...the internal counts of the m100, and the paper tape reports will be correct and the system will function normally, but the counts of the votes scanned will not be added to the electronic media delivered to the central Board of Elections... To add to the level of difficulty in detection of the exploit, while the physical ballots are in the ballot box in the correct number and the paper tape shows the correct number, the memory card is delivered to the central Board of Elections where it is read and processed. The current processes in use in most polling places are a simple review of the paper tapes, which would be correct. As such, it is likely that unless close scrutiny or recounts of the precinct were performed that surgical use of this vulnerability would go undetected.

Note that this write-protect switch is apparently easy to flip accidentally.

Obviously, turning on the write-protect for the duration of a whole election would cause that machine's precinct to report "zero" votes cast, thereby tipping off election officials that something was wrong. But if a malicious precinct worker were to just reach down periodically and flip the switch on and off during the course of a day's polling, he or she could easily cause a serious undervote that would only be detected by a hand count of the optical scan ballots.

Of course, the problems with the optical scan machines didn't end there. In an section of one report document that brought back memories of hanging chads for me, the researcher team from a company called Systest reported that the M100 also had serious problems properly recognizing votes on ballots where the ovals were less than fully filled in. "It is possible that clearly indicated votes may not be recognized by the scanner," Systest stated in their report, "and if the election is not configured to warn of undervotes, those votes will be lost. It's also possible that overvotes may not be recognized as such and warned about if made with marks that the scanner does not recognize."

Nonetheless, optical scan to the rescue
In the wake of the report, Brenner is talking about scrapping all of the direct recording electronic machines (DREs, aka "touchscreens") in the state and moving to a system in which Ohio voters manually mark optical scan ballots that are then shipped off to a centralized location for scanning. In order to give this system enough time to work, Brenner is proposing that early voting begin a full fifteen days before the election date, with polling locations open from 7am to 7pm six days a week, and from noon to 7pm on Sundays.

The move to centralize the actual ballot scanning is intended to cut down on the number of points at which attackers could influence the polling using simple tricks like the CF card "write protect" manipulation described above. Unfortunately, it would also have the effect creating fewer points of failure for the entire voting system, so that you'd need fewer bad actors willing to do the CF card trick if you wanted to steal an election. Unless the security at the centralized polling location is extremely tight and the people who are doing the ballot scanning are 100 percent trustworthy, this portion Brenner's plan could make stealing an election even easier.

Even though the long-term plan is to replace all of the DREs in the state with optical scan machines, the report admits that this won't be possible in time for the March 2008 presidential primaries. There is some hope, however, that the new system (such as it is) will be in place for the 2008 presidential election.

Links to the report and its appendixes are here.

Welcome To American Justice!

Iceland's government has asked the U.S. ambassador to explain the treatment of an Icelandic tourist who says she was held in shackles before being deported from the United States.

The woman, Erla Osk Arnardottir Lillendahl, 33, was arrested Sunday when she arrived at JFK airport in New York because she had overstayed a U.S. visa more than 10 years earlier.

Lillendahl, 33, had planned to shop and sightsee with friends, but endured instead what she has claimed was the most humiliating experience of her life.

She contended she was interrogated at JFK airport for two days, during which she was not allowed to call relatives. She said she was denied food and drink for part of the time, and was photographed and fingerprinted.

On Monday, Lillendahl claimed, her hands and feet were chained and she was moved to a prison in New Jersey, where she was kept in a cell, interrogated further and denied access to a phone.

She was deported Tuesday, she told reporters and wrote on her Internet blog.

Link.

Honest St. Joe And His Misplaced Love For The Straight Talker

This is too demented to even comment on.

Except when anyone whines that the Dems aren't pushing Our Leaders around with their hair thin congressional majorities, this is why: When your majority in the Senate relies on a delusional whacko like Lieberman, you're limited.

OK, a quick comment: What fucked up basis is there for Lieberman's belief in McCain? If for nothing else, the self-proclaimed straight talker is a panderer and flip-flopper.

Republican presidential hopeful John McCain is trying to build momentum toward a repeat of his 2000 New Hampshire primary victory.

He's doing it by piling up high-profile endorsements, including one from another political maverick, Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman.

The Democrat-turned-independent is scheduled to announce his support for McCain at a town hall meeting tomorrow morning.

A Lieberman adviser says the senator decided to back the Republican McCain because he believes his colleague "has the best chance of uniting the country in its fight against Islamic terrorism.''

Link.

With An Ally Like This....

Personally, I believe there is what you can call a sotto voce rapproachment between us and the Iran. You know, we're screwing but have to keep it a secret. That said, dunno that this isn't going too far.

Russia has delivered its first shipment of nuclear fuel to a reactor it is helping to build at Bushehr in Iran, Russia's foreign ministry has said.
The two sides reached agreement last week on a schedule to finish building the plant after years of delays.

Some Western countries fear Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons but Tehran says its programme is peaceful.

[more]

A Plea....

Its been a long time since I rock and rolled,
Its been a long time since I did the stroll.
Ooh, let me get it back, let me get it back,
Let me get it back, baby, where I come from.

Wasn't there but got one of the next best things: a download of that concert the other night... 10 December... London... you know who -- and if you're not with me yet, you can stop reading.

Gentlemen: You got part of the job done. But if there's not a DVD within a month or so and a live album or, say, by Summer, well, you're all major wankers.

And come back to the Garden for a week or so and I will make every effort to the others and be there.

Gentlemen, you've got your job, and your duty.

(The above is written with no sense of entitlement.)

Why Is This Man Giggling Like A Complete Idiot?

Besides trying to show contempt for being asked about bad behavior?



Wishful thinking...? TPM:

I have been watching Meet The Press since, I don't know, Estes Kefauver days and, I'm sad to say, Rudy Giuliani provided the worst performance I've ever seen by a major Presidential candidate.

Okay, I am not sad to say. I am delighted. I believe that, although I have my clear preference, none of the major candidates from either party would be a disastrous President except for Giuliani. Yes, some would be awful. Any of the Republicans would extend our long national nightmare.

But, in my opinion, Rudy is in a whole other category. Surrounded by crazy people like Podhoretz and Pipes, a Giuliani Presidency would guarantee one, two, three many Iraqs and jeopardize this country's survival.

So I was delighted to see his halting, nervous, scared, inarticulate performance on MTP yesterday.

And he had every reason to be scared.

Russert prosecuted the famed prosecutor, enumerating one Giuliani scandal after another. All Rudy could do was giggle. He reminded me of that ancient clip in which Bobby Kennedy grilled some miscreant at a Senate hearing and the bad guy laughed at every question. Bobby finally said: "Are you going to tell us anything or just giggle? I thought only little girls giggled?." Sexist, yes (it was 1959).

But it destroyed the giggly witness.

That was Rudy yesterday. All giggles and deer-in-the-headlights terror.

And with good reason. There are no good (or any) answers to the questions Russert posed about "Driving Miss Judy," Giuliani and Associates' client list, Bernard Kerik, etc etc.

And Russert didn't even ask about the priest-rapist on Rudy's staff.

Great television. Bye bye, Rudy.

Losers All....

He just might not win after all....

Message From The Huck

Beloved Leader Whines, Lies

Link.

He's Happy To Do Business With Former Drug-Dealer, Happy To Lie About Being A Lobbyist

Link.

The Huck: Soft On Crime, Letting Killers Loose To Kill Some More

Link.

Here's the story behind the making of the video.

Our Leaders' Great Failure

Allows terrorists to go free???

The Genius And Class Of Fred Thompson

The Associated Press asked all the Presidential campaigns to name their principal's most "prized possession." Fred Thompson's answer:

Trophy wife

Link.

The Brilliance And Principle Of The Huck

Facts? Don't need no stinking facts....

A pandering idiot hiring a whacko scumbag campaign manager: proof of competence, proof of fitness for office... well, at least to succeed Beloved Leader. TPM:

Back in October, in one of the debates for Republican presidential candidates, Mike Huckabee bragged that of the "56 brave people" who signed the Declaration of Independence, "most...were clergymen." As it turns out, Huckabee didn't know what he was talking about -- only one of the 56 was an active minister at the time. Huckabee later conceded his mistake.

Apparently, his new campaign chairman, Ed Rollins, missed the incident two months ago, because he offered a similar argument yesterday on CNN. (via Michael D.)

DOBBS: I have never, perhaps you have, but never in my experience have I seen so many candidates talking about God in a primary campaign and in a general election, I presume and it will remain there. How comfortable are you with that and is it appropriate for God to be in religion and faith to be this prominent in a secular campaign for president?

ROLLINS: You go back to the signing of the Constitution I think 26 of the people that signed it were ministers.

Granted, we've already seen plenty of more egregious errors of fact and judgment from the Huckabee campaign, but if they're going to keep throwing around these numbers, we might as well set the historical record straight.

There were 40 signers of the U.S. Constitution, and one -- not 26 -- was a minister.

Besides the response was a bit of a non-sequitur anyway -- the question was about the role of near-constant religious rhetoric in a presidential campaign. Rollins' ignorance of history is amusing, but it would have been far more helpful if he at least tried to answer a reasonable question.

The Wingnuts' Hatred Of Their Own, The Huck

They are fucking nuts, absolute, complete crazies.

TPM:

It may be an exaggeration to say conservatives are having a major-league freak-out over the prospects of Mike Huckabee winning the Republican Party's presidential nomination, but only slightly.

In the new issue of the Weekly Standard, conservative Stephen Hayes highlights the many ways in which Huckabee seems to have a child-like understanding of international affairs. In the new issue of National Review, conservative Rich Lowry writes that Huckabee's nomination "would represent an act of suicide by his party," in large part because the Arkansan is "manifestly unprepared to be president of the United States."

This is hardly limited to the GOP establishment. John Cole, in a post headlined, "The Huckabee Panic," noted that several major far-right bloggers are "beginning to squirm in the face of Huckabee's surge."

It's pretty obvious why the left is frightened by the notion of a Huckabee presidency -- we've already seen the results of electing a nutty southern governor who doesn't know anything about policy, who runs on his charm, his evangelical religion, and his appeal to far-right activists -- but what's up the right's apoplexy?

I think Kevin Drum's reaction was spot-on.

[A]s with blogosphere conservatives, mainstream conservatives are mostly urban sophisticates with a libertarian bent, not rural evangelicals with a social conservative bent. They're happy to talk up NASCAR and pickup trucks in public, but in real life they mostly couldn't care less about either. Ditto for opposing abortion and the odd bit of gay bashing via proxy. But when it comes to Ten Commandments monuments and end times eschatology, they shiver inside just like any mainstream liberal. The only difference is that usually they keep their shivering to themselves because they want to keep everyone in the big tent happy.

But then along comes Huckabee, and guess what? He's the real deal. Not a guy like George Bush or Ronald Reagan, who talks a soothing game to the snake handlers but then turns around and spends his actual political capital on tax cuts, foreign wars, and deregulating big corporations. Huckabee, it turns out, isn't just giving lip service to evangelicals, he actually believes all that stuff.

The Republican Party's religious right base is supposed to be seen, not heard. Candidates are supposed to pander to this crowd, not actually come from this crowd.

Except it's clearly not working out that way this time. The panic is palpable.

And here's a bunch of quotes from the Huck's people, ripping him:

It really is pretty awesome watching the Republican panic about Mike Huckabee set in, especially as he moves ahead in the polls in several states. This quote from Sullivan really sums it up:

Every complacent secular Republican who has scorned those of us worried about the fundie right is beginning to squirm in the face of Huckabee’s surge.
And squirm is putting it lightly. Also via Sully, Ace:

Not that what one blogger thinks matters that much, but if Huckabee gets the nomination, I’m voting Democratic. It’s not just an idle threat; I just won’t vote for him and in fact won’t even vote third party or stay home.
Dan Riehl:

That Presidential “R” in 2008 will stand for nothing I believe in. The guy is slick but doesn’t even look competent. And if Republican primary voters are that stupid, they deserve to lose next Fall. To pass over McCain, Thompson, Romney and Giuliani ONLY because someone’s slick and a Jesus Freak, which makes him your average televangelist – forget it.
We will pause for a moment to let it sink in that the Dan Riehl right now views actual social cons as “Jesus Freaks.” Moving right along, Captain Ed (not freaking out like the others, but seeing the writing on the wall):

Huckabee has gained credibility at an amazing rate in this race. The biggest question is why. It appears that the evangelicals have begun to make their voice heard in this race. For months, they complained about the lack of choice for their constituency, even at one point threatening to splinter into a third party. Instead, they seem to have collected themselves and looked for the most representative candidate in the race—and Huckabee has the strongest record on pro-life and social-conservative causes.
james Joyner has a solid round-up of what the op-ed writers are saying, including Peggy Noonan:

I wonder if our old friend Ronald Reagan could rise in this party, this environment. Not a regular churchgoer, said he experienced God riding his horse at the ranch, divorced, relaxed about the faiths of his friends and aides, or about its absence. He was a believing Christian, but he spent his adulthood in relativist Hollywood, and had a father who belonged to what some saw, and even see, as the Catholic cult. I’m just not sure he’d be pure enough to make it in this party. I’m not sure he’d be considered good enough.
I simply can not tell you how much I am enjoying this. The GOP has been pandering to these stupid bastards for years, and every time I pointed it out I was called “anti-Christian” or something or other. Those of us who saw what the party was becoming were told to shut up, that it was good politics.

Enjoy your new GOP, folks. And here is something else to think about- are the evangelicals going to support Romney or Giuliani if you do manage to trash Huckabee enough to secure the nomination for them? Will the eye for an eye crowd learn to forgive and forget? Have fun!

*** Update ***

Someone else is enjoying this as much as me:

This, to me, is the critical distinction between a Christianist and a mere Christian. One wants to infuse politics with religion; the other wants to respect both, separately, and to keep religion private. I should add I do not want to banish the word “God” from the public square. But I do want that invocation to be as thin and as empty and as formal as the Founders intended. The current Republican party has reinvented itself as a force on opposite grounds. The party of Huckabee and Romney, the party of Hewitt and Dobson, the party of Ponnuru and Neuhaus is emphatically not a secular party.
And that is why part of me, I confess, wants Huckabee to win. So he can lose. So the GOP can lose – as spectacularly and humiliatingly as possible. If we are to rid conservatism of this theocratic cancer, we need to start over. Maybe it has to get worse before it can get better. But it is certainly too late for fellow-traveling Christianists like Lowry and Krauthammer to start whining now. This is their party. And they asked for every last bit of it.

Can schadenfreude be fatal?

Jesus' Love For The Huck

Link.

American Justice: What The One-Party GOP State Has Brought Us

A retort to the "both sides does it" arguement:

Only the rightist radical Aerica-haters ru(i)ning this nation would and do pull crap like this:

From the General:

The greatest propaganda coup of the last century wasn't birthed at a stadium in Nuremberg or in the the dark recesses of the Kremlin, it was given life by an American president in an Oval Office meeting with his top advisers. That president was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and his propaganda victory was the acceptance of the idea that the role of government was to serve the people.

Prior to FDR, government served only those who deserved it: the corporations. Indeed, it was merely a few decades earlier that corporations were granted personhood and at least one senator, after proudly stating he represented Standard Oil, proposed that Senate representation should be given to corporations rather than the states.

But all that changed with FDR. He and his successors perverted government's purpose by forcing it to address things like the 40 hour work week, workplace safety regulation, state subsidies for the elderly and the sick, and eventually, even civil rights.

The election of Ronald Reagan signaled the beginning of the end of this tyranny of the public good. We've come a very long way in the last 28 years in restoring the important master/servant relationship between corporations and government. I think a recent incident involving Haliburton subsidiary KBR and the US State Department serves as a great example of just how far we've come.

A little over two years ago, a group of KBR employees drugged and gang raped Jamie Leigh Jones, a 20-year-old female American staffer. Jones responded by attempting to report the incident and management reacted by ordering their security division to lock her up in a shipping container.

A sympathetic guard eventually allowed her to use his cellphone and she called her father. He, in turn, called his congressman who contacted the State Department and asked them to dispatch embassy personnel to free her and take her to a medical facility for treatment.

Jones was examined by a doctor who determined that she had been vaginally and anally raped multiple times by the KBR contractors.

At this point, the State Department had a decision to make. Should they allow the rape kit to be sent to the FBI and the Justice Department or given to Jones for a potential lawsuit (contractors are shielded by law from being arrested for anything) and by doing so, side with the young woman against the contractor, or should they seize it and give it to KBR--the company that had imprisoned her to keep her from complaining--and thus honor the sacred covenant Our Leader made with the owners in his ownership society.

As one would expect from any agency run by a good Republican soldier like Condi Rice, State sided with the contractor and gave the rape kit to KBR security, who promptly lost it.

No rape kit; no problem; the Republican revolution delivers again.

The Failure Of The American Left

"Given the growing opposition to the Iraq war and rising inequality, why hasn't the Left done better at organizing around these key issues, and what needs to be improved in order to do so? Making people aware of how bad things are is clearly necessary, but it is not sufficient for building something new. The real question of course is: Now what? And in particular: How to strategically build power for the long-term.”

The preceding paragraph was from a somewhat irritable note from a member of the audience at a meeting on October 15, hosted by the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The meeting featured myself and Alexander Cockburn, addressing the theme, “Is there a Left left?”
'Why hasn't the Left done better at organizing around these key issues?' The question presupposes there is a coherent force in the country that can be called by that name, “the Left”. I don't think there is, in the sense of any potent organized force, let alone mass movement or even mini-movement that is challenging the fundamental terms of the system and is equal to the moment. And this -- the disequilibrium of movement to moment -- I think, is the cause for so much despondency (secret and not-so-secret) among American leftists, who certainly are alive even if some identifiable political and ideological home with a clear project, "The Left", is not. There are many reasons for this, many of thm obvious ones, like the long-term effect of the imploding of the Soviet Union; the long-term effect of a reigning ideology in the West that 'there is no alternative'; the demobilizing effect of Clintonism on vast sectors of progressive America, disorganization; disarray of the black community as a result of repression / criminalization, deindustrialization and split-level economic conditions (economic catastrophe for part of the community, McMansions for another part); the continuing long slide of organized labor; a generalized sense of insecurity (economic and personal) that lends itself more to caution than to daring, and so on.

I don't think there is any magic formula, any set of approaches, to 'fix' this, and it would have been presumptuous or dishonest or both to say there was. Why, for instance, is the antiwar movement basically nowhere on campuses? I don't know, and the people on campuses I've spoken to don't have good answers either, but it's up to them to answer that. They were disappointed when the war wasn't stopped before it started after the Feb. 15, 2003, worldwide demonstrations. They were disappointed when it wasn't stopped after that, and after a few more marches. They were disappointed and demoralized when Bush was re-elected. They can never get more than 15 people for a meeting and 5 are pushing a sectarian agenda, 5 want to talk only about Palestine and 5 can't get past identity politics.

This last, admittedly, I've only heard from Columbia students, but the point is the institutionalized leadership of UFPJ and ANSWER isn't being challenged by a younger generation pushing itself to the lead. And that institutionalized leadership is exhausted. Friends who work for UFPJ every day as volunteers say privately, "It's hopeless." Work goes on, the demos get planned, people do their vigils. The only force with any juice, it seems to me, are the military families, the counter-recruiters, the antiwar vets. I don't believe some tactical adjustment will change this -- ditching "Support the Troops", ditching big demonstrations, embracing the Moratorium idea of doing one small thing every day on the same month in the same place, ditching UFPJ, ditching any engagement at all with electoral politics, throwing all effort into electoral politics, waving the flag of the Mahdi Army or whatever faction one wants to choose of the Iraqi resistance. All of those tactics have been proposed by various people. We can discuss till we're blue in the face the various merits or demerits of such ideas, but I think it's foolhardy to think any one or combination of them is going to invigorate the antiwar movement into an edgy potent force.

The antiwar movement is in a weird position: it's job is not to sway public opinion, since a majority of Americans agree with it; but nothing changes, so people are demoralized. They're not illogical in their demoralization. And there is neither the wild courage nor the organization to throw a spanner in the works, to disrupt the war machine -- not from labor (though some unionists on the West Coast and internationally are trying to see what they might put together toward this end), not from the campuses, and only so far among the soldiers. The latter are the most promising, but are nowhere close to the situation of mass mutiny of drafted armies past. At this point it looks as if the war will end when the Iraqis punish the US beyond endurance or the generals mutiny or both, but I don't think we should have illusions that that will be a glorious day for the Left.

I don't think either mere cheerleading -- we need the will! we need the courage! another world IS possible! -- is much of a solution to anything. There are world historical forces afoot here, and one of the jobs of anyone who considers herself on the left is to try to understand them. I don't think the Left in the heady days of empire really thought too much about the privileges and distortions being children of the empire conferred on it, except to say, in some quarters, We don't want any part of it! But opting out only goes so far, and is delusional even if understandable. Now that the empire is exhausted at the top -- and we could disagree about that, but I think the signs are more indicative of fundamental weakness than of strength even if the US can still kill everyone in the world many times over and still 'afford' billions of dollars a day doing that in one way or another -- radicals are feeling what it means to be part of the general decline. How do we deal with it? That's not an idle question, or one that has an obvious answer. There was a certain amount of chauvinism attached to the American Left in the sixties, a sense of being at the center of the political universe even if people did make their trips to Hanoi or Ghana or Paris.

And part of that was even justified, because America at the time could be said to be "swinging", to quote Andy Kopkind from 1967. It's not swinging now, but at the same time it's awfully narrow to have to think of 'the Left' as something that's bounded by national borders. And if we look beyond our borders, there is clearly a Left, in the sense of powerful movements or currents challenging the fundamental terms of the world economic system.

So if one asks, Is there a Left left? the answer is clearly yes, but not necessarily within our borders. So then how do we engage with that? What does solidarity and internationalism, as opposed to rad-tourism, demand today? What can we learn from those who have set out a task of developing "socialism for the 21st century" or autonomy and freedom from the neoliberal chokehold? And how can we support those efforts, while not abandoning organizing at home that might not rattle the world, at least not this minute, but is still necessary if one has any sense of politics as being a long march?

In Bolivia you have massed organizations of peasants, workers, farmers, indigenous people in Bolivia toppling two governments, facing bullets and suffering casualties to do so, asserting in the most powerful way claims against the force of privatization, deregulation, immiseration, etc. In Mexico You have the Zapatistas arising from seemingly nowhere on the eve of NAFTA's implementation saying No, everything is not finished; it is still possible to put up a fundamental fight -- and changing Mexican politics. These are not movements that can just be 'imitated'. Nor are they -- either in Bolivia or Mexico or Ecuador or Venezuela or Argentina or Cuba or Brazil – movements that are perfectly realized, without contradictions, without setbacks, weaknesses, disappointments ahead. Most of all they are not to be romanticized. But Latin America, I believe, where the center of political energy has shifted. It is where what Eqbal Ahmad called "the logic of daring" is at work. And it is the original homeland of millions of people now in this country whose movements and organizing here may be uneven, may not conform strictly to some notion of the Left but do bear attention and support from the rest of us. Certainly in the realm of labor, organizing by immigrants is where most of the action is. I think one can with justice say that the immigrant rights marches of May 1, 2006, were the closest thing to a general strike that the US has seen in a long time, to take the most obvious example. Now that movement is fractured too, and has its contradictions, and has come under severe repression.

That there has been no wider Left in the US to defend immigrants, to articulate the rights of people not only to move across borders (mobility of labor) but also to stay in their homelands and survive -- and to link the international experience with the domestic experience of dispossession on any number of fronts (the most glaring being Katrina) -- indicates that there is a task at hand considerably more robust than blogging in the fight for a world fit to live in.

There are people and groups chipping away at a piece of this here and there, but I'm certain they don't think it will be realized off a breezy checklist of 'things to do'.There's a pretty major hurdle, and that, as I see it, is how to counter the dominant reality of our lives, which is that capitalism is increasingly organizing society for alienation.

When you talk to old labor strategists they often make the point that labor organizing follows corporate organizing, and the way a job organizes crews or teams or distribution systems or whatever helps point a direction for how labor can most effectively organize. (Because those crews or whatever already work together, trust each other, rely on each other, are sometimes intimate socially.) So on one level we could say capitalism organizes production globally, so labor needs to organize globally, though that presents a tougher set of problems from the organization of one workplace; plus not all work is globalized, But if you think about capitalism as a system that implicates us beyond a particular job, then its global organization is something that affects us all, because it is a worldwide system of lowered living standards, increasing insecurity, deregulation, evisceration of the social contract/social safety net, privatization and dispossession. So one question that arises is, How do societies, at a minimum, put capitalism back on a leash? Because it's unleashed now and that fact makes almost every action for a more just or equitable society impossible. So that's a major question. What the strategy is for doing that, in real terms, with real people on the ground, I don't know. But that curls back to the other problem mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph. If you think about how disconnected people are -- from their co-workers (the rise of consultancies, independent contract work, telecommuting, call centers, temp work, personal service work), from their neighbors, this is a pretty profound problem. And you can extend that out, to alienation within a workplace via two-tier union contracts, temporary vs permanent employees, domestic vs native-born employees; within a community, witness the crazy obsession with homosexuals in the black community, the crazy persistent racism in the white community, the crazy bugaboo of undocumented immigrants across many communities, including those of documented immigrants. A lot of this is not new, obviously, but the disorganization of so much of society feels new (and I'm talking over the past maybe 15 years). Sometimes I think that at a minimum we ought to be encouraging people to join -- anything. The PTA, the Kiwanis Club, the local pathetic chapter of the NAACP, the local tenants group, the freelancers union, the local Democratic club or libertarian club, whatever, just to start remembering how to think together. And even if it prompted people to see what they don't want to be part of, maybe it would encourage them to create something that they do. This sounds pretty lame, I know. But the situation is pretty lame, or so it seems. The whole reason the church has been so effective in politics, I think, is because it's one of the last stands in society where people aren't alienated: they meet every week, share a set of ideas and values, engage in something that is practical and enchanted at the same time. And what does the left have? Virtual communities, virtual organizing, virtual communication. I don't think it's all that helpful. You can get a hundred thousand people to a demo, or to sign a letter or call their Congress people or donate to some candidate or cause (send money for an ad in the NYTimes!), but they're pretty much alone.

So, it seems to me the first step has to involve a reorganization of society, people getting together. I work with a housing group in New York. We do a lot of great work, organizing in private and public housing. But it's a lot harder than it was in the 70s. The neighborhood has changed, people are less solidaristic, the economic structure of buildings makes them less solidaristic, since obviously the last rent controlled tenant and next to last rent stabilized tenant have nothing in common with the high-flying market-rate tenants, and in public housing there's so much pressure and so much bad blood and people are so tired just trying to live. And our organization gets so tired just trying to survive, get the grants, etc. So it's like rolling the rock up the hill. I have a little hope that the public housing work could gather more steam. There's a summit of groups doing this kind of work around the country coming up in January, hoping to figure out how everyone's disjointed work could be strengthened and combined, and trying, maybe, to think about it all in larger terms re public resources, public good, some reinvigorated social contract. Baby steps.

Link.

Loser??

My former girl, Wyp, via CounterPunch:

There is something untrustworthy about a man who can't conduct a decent affair. Rudy Giuliani never could. He flaunted his girlfriend Judi Nathan (now a proper lady with a proper lady's name, Mrs. Judith Giuliani) at public events while he was mayor and married to Donna Hanover, with whom he had no understanding about elective affinities. He used his son Andrew as his beard, claiming he was teaching the boy golf those many weekends when he was cavorting with Judi in Southampton. He announced his new love, and concomitant dumping of the old, at a 2001 press conference, thus informing Donna their marriage was over at the precise moment that any New Yorker listening to 1010 WINS learned of it. Then he tried to push her and the children out of Gracie Mansion so he could get on with his life.

In the return whiff of scandal around Rudy and Judi the hoary details of their crass courtship are said to be of no consequence. Let's not get into his private life, commentators quickly warned, eager to steer political discussion clear of anything that might actually rub up against realities of life experienced by the common horde. Let's talk about the issues, the "new" ones here being hardly newer than what any New Yorker had long known: that the NYPD accompanied the pair on their trysts; that, hark!, these police escorts were paid for from the public purse and involved some finagled accounting. The parched details and dollar amounts in the latest revelations are nowhere nearly as telling as the rough picture of things sketched in Newsday by Jimmy Breslin back in 2000, when he wrote about a cop nicknamed Wrong Way because once while pulling into Gracie Mansion with Judi in the backseat he almost collided with the cop pulling out of the mansion with Donna.

Wrong Way was later part of a five-car police detail assembled simply to get the king and his court to the ballgame: one car for Rudy, one for Judi, one for Andrew, one for Donna and one for the Other Girl he's said to have kept on the side, the two girlfriends given separate corporate seats at Yankee Stadium. The only evocative tidbits among the latest are news that someone from the NYPD walked Judi's dog and accompanied her on a shopping trip when she selected her sapphire and diamond engagement ring--in Atlanta, while business in post-9/11 New York bordered on the berserk insisting that Love NY meant Shop NY. At least the cops didn't torture or kill the dog, a practice that in an earlier life was part of young Judi's job. That would have twinned Giuliani's personal and political deficits, probably irreparably.

In the main, the huff and puff over "taxpayer expense" is not likely to blow down much to obstruct Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign. Once we collectively concede that some maximum leader requires maximum protection, and so too his loved ones--either for the sake of his happiness or as a hedge against ransom threats--then there's really not much difference between the wife, the kids, the dog, the girlfriend. The reporters at Politico didn't sift through those FOIA documents out of a passion for fiscal probity. Sex is the story that sells here, so why not talk about sex?

Granted it was more fun--the last time adultery and presidential ambitions coincided so publicly--to imagine Governor Clinton bound to a bedstead with silken ties, maddened by the big-haired blonde with her animal prints and scented light bulbs, a woman who claimed he was never so happy as when he could bury his face in her muff, than it is to contemplate Mayor Giuliani panting over his soon-to-be-new-missus, the "princess," according to Vanity Fair, who's always longed to be "a queen." To toss around the subject of adultery and politics now is to raise that specter of Saturday Night Bill, and of the other big-haired girl, the frisky Monica, with her kneepads and cigar tricks and oral-anal games in the Oval Office. And no one much wants to do that: not partisans of Hillary Clinton; not her opponents, who may have to support her come November or ask for the Clintons' support; not conservatives, who may find themselves having to back their own philanderer down the road.

Already, this is a repression election. Rumors are afloat that Rudy needs a short leash, his eyes wandering toward a former rhythmic twirler with eclectic tastes, a fan of The Lonely Crowd, The Indispensable Chomsky and Leadership, by Rudolph Giuliani. Democratic bloggers bleat pathetically, "At least he [Bill] stayed married." Although Hillary's great asset, she sometimes wears it like a cross. Rudy is said to be similarly chafing now that Judith is his wedded wife. Christians take heart in Mike Huckabee and, maybe, the knowledge that if Giuliani does turn out to be the chosen one, his sins won't matter anyway. David got away with Bathsheba, after all, and with dispatching her husband, Uriah the Hittite, to the enemy's spears. The rest of us can take heart that at least Rudy doesn't hold the power of life and death over anyone. Bill executed a man as the Gennifer Flowers story swirled in 1992. He bombed Iraq as the Senate considered removing him from office over Monica Lewinsky. Nothing beats death for distraction.

The trouble, in fact, is in treating sex as a distraction. Usually it isn't. Usually it's just life, like the mortgage and the bad school and the checkbook that's balanced or not, the dinner that's sublime or not. Adultery may thrillingly divert from one reality, but in the form practiced by Bill and Rudy and millions of others it tends to create its own parallel universe, with its own set of mores and unwritten rules. Rudy broke them all. One doesn't bring the paramour to the marriage bed (unless it's a threesome), or involve the children, or deliberately humiliate the spouse. Bohemians, hippies, gay people, adventurers in polyamory have all experimented with different levels of truth-telling, and have all decided, at one time or another, when a lie or reticence is the kindest act of all. But they've also understood, at some deep level, why the English called adultery a "criminal conversation": the criminal part could be jettisoned, as it was by English law in the nineteenth century, but the conversation, measured physically, emotionally, intellectually, could not.

Only a madman or a monk would count it a moral failure to converse with more than one person for a lifetime, yet most Americans call adultery just that, even when they're involved in it. And most married people probably are involved in it, or have been. Poll numbers are as schizoid as the culture, with overwhelming majorities telling surveyors they "know someone" who's not monogamous while only a minority own up to it. A politics that's similarly evasive--that counts as irrelevant the ways in which people arrange their lives, their joys, needs and sorrows; that cares nothing for how and why they converse--is no politics at all. It doesn't matter that Rudy had sex with Judi or anyone else, or that he had that police escort, frankly. What matters is that Rudy was a prick. Rudy made it cruel.

How Well Do You Know Him?

Who said what about Rudolph Giuliani?
1. Schools chancellor Rudy Crew.
2. Columnist Jimmy Breslin.
3. Police Commissioner William Bratton.
4. His son, Andrew.
5. Former Mayor Ed Koch.
6. Al Sharpton.
(a) “His goal in life is to spear people, destroy them, to go for the jugular.”
(b) “It’s like a cult he’s got there. You can’t work with the guy unless you’re willing to drink the Kool-Aid.”
(c) “There’s obviously a little problem that exists between me and his wife.”
(d) “He is not bound by the truth. I have studied animal life, and their predator/prey relations are more graceful than his.”
(e) “[He] didn’t bring us together, our pain brought us together. . . . We would have come together if Bozo was the mayor.”
(f ) “He is a small man in search of a balcony.”

7. True or false: When Giuliani blamed an underling named Jerome M. Hauer for the foolhardy idea of placing the city’s emergency-management headquarters in the World Trade Center, he was confronted with a memo in which Hauer had argued against the site and in favor of a less visible target in Brooklyn.

Which Giuliani appointee did what?
8. Housing Development Corporation head Russell Harding.
9. Housing Commissioner Richard Roberts.
10. Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik.
(a) Pleaded guilty to perjury.
(b) Was found guilty of embezzlement and possession of child pornography.
(c) Was indicted on sixteen charges, including corruption, mail fraud, and tax fraud.

11. Who is Leo D’Avanzo?
(a) The Grammy Awards official whose refusal to let Giuliani read a list of nominees at a press conference caused such tension that the organization decided to move its next ceremony to Los Angeles, costing New York forty million dollars in revenue.
(b) The Mob-connected uncle who employed Giuliani’s father as a bat-wielding debt collector.
(c) The artist whose painting of a black Virgin Mary surrounded by images of female genitalia and elephant dung caused Giuliani to threaten to shut down the Brooklyn Museum exhibition in which it hung, calling it “sick stuff.”
(d) One of the cops who fired nineteen bullets into the unarmed Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo.

12. What action by the Giuliani administration was found by the courts to have violated the First Amendment rights of New Yorkers?
(a) Preventing taxi-drivers from assembling for a protest.
(b) Requiring city workers to obtain permission to speak to the press.
(c) Refusing to issue a permit for an anti-police-brutality march.
(d) All of the above, and many more.

13. What prompted a legal skirmish between New York magazine and the city during Giuliani’s mayoralty?
(a) A bus ad touting the magazine as “possibly the only good thing in New York Rudy hasn’t taken credit for.”
(b) A cover story pointing out how odd it was that he was married to his first wife for fourteen years before finding out that she was not his third cousin but, rather, his second cousin—a confusion that occurred, he explained, “because I never calculated the lines of consanguinity.”
(c) A photo spread of his comb-overs that described him as “thin-haired and even thinner-skinned.”
(d) A column mocking his vendettas against hot-dog venders, jaywalkers, turnstile-jumpers, and squeegee men.

14. True or false: When Hillary Clinton announced her Senate run, Giuliani attacked her for including, on the preceremony soundtrack, the Billy Joel song “Captain Jack,” which the Mayor claimed encouraged masturbation and put out the message “Let’s say yes to drugs.”

Which Judith did what?
15. Judith Regan.
16. Judith Nathan.
(a) Carried on an affair with a top city official at a house in Southampton.
(b) Carried on an affair with a top city official in an apartment near Ground Zero donated for the use of relief workers.

17. Who is Justin Volpe?
(a) The priest recently hired by Giuliani’s consulting firm despite having been accused of molesting young boys.
(b) The police officer who sodomized the Haitian immigrant Abner Louima with a broomstick in a Brooklyn station house.
(c) The live-in partner of the gay friend whom Giuliani moved in with after his wife Donna Hanover, having learned of his intention to divorce her when he announced it at a press conference, refused to leave Gracie Mansion.
(d) The man standing between Giuliani and Alfonse D’Amato in a picture of them, dressed as hoodlums, from a photo-op drug bust in 1986.

18. Who is Elliot Cuker?
(a) The ex-husband of Giuliani’s third wife, who said that she called him Rich Little Kike and Jew Boy.
(b) One of the first indicted Wall Street traders subjected to Giuliani’s “perp walk” technique.
(c) The adviser who first got Giuliani to appear in drag in public.
(d) The official to whom Giuliani claimed to have said, on the morning of September 11, 2001, “Thank God George Bush is our President.”

Answers:

(1) d, (2) f, (3) b, (4) c, (5) a, (6) e, (7) True, (8) b, (9) a, (10) c, (11) b, (12) d, (13) a, (14) True, (15) b, (16) a, (17) b, (18) c

Link. And my condolences to the author for having to waded through all the muck to put this together....

The WGA Strikers' Mesage Of The Day

Drink Of The Day

Via Nikki Finke:

The Striking Writer Martini
2 oz vodka "to fortify against the cold Strike Winter"
2 oz cranberry juice "as the writers are seeing red"
1 oz sweet and sour mix "they’re grateful for solidarity in this bitter struggle"
4 drops vanilla (or use vanilla vodka) "to symbolize the 4 cent raise they asked for"
"There’s no cherry in this drink, as writers aren’t getting a piece of the pie. Garnish with a half a redvine, as they hope to be back on the set soon."

The Coming Great Disaster That Will Be 2008; Today: E-Voting

Yeah, what are they doing about it?

Nothing....

Ohio:

Ohio’s electronic voting systems have “critical security failures” which could impact the integrity of elections in the Buckeye State, according to a review of the systems commissioned by Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner.

“The results underscore the need for a fundamental change in the structure of Ohio’s election system to ensure ballot and voting system security while still making voting convenient and accessible to all Ohio voters, “ Secretary Brunner said Friday in unveiling the report.

“In an era of computer-based voting systems, voters have a right to expect that their voting system is at least as secure as the systems they use for banking and communication,” she said.

THE REPORT

The Evaluation & Validation of Election-Related Equipment, Standards & Testing report, known as EVEREST, is a comprehensive review of voting systems revealing startling findings on voting machines and systems used in Ohio and throughout the country. The Ohio study tested the systems for:
- risks to vote security,
- system performance, including load capacity,
- configuration to currently certified systems specifications, and
- operations and internal controls that could mitigate risk.

The $1.9 million study, paid for using federal funds, was structured to allow two teams of scientists, corporate and academic, to conduct parallel assessment of the security of the state’s three voting systems - Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Hart Intercivic and Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold) - in both voting and board of elections environments. Separate research was conducted on each voting system’s performance, configuration and operations and internal controls management. A bipartisan team of 12 election board directors and deputy directors advised the study and evaluated all reports, participating with the secretary in making recommendations for change.

While some tests to compromise voting systems took higher levels of sophistication, fairly simple techniques were often successfully deployed.

“To put it in every-day terms, the tools needed to compromise an accurate vote count could be as simple as tampering with the paper audit trail connector or using a magnet and a personal digital assistant,” Brunner said.

The researchers in the Ohio study didn’t address the issue of probability of attack, leaving that to the determination of state and local officials. The researchers commented that with the lack of technical measures in voting system design, its integrity “is provided purely by the integrity and honesty of election officials.” (p. 20, Final Report of Academic Researchers.)

“It’s a testament to our state’s boards of elections officials that elections on the new HAVA mandated voting systems have gone as smoothly as they have in light of these findings,” Brunner said.

Testers looking at the performance of the voting systems used in Ohio and in many locales throughout the country, identified numerous risks to election integrity ranging from minor to severe, according to the review.

Also, those examining how voting systems were configured in the field found risks such as the use of materials like memory storage and printer paper that had not been certified by the voting system manufacturers; a lack of standardized equipment testing and that revisions to voting system software for all systems and counties were not documented or tracked, the review said.

California:

Earlier this year, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen established strict new standards for electronic voting machines, requiring independent code audits, Red Team security testing, and support for paper records. The Red Team testing process primarily involves subjecting the machines to review by security experts who attempt to hack the software and bypass the physical security mechanisms. Recent Red Team tests of ES&S voting machines have uncovered serious security flaws.

Previous Red Team tests commissioned by the state of California revealed significant vulnerabilities in devices sold by Diebold and Sequoia. At the time, ES&S declined to participate in the testing, citing lack of preparedness. The tests on the ES&S machines were finally conducted in October, and the results, which were recently published (PDF), show that products from ES&S are as insecure as the rest.

The first round of tests focused on the physical security of the Polling Ballot Counter (PBC), which the Red Team researchers were able to circumvent with little effort. "In the physical security testing, the wire- and tamper-proof paper seals were easily removed without damage to the seals using simple household chemicals and tools and could be replaced without detection," the report says. "Once the seals are bypassed, simple tools or easy modifications to simple tools could be used to access the computer and its components. The key lock for the Transfer Device was unlocked using a common office item without the special 'key' and the seal removed."

After bypassing the physical security of the voting machines, the Red Team researchers were able to gain direct access to all of the files on the systems, including password files. "Making a change to the BIOS to reconfigure the boot sequence allows the system to be booted up using external memory devices containing a bootable Linux copy," according to the researchers. "Once done, all the files can be accessed and potentially modified, including sensitive files such as the password file which can be cracked by openly available cracker programs. New users may be added with known passwords and used by the same attacker or other attackers later."

The Election Management System workstations were also found to be vulnerable, with critical security codes stored in files as plain text. The Red Team also discovered that the Election Loader System used unencrypted protocols to transmit election initialization data to the PBC units, which implies vulnerability to a man-in-the-middle attack. The Election Loader System is populated with data from an Election Distribution CD, which is generated by a special Election Converter Application. The researchers were able to break the encryption used on the generated CD to "breakdown the CD, revise the election definition, and replace the CD with a new encrypted CD with an alternate election definition." The researchers note that this tactic could be used to alter vote tallies.

ES&S is already in serious trouble in California for selling uncertified voting machines to several counties in violation of state law. The results of the Red Team test, which demonstrate beyond doubt that the security of ES&S voting machines is utterly inadequate for use in elections, make it seem unlikely that ES&S will be able to continue peddling their defective products in the state.

And then there's the (global) economy -- we're maybe on the cusp of inflation thanks to all the gratuitous rate cuts that haven't and won't do anything for the subprime/housing disaster -- and Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan....

And speking of free elections:

The Justice Department's voting rights chief stepped down Friday amid allegations that he'd used the position to aid a Republican strategy to suppress African-American votes.

John Tanner became the latest of about a dozen senior department officials, including former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who've resigned in recent months in a scandal over the politicization of the Justice Department in the Bush administration.

In recent months, McClatchy has reported on a pattern of decision-making within the department's Civil Rights Division, of which the Voting Rights Section is a part, that tended to narrow the voting rights of Democratic-leaning minorities.

Tanner has been enmeshed for months in congressional investigations over his stewardship of the unit that was established to protect minority-voting rights. He drew increased focus this fall after he told a Latino group: "African-Americans don't become elderly the way white people do. They die."

In addition, the Justice Department opened an internal investigation into allegations that Tanner unfairly had deprived two veteran African-American staffers of bonuses and that he and a deputy had misused tax dollars on official trips.

***

While Tanner hailed his accomplishments, asserting that the section had "tripled the number of new lawsuits" compared with the period before he took office, critics have charged that the department has filed few suits on behalf of African-American voting rights.

Shortly after he became section chief in 2005, Tanner reversed the recommendation of the career staff that the department object to a Georgia law requiring voters in that state to produce photo identification cards. The staff had argued that the law would disenfranchise minority voters.

A federal judge later blocked implementation of the law, likening it to a Jim Crow-era poll tax because poor minority voters, who are most likely to lack driver's licenses, would be required to buy photo IDs.

This October, after making his comments about the shorter life span of blacks while defending the Georgia law, Tanner apologized for his "clumsiness" before a House Judiciary subcommittee.

Tanner also drew harsh criticism for directing a crackdown to force states to purge hundreds of thousands of names from voter registration rolls, an initiative that critics charge was aimed at disenfranchising minority voters, who move frequently.

He's facing an investigation by the department's Office of Professional Responsibility into multiple allegations that he mistreated staff and abused his travel privileges. At least two of the inquiries stem from formal complaints from members of his staff.

In late November, the Web site TPM Muckraker reported that Tanner had made taxpayer-funded trips to Hawaii for three straight years, twice staying a full week although his work was completed within a couple of business days. The Web site said he'd made 36 trips covering 97 days since taking the helm in May 2005.

Link.

Tech Tip: Upgrading From Vista To XP

I have finally decided to take the plunge. Last night I upgraded my Vista desktop machine to Windows XP, and this afternoon I will be doing the same to my laptop.

Look & Feel

Windows XP has quite a cartoony look and feel compared to the slick look of Aero Glass; this is mostly offset by the lack of strange screen artifacts caused by malfunctioning graphics code. You know, almost like static on the screen. This was a once or twice monthly occurrence on my laptop, and happened on my desktop whenever I logged in, and also whenever I played a 3D game after leaving Vista running for a couple of hours. I also miss the "orphaned windows" I got on Vista, dialog boxes that would not go away, in a sense they became part of the desktop, since you could drag a selection from within them, despite the fact that the Glass would render the selection below them. Such crazy graphics bugs appear to be a thing of the past.

Performance

Well, here there appears to be no contest. Windows XP is both faster and far more responsive. I no longer have the obligatory 1-minute system lock that happens whenever I log onto Vista, instead I can run applications as soon as I can click their icons. Not only that, but the applications start snappily too, rather than all waiting in some "I'm still starting up the OS" queue for 30 seconds or so before all starting at once. In addition, I have noticed that when performing complex tasks such as viewing large images, or updating large spreadsheets, instead of the whole operating system locking down for several seconds, it now just locks down the application I am working on, allowing me to Alt-Tab to another application and work on that. I am thrilled that Microsoft decided to add preemptive multitasking to their operating system, and for this reason alone I would strongly urge you to upgrade to XP. With the amount of multi-core processors around today using a multitasking operating system like XP makes a world of difference.


In addition, numerous tasks that take a long time on Vista have been greatly speeded up. File copies are snappy and responsive, and pressing the Cancel button halfway through actually cancels the copy almost immediately, as opposed to having it lock up, and sometimes lock up the PC. In addition, a lot of work has gone into making deletes far more efficient, it appears that no more does the operating system scan every file to be deleted prior to wiping it, and instead just wipes out the NTFS trees involved, a far quicker operation. On my Vista machine I would often see a dialog box from some of my video codec's pop up when deleting, moving or copying videos. No more, now all that is involved is a byte transfer or NTFS operation.

Automatic Updates has also gone through a performance facelift in that it no longer hogs your bandwidth when you're surfing, a nice touch.

Device Support

XP comes with some impressive device support. In fact, every peripheral I've collected over the years works perfectly with it. Many have the device drivers preinstalled on XP, making their installation a snap, but for the rest it was easy to find device drivers on the Web. In addition I found the drivers quick and reliable, a far cry from the buggy, slow and sparse driver support in Vista. I'm glad to see that with their new flagship OS, Windows XP, Microsoft have finally learnt from the mistakes they made with the Vista launch. In addition, support for mobile devices seems to be significantly improved.

I've also found that XP seems much lighter on the hardware than Vista, when it's inactive the hard drive very rarely spins up, a major advantage for me, since I often sleep near my laptop. No longer do I have to try and ignore the continual hard drive drone, but can now sleep soundly just like my computer. I never did figure out exactly what Vista was doing with my hard drive the whole time, but I'm sure it degraded its lifespan with all that spinning.

Reliability

All I can say is "wow!" You can see that a lot of work has gone into making XP more reliable than its predecessor. The random program crashes, and hangs appear to be a thing of the past.

Internet Explorer 7 is much more reliable on XP as well, and has so far not crashed once whilst viewing GMail, when it used to do this several times a day. In addition, I can now actually close the thing down normally every time, instead of sometimes having to kill the process. Error collection seems to be far better as well. Instead of a dialog taking a minute or two to collect the information it needs, the dialog comes up and is ready to send error data almost immediately. I am sad to see the back of the Solutions tool though, it may have hardly ever delivered any valid solutions, especially for the standard random crashes, but at least you knew that something under your control was tracking that information. Please, Microsoft bring it back.

Speaking of which, I notice that the Reliability Report is also gone, again a sore loss, I really enjoyed charting the downward spiral of my Vista reliability, there were those occasional humps that got you all excited, and then the graph would continue its steady sojourn downwards. Of course, the fact that it only appeared to pay attention to a tiny fraction of the actual problems was a bit of an issue, but I'm sure they could have resolved that for the XP release. Ah well.

I also am pleased to note that Ctrl-Alt-Del does actually have an effect nowadays. Many times in Vista, I wished that they would make this more reliable so I could kill off the inevitable hanging Windows Explorer process (as a matter of fact, this is the situation I find myself in right now), in XP it actually does something as opposed to being part of the usual Vista eternal hang. Speaking of which, please excuse me for a few minutes, Windows Explorer has now been 100% hung for 5 minutes, despite my asking Vista to restart it, and despite me pushing Ctrl-Alt-Del several times over those 5 minutes. So I'm going to have to hard-reset my laptop. This process, by the way, is also something that amazingly seems to almost never be required in the clean and sparkling new XP.

Right, I'm back, thanks for being patient. I mentioned how much quicker you could start using programs from a boot in XP; I must admit that, appealing though that feature is, you won't actually find it that useful. XP almost never appears to require a reboot, so you hardly ever take advantage of a wonderful improvement like that, which otherwise would save you at least 15-20 minutes a day.

Gaming

This is another area where Microsoft has really excelled in Windows XP. Games are significantly more responsive, get much higher frame rates, and are far more reliable than in Vista. If you're a gamer, the upgrade to XP is mandatory. Whilst there are a few games that won't work as well in XP than in Vista, you'll find that on the whole XP supports almost all the games you'd want to play. In addition, it's vastly increased reliability means you'll spend much more time killing things than restarting, a welcome change I can assure you. You'll also find that non-X-Fi soundcards with EAX are much improved by their support in XP, which can really add a bit of excitement to your gaming experience.

Multimedia

Multimedia support on XP is vastly better than on Vista. Whilst content-creators had insisted on all sorts of intrusive features in Vista that made the multimedia experience a living hell for Microsoft users, thankfully with XP Microsoft were able to insist that their customers' needs came ahead of the content creators outdated business model. It's nice to see a corporation like Microsoft stand up to the cyber bullies at the MPAA and refuse to assume that its loyal customers are criminals. In any case, the DRM built into Vista was broken shortly after its release anyway.

Conclusion

To be honest there is only one conclusion to be made; Microsoft has really outdone themselves in delivering a brand new operating system that really excels in all the areas where Vista was sub-optimal. From my testing, discussions with friends and colleagues, and a review of the material out there on the web there seems to be no doubt whatsoever that that upgrade to XP is well worth the money. Microsoft can really pat themselves on the back for a job well done, delivering an operating system which is much faster and far more reliable than its predecessor. Anyone who thinks there are problems in the Microsoft Windows team need only point to this fantastic release and scoff loudly.

Well done Microsoft!

Link.