| Start: | Jan 1, '05 9:30p |
| Location: | Black Cat, Washington DC |
Wednesday, December 22, 2004
Right Round
Tuesday, December 21, 2004
Monday, December 20, 2004
funny techy gift idea
made me laugh!
Say you want to keep a beverage hot while you work, but you don’t have access to a microwave. ThinkGeek’s USB Cup Warmer plugs into a computer’s USB port and warms your mug for 30 minutes, providing heat directly from your computer. This gadget is also great for lazy office workers...
$12.99 http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/6db9/
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
Depressed Democrats Guide to Recovery
http://www.markfiore.com/animation/depressed.html
For those of us still feeling blue about the election (no pun intended).
For those of us still feeling blue about the election (no pun intended).
Sunday, December 5, 2004
NYC Photography 12/2004
I took a stroll this morning (Dec 5th) from the East Village up to the Empire State Building, camera in hand (and of course stopped in a few shops on Fifth Avenue along the way).
Like my last album, I'm still playing around with images/photoshop, etc...
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
Nelson Demille reading in NY
| Start: | Dec 8, '04 7:00p |
| Location: | Barnes & Noble, 1972 Broadway, at 65th St. (212-595-6859) |
The popular mystery writer reads from his new novel, Night Fall. free.
by the way, I am almost done with Night Fall and unfortunately I am not too impressed... have about 100 pages left.
Thursday, November 18, 2004
Connecticut
| Start: | Jan 7, '05 |
| End: | Jan 9, '05 |
| Location: | Westport |
Friday, 07 Jan 05 Flight DH 1027
Depart: Washington-Dulles, VA (IAD) 6:50 pm
Arrive: Newark, NJ (EWR) 8:24 pm
Sunday, 09 Jan 05 Flight DH 1018
Depart: Newark, NJ (EWR) 2:50 pm
Arrive: Washington-Dulles, VA (IAD) 4:11 pm
Los Angeles, CA
| Start: | Feb 17, '05 |
| End: | Feb 20, '05 |
| Location: | Sunset Strip, baby |
Date Flt Depart Arrive
17 Feb 05 311 Wash. Dulles 07:00am Long Beach, CA 09:40am
20 Feb 05 307 Long Beach, CA 11:15am Wash. Dulles 7:00pm
Thursday, November 11, 2004
Yes Virginia Women's Rights Meeting
| Start: | Nov 16, '04 7:00p |
| Location: | Jammin Java, Vienna, VA |
DoS playing at Wonderland
| Start: | Nov 11, '04 9:00p |
| Location: | Wonderland Bar & Grill, DC |
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
Thought for today- "Live Deliberately"
From Henry David Thoreau's Walden:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
Our life is frittered away by detail.
Simplify, simplify.
Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
Our life is frittered away by detail.
Simplify, simplify.
Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?
Monday, November 8, 2004
Shane Hines at Jammin Java
| Start: | Nov 20, '04 8:00p |
| Location: | Jammin Java, Vienna, VA |
www.shanehines.com
$10.00.
Sunday, November 7, 2004
Hiking at Rock Creek Park, 11/07/04
Today, Sunday, 11/07/04, some friends and I decided to take advantage of what might be one of the last nice days of the year and go hiking. What made this hiking trip different was, instead of our usual trek to Great Falls (Maryland side for climbing, Virginia side for hiking) we decided to go to Rock Creek Park in DC. Although I have walked and driven through the park before, I never endeavored on any of it̢۪s many trails.
So we ventured out. It was close to 70 degrees and the skies were a beautiful blue. I should have known it was going to be a great day because on my drive in to DC there was no traffic. I mean seriously, Rte 66, west into DC and no traffic. That̢۪s unheard of, you know? Oh, you don̢۪t? Well it̢۪s extremely rare. Trust me, I do it all the time. Maybe most people were either at church or at home still mourning the election.
Todd, Jim, Tom and James joined me on this trip. I don̢۪t know where all the girls were today, probably home watching football J. James isn̢۪t in any of these photos since he was the main photographer for the day but Jim and Todd also took some and I hope to add those later. Can̢۪t have an album without James in it.
We set out around 11:30 am and planned on a 4-5 mile hike. I have no idea how long it actually was but it lasted a few hours, much of it uphill. The scenery was gorgeous. There were fallen leaves all around (making it a little slippery at times) and multi-colored foliage still grasping to the surrounding trees. The Creek intercepted us (or rather vice versa) multiple times. We seemed to be moving very fast and a part of me felt as if I was in a Thoreau essay racing against time… only days from this day would be the first frost and these adventures would be put on hiatus till spring.
Without the usual risks and fears of falling in the Potomac (at Great Falls), the steep inclines and slippery leaves rattled the nerves just slightly enough to get the adrenaline going.
The day was perfect.
--Regrets, no regrets--
Regretfully, I went for an extremely long jog yesterday (Saturday) and was already sore at the start of this journey. I can only imagine how my legs will feel tomorrow when my alarm sounds for a new workweek. However I no longer feel guilty about the pints of Guinness I thoroughly enjoyed Friday night at happy hour.
Until next time… enjoy the scenery and LIVESTRONG.
Friday, November 5, 2004
Wednesday, October 20, 2004
Sunday, October 17, 2004
Amsterdam Vacation, 10/10/04-10/16/04
I left DC (National Airport) on Sunday afternoon, 10/10. Thank you to James for picking me up (and being early because he knows me so well).
I started a new book (freebie chic-lit from work called Fashionistas, light and entertaining) in DCA while waiting. I exchanged currency at the airport, trading in my dollars for Euros and I was all ready to go. I transferred at JFK and had a couple hours there. Bought a salad and read almost ¾ of the book at the airport.
Finally out of JFK (I have spent enough time there in October alone to be thoroughly sick of that airport)… Unfortunately because I slept most of the DCA-> JFK flight, I was wide-awake for the JFK-> AMS flight. I sat next to a girl approximately my age. She was from Amsterdam and was very nice. She told me the area our apartment was in was great. The movie was Dodgeball. It takes a certain kind of sense of humor to enjoy this movie. Fortunately I have that sense of humor. I didn't really sleep on the flight.
When I got to AMS, I found out my luggage was still at JFK. It wasn't lost; they actually had my name on a list of bags that were held up by TSA in NY (I guess the two hour layover wasn’t enough time for them to screen my bags). Regardless, so many people warned me about the potential of this happening that I packed my carry on well. They said my luggage would come in the same flight the next day and they would deliver it to the apartment. The positive side, I didn't have to lug that big bag around plus it gave me a good reason to go shopping that first afternoon in Amsterdam.
I met up with Laurie after Customs and we met up with Jenna at the airport hotel lobby. After our first of many GOOD cups of Amsterdam coffee, we got a cab and headed out to the city. It was now approximately 10:30 am on Monday 10/11.
We arrived at Prinsengracht 604 (our apartment) and were greeted by a pleasant Dutch girl who spoke English (as did mostly everyone we would encounter). She showed us around the apartment with its narrow stairs, so narrow we had to leave the suitcases down at the entry hall because they wouldn’t fit up the stairs (apparently in the old days, people in Amsterdam were taxed based on the width of the homes, but height had no restrictions, so you would find row houses about 18 feet wide but very tall, hence the narrow stairs). The apartment was adorable. It had a cute living room, dining room, kitchen on main floor and two bedrooms and full bath on top floor.
Jenna and I shared the slightly larger room with the two single (and I mean single as in tiny, narrow) beds. Laurie took the other bedroom (which had the washer/dryer).
Once settled, we took off to go shopping. Approximately 2 blocks away down was the Leidseplein (ei pronounced like eye). This area near the Leidsegracht Canal had many shops, cafes, restaurants and bars. We didn't know it at the time, but we would come to visit this area, the Leidseplein, often. I bought a cute hat and blouse. Jenna bought sneakers. The weather was approximately 16 degrees C. We then went to a grocery store and worked to translate what we needed, a few basic staples, from English to Dutch. We went back to the apartment, made lunch and rested.
The plan was to meet up with a couple friends who were in town for the Newspaper Convention. Allistair and Jürgen came by around 8/9p and we all went for Thai food (and much wine) at a place called Thai corner (note: one guide book said "Traditional Dutch food is fairly unremarkable. Luckily for us, Amsterdam has a lot of good restaurants featuring other cuisines"). Monday wound down.
Tuesday morning I had to hang around a bit waiting for my luggage (and nursing a hangover). It showed up around 12:30p.
We then took off down (or up?) the Prinsengracht Canal heading to the Anne Frankhuis (at 267 Prinsengracht). We walked through the house and museum. It was really amazing sneaking through the secret passage behind the bookcase and into the Annex where Anne Frank and 7 others hid for 2+ years. After the museum (and a bite at the café) we walked homewards.
We had dinner at a Greek restaurant called Zorba the Griek in the Leidsplein (yummy).
Wednesday we headed out to the IfraExpo (The International Newspaper Convention). This was our first and only experience with the tram (or scary tram as I had named it immediately upon seeing it our first day). Scary Tram 4 took us to the RAI Convention Center. We browsed the convention for a couple hours and met up with a couple people we knew.
After leaving Ifra (again on scary tram 4), we got back to Prinsengracht and headed to the famous Rijksmuseum (only a few blocks from our apartment). There we saw paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer and many others.
After the museum we browsed the stores on Leidsegracht (again) and went home. Allistair met us for dinner and we went to a yummy restaurant called De Balie. After dinner, we parted ways with him and headed back to Leidseplein. We had a few drinks at a piano bar and after 11:30ish headed to the Bourbon Street Blues bar where there was a live band. Jenna recognized some vendors there and we hung out with a group of guys from Denmark. Eventually we walked home.
Laurie and I got up early and ventured out to the Amsterdam Cat Museum (Kattenkabinet). Amsterdam is well known to be a very cat-friendly city.
Initially we were all going to go out to the country this day, Thursday, to visit one of USA WEEKEND's paper mills, Norske Skog. Jenna and I decided we would rather investigate more of Amsterdam instead. So we were off to get lost in the city and Laurie was off to the country.
Jenna and I started at the Van Gogh Museum. I enjoyed this one the most. Saw many of Van Gogh’s famous paintings. Saw many Gaugin's, Rodin's, a couple Monet’s and Pissaro, Toluesse LeTrec and others, bought postcards of my favorite paintings at the museum shop.
Then we started walking, first ending up in a very upscale shopping area we later found out is called P.C. Hooft-straat. Stores included Gucci and Armani. We only window-shopped there :).
Then we had lunch at a little Van Gogh themed Brasserie and more yummy coffee. We continued walking.
We peaked in at Vondelpark.
We entered another shopping area off Huidenstraat (off the Herengracht Canal). More affordable quaint thrift stores and antique shops here. We continued walking. We ended up on a street called Rokin, which took us right into the city center, passing the landmark national monument. We were in Dam Square now. There was an amusement park there (looked like the traveling temporary kind) and Jenna wanted to go on the Ferris wheel. But we all know people die on traveling amusement park rides in foreign countries, right?
We continued north and headed towards Central Station. This area was very different from the other cute and quaint neighborhoods we spent most of the trip in. This area reminded me of Times Square. Lots of lights, lots of stores, lots of narrow streets with brown cafes. This was also near the Red Light District.
We both felt this wasn't entirely a place we wanted to be in when it got dark (and it was getting dark). Don't get me wrong, there were a ton of people around, a very active area, but I was holding my purse tighter here.
We walked back down to our area, walking down Nieuwezijds area (called the New Side of Amsterdam). As we returned to the Canal area near our apartment, it started to drizzle. This was our first sign of rain since arriving in this supposedly rainy city. We had been very lucky with the weather. The drizzles stopped and Laurie called that she was just about back to the apartment. Great timing as we just turned down Prinsengracht. It was probably around 6/7p.
We all met up and rested for about an hour or so, then headed back out for dinner, Leidseplein again, this time super yummy Indian food. After dinner we walked around the canals as it started to drizzle again. We called it a night.
Friday we got up and decided to do a canal boat tour. These were long covered boats with windows on all sides that ride around the canals stopping at various locations. While waiting for our boat, we had some yummy coffee and sat at an outside café people watching the locals and tourists and crazy scary bikers. If you don't know this already, everyone bikes in Amsterdam. That is the main mode of transportation. Old looking bikes with businessmen in their suits, women in skirts and heels, on cell phones, all biking everywhere. And they own the road so you really have to look out.
Anyway, back to the canal boat. We picked one up near Rijksmuseum and took it to City Hall, Waterloo area. This area had a large flea market known as Waterlooplein which we perused for an hour or so. This was also near the Joods Historical Museum. We toured the Jewish Museum and were lucky enough to catch a traveling photography exhibit called Diaspora by Frederic Brenner. It was amazing. We wandered around the permanent exhibit and had lunch at the Jewish/Kosher café (yum).
We took the canal boat further up to Central Station and came back around toward home. It was actually dinner time by now and we walked around the neighborhood, headed home and had leftover yummy Indian food from the night before.
Jenna was antsy to go out since it was our last night in Amsterdam (and our first weekend night since we arrived on a Monday). I felt a cold coming on and Laurie was enjoying a glass of wine and people watching from our window view of the canal. Jenna ventured out briefly and came back to report the Leidseplein was jam packed with people (many drunk/high). Obviously weekend nights are a lot crazier in the Leidseplein. If I was 10 years younger and not feeling under the weather, I may have gone back out, but I was content to sit in our living room, face the large windows looking out at the Prinsengracht and enjoy our last evening in this adorable city. As we people watched, it began to pour.
Saturday am, one last walk down Prinsengracht to the Leidseplein and Leidsegracht and then our cab came to take us back to Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport.
My flight was latest of the three of us so after Laurie took off for Verona, Italy and Jenna and I had one last meal and yummy Amsterdam coffee, I was on my own and had a chance to start documenting this trip (although many details are already lost to the moment).
On the plane for my first leg (AMS->MEM- Memphis) I sat with a gentleman from Belgium. We discussed South Africa, New Zealand, Europe, and U.S.A. That passed about an hour of this 8 hour leg. They were showing 2 movies during the flight, but because of my bad airplane luck, it was an old plane and there was only one screen in the front center about 25 rows up from me so I saw nothing.
I did read "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" by Mitch Albom, review to come.
My first leg flew into Memphis. Am I boring you with details? Too bad. This how I write in my paper journal so that's what you're gonna get.
Customs/Immigration took far too long in Memphis and I barely made my flight (7 minutes to spare). Sorry Michael, no Memphis/Elvis shot glass, no time…
Little puddle jumper back to DC (this time Dulles/IAD). The plane was half empty (seated 50 and had about 23) so I moved to an empty row. I sought out the exit row. I do this usually for 2 reasons. 1- more leg room usually in the exit row, and 2- part of me feels if an emergency were to occur, I would be this total take charge gal, in control, flipping up and opening the 40 lb door and guiding all the passengers to safety.
The 1st air pocket we hit though, with it’s loud thud (these little planes have loud thuds) I thought maybe my whole emergency exit plan needed some re-thinking. In any case, that would not be the day for me to show my bravery, strength, balls if you will.
Back in DC, thanks to James for picking me up! Pictures posted here and many linked through out this entry.
I really thought the city was adorable. They were very American friendly and all the neighborhoods and canals were so cute. I would like to go back again, maybe next year :).
All pictures (100+) posted here.
I started a new book (freebie chic-lit from work called Fashionistas, light and entertaining) in DCA while waiting. I exchanged currency at the airport, trading in my dollars for Euros and I was all ready to go. I transferred at JFK and had a couple hours there. Bought a salad and read almost ¾ of the book at the airport.
Finally out of JFK (I have spent enough time there in October alone to be thoroughly sick of that airport)… Unfortunately because I slept most of the DCA-> JFK flight, I was wide-awake for the JFK-> AMS flight. I sat next to a girl approximately my age. She was from Amsterdam and was very nice. She told me the area our apartment was in was great. The movie was Dodgeball. It takes a certain kind of sense of humor to enjoy this movie. Fortunately I have that sense of humor. I didn't really sleep on the flight.
When I got to AMS, I found out my luggage was still at JFK. It wasn't lost; they actually had my name on a list of bags that were held up by TSA in NY (I guess the two hour layover wasn’t enough time for them to screen my bags). Regardless, so many people warned me about the potential of this happening that I packed my carry on well. They said my luggage would come in the same flight the next day and they would deliver it to the apartment. The positive side, I didn't have to lug that big bag around plus it gave me a good reason to go shopping that first afternoon in Amsterdam.
I met up with Laurie after Customs and we met up with Jenna at the airport hotel lobby. After our first of many GOOD cups of Amsterdam coffee, we got a cab and headed out to the city. It was now approximately 10:30 am on Monday 10/11.
We arrived at Prinsengracht 604 (our apartment) and were greeted by a pleasant Dutch girl who spoke English (as did mostly everyone we would encounter). She showed us around the apartment with its narrow stairs, so narrow we had to leave the suitcases down at the entry hall because they wouldn’t fit up the stairs (apparently in the old days, people in Amsterdam were taxed based on the width of the homes, but height had no restrictions, so you would find row houses about 18 feet wide but very tall, hence the narrow stairs). The apartment was adorable. It had a cute living room, dining room, kitchen on main floor and two bedrooms and full bath on top floor.
Jenna and I shared the slightly larger room with the two single (and I mean single as in tiny, narrow) beds. Laurie took the other bedroom (which had the washer/dryer).
Once settled, we took off to go shopping. Approximately 2 blocks away down was the Leidseplein (ei pronounced like eye). This area near the Leidsegracht Canal had many shops, cafes, restaurants and bars. We didn't know it at the time, but we would come to visit this area, the Leidseplein, often. I bought a cute hat and blouse. Jenna bought sneakers. The weather was approximately 16 degrees C. We then went to a grocery store and worked to translate what we needed, a few basic staples, from English to Dutch. We went back to the apartment, made lunch and rested.
The plan was to meet up with a couple friends who were in town for the Newspaper Convention. Allistair and Jürgen came by around 8/9p and we all went for Thai food (and much wine) at a place called Thai corner (note: one guide book said "Traditional Dutch food is fairly unremarkable. Luckily for us, Amsterdam has a lot of good restaurants featuring other cuisines"). Monday wound down.
Tuesday morning I had to hang around a bit waiting for my luggage (and nursing a hangover). It showed up around 12:30p.
We then took off down (or up?) the Prinsengracht Canal heading to the Anne Frankhuis (at 267 Prinsengracht). We walked through the house and museum. It was really amazing sneaking through the secret passage behind the bookcase and into the Annex where Anne Frank and 7 others hid for 2+ years. After the museum (and a bite at the café) we walked homewards.
We had dinner at a Greek restaurant called Zorba the Griek in the Leidsplein (yummy).
Wednesday we headed out to the IfraExpo (The International Newspaper Convention). This was our first and only experience with the tram (or scary tram as I had named it immediately upon seeing it our first day). Scary Tram 4 took us to the RAI Convention Center. We browsed the convention for a couple hours and met up with a couple people we knew.
After leaving Ifra (again on scary tram 4), we got back to Prinsengracht and headed to the famous Rijksmuseum (only a few blocks from our apartment). There we saw paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer and many others.
After the museum we browsed the stores on Leidsegracht (again) and went home. Allistair met us for dinner and we went to a yummy restaurant called De Balie. After dinner, we parted ways with him and headed back to Leidseplein. We had a few drinks at a piano bar and after 11:30ish headed to the Bourbon Street Blues bar where there was a live band. Jenna recognized some vendors there and we hung out with a group of guys from Denmark. Eventually we walked home.
Laurie and I got up early and ventured out to the Amsterdam Cat Museum (Kattenkabinet). Amsterdam is well known to be a very cat-friendly city.
Initially we were all going to go out to the country this day, Thursday, to visit one of USA WEEKEND's paper mills, Norske Skog. Jenna and I decided we would rather investigate more of Amsterdam instead. So we were off to get lost in the city and Laurie was off to the country.
Jenna and I started at the Van Gogh Museum. I enjoyed this one the most. Saw many of Van Gogh’s famous paintings. Saw many Gaugin's, Rodin's, a couple Monet’s and Pissaro, Toluesse LeTrec and others, bought postcards of my favorite paintings at the museum shop.
Then we started walking, first ending up in a very upscale shopping area we later found out is called P.C. Hooft-straat. Stores included Gucci and Armani. We only window-shopped there :).
Then we had lunch at a little Van Gogh themed Brasserie and more yummy coffee. We continued walking.
We peaked in at Vondelpark.
We entered another shopping area off Huidenstraat (off the Herengracht Canal). More affordable quaint thrift stores and antique shops here. We continued walking. We ended up on a street called Rokin, which took us right into the city center, passing the landmark national monument. We were in Dam Square now. There was an amusement park there (looked like the traveling temporary kind) and Jenna wanted to go on the Ferris wheel. But we all know people die on traveling amusement park rides in foreign countries, right?
We continued north and headed towards Central Station. This area was very different from the other cute and quaint neighborhoods we spent most of the trip in. This area reminded me of Times Square. Lots of lights, lots of stores, lots of narrow streets with brown cafes. This was also near the Red Light District.
We both felt this wasn't entirely a place we wanted to be in when it got dark (and it was getting dark). Don't get me wrong, there were a ton of people around, a very active area, but I was holding my purse tighter here.
We walked back down to our area, walking down Nieuwezijds area (called the New Side of Amsterdam). As we returned to the Canal area near our apartment, it started to drizzle. This was our first sign of rain since arriving in this supposedly rainy city. We had been very lucky with the weather. The drizzles stopped and Laurie called that she was just about back to the apartment. Great timing as we just turned down Prinsengracht. It was probably around 6/7p.
We all met up and rested for about an hour or so, then headed back out for dinner, Leidseplein again, this time super yummy Indian food. After dinner we walked around the canals as it started to drizzle again. We called it a night.
Friday we got up and decided to do a canal boat tour. These were long covered boats with windows on all sides that ride around the canals stopping at various locations. While waiting for our boat, we had some yummy coffee and sat at an outside café people watching the locals and tourists and crazy scary bikers. If you don't know this already, everyone bikes in Amsterdam. That is the main mode of transportation. Old looking bikes with businessmen in their suits, women in skirts and heels, on cell phones, all biking everywhere. And they own the road so you really have to look out.
Anyway, back to the canal boat. We picked one up near Rijksmuseum and took it to City Hall, Waterloo area. This area had a large flea market known as Waterlooplein which we perused for an hour or so. This was also near the Joods Historical Museum. We toured the Jewish Museum and were lucky enough to catch a traveling photography exhibit called Diaspora by Frederic Brenner. It was amazing. We wandered around the permanent exhibit and had lunch at the Jewish/Kosher café (yum).
We took the canal boat further up to Central Station and came back around toward home. It was actually dinner time by now and we walked around the neighborhood, headed home and had leftover yummy Indian food from the night before.
Jenna was antsy to go out since it was our last night in Amsterdam (and our first weekend night since we arrived on a Monday). I felt a cold coming on and Laurie was enjoying a glass of wine and people watching from our window view of the canal. Jenna ventured out briefly and came back to report the Leidseplein was jam packed with people (many drunk/high). Obviously weekend nights are a lot crazier in the Leidseplein. If I was 10 years younger and not feeling under the weather, I may have gone back out, but I was content to sit in our living room, face the large windows looking out at the Prinsengracht and enjoy our last evening in this adorable city. As we people watched, it began to pour.
Saturday am, one last walk down Prinsengracht to the Leidseplein and Leidsegracht and then our cab came to take us back to Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport.
My flight was latest of the three of us so after Laurie took off for Verona, Italy and Jenna and I had one last meal and yummy Amsterdam coffee, I was on my own and had a chance to start documenting this trip (although many details are already lost to the moment).
On the plane for my first leg (AMS->MEM- Memphis) I sat with a gentleman from Belgium. We discussed South Africa, New Zealand, Europe, and U.S.A. That passed about an hour of this 8 hour leg. They were showing 2 movies during the flight, but because of my bad airplane luck, it was an old plane and there was only one screen in the front center about 25 rows up from me so I saw nothing.
I did read "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" by Mitch Albom, review to come.
My first leg flew into Memphis. Am I boring you with details? Too bad. This how I write in my paper journal so that's what you're gonna get.
Customs/Immigration took far too long in Memphis and I barely made my flight (7 minutes to spare). Sorry Michael, no Memphis/Elvis shot glass, no time…
Little puddle jumper back to DC (this time Dulles/IAD). The plane was half empty (seated 50 and had about 23) so I moved to an empty row. I sought out the exit row. I do this usually for 2 reasons. 1- more leg room usually in the exit row, and 2- part of me feels if an emergency were to occur, I would be this total take charge gal, in control, flipping up and opening the 40 lb door and guiding all the passengers to safety.
The 1st air pocket we hit though, with it’s loud thud (these little planes have loud thuds) I thought maybe my whole emergency exit plan needed some re-thinking. In any case, that would not be the day for me to show my bravery, strength, balls if you will.
Back in DC, thanks to James for picking me up! Pictures posted here and many linked through out this entry.
I really thought the city was adorable. They were very American friendly and all the neighborhoods and canals were so cute. I would like to go back again, maybe next year :).
All pictures (100+) posted here.
Friday, October 8, 2004
National Anthem: Inside the "Vote for Change" Concert Tour
| Start: | Oct 11, '04 6:30p |
| End: | Oct 11, '04 11:30p |
| Location: | Sundance Channel |
"National Anthem" will consist of behind-the-scenes footage from the tour and live performances from the final sold-out "Vote for Change" concert in Washington D.C. on October 11th. National Anthem will air on October 11th from 6:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. ET/PT. Among the artists to be featured in National Anthem are Dave Matthews Band, Bonnie Raitt, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, the Dixie Chicks, Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Keb' Mo', Kenny "Babyface" Edmonds, Pearl Jam and R.E.M.
Tour of Hope hits DC
| Start: | Oct 9, '04 9:00a |
| Location: | White House Ellipse, Washington, DC |
Good luck to my friend Chris who I will be cheering on Saturday morning as he approaches DC!
Friday, October 1, 2004
Morrissey at Constitution Hall, 9/29/04
| Rating: | ★★★★★ |
| Category: | Music |
| Genre: | Alternative Rock |
| Artist: | Morrissey |
If you are not a Morrissey or Smiths fan, you probably wouldn't have enjoyed this concert. But if you are, like me, you would have loved it!!!
First off, Morrissey still looked great. He has put on some weight (which for him is good) and hair receded a little, but still had the height :)
I wasn't sure how much old stuff he would perform but I do have his new album so figured either way, it'd be good.
Oh my, was it. Here's the set list:
- How Soon is Now (The Smiths- Hatful of Hollow) [worth the ticket price right here]
- First of the Gang to Die (Morrissey- You are the Quarry)
- November Spawned a Monster (Morrissey- Bona Drag) [YAY!!!!]
- Such A Little Thing Makes Such A Big Difference (Morrissey- Bona Drag)
- Big Mouth Strikes Again (The Smiths- The Queen is Dead)
- Let Me Kiss You (Morrissey- You are the Quarry)
- The World is Full of Crashing Bores (Morrissey- You are the Quarry)
- Everyday is like Sunday (Morrissey- Viva Hate)
- How Can Anyone Possibly Know How I Feel (Morrissey- You are the Quarry)
- Rubber Ring (The Smiths- Louder Than Bombs)
- Irish Blood, English Heart (Morrissey- You are the Quarry)
- I Like You (Morrissey- You are the Quarry)
- You Know I Couldn't Last (Morrissey- You are the Quarry)
- There is a Light That Never Goes Out (The Smiths- The Queen is Dead) [this was the encore]
It was awesome. Made me very nostalgic. He made jokes and interacted a lot with the people in the front rows. And as always, during the encore, fans one by one swarmed the stage for a quick touch of his greatness.
If you happen to have the opportunity to catch him on this tour, I recommend it.
Just in the past month I saw Siousxie (of Siousxie and the Banshees) at the 9:30 Club and now Morrissey at Constitution Hall... It was like a major flashback month....
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
HBO's The Wire Premiere Party
he is drunk :)
Last night (9/14) I was fortunate enough to attend HBO's 'The Wire' premiere in NY. The premiere was at Chelsea West Theaters and dinner/party afterwards was at Vento.
It was kind of hard to take pictures (because I didn't want to annoy anyone) but I got a few (and someone is hopefully sending me the picture they took of me and Michael K. Williams (Omar)).
The show was great. It premieres this Sunday on HBO (9/18) so you should definitely catch it. If you haven't watched the 1st two seasons it may be a little hard to get into it now... the stories are kind of complex.
My goals for the night were to meet Dominic West (McNulty and star of many movies including the new one w/Julianne Moore- 'The Forgotten'), Michael K. Williams (Omar) and Idris Elba (Stringer Bell).
Goals accomplished.
Once there I realized I also really wanted to meet Andre Royo (Bubbles) and Chris Bauer (Frank Sobotka on 'The Wire' and Fred Yokas on 'Third Watch').
Accomplished.
I told Chris Bauer how amazing he was this past season on The Wire and how I have watched him for years on Third Watch. He said he has been disappointed with Third Watch, 'third watch doesn't let me do anything' (meaning acting wise).
I danced with Dominic West (who was very drunk- see the photos below) and chatted with Jim True-Frost (Detective Roland "Prez" Pryzbylewski), Callie Thorne (McNulty's ex-wife, now Sheila on FX's Rescue Me), Domenick Lombardozzi (Detective Thomas "Herc" Hauk) and Delaney Williams (Sergeant Jay Landsman). I hung out with Richard Burton (Shamrock) and his pal Moses.
Tameka and I had a very funny discussion with Pablo Schreiber (Nick Sobotka) about how most actors are so much shorter in real life, except he was much much taller than he appeared on TV, it was funny- maybe you had to be there...
I boogied with Andre Royo (Bubbles) and Michael K. Williams (Omar) and discussed Baltimore with David Simon (Executive Producer, Creator of The Wire).
The only people that weren't there that I would have liked to have met were James Ransone (Ziggy Sobotka) and Wood Harris (Avon Barksdale).
It was a blast. I have to totally thank Tameka for the invite and the opportunity to squeeze Dominic West's ass (another goal accomplished)...
Wednesday, September 8, 2004
Michael, Alecia & Brandi visit me
| Start: | Sep 3, '04 |
| End: | Sep 7, '04 |
Friday, September 3, 2004
Hockey World Cup: Slovakia vs. United States
| Start: | Sep 3, '04 7:00p |
| Location: | ESPN2 |
Team USA is down 0-2 :(
NHL fisticuffs bring out fury
(from USA TODAY feature- Top 10 Things to Change in Sports)
By Kevin Allen, USA TODAY
Fighting is so ingrained in the NHL culture that brothers Keith and Wayne Primeau fought each other in 1996-97.
Their mother wasn't pleased, but the NHL didn't blink because hockey fights have been a staple since the league was founded in 1917. Fighters were called "policemen" in the Original Six years because it was their job to protect the stars. In the 1970s, they began to be called "goons."
Fighters today are "tough guys," and their role is scrutinized more than ever in a debate about whether the sport would be better off if harsher penalties could discourage players from dropping their gloves.
"I don't believe there is a majority" thinking that way," Nashville Predators general manager David Poile says. "But there's a lot."
Those against fighting argue the NHL's tolerance gives the sport a cartoonish quality that prevents it from fully exploring its national potential. The pro-fighting delegation counters that the NHL plays to more than 90% capacity on average and most of the fans like fighting.
In the 2003-04 season, there were about 780 fights in 1,230 NHL games. That's about two fights every three games, roughly the same rate the past seven seasons. In the mid-1980s, the rate was about one fight a game.
Fighting isn't truly legal in the NHL, but it's fair to say it's encouraged. Players are penalized five minutes for fighting, and those who initiate a fight can be given an extra two-minute penalty as "an instigator." But top fighters are respected, and coaches and general managers revere those who can play at a high level and fight.
The rationale for fighting isn't as basic as tempers boiling over, although certainly that plays a role. Strategy is a consideration. It's widely held that Wayne Gretzky was given more room and opportunity to show his brilliance in his early years because opponents were petrified they'd have to face Edmonton Oilers tough guy Dave Semenko if they bothered Gretzky.
When Calgary's Jarome Iginla and Tampa Bay budding star Vincent Lecavalier fought in the Stanley Cup Finals, it was clearly about symbolism. Iginla had established his reputation as a playoff warrior, and it was presumed Lecavalier wanted to show the hockey world he had the same kind of fire.
The anti-fighting camp says the fighter's protector role simply wouldn't be necessary if the NHL enacted and enforced rules to protect stars. They point out that athletes in other sports prove their toughness without having to fight.
The fighting issue often comes to the forefront of talk shows when there are extracurricular violence issues, such as when Todd Bertuzzi attacked Steve Moore from behind in March, breaking vertebrae in his neck. Bertuzzi, who had tried to persuade Moore to fight before the attack, is serving an open-ended suspension. He goes to trial on assault charges Jan. 17.
"Maybe at some point in time (fighting) will be banned," NHL director of hockey operations Colin Campbell says. "But right now, it's part of the game, except to the point where it's penalized."
Some rules have been added that have altered the fighting climate. Starting in 1971-72, the third man to enter a fight was ejected. The league in 1987-88 began handing a 10-game suspension to the first player to leave the bench to enter a fight, effectively eliminating the bench-clearing brawl.
The only significant effort to reduce the number of one-on-one fights came in 1992-93 when the NHL introduced a game misconduct penalty to the instigator. Fighting majors fell by 19% that season and reached their lowest levels in 16 years. The instigator rule was revised in 1996-97 to replace the game misconduct with a 10-minute misconduct.
If the NHL wanted to reduce the number of fights, the easiest method would be to eject players as is done in college and international play. In college hockey, a player also is suspended for the next game.
Thursday, September 2, 2004
Hockey: World Cup: Russia vs. United States
| Start: | Sep 2, '04 7:00p |
| Location: | ESPN2 |
Wednesday, September 1, 2004
The 10 big stories the national news media ignore
Interesting article from The San Francisco Bay Guardian
snippet (but you should really read the details in the article before commenting...):
http://www.sfbg.com/38/49/cover_censored.html
snippet (but you should really read the details in the article before commenting...):
- Wealth inequality in 21st century threatens economy and democracy
- Ashcroft versus human rights law that holds corporations accountable
- Bush administration manipulates science and censors scientists
- High uranium levels found in troops and civilians
- Wholesale giveaway of our natural resources
- Sale of electoral politics
- Conservative organization drives judicial appointments
- Secrets of Cheney's energy task force come to light
- Widow brings RICO case against U.S. government for 9/11
- New nuke plants: taxpayers support, industry profits
http://www.sfbg.com/38/49/cover_censored.html
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Hockey World Cup: Canada vs. United States
| Start: | Aug 31, '04 7:00p |
| Location: | ESPN2 |
Siouxsie at 9:30 club
| Start: | Sep 9, '04 |
| Location: | 9:30 Club, DC |
Siouxsie Sioux of Siouxsie and the Banshees fame at 9:30 Club
NYC
| Start: | Sep 14, '04 |
| End: | Sep 15, '04 |
| Location: | Chelsea, NYC |
Amertania Hotel
chelsea west cinemas
Vento trattoria
Monday, August 23, 2004
Ron Reagan Esquire article, Sept 2004 Issue
The Case Against George W. Bush
By Ron Reagan
It may have been the guy in the hood teetering on the stool, electrodes clamped to his genitals. Or smirking Lynndie England and her leash. Maybe it was the smarmy memos tapped out by soft-fingered lawyers itching to justify such barbarism. The grudging, lunatic retreat of the neocons from their long-standing assertion that Saddam was in cahoots with Osama didn't hurt. Even the Enron audiotapes and their celebration of craven sociopathy likely played a part. As a result of all these displays and countless smaller ones, you could feel, a couple of months back, as summer spread across the country, the ground shifting beneath your feet. Not unlike that scene in The Day After Tomorrow, then in theaters, in which the giant ice shelf splits asunder, this was more a paradigm shift than anything strictly tectonic. No cataclysmic ice age, admittedly, yet something was in the air, and people were inhaling deeply. I began to get calls from friends whose parents had always voted Republican, "but not this time." There was the staid Zbigniew Brzezinski on the staid NewsHour with Jim Lehrer sneering at the "Orwellian language" flowing out of the Pentagon. Word spread through the usual channels that old hands from the days of Bush the Elder were quietly (but not too quietly) appalled by his son's misadventure in Iraq. Suddenly, everywhere you went, a surprising number of folks seemed to have had just about enough of what the Bush administration was dishing out. A fresh age appeared on the horizon, accompanied by the sound of scales falling from people's eyes. It felt something like a demonstration of that highest of American prerogatives and the most deeply cherished American freedom: dissent.
Oddly, even my father's funeral contributed. Throughout that long, stately, overtelevised week in early June, items would appear in the newspaper discussing the Republicans' eagerness to capitalize (subtly, tastefully) on the outpouring of affection for my father and turn it to Bush's advantage for the fall election. The familiar "Heir to Reagan" puffballs were reinflated and loosed over the proceedings like (subtle, tasteful) Mylar balloons. Predictably, this backfired. People were treated to a side-by-side comparison�Ronald W. Reagan versus George W. Bush�and it's no surprise who suffered for it. Misty-eyed with nostalgia, people set aside old political gripes for a few days and remembered what friend and foe always conceded to Ronald Reagan: He was damned impressive in the role of leader of the free world. A sign in the crowd, spotted during the slow roll to the Capitol rotunda, seemed to sum up the mood�a portrait of my father and the words NOW THERE WAS A PRESIDENT.
The comparison underscored something important. And the guy on the stool, Lynndie, and her grinning cohorts, they brought the word: The Bush administration can't be trusted. The parade of Bush officials before various commissions and committees�Paul Wolfowitz, who couldn't quite remember how many young Americans had been sacrificed on the altar of his ideology; John Ashcroft, lip quivering as, for a delicious, fleeting moment, it looked as if Senator Joe Biden might just come over the table at him�these were a continuing reminder. The Enron creeps, too�a reminder of how certain environments and particular habits of mind can erode common decency. People noticed. A tipping point had been reached. The issue of credibility was back on the table. The L-word was in circulation. Not the tired old bromide liberal. That's so 1988. No, this time something much more potent: liar.
Politicians will stretch the truth. They'll exaggerate their accomplishments, paper over their gaffes. Spin has long been the lingua franca of the political realm. But George W. Bush and his administration have taken "normal" mendacity to a startling new level far beyond lies of convenience. On top of the usual massaging of public perception, they traffic in big lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic small lies, and, ultimately, have come to embody dishonesty itself. They are a lie. And people, finally, have started catching on.
None of this, needless to say, guarantees Bush a one-term presidency. The far-right wing of the country�nearly one third of us by some estimates�continues to regard all who refuse to drink the Kool-Aid (liberals, rationalists, Europeans, et cetera) as agents of Satan. Bush could show up on video canoodling with Paris Hilton and still bank their vote. Right-wing talking heads continue painting anyone who fails to genuflect deeply enough as a "hater," and therefore a nut job, probably a crypto-Islamist car bomber. But these protestations have taken on a hysterical, almost comically desperate tone. It's one thing to get trashed by Michael Moore. But when Nobel laureates, a vast majority of the scientific community, and a host of current and former diplomats, intelligence operatives, and military officials line up against you, it becomes increasingly difficult to characterize the opposition as fringe wackos.
Does anyone really favor an administration that so shamelessly lies? One that so tenaciously clings to secrecy, not to protect the American people, but to protect itself? That so willfully misrepresents its true aims and so knowingly misleads the people from whom it derives its power? I simply cannot think so. And to come to the same conclusion does not make you guilty of swallowing some liberal critique of the Bush presidency, because that's not what this is. This is the critique of a person who thinks that lying at the top levels of his government is abhorrent. Call it the honest guy's critique of George W. Bush.
THE MOST EGREGIOUS EXAMPLES OF distortion and misdirection�which the administration even now cannot bring itself to repudiate�involve our putative "War on Terror" and our subsequent foray into Iraq.
During his campaign for the presidency, Mr. Bush pledged a more "humble" foreign policy. "I would take the use of force very seriously," he said. "I would be guarded in my approach." Other countries would resent us "if we're an arrogant nation." He sniffed at the notion of "nation building." "Our military is meant to fight and win wars. . . . And when it gets overextended, morale drops." International cooperation and consensus building would be the cornerstone of a Bush administration's approach to the larger world. Given candidate Bush's remarks, it was hard to imagine him, as president, flipping a stiff middle finger at the world and charging off adventuring in the Middle East.
But didn't 9/11 reshuffle the deck, changing everything? Didn't Mr. Bush, on September 12, 2001, awaken to the fresh realization that bad guys in charge of Islamic nations constitute an entirely new and grave threat to us and have to be ruthlessly confronted lest they threaten the American homeland again? Wasn't Saddam Hussein rushed to the front of the line because he was complicit with the hijackers and in some measure responsible for the atrocities in Washington, D. C., and at the tip of Manhattan?
Well, no.
As Bush's former Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, and his onetime "terror czar," Richard A. Clarke, have made clear, the president, with the enthusiastic encouragement of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, was contemplating action against Iraq from day one. "From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out," O'Neill said. All they needed was an excuse. Clarke got the same impression from within the White House. Afghanistan had to be dealt with first; that's where the actual perpetrators were, after all. But the Taliban was a mere appetizer; Saddam was the entr�e. (Or who knows? The soup course?) It was simply a matter of convincing the American public (and our representatives) that war was justified.
The real�but elusive�prime mover behind the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, was quickly relegated to a back burner (a staff member at Fox News�the cable-TV outlet of the Bush White House�told me a year ago that mere mention of bin Laden's name was forbidden within the company, lest we be reminded that the actual bad guy remained at large) while Saddam's Iraq became International Enemy Number One. Just like that, a country whose economy had been reduced to shambles by international sanctions, whose military was less than half the size it had been when the U. S. Army rolled over it during the first Gulf war, that had extensive no-flight zones imposed on it in the north and south as well as constant aerial and satellite surveillance, and whose lethal weapons and capacity to produce such weapons had been destroyed or seriously degraded by UN inspection teams became, in Mr. Bush's words, "a threat of unique urgency" to the most powerful nation on earth.
Fanciful but terrifying scenarios were introduced: Unmanned aircraft, drones, had been built for missions targeting the U. S., Bush told the nation. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice deadpanned to CNN. And, Bush maintained, "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists." We "know" Iraq possesses such weapons, Rumsfeld and Vice-President Cheney assured us. We even "know" where they are hidden. After several months of this mumbo jumbo, 70 percent of Americans had embraced the fantasy that Saddam destroyed the World Trade Center.
ALL THESE ASSERTIONS have proved to be baseless and, we've since discovered, were regarded with skepticism by experts at the time they were made. But contrary opinions were derided, ignored, or covered up in the rush to war. Even as of this writing, Dick Cheney clings to his mad assertion that Saddam was somehow at the nexus of a worldwide terror network.
And then there was Abu Ghraib. Our "war president" may have been justified in his assumption that Americans are a warrior people. He pushed the envelope in thinking we'd be content as an occupying power, but he was sadly mistaken if he thought that ordinary Americans would tolerate an image of themselves as torturers. To be fair, the torture was meant to be secret. So were the memos justifying such treatment that had floated around the White House, Pentagon, and Justice Department for more than a year before the first photos came to light. The neocons no doubt appreciate that few of us have the stones to practice the New Warfare. Could you slip a pair of women's panties over the head of a naked, cowering stranger while forcing him to masturbate? What would you say while sodomizing him with a toilet plunger? Is keeping someone awake till he hallucinates inhumane treatment or merely "sleep management"?
Most of us know the answers to these questions, so it was incumbent upon the administration to pretend that Abu Ghraib was an aberration, not policy. Investigations, we were assured, were already under way; relevant bureaucracies would offer unstinting cooperation; the handful of miscreants would be sternly disciplined. After all, they didn't "represent the best of what America's all about." As anyone who'd watched the proceedings of the 9/11 Commission could have predicted, what followed was the usual administration strategy of stonewalling, obstruction, and obfuscation. The appointment of investigators was stalled; documents were withheld, including the full report by Major General Antonio Taguba, who headed the Army's primary investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib. A favorite moment for many featured John McCain growing apoplectic as Donald Rumsfeld and an entire tableful of army brass proved unable to answer the simple question Who was in charge at Abu Ghraib?
The Bush administration no doubt had its real reasons for invading and occupying Iraq. They've simply chosen not to share them with the American public. They sought justification for ignoring the Geneva Convention and other statutes prohibiting torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners but were loath to acknowledge as much. They may have ideas worth discussing, but they don't welcome the rest of us in the conversation. They don't trust us because they don't dare expose their true agendas to the light of day. There is a surreal quality to all this: Occupation is liberation; Iraq is sovereign, but we're in control; Saddam is in Iraqi custody, but we've got him; we'll get out as soon as an elected Iraqi government asks us, but we'll be there for years to come. Which is what we counted on in the first place, only with rose petals and easy coochie.
This M�bius reality finds its domestic analogue in the perversely cynical "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forests" sloganeering at Bush's EPA and in the administration's irresponsible tax cutting and other fiscal shenanigans. But the Bush administration has always worn strangely tinted shades, and you wonder to what extent Mr. Bush himself lives in a world of his own imagining.
And chances are your America and George W. Bush's America are not the same place. If you are dead center on the earning scale in real-world twenty-first-century America, you make a bit less than $32,000 a year, and $32,000 is not a sum that Mr. Bush has ever associated with getting by in his world. Bush, who has always managed to fail upwards in his various careers, has never had a job the way you have a job�where not showing up one morning gets you fired, costing you your health benefits. He may find it difficult to relate personally to any of the nearly two million citizens who've lost their jobs under his administration, the first administration since Herbert Hoover's to post a net loss of jobs. Mr. Bush has never had to worry that he couldn't afford the best available health care for his children. For him, forty-three million people without health insurance may be no more than a politically inconvenient abstraction. When Mr. Bush talks about the economy, he is not talking about your economy. His economy is filled with pals called Kenny-boy who fly around in their own airplanes. In Bush's economy, his world, friends relocate offshore to avoid paying taxes. Taxes are for chumps like you. You are not a friend. You're the help. When the party Mr. Bush is hosting in his world ends, you'll be left picking shrimp toast out of the carpet.
ALL ADMINISTRATIONS WILL DISSEMBLE, distort, or outright lie when their backs are against the wall, when honesty begins to look like political suicide. But this administration seems to lie reflexively, as if it were simply the easiest option for busy folks with a lot on their minds. While the big lies are more damning and of immeasurably greater import to the nation, it is the small, unnecessary prevarications that may be diagnostic. Who lies when they don't have to? When the simple truth, though perhaps embarrassing in the short run, is nevertheless in one's long-term self-interest? Why would a president whose calling card is his alleged rock-solid integrity waste his chief asset for penny-ante stakes? Habit, perhaps. Or an inability to admit even small mistakes.
Mr. Bush's tendency to meander beyond the bounds of truth was evident during the 2000 campaign but was largely ignored by the mainstream media. His untruths simply didn't fit the agreed-upon narrative. While generally acknowledged to be lacking in experience, depth, and other qualifications typically considered useful in a leader of the free world, Bush was portrayed as a decent fellow nonetheless, one whose straightforwardness was a given. None of that "what the meaning of is is" business for him. And, God knows, no furtive, taxpayer-funded fellatio sessions with the interns. Al Gore, on the other hand, was depicted as a dubious self-reinventor, stained like a certain blue dress by Bill Clinton's prurient transgressions. He would spend valuable weeks explaining away statements�"I invented the Internet"�that he never made in the first place. All this left the coast pretty clear for Bush.
Scenario typical of the 2000 campaign: While debating Al Gore, Bush tells two obvious�if not exactly earth-shattering�lies and is not challenged. First, he claims to have supported a patient's bill of rights while governor of Texas. This is untrue. He, in fact, vigorously resisted such a measure, only reluctantly bowing to political reality and allowing it to become law without his signature. Second, he announces that Gore has outspent him during the campaign. The opposite is true: Bush has outspent Gore. These misstatements are briefly acknowledged in major press outlets, which then quickly return to the more germane issues of Gore's pancake makeup and whether a certain feminist author has counseled him to be more of an "alpha male."
Having gotten away with such witless falsities, perhaps Mr. Bush and his team felt somehow above day-to-day truth. In any case, once ensconced in the White House, they picked up where they left off.
IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH and confusion of 9/11, Bush, who on that day was in Sarasota, Florida, conducting an emergency reading of "The Pet Goat," was whisked off to Nebraska aboard Air Force One. While this may have been entirely sensible under the chaotic circumstances�for all anyone knew at the time, Washington might still have been under attack�the appearance was, shall we say, less than gallant. So a story was concocted: There had been a threat to Air Force One that necessitated the evasive maneuver. Bush's chief political advisor, Karl Rove, cited "specific" and "credible" evidence to that effect. The story quickly unraveled. In truth, there was no such threat.
Then there was Bush's now infamous photo-op landing aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and his subsequent speech in front of a large banner emblazoned MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. The banner, which loomed in the background as Bush addressed the crew, became problematic as it grew clear that the mission in Iraq�whatever that may have been�was far from accomplished. "Major combat operations," as Bush put it, may have technically ended, but young Americans were still dying almost daily. So the White House dealt with the questionable banner in a manner befitting a president pledged to "responsibility and accountability": It blamed the sailors. No surprise, a bit of digging by journalists revealed the banner and its premature triumphalism to be the work of the White House communications office.
More serious by an order of magnitude was the administration's dishonesty concerning pre-9/11 terror warnings. As questions first arose about the country's lack of preparedness in the face of terrorist assault, Condoleezza Rice was dispatched to the pundit arenas to assure the nation that "no one could have imagined terrorists using aircraft as weapons." In fact, terrorism experts had warned repeatedly of just such a calamity. In June 2001, CIA director George Tenet sent Rice an intelligence report warning that "it is highly likely that a significant Al Qaeda attack is in the near future, within several weeks." Two intelligence briefings given to Bush in the summer of 2001 specifically connected Al Qaeda to the imminent danger of hijacked planes being used as weapons. According to The New York Times, after the second of these briefings, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States," was delivered to the president at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, in August, Bush "broke off from work early and spent most of the day fishing." This was the briefing Dr. Rice dismissed as "historical" in her testimony before the 9/11 Commission.
What's odd is that none of these lies were worth the breath expended in the telling. If only for self-serving political reasons, honesty was the way to go. The flight of Air Force One could easily have been explained in terms of security precautions taken in the confusion of momentous events. As for the carrier landing, someone should have fallen on his or her sword at the first hint of trouble: We told the president he needed to do it; he likes that stuff and was gung-ho; we figured, What the hell?; it was a mistake. The banner? We thought the sailors would appreciate it. In retrospect, also a mistake. Yup, we sure feel dumb now. Owning up to the 9/11 warnings would have entailed more than simple embarrassment. But done forthrightly and immediately, an honest reckoning would have earned the Bush team some respect once the dust settled. Instead, by needlessly tap-dancing, Bush's White House squandered vital credibility, turning even relatively minor gaffes into telling examples of its tendency to distort and evade the truth.
But image is everything in this White House, and the image of George Bush as a noble and infallible warrior in the service of his nation must be fanatically maintained, because behind the image lies . . . nothing? As Jonathan Alter of Newsweek has pointed out, Bush has "never fully inhabited" the presidency. Bush apologists can smilingly excuse his malopropisms and vagueness as the plainspokenness of a man of action, but watching Bush flounder when attempting to communicate extemporaneously, one is left with the impression that he is ineloquent not because he can't speak but because he doesn't bother to think.
GEORGE W. BUSH PROMISED to "change the tone in Washington" and ran for office as a moderate, a "compassionate conservative," in the focus-group-tested sloganeering of his campaign. Yet he has governed from the right wing of his already conservative party, assiduously tending a "base" that includes, along with the expected Fortune 500 fat cats, fiscal evangelicals who talk openly of doing away with Social Security and Medicare, of shrinking government to the size where they can, in tax radical Grover Norquist's phrase, "drown it in the bathtub." That base also encompasses a healthy share of anti-choice zealots, homophobic bigots, and assorted purveyors of junk science. Bush has tossed bones to all of them�"partial birth" abortion legislation, the promise of a constitutional amendment banning marriage between homosexuals, federal roadblocks to embryonic-stem-cell research, even comments suggesting presidential doubts about Darwinian evolution. It's not that Mr. Bush necessarily shares their worldview; indeed, it's unclear whether he embraces any coherent philosophy. But this president, who vowed to eschew politics in favor of sound policy, panders nonetheless in the interest of political gain. As John DiIulio, Bush's former head of the Office of Community and Faith-Based Initiatives, once told this magazine, "What you've got is everything�and I mean everything�being run by the political arm."
This was not what the American electorate opted for when, in 2000, by a slim but decisive margin of more than half a million votes, they chose . . . the other guy. Bush has never had a mandate. Surveys indicate broad public dissatisfaction with his domestic priorities. How many people would have voted for Mr. Bush in the first place had they understood his eagerness to pass on crushing debt to our children or seen his true colors regarding global warming and the environment? Even after 9/11, were people really looking to be dragged into an optional war under false pretenses?
If ever there was a time for uniting and not dividing, this is it. Instead, Mr. Bush governs as if by divine right, seeming to actually believe that a wise God wants him in the White House and that by constantly evoking the horrible memory of September 11, 2001, he can keep public anxiety stirred up enough to carry him to another term.
UNDERSTANDABLY, SOME SUPPORTERS of Mr. Bush's will believe I harbor a personal vendetta against the man, some seething resentment. One conservative commentator, based on earlier remarks I've made, has already discerned "jealousy" on my part; after all, Bush, the son of a former president, now occupies that office himself, while I, most assuredly, will not. Truth be told, I have no personal feelings for Bush at all. I hardly know him, having met him only twice, briefly and uneventfully�once during my father's presidency and once during my father's funeral. I'll acknowledge occasional annoyance at the pretense that he's somehow a clone of my father, but far from threatening, I see this more as silly and pathetic. My father, acting roles excepted, never pretended to be anyone but himself. His Republican party, furthermore, seems a far cry from the current model, with its cringing obeisance to the religious Right and its kill-anything-that-moves attack instincts. Believe it or not, I don't look in the mirror every morning and see my father looming over my shoulder. I write and speak as nothing more or less than an American citizen, one who is plenty angry about the direction our country is being dragged by the current administration. We have reached a critical juncture in our nation's history, one ripe with both danger and possibility. We need leadership with the wisdom to prudently confront those dangers and the imagination to boldly grasp the possibilities. Beyond issues of fiscal irresponsibility and ill-advised militarism, there is a question of trust. George W. Bush and his allies don't trust you and me. Why on earth, then, should we trust them?
Fortunately, we still live in a democratic republic. The Bush team cannot expect a cabal of right-wing justices to once again deliver the White House. Come November 2, we will have a choice: We can embrace a lie, or we can restore a measure of integrity to our government. We can choose, as a bumper sticker I spotted in Seattle put it, SOMEONE ELSE FOR PRESIDENT.
September 2004, Volume 142, Issue 3
By Ron Reagan
It may have been the guy in the hood teetering on the stool, electrodes clamped to his genitals. Or smirking Lynndie England and her leash. Maybe it was the smarmy memos tapped out by soft-fingered lawyers itching to justify such barbarism. The grudging, lunatic retreat of the neocons from their long-standing assertion that Saddam was in cahoots with Osama didn't hurt. Even the Enron audiotapes and their celebration of craven sociopathy likely played a part. As a result of all these displays and countless smaller ones, you could feel, a couple of months back, as summer spread across the country, the ground shifting beneath your feet. Not unlike that scene in The Day After Tomorrow, then in theaters, in which the giant ice shelf splits asunder, this was more a paradigm shift than anything strictly tectonic. No cataclysmic ice age, admittedly, yet something was in the air, and people were inhaling deeply. I began to get calls from friends whose parents had always voted Republican, "but not this time." There was the staid Zbigniew Brzezinski on the staid NewsHour with Jim Lehrer sneering at the "Orwellian language" flowing out of the Pentagon. Word spread through the usual channels that old hands from the days of Bush the Elder were quietly (but not too quietly) appalled by his son's misadventure in Iraq. Suddenly, everywhere you went, a surprising number of folks seemed to have had just about enough of what the Bush administration was dishing out. A fresh age appeared on the horizon, accompanied by the sound of scales falling from people's eyes. It felt something like a demonstration of that highest of American prerogatives and the most deeply cherished American freedom: dissent.
Oddly, even my father's funeral contributed. Throughout that long, stately, overtelevised week in early June, items would appear in the newspaper discussing the Republicans' eagerness to capitalize (subtly, tastefully) on the outpouring of affection for my father and turn it to Bush's advantage for the fall election. The familiar "Heir to Reagan" puffballs were reinflated and loosed over the proceedings like (subtle, tasteful) Mylar balloons. Predictably, this backfired. People were treated to a side-by-side comparison�Ronald W. Reagan versus George W. Bush�and it's no surprise who suffered for it. Misty-eyed with nostalgia, people set aside old political gripes for a few days and remembered what friend and foe always conceded to Ronald Reagan: He was damned impressive in the role of leader of the free world. A sign in the crowd, spotted during the slow roll to the Capitol rotunda, seemed to sum up the mood�a portrait of my father and the words NOW THERE WAS A PRESIDENT.
The comparison underscored something important. And the guy on the stool, Lynndie, and her grinning cohorts, they brought the word: The Bush administration can't be trusted. The parade of Bush officials before various commissions and committees�Paul Wolfowitz, who couldn't quite remember how many young Americans had been sacrificed on the altar of his ideology; John Ashcroft, lip quivering as, for a delicious, fleeting moment, it looked as if Senator Joe Biden might just come over the table at him�these were a continuing reminder. The Enron creeps, too�a reminder of how certain environments and particular habits of mind can erode common decency. People noticed. A tipping point had been reached. The issue of credibility was back on the table. The L-word was in circulation. Not the tired old bromide liberal. That's so 1988. No, this time something much more potent: liar.
Politicians will stretch the truth. They'll exaggerate their accomplishments, paper over their gaffes. Spin has long been the lingua franca of the political realm. But George W. Bush and his administration have taken "normal" mendacity to a startling new level far beyond lies of convenience. On top of the usual massaging of public perception, they traffic in big lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic small lies, and, ultimately, have come to embody dishonesty itself. They are a lie. And people, finally, have started catching on.
None of this, needless to say, guarantees Bush a one-term presidency. The far-right wing of the country�nearly one third of us by some estimates�continues to regard all who refuse to drink the Kool-Aid (liberals, rationalists, Europeans, et cetera) as agents of Satan. Bush could show up on video canoodling with Paris Hilton and still bank their vote. Right-wing talking heads continue painting anyone who fails to genuflect deeply enough as a "hater," and therefore a nut job, probably a crypto-Islamist car bomber. But these protestations have taken on a hysterical, almost comically desperate tone. It's one thing to get trashed by Michael Moore. But when Nobel laureates, a vast majority of the scientific community, and a host of current and former diplomats, intelligence operatives, and military officials line up against you, it becomes increasingly difficult to characterize the opposition as fringe wackos.
Does anyone really favor an administration that so shamelessly lies? One that so tenaciously clings to secrecy, not to protect the American people, but to protect itself? That so willfully misrepresents its true aims and so knowingly misleads the people from whom it derives its power? I simply cannot think so. And to come to the same conclusion does not make you guilty of swallowing some liberal critique of the Bush presidency, because that's not what this is. This is the critique of a person who thinks that lying at the top levels of his government is abhorrent. Call it the honest guy's critique of George W. Bush.
THE MOST EGREGIOUS EXAMPLES OF distortion and misdirection�which the administration even now cannot bring itself to repudiate�involve our putative "War on Terror" and our subsequent foray into Iraq.
During his campaign for the presidency, Mr. Bush pledged a more "humble" foreign policy. "I would take the use of force very seriously," he said. "I would be guarded in my approach." Other countries would resent us "if we're an arrogant nation." He sniffed at the notion of "nation building." "Our military is meant to fight and win wars. . . . And when it gets overextended, morale drops." International cooperation and consensus building would be the cornerstone of a Bush administration's approach to the larger world. Given candidate Bush's remarks, it was hard to imagine him, as president, flipping a stiff middle finger at the world and charging off adventuring in the Middle East.
But didn't 9/11 reshuffle the deck, changing everything? Didn't Mr. Bush, on September 12, 2001, awaken to the fresh realization that bad guys in charge of Islamic nations constitute an entirely new and grave threat to us and have to be ruthlessly confronted lest they threaten the American homeland again? Wasn't Saddam Hussein rushed to the front of the line because he was complicit with the hijackers and in some measure responsible for the atrocities in Washington, D. C., and at the tip of Manhattan?
Well, no.
As Bush's former Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, and his onetime "terror czar," Richard A. Clarke, have made clear, the president, with the enthusiastic encouragement of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, was contemplating action against Iraq from day one. "From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out," O'Neill said. All they needed was an excuse. Clarke got the same impression from within the White House. Afghanistan had to be dealt with first; that's where the actual perpetrators were, after all. But the Taliban was a mere appetizer; Saddam was the entr�e. (Or who knows? The soup course?) It was simply a matter of convincing the American public (and our representatives) that war was justified.
The real�but elusive�prime mover behind the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, was quickly relegated to a back burner (a staff member at Fox News�the cable-TV outlet of the Bush White House�told me a year ago that mere mention of bin Laden's name was forbidden within the company, lest we be reminded that the actual bad guy remained at large) while Saddam's Iraq became International Enemy Number One. Just like that, a country whose economy had been reduced to shambles by international sanctions, whose military was less than half the size it had been when the U. S. Army rolled over it during the first Gulf war, that had extensive no-flight zones imposed on it in the north and south as well as constant aerial and satellite surveillance, and whose lethal weapons and capacity to produce such weapons had been destroyed or seriously degraded by UN inspection teams became, in Mr. Bush's words, "a threat of unique urgency" to the most powerful nation on earth.
Fanciful but terrifying scenarios were introduced: Unmanned aircraft, drones, had been built for missions targeting the U. S., Bush told the nation. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice deadpanned to CNN. And, Bush maintained, "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists." We "know" Iraq possesses such weapons, Rumsfeld and Vice-President Cheney assured us. We even "know" where they are hidden. After several months of this mumbo jumbo, 70 percent of Americans had embraced the fantasy that Saddam destroyed the World Trade Center.
ALL THESE ASSERTIONS have proved to be baseless and, we've since discovered, were regarded with skepticism by experts at the time they were made. But contrary opinions were derided, ignored, or covered up in the rush to war. Even as of this writing, Dick Cheney clings to his mad assertion that Saddam was somehow at the nexus of a worldwide terror network.
And then there was Abu Ghraib. Our "war president" may have been justified in his assumption that Americans are a warrior people. He pushed the envelope in thinking we'd be content as an occupying power, but he was sadly mistaken if he thought that ordinary Americans would tolerate an image of themselves as torturers. To be fair, the torture was meant to be secret. So were the memos justifying such treatment that had floated around the White House, Pentagon, and Justice Department for more than a year before the first photos came to light. The neocons no doubt appreciate that few of us have the stones to practice the New Warfare. Could you slip a pair of women's panties over the head of a naked, cowering stranger while forcing him to masturbate? What would you say while sodomizing him with a toilet plunger? Is keeping someone awake till he hallucinates inhumane treatment or merely "sleep management"?
Most of us know the answers to these questions, so it was incumbent upon the administration to pretend that Abu Ghraib was an aberration, not policy. Investigations, we were assured, were already under way; relevant bureaucracies would offer unstinting cooperation; the handful of miscreants would be sternly disciplined. After all, they didn't "represent the best of what America's all about." As anyone who'd watched the proceedings of the 9/11 Commission could have predicted, what followed was the usual administration strategy of stonewalling, obstruction, and obfuscation. The appointment of investigators was stalled; documents were withheld, including the full report by Major General Antonio Taguba, who headed the Army's primary investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib. A favorite moment for many featured John McCain growing apoplectic as Donald Rumsfeld and an entire tableful of army brass proved unable to answer the simple question Who was in charge at Abu Ghraib?
The Bush administration no doubt had its real reasons for invading and occupying Iraq. They've simply chosen not to share them with the American public. They sought justification for ignoring the Geneva Convention and other statutes prohibiting torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners but were loath to acknowledge as much. They may have ideas worth discussing, but they don't welcome the rest of us in the conversation. They don't trust us because they don't dare expose their true agendas to the light of day. There is a surreal quality to all this: Occupation is liberation; Iraq is sovereign, but we're in control; Saddam is in Iraqi custody, but we've got him; we'll get out as soon as an elected Iraqi government asks us, but we'll be there for years to come. Which is what we counted on in the first place, only with rose petals and easy coochie.
This M�bius reality finds its domestic analogue in the perversely cynical "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forests" sloganeering at Bush's EPA and in the administration's irresponsible tax cutting and other fiscal shenanigans. But the Bush administration has always worn strangely tinted shades, and you wonder to what extent Mr. Bush himself lives in a world of his own imagining.
And chances are your America and George W. Bush's America are not the same place. If you are dead center on the earning scale in real-world twenty-first-century America, you make a bit less than $32,000 a year, and $32,000 is not a sum that Mr. Bush has ever associated with getting by in his world. Bush, who has always managed to fail upwards in his various careers, has never had a job the way you have a job�where not showing up one morning gets you fired, costing you your health benefits. He may find it difficult to relate personally to any of the nearly two million citizens who've lost their jobs under his administration, the first administration since Herbert Hoover's to post a net loss of jobs. Mr. Bush has never had to worry that he couldn't afford the best available health care for his children. For him, forty-three million people without health insurance may be no more than a politically inconvenient abstraction. When Mr. Bush talks about the economy, he is not talking about your economy. His economy is filled with pals called Kenny-boy who fly around in their own airplanes. In Bush's economy, his world, friends relocate offshore to avoid paying taxes. Taxes are for chumps like you. You are not a friend. You're the help. When the party Mr. Bush is hosting in his world ends, you'll be left picking shrimp toast out of the carpet.
ALL ADMINISTRATIONS WILL DISSEMBLE, distort, or outright lie when their backs are against the wall, when honesty begins to look like political suicide. But this administration seems to lie reflexively, as if it were simply the easiest option for busy folks with a lot on their minds. While the big lies are more damning and of immeasurably greater import to the nation, it is the small, unnecessary prevarications that may be diagnostic. Who lies when they don't have to? When the simple truth, though perhaps embarrassing in the short run, is nevertheless in one's long-term self-interest? Why would a president whose calling card is his alleged rock-solid integrity waste his chief asset for penny-ante stakes? Habit, perhaps. Or an inability to admit even small mistakes.
Mr. Bush's tendency to meander beyond the bounds of truth was evident during the 2000 campaign but was largely ignored by the mainstream media. His untruths simply didn't fit the agreed-upon narrative. While generally acknowledged to be lacking in experience, depth, and other qualifications typically considered useful in a leader of the free world, Bush was portrayed as a decent fellow nonetheless, one whose straightforwardness was a given. None of that "what the meaning of is is" business for him. And, God knows, no furtive, taxpayer-funded fellatio sessions with the interns. Al Gore, on the other hand, was depicted as a dubious self-reinventor, stained like a certain blue dress by Bill Clinton's prurient transgressions. He would spend valuable weeks explaining away statements�"I invented the Internet"�that he never made in the first place. All this left the coast pretty clear for Bush.
Scenario typical of the 2000 campaign: While debating Al Gore, Bush tells two obvious�if not exactly earth-shattering�lies and is not challenged. First, he claims to have supported a patient's bill of rights while governor of Texas. This is untrue. He, in fact, vigorously resisted such a measure, only reluctantly bowing to political reality and allowing it to become law without his signature. Second, he announces that Gore has outspent him during the campaign. The opposite is true: Bush has outspent Gore. These misstatements are briefly acknowledged in major press outlets, which then quickly return to the more germane issues of Gore's pancake makeup and whether a certain feminist author has counseled him to be more of an "alpha male."
Having gotten away with such witless falsities, perhaps Mr. Bush and his team felt somehow above day-to-day truth. In any case, once ensconced in the White House, they picked up where they left off.
IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH and confusion of 9/11, Bush, who on that day was in Sarasota, Florida, conducting an emergency reading of "The Pet Goat," was whisked off to Nebraska aboard Air Force One. While this may have been entirely sensible under the chaotic circumstances�for all anyone knew at the time, Washington might still have been under attack�the appearance was, shall we say, less than gallant. So a story was concocted: There had been a threat to Air Force One that necessitated the evasive maneuver. Bush's chief political advisor, Karl Rove, cited "specific" and "credible" evidence to that effect. The story quickly unraveled. In truth, there was no such threat.
Then there was Bush's now infamous photo-op landing aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and his subsequent speech in front of a large banner emblazoned MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. The banner, which loomed in the background as Bush addressed the crew, became problematic as it grew clear that the mission in Iraq�whatever that may have been�was far from accomplished. "Major combat operations," as Bush put it, may have technically ended, but young Americans were still dying almost daily. So the White House dealt with the questionable banner in a manner befitting a president pledged to "responsibility and accountability": It blamed the sailors. No surprise, a bit of digging by journalists revealed the banner and its premature triumphalism to be the work of the White House communications office.
More serious by an order of magnitude was the administration's dishonesty concerning pre-9/11 terror warnings. As questions first arose about the country's lack of preparedness in the face of terrorist assault, Condoleezza Rice was dispatched to the pundit arenas to assure the nation that "no one could have imagined terrorists using aircraft as weapons." In fact, terrorism experts had warned repeatedly of just such a calamity. In June 2001, CIA director George Tenet sent Rice an intelligence report warning that "it is highly likely that a significant Al Qaeda attack is in the near future, within several weeks." Two intelligence briefings given to Bush in the summer of 2001 specifically connected Al Qaeda to the imminent danger of hijacked planes being used as weapons. According to The New York Times, after the second of these briefings, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States," was delivered to the president at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, in August, Bush "broke off from work early and spent most of the day fishing." This was the briefing Dr. Rice dismissed as "historical" in her testimony before the 9/11 Commission.
What's odd is that none of these lies were worth the breath expended in the telling. If only for self-serving political reasons, honesty was the way to go. The flight of Air Force One could easily have been explained in terms of security precautions taken in the confusion of momentous events. As for the carrier landing, someone should have fallen on his or her sword at the first hint of trouble: We told the president he needed to do it; he likes that stuff and was gung-ho; we figured, What the hell?; it was a mistake. The banner? We thought the sailors would appreciate it. In retrospect, also a mistake. Yup, we sure feel dumb now. Owning up to the 9/11 warnings would have entailed more than simple embarrassment. But done forthrightly and immediately, an honest reckoning would have earned the Bush team some respect once the dust settled. Instead, by needlessly tap-dancing, Bush's White House squandered vital credibility, turning even relatively minor gaffes into telling examples of its tendency to distort and evade the truth.
But image is everything in this White House, and the image of George Bush as a noble and infallible warrior in the service of his nation must be fanatically maintained, because behind the image lies . . . nothing? As Jonathan Alter of Newsweek has pointed out, Bush has "never fully inhabited" the presidency. Bush apologists can smilingly excuse his malopropisms and vagueness as the plainspokenness of a man of action, but watching Bush flounder when attempting to communicate extemporaneously, one is left with the impression that he is ineloquent not because he can't speak but because he doesn't bother to think.
GEORGE W. BUSH PROMISED to "change the tone in Washington" and ran for office as a moderate, a "compassionate conservative," in the focus-group-tested sloganeering of his campaign. Yet he has governed from the right wing of his already conservative party, assiduously tending a "base" that includes, along with the expected Fortune 500 fat cats, fiscal evangelicals who talk openly of doing away with Social Security and Medicare, of shrinking government to the size where they can, in tax radical Grover Norquist's phrase, "drown it in the bathtub." That base also encompasses a healthy share of anti-choice zealots, homophobic bigots, and assorted purveyors of junk science. Bush has tossed bones to all of them�"partial birth" abortion legislation, the promise of a constitutional amendment banning marriage between homosexuals, federal roadblocks to embryonic-stem-cell research, even comments suggesting presidential doubts about Darwinian evolution. It's not that Mr. Bush necessarily shares their worldview; indeed, it's unclear whether he embraces any coherent philosophy. But this president, who vowed to eschew politics in favor of sound policy, panders nonetheless in the interest of political gain. As John DiIulio, Bush's former head of the Office of Community and Faith-Based Initiatives, once told this magazine, "What you've got is everything�and I mean everything�being run by the political arm."
This was not what the American electorate opted for when, in 2000, by a slim but decisive margin of more than half a million votes, they chose . . . the other guy. Bush has never had a mandate. Surveys indicate broad public dissatisfaction with his domestic priorities. How many people would have voted for Mr. Bush in the first place had they understood his eagerness to pass on crushing debt to our children or seen his true colors regarding global warming and the environment? Even after 9/11, were people really looking to be dragged into an optional war under false pretenses?
If ever there was a time for uniting and not dividing, this is it. Instead, Mr. Bush governs as if by divine right, seeming to actually believe that a wise God wants him in the White House and that by constantly evoking the horrible memory of September 11, 2001, he can keep public anxiety stirred up enough to carry him to another term.
UNDERSTANDABLY, SOME SUPPORTERS of Mr. Bush's will believe I harbor a personal vendetta against the man, some seething resentment. One conservative commentator, based on earlier remarks I've made, has already discerned "jealousy" on my part; after all, Bush, the son of a former president, now occupies that office himself, while I, most assuredly, will not. Truth be told, I have no personal feelings for Bush at all. I hardly know him, having met him only twice, briefly and uneventfully�once during my father's presidency and once during my father's funeral. I'll acknowledge occasional annoyance at the pretense that he's somehow a clone of my father, but far from threatening, I see this more as silly and pathetic. My father, acting roles excepted, never pretended to be anyone but himself. His Republican party, furthermore, seems a far cry from the current model, with its cringing obeisance to the religious Right and its kill-anything-that-moves attack instincts. Believe it or not, I don't look in the mirror every morning and see my father looming over my shoulder. I write and speak as nothing more or less than an American citizen, one who is plenty angry about the direction our country is being dragged by the current administration. We have reached a critical juncture in our nation's history, one ripe with both danger and possibility. We need leadership with the wisdom to prudently confront those dangers and the imagination to boldly grasp the possibilities. Beyond issues of fiscal irresponsibility and ill-advised militarism, there is a question of trust. George W. Bush and his allies don't trust you and me. Why on earth, then, should we trust them?
Fortunately, we still live in a democratic republic. The Bush team cannot expect a cabal of right-wing justices to once again deliver the White House. Come November 2, we will have a choice: We can embrace a lie, or we can restore a measure of integrity to our government. We can choose, as a bumper sticker I spotted in Seattle put it, SOMEONE ELSE FOR PRESIDENT.
September 2004, Volume 142, Issue 3
Thursday, August 19, 2004
Morrissey at DAR Consitution Hall
| Start: | Sep 29, '04 |
| Location: | DAR Consitution Hall, DC |
Monday, August 16, 2004
A New York lifestyle magazine for dog fanatics
For Dogs in New York, a Glossy Look at Life
With feature articles covering "The 10 Best Walks in Manhattan" and how to keep a dog in a custody battle, a New York lifestyle magazine for dog fanatics, The New York Dog, is scheduled to begin publishing this autumn.
The idea of the Irish magazine publishers Michael O'Doherty and John Ryan, the 96-page glossy is expected to be printed every two months and is intended to sit alongside Vogue and Cosmopolitan. It even plans to include photo shoots illustrating dog haute couture.
"Instead of talking about women's fashion, we're talking about dogs' fashion," said Mr. O'Doherty in an interview from his office. Following the lead of other magazines, The New York Dog will feature dog horoscopes and obituaries, dog dieting tips and pop psychology advice for dogs.
more from NYTimes.com
Thursday, August 12, 2004
c'mon, now. what are the olympics really about
Fans face boot for eating or drinking wrong brands at games
In a far cry from the high-minded ideals of humanity and tolerance embodied by the Olympics, the organizers of the Athens games have warned spectators that they could be barred for taking a surreptitious sip of Pepsi or an illicit bite from a Burger King Whopper.
Strict regulations published by Athens 2004 last week dictate that spectators may be refused admission to events if they are carrying food or drinks made by companies that did not see fit to sponsor the games.
Sweltering sports fans who seek refuge from the soaring temperatures with a soft drink other than one made by Coca-Cola will be told to leave the banned refreshment at the gates or be shut out. High on the list of blacklisted beverages is Pepsi, but even the wrong bottle of water could land spectators in trouble.
Fans will be allowed into the Olympic complex if they are drinking Avra, a Greek mineral water owned by Coca-Cola, which paid $60 million US for the privilege of being one of the main sponsors. Officials are under orders not to let in rival brands' bottles unless the labels are removed.
more from the Chronicle Herald
Friday, August 6, 2004
Excerpt: All the President's Spin
For your reading pleasure...
In the introduction to their new book, the editors of Spinsanity.com set out to expose the Bush administration's tactics of media manipulation.
http://www.mediabistro.com/articles/cache/a2124.asp
Don't ask me (jodig) to defend their claims. I am just linking to the intro of their book. enjoy.
Friday, July 30, 2004
Clinton's Speech from the DNC, 2004
The text of former President Clinton�s speech Monday, 7/26/04 at the Democratic National Convention
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CLINTON: Ladies and gentlemen, I am honored to be here with you.
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I am honored to share this podium with my senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton. And I want to thank the people of New York for giving the best
public servant in my family a chance to continue serving the public. Thank you. I am also � I�m going to say that again, in case you didn�t
hear it.
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I�m honored to be here tonight. And I want to thank the people of New York for giving Hillary the chance to continue to serve in public life.
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I am very proud of her. And we are both very grateful to all of you, especially my good friends from Arkansas, for giving me the chance to
serve in the White House for eight years.
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I am honored to share this night with President Carter, for whom I worked in 1976 and who has inspired the world with his work for peace,
democracy and human rights.
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I am honored to share it with Al Gore, my friend and my partner for eight years, who played such a large role in building the prosperity and
peace that we left America in 2000.
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And Al Gore, as he showed again tonight, demonstrated incredible patriotism and grace under pressure. He is the living embodiment of the
principle that every vote counts.
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And this year, we�re going to make sure they�re all counted in every state in America. My friends, after three conventions as a candidate or
a president, tonight I come to you as a citizen, returning to the role that I have played for most of my life, as a foot soldier in our fight for
the future, as we nominate in Boston a true New England Patriot for president.
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Now this state, who gave us in other times of challenge John Adams and John Kennedy, has given us John Kerry, a good man, a great
senator, a visionary leader. And we are all here to do what we can to make him the next president of the United States.
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My friends, we are constantly being told that America is deeply divided. But all Americans value freedom and faith and family. We all honor
the service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform, in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the world.
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We all want good jobs, good schools, health care, safe streets, a clean environment. We all want our children to grow up in a secure
America leading the world toward a peaceful and prosperous future.
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Our differences are in how we can best achieve these things in a time of unprecedented change. Therefore, we Democrats will bring to the
American people this year a positive campaign, arguing not who is a good or a bad person, but what is the best way to build a safe and
prosperous world our children deserve.
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The 21st century is marked by serious security threats, serious economic challenges and serious problems, from AIDS to global warming to
the continuing turmoil in the Middle East.
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But it is also full of amazing opportunities to create millions of new jobs and clean energy and biotechnology, to restore our manufacturing
base and reap the benefits of the global economy, through our diversity and our commitment to decent labor and environmental standards
for people all across the world and to create a world where we can celebrate our religious, our racial, our ethnic, our tribal differences
because our common humanity matters most of all.
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To build that kind of world, we must make the right choices. And we must have a president who will lead the way. Democrats and
Republicans have very different and deeply felt ideas about what choices we should make. They�re rooted in fundamentally different views
of how we should meet our common challenges at home, and how we should play our role in the world.
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We Democrats want to build a world and an America of shared responsibilities and shared benefits. We want a world with more global
cooperation where we act alone only when we absolutely have to.
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We think the role of government should be to give people the tools to create the conditions to make the most of their own lives. And we
think everybody should have that chance.
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On the other hand, the Republicans in Washington believe that America should be run by the right people � their people � in a world in
which America acts unilaterally when we can and cooperates when we have to.
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They believe the role of government is to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of those who embrace their economic, political and
social views, leaving ordinary citizens to fend for themselves on important matters like health care and retirement security.
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Now, since most Americans aren�t that far to the right, our friends have to portray us Democrats as simply unacceptable, lacking in
strength and values. In other words, they need a divided America.
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But we don�t.
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Americans long to be united. After 9/11, we all just wanted to be one nation. Not a single American on September the 12th, 2001, cared
who won the next presidential election.
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All we wanted to do was to be one country, strong in the fight against terror, helping to heal those who were wounded and the families of
those who lost their loved ones, reaching out to the rest of the world so we could meet these new challenges and go on with our
democratic way of life.
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The president had an amazing opportunity to bring the country together under his slogan of compassionate conservatism and to unite the
world in the struggle against terror.
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Instead, he and his congressional allies made a very different choice. They chose to use that moment of unity to try to push the country
too far to the right and to walk away from our allies, not only in attacking Iraq before the weapons inspectors had finished their work, but
in withdrawing American support for the climate change treaty and for the international court on war criminals and for the anti-ballistic
missile treaty and from the nuclear test ban treaty.
.
Now, now at a time when we�re trying to get other people to give up nuclear and biological and chemical weapons, they are trying to
develop two new nuclear weapons which they say we might use first.
.
At home, the president and the Republican Congress have made equally fateful choices, which they also deeply believe in.
.
For the first time when America was in a war footing in our whole history, they gave two huge tax cuts, nearly half of which went to the
top 1 percent of us.
.
Now, I�m in that group for the first time in my life. And you might remember that when I was in office, on occasion, the Republicans were
kind of mean to me.
.
But as soon as I got out and made money, I became part of the most important group in the world to them. It was amazing. I never
thought I�d be so well cared for by the president and the Republicans in Congress. I almost sent them a thank you note for my tax cuts
until I realized that the rest of you were paying the bill for it. And then I thought better of it.
.
Now look at the choices they made, choices they believed in. They chose to protect my tax cut at all costs while withholding promised
funding to the Leave No Child Behind Act, leaving 2.1 million children behind.
.
They chose to protect my tax cut, while cutting 140,000 unemployed workers out of their job training programs, 100,000 working families
out of their child care assistance, and worst of all, while cutting 300,000 poor children out of their after-school programs when we know it
keeps them off the streets, out of trouble, in school, learning, going to college and having a good life.
.
They chose � they chose to protect my tax cuts while dramatically raising the out-of-pocket costs of health care to our veterans and while
weakening or reversing very important environmental measures that Al Gore and I put into place, everything from clean air to the
protection of our forests.
.
Now, in this time, everyone in America had to sacrifice except the wealthiest Americans. And most of us, almost all of us, from Republicans
to independents and Democrats, we wanted to be asked to do our part, too. But all they asked us to do was to expend the energy
necessary to open the envelopes containing our tax cuts. Now, if you like these choices and you agree with them, you should vote to
return them to the White House and the Congress. If not, take a look at John Kerry, John Edwards and the Democrats. We�ve got a
different economic policy.
.
In this year�s budget, the White House this year wants to cut off all the federal funding for 88,000 uniformed police officers under the
COPS program we�ve had for 10 years. Among those 88,000 police are more than 700 members of the New York Police Department who
put their lives on the line on 9/11.
.
With gang violence rising, and with all of us looking for terrorists in our midst and hoping they�re not too well armed or too dangerous, the
president and the Congress are about to allow the 10- year-old ban on deadly assault weapons to lapse.
.
Now, they believe it�s the right thing to do. But our policy was to put more police on the street and to take assault weapons off the street.
And it gave you eight years of declining crime and eight years of declining violence. Their policy is the reverse.
.
They�re taking police off the streets while they put assault weapons back on the street.
.
Now, if you agree with that choice, by all means, vote to keep them in office. But if you don�t, join John Kerry, John Edwards and the
Democrats in making America safer, smarter and stronger again.
.
On homeland security, Democrats tried to double the number of containers at ports and airports checked for weapons of mass destruction.
It cost $1 billion. It would have been paid for under our bill by asking the 200,000 millionaires in America to cut their tax cut by $5,000.
Almost all 200,000 of us would like to have done that, to spend $5,000 to make all 300 million Americans safer.
.
The measure failed. Why? Because the White House and the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives opposed it. They
thought our $5,000 was more important than doubling the container checks at our ports and airports.
.
If you agree with that, by all means, re-elect them. If not, John Kerry and John Edwards are your team for the future.
.
These policies have turned a projected $5.8 trillion surplus that we left, enough to pay for the baby boomer retirement, into a projected
debt of almost $5 trillion, with over $400 billion in deficit this year and for years to come.
.
.
Now, how do they pay for that deficit? First, by taking the Social Security surplus that comes in every month and endorsing the checks of
working people over to me to pay for the tax cuts. But it�s not enough.
.
So then they have to go borrow money. Most of it they borrow from the Chinese and the Japanese government.
.
Sure, these countries are competing with us for good jobs, but how can we enforce our trade laws against our bankers? I mean, come on.
.
So if you think � if you believe it is good policy � if you believe it is good policy to pay for my tax cuts with the Social Security checks of
working men and women and borrowed money from China and Japan, you should vote for them. If not, John Kerry�s your man.
.
We Americans must choose for president...
.
... we�ve got to choose for president between two strong men who both love their countries, but who have very different world views: our
nominee, John Kerry, who favors shared responsibility, shared opportunity and more global cooperation; and their president and their
party in Congress who favor concentrated wealth and power, leaving people to fend for themselves and more unilateral action.
.
I think we�re right for two reasons.
.
First of all, America just works better when more people have a chance to live their dreams.
.
And, secondly, we live in an interdependent world in which we cannot possibly kill, jail or occupy all of our potential adversaries. So we
have to both fight terror and build a world with more partners and fewer terrorists.
.
Now, we tried it their way for 12 years. We tried it their way for 12 years. We tried it our way for eight years. Then we tried it their way
for four more. But the only test that matters is whether people were better off when we finished than when we started. Our way works
better.
.
It produced over 22 million good jobs, rising incomes for the middle class, over 100 times as many people moved from poverty into the
middle class, more health care, the largest increase in college aid in 50 years, record home ownership, a cleaner environment, three
surpluses in a row, a modernized defense force, strong efforts against terror and a respected America in the world.
.
.
More importantly, more importantly we have great new champions in John Kerry and John Edwards, two good men, with wonderful wives:
Teresa, a generous and wise woman, who understands the world we�re trying to shape; and Elizabeth, a lawyer and mother, who
understands the lives we�re trying to live.
.
Now, let me tell you know what I know about John Kerry. I�ve been seeing all of the Republican ads about him. Let me tell you what I know
about him.
.
During the Vietnam War, many young men, including the current president, the vice president and me, could have gone to Vietnam and
didn�t. John Kerry came from a privileged background. He could have avoided going too, but instead, he said: Send me.
.
When they sent those swiftboats up the river in Vietnam and they told them their job was to draw hostile fire, to wave the American flag
and bate the enemy to come out and fight, John Kerry said: Send me.
.
And then, on my watch, when it was time to heal the wounds of war and normalize relations with Vietnam and to demand an accounting of
the POWs and MIAs we lost there, John Kerry said: Send me.
.
Then when we needed someone to push the cause of inner-city children struggling to avoid a life of crime or to bring the benefits of high
technology to ordinary Americans or to clean the environment in a way that created new jobs, or to give small businesses a better chance
to make it, John Kerry said: Send me.
.
So tonight, my friends, I ask you to join me for the next 100 days in telling John Kerry�s story and promoting his ideas. Let every person in
this hall and like-minded people all across our land say to him what he has always said to America: Send me.
.
The bravery that men who fought by his side in battle, that bravery they saw in battle, I have seen in politics. When I was president, John
Kerry showed courage and conviction on crime, on welfare reform, on balancing the budget, at a time when those priorities were not
exactly the way to win a popularity contest in our party.
.
John Kerry took tough positions on tough problems. He knows who he is and where he�s going. He has the experience, the character, the
ideas, the values to be a great president.
.
And in a time of change, he has two other very important qualities: an insatiable curiosity to understand the world around him, and a
willingness to hear other views, even those who disagree with him. Therefore...
.
Therefore, John Kerry will make choices that reflect both conviction and common sense. He proved that when he picked John Edwards to
be his partner.
.
Now, everybody talks about John Edwards� energy and intellect and charisma. You know, I kind of resent him.
.
But the important thing is not what talents he has, but how he has used them. He chose � he chose to use his talents to improve the lives
of people like him who had to work for everything they�ve got and to help people too often left out and left behind. And that�s what he�ll do
as our vice president.
.
Now their opponents will tell you...
.
Their opponents will tell you we should be afraid of John Kerry and John Edwards, because they won�t stand up to the terrorists. Don�t you
believe it. Strength and wisdom are not opposing values. They go hand in hand.
.
They go hand in hand, and John Kerry has both. His first priority will be to keep America safe.
.
Remember the scripture: Be not afraid.
.
John Kerry and John Edwards are good people with good ideas, ideas to make the economy work again for middle-class Americans, to
restore fiscal responsibility, to save Social Security, to make health care more affordable, college more available, to free us from
dependence on foreign oil and create new jobs with clean energy and a cleaner environment...
.
... to rally the world to our side in the war against terror and to make a world with more friends and less terror.
.
My friends, at every turning point in our history, we, the people, have chosen unity over division, heeding our founders� call to America�s
eternal mission to form a more perfect union, to widen the circle of opportunity deep in the reach of freedom and strengthen the bonds of
our community. It happened every time, because we made the right choices.
.
In the early days of the republic, America was divided and at a crossroads, much as it is today, deeply divided over whether or not to build
a real nation with a national economy and a national legal system. We chose to build a more perfect union.
.
In the Civil War, America was at another crossroads, deeply divided over whether to save the union and end slavery. We chose a more
perfect union.
.
In the 1960s, when I was a young man, we were divided again over civil rights and women�s rights. And again we chose to form a more
perfect union.
.
As I said in 1992, I say again tonight, we are all in this together. We have an obligation, both to work hard and to help our fellow citizens,
an obligation both to fight terror and to build a world with more cooperation and less terror.
.
Now, again, it is time to choose. Since we�re all in the same boat, we should choose a captain of our ship who is a brave good man, who
knows how to steer a vessel through troubled waters, to the calm seas and the clear sides of our more perfect union. That is our mission.
.
So let us go in tonight and say to America in a loud, clear voice: Send John Kerry.
.
God bless you.
:: Listen to it ::
.
CLINTON: Ladies and gentlemen, I am honored to be here with you.
.
I am honored to share this podium with my senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton. And I want to thank the people of New York for giving the best
public servant in my family a chance to continue serving the public. Thank you. I am also � I�m going to say that again, in case you didn�t
hear it.
.
I�m honored to be here tonight. And I want to thank the people of New York for giving Hillary the chance to continue to serve in public life.
.
I am very proud of her. And we are both very grateful to all of you, especially my good friends from Arkansas, for giving me the chance to
serve in the White House for eight years.
.
I am honored to share this night with President Carter, for whom I worked in 1976 and who has inspired the world with his work for peace,
democracy and human rights.
.
I am honored to share it with Al Gore, my friend and my partner for eight years, who played such a large role in building the prosperity and
peace that we left America in 2000.
.
And Al Gore, as he showed again tonight, demonstrated incredible patriotism and grace under pressure. He is the living embodiment of the
principle that every vote counts.
.
And this year, we�re going to make sure they�re all counted in every state in America. My friends, after three conventions as a candidate or
a president, tonight I come to you as a citizen, returning to the role that I have played for most of my life, as a foot soldier in our fight for
the future, as we nominate in Boston a true New England Patriot for president.
.
Now this state, who gave us in other times of challenge John Adams and John Kennedy, has given us John Kerry, a good man, a great
senator, a visionary leader. And we are all here to do what we can to make him the next president of the United States.
.
My friends, we are constantly being told that America is deeply divided. But all Americans value freedom and faith and family. We all honor
the service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform, in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the world.
.
We all want good jobs, good schools, health care, safe streets, a clean environment. We all want our children to grow up in a secure
America leading the world toward a peaceful and prosperous future.
.
Our differences are in how we can best achieve these things in a time of unprecedented change. Therefore, we Democrats will bring to the
American people this year a positive campaign, arguing not who is a good or a bad person, but what is the best way to build a safe and
prosperous world our children deserve.
.
The 21st century is marked by serious security threats, serious economic challenges and serious problems, from AIDS to global warming to
the continuing turmoil in the Middle East.
.
But it is also full of amazing opportunities to create millions of new jobs and clean energy and biotechnology, to restore our manufacturing
base and reap the benefits of the global economy, through our diversity and our commitment to decent labor and environmental standards
for people all across the world and to create a world where we can celebrate our religious, our racial, our ethnic, our tribal differences
because our common humanity matters most of all.
.
To build that kind of world, we must make the right choices. And we must have a president who will lead the way. Democrats and
Republicans have very different and deeply felt ideas about what choices we should make. They�re rooted in fundamentally different views
of how we should meet our common challenges at home, and how we should play our role in the world.
.
We Democrats want to build a world and an America of shared responsibilities and shared benefits. We want a world with more global
cooperation where we act alone only when we absolutely have to.
.
We think the role of government should be to give people the tools to create the conditions to make the most of their own lives. And we
think everybody should have that chance.
.
On the other hand, the Republicans in Washington believe that America should be run by the right people � their people � in a world in
which America acts unilaterally when we can and cooperates when we have to.
.
They believe the role of government is to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of those who embrace their economic, political and
social views, leaving ordinary citizens to fend for themselves on important matters like health care and retirement security.
.
Now, since most Americans aren�t that far to the right, our friends have to portray us Democrats as simply unacceptable, lacking in
strength and values. In other words, they need a divided America.
.
But we don�t.
.
Americans long to be united. After 9/11, we all just wanted to be one nation. Not a single American on September the 12th, 2001, cared
who won the next presidential election.
.
All we wanted to do was to be one country, strong in the fight against terror, helping to heal those who were wounded and the families of
those who lost their loved ones, reaching out to the rest of the world so we could meet these new challenges and go on with our
democratic way of life.
.
The president had an amazing opportunity to bring the country together under his slogan of compassionate conservatism and to unite the
world in the struggle against terror.
.
Instead, he and his congressional allies made a very different choice. They chose to use that moment of unity to try to push the country
too far to the right and to walk away from our allies, not only in attacking Iraq before the weapons inspectors had finished their work, but
in withdrawing American support for the climate change treaty and for the international court on war criminals and for the anti-ballistic
missile treaty and from the nuclear test ban treaty.
.
Now, now at a time when we�re trying to get other people to give up nuclear and biological and chemical weapons, they are trying to
develop two new nuclear weapons which they say we might use first.
.
At home, the president and the Republican Congress have made equally fateful choices, which they also deeply believe in.
.
For the first time when America was in a war footing in our whole history, they gave two huge tax cuts, nearly half of which went to the
top 1 percent of us.
.
Now, I�m in that group for the first time in my life. And you might remember that when I was in office, on occasion, the Republicans were
kind of mean to me.
.
But as soon as I got out and made money, I became part of the most important group in the world to them. It was amazing. I never
thought I�d be so well cared for by the president and the Republicans in Congress. I almost sent them a thank you note for my tax cuts
until I realized that the rest of you were paying the bill for it. And then I thought better of it.
.
Now look at the choices they made, choices they believed in. They chose to protect my tax cut at all costs while withholding promised
funding to the Leave No Child Behind Act, leaving 2.1 million children behind.
.
They chose to protect my tax cut, while cutting 140,000 unemployed workers out of their job training programs, 100,000 working families
out of their child care assistance, and worst of all, while cutting 300,000 poor children out of their after-school programs when we know it
keeps them off the streets, out of trouble, in school, learning, going to college and having a good life.
.
They chose � they chose to protect my tax cuts while dramatically raising the out-of-pocket costs of health care to our veterans and while
weakening or reversing very important environmental measures that Al Gore and I put into place, everything from clean air to the
protection of our forests.
.
Now, in this time, everyone in America had to sacrifice except the wealthiest Americans. And most of us, almost all of us, from Republicans
to independents and Democrats, we wanted to be asked to do our part, too. But all they asked us to do was to expend the energy
necessary to open the envelopes containing our tax cuts. Now, if you like these choices and you agree with them, you should vote to
return them to the White House and the Congress. If not, take a look at John Kerry, John Edwards and the Democrats. We�ve got a
different economic policy.
.
In this year�s budget, the White House this year wants to cut off all the federal funding for 88,000 uniformed police officers under the
COPS program we�ve had for 10 years. Among those 88,000 police are more than 700 members of the New York Police Department who
put their lives on the line on 9/11.
.
With gang violence rising, and with all of us looking for terrorists in our midst and hoping they�re not too well armed or too dangerous, the
president and the Congress are about to allow the 10- year-old ban on deadly assault weapons to lapse.
.
Now, they believe it�s the right thing to do. But our policy was to put more police on the street and to take assault weapons off the street.
And it gave you eight years of declining crime and eight years of declining violence. Their policy is the reverse.
.
They�re taking police off the streets while they put assault weapons back on the street.
.
Now, if you agree with that choice, by all means, vote to keep them in office. But if you don�t, join John Kerry, John Edwards and the
Democrats in making America safer, smarter and stronger again.
.
On homeland security, Democrats tried to double the number of containers at ports and airports checked for weapons of mass destruction.
It cost $1 billion. It would have been paid for under our bill by asking the 200,000 millionaires in America to cut their tax cut by $5,000.
Almost all 200,000 of us would like to have done that, to spend $5,000 to make all 300 million Americans safer.
.
The measure failed. Why? Because the White House and the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives opposed it. They
thought our $5,000 was more important than doubling the container checks at our ports and airports.
.
If you agree with that, by all means, re-elect them. If not, John Kerry and John Edwards are your team for the future.
.
These policies have turned a projected $5.8 trillion surplus that we left, enough to pay for the baby boomer retirement, into a projected
debt of almost $5 trillion, with over $400 billion in deficit this year and for years to come.
.
.
Now, how do they pay for that deficit? First, by taking the Social Security surplus that comes in every month and endorsing the checks of
working people over to me to pay for the tax cuts. But it�s not enough.
.
So then they have to go borrow money. Most of it they borrow from the Chinese and the Japanese government.
.
Sure, these countries are competing with us for good jobs, but how can we enforce our trade laws against our bankers? I mean, come on.
.
So if you think � if you believe it is good policy � if you believe it is good policy to pay for my tax cuts with the Social Security checks of
working men and women and borrowed money from China and Japan, you should vote for them. If not, John Kerry�s your man.
.
We Americans must choose for president...
.
... we�ve got to choose for president between two strong men who both love their countries, but who have very different world views: our
nominee, John Kerry, who favors shared responsibility, shared opportunity and more global cooperation; and their president and their
party in Congress who favor concentrated wealth and power, leaving people to fend for themselves and more unilateral action.
.
I think we�re right for two reasons.
.
First of all, America just works better when more people have a chance to live their dreams.
.
And, secondly, we live in an interdependent world in which we cannot possibly kill, jail or occupy all of our potential adversaries. So we
have to both fight terror and build a world with more partners and fewer terrorists.
.
Now, we tried it their way for 12 years. We tried it their way for 12 years. We tried it our way for eight years. Then we tried it their way
for four more. But the only test that matters is whether people were better off when we finished than when we started. Our way works
better.
.
It produced over 22 million good jobs, rising incomes for the middle class, over 100 times as many people moved from poverty into the
middle class, more health care, the largest increase in college aid in 50 years, record home ownership, a cleaner environment, three
surpluses in a row, a modernized defense force, strong efforts against terror and a respected America in the world.
.
.
More importantly, more importantly we have great new champions in John Kerry and John Edwards, two good men, with wonderful wives:
Teresa, a generous and wise woman, who understands the world we�re trying to shape; and Elizabeth, a lawyer and mother, who
understands the lives we�re trying to live.
.
Now, let me tell you know what I know about John Kerry. I�ve been seeing all of the Republican ads about him. Let me tell you what I know
about him.
.
During the Vietnam War, many young men, including the current president, the vice president and me, could have gone to Vietnam and
didn�t. John Kerry came from a privileged background. He could have avoided going too, but instead, he said: Send me.
.
When they sent those swiftboats up the river in Vietnam and they told them their job was to draw hostile fire, to wave the American flag
and bate the enemy to come out and fight, John Kerry said: Send me.
.
And then, on my watch, when it was time to heal the wounds of war and normalize relations with Vietnam and to demand an accounting of
the POWs and MIAs we lost there, John Kerry said: Send me.
.
Then when we needed someone to push the cause of inner-city children struggling to avoid a life of crime or to bring the benefits of high
technology to ordinary Americans or to clean the environment in a way that created new jobs, or to give small businesses a better chance
to make it, John Kerry said: Send me.
.
So tonight, my friends, I ask you to join me for the next 100 days in telling John Kerry�s story and promoting his ideas. Let every person in
this hall and like-minded people all across our land say to him what he has always said to America: Send me.
.
The bravery that men who fought by his side in battle, that bravery they saw in battle, I have seen in politics. When I was president, John
Kerry showed courage and conviction on crime, on welfare reform, on balancing the budget, at a time when those priorities were not
exactly the way to win a popularity contest in our party.
.
John Kerry took tough positions on tough problems. He knows who he is and where he�s going. He has the experience, the character, the
ideas, the values to be a great president.
.
And in a time of change, he has two other very important qualities: an insatiable curiosity to understand the world around him, and a
willingness to hear other views, even those who disagree with him. Therefore...
.
Therefore, John Kerry will make choices that reflect both conviction and common sense. He proved that when he picked John Edwards to
be his partner.
.
Now, everybody talks about John Edwards� energy and intellect and charisma. You know, I kind of resent him.
.
But the important thing is not what talents he has, but how he has used them. He chose � he chose to use his talents to improve the lives
of people like him who had to work for everything they�ve got and to help people too often left out and left behind. And that�s what he�ll do
as our vice president.
.
Now their opponents will tell you...
.
Their opponents will tell you we should be afraid of John Kerry and John Edwards, because they won�t stand up to the terrorists. Don�t you
believe it. Strength and wisdom are not opposing values. They go hand in hand.
.
They go hand in hand, and John Kerry has both. His first priority will be to keep America safe.
.
Remember the scripture: Be not afraid.
.
John Kerry and John Edwards are good people with good ideas, ideas to make the economy work again for middle-class Americans, to
restore fiscal responsibility, to save Social Security, to make health care more affordable, college more available, to free us from
dependence on foreign oil and create new jobs with clean energy and a cleaner environment...
.
... to rally the world to our side in the war against terror and to make a world with more friends and less terror.
.
My friends, at every turning point in our history, we, the people, have chosen unity over division, heeding our founders� call to America�s
eternal mission to form a more perfect union, to widen the circle of opportunity deep in the reach of freedom and strengthen the bonds of
our community. It happened every time, because we made the right choices.
.
In the early days of the republic, America was divided and at a crossroads, much as it is today, deeply divided over whether or not to build
a real nation with a national economy and a national legal system. We chose to build a more perfect union.
.
In the Civil War, America was at another crossroads, deeply divided over whether to save the union and end slavery. We chose a more
perfect union.
.
In the 1960s, when I was a young man, we were divided again over civil rights and women�s rights. And again we chose to form a more
perfect union.
.
As I said in 1992, I say again tonight, we are all in this together. We have an obligation, both to work hard and to help our fellow citizens,
an obligation both to fight terror and to build a world with more cooperation and less terror.
.
Now, again, it is time to choose. Since we�re all in the same boat, we should choose a captain of our ship who is a brave good man, who
knows how to steer a vessel through troubled waters, to the calm seas and the clear sides of our more perfect union. That is our mission.
.
So let us go in tonight and say to America in a loud, clear voice: Send John Kerry.
.
God bless you.
:: Listen to it ::
Monday, July 19, 2004
Hiking at Great Falls, VA
| Start: | Jul 25, '04 |
| Location: | Great Falls, VA |
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
MULTIPLY ONE OF USA TODAY.COM'S HOT SITES
Check it out!! (I updated the link now)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/hotsites/2004/2004-07-13-hotsites.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/hotsites/2004/2004-07-13-hotsites.htm
Friday, June 18, 2004
Friday, June 11, 2004
Old Dominion Beer Festival
| Start: | Jun 25, '04 |
| End: | Jun 26, '04 |
| Location: | Ashburn, VA |
For more information (including a $1.00 off coupon), visit: http://www.olddominion.com/inner_pages/10_beerfest_link.html
Amsterdam Vacation
| Start: | Oct 10, '04 |
| End: | Oct 16, '04 |
| Location: | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
Our apartment for the week
Ifra Newspaper Expo/Convention
Visit Amsterdam
Sunday, June 6, 2004
Some Favorite Quotes
I was in the mood to post some favorite quotes... these all fall under a certain theme.
- I went to the woods, because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Henry David Thoreau - If we did all things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.
Thomas Edison - There is really no insurmountable barrier save your own inherent weakness of purpose.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - The tragedy in life doesn't lie in not reaching your goal.
The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach.
Benjamin Mays
Nexpo
| Start: | Jun 19, '04 |
| End: | Jun 22, '04 |
| Location: | DC Convention Center, Washington DC |
Monday, May 24, 2004
University of Maryland Unofficial 10 year Reunion
My two college roomies, Mary and Emlyn, and I went back to visit College Park on 5/23/04, 10 years after I graduated....
Friday, May 21, 2004
College Mini Reunion
| Start: | May 23, '04 1:00p |
| Location: | UMD, College Park |
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
Quark Summit
| Start: | Jun 1, '04 |
| End: | Jun 5, '04 |
| Location: | Brekendridge, CO |
Monday, May 3, 2004
Volcano
| Rating: | ★★★★★ |
| Category: | Music |
| Genre: | Alternative Rock |
| Artist: | Edie Brickell |
Produced by Charlie Sexton, it is haunting at times, whimsical at times, but always has that Edie flare.
When I listen to it, I want to be sitting on a beach with a drink and a nice breeze. It's exotic at times because of her style of singing but also the melodies are extremely catchy and the lyrics are poetic.
Go to amazon and download the free song (Rush Around). Do it. Now!
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amazon download
Cover the Uninsured Week
| Start: | May 10, '04 |
| End: | May 16, '04 |
| Location: | http://covertheuninsuredweek.org/ |
Get Involved!
Sunday, April 25, 2004
Vegas Birthday Trip
So, just got in this morning from Vegas. Took the red eye so really I should be sleeping now but....
So I flew out to Vegas Wednesday night on America West (in-flight movie: Mona Lisa Smile). Was a non-stop flight (nice) and arrived around 10p Vegas time. I met up with Alecia at the airport (she landed around 10:15p) and we headed to MGM Grand.
As hotel check-ins go, this was fairly seamless. Sometimes there are lines, problems with rooms, etc. Not this time. Checked in fast and were off to the room.
MGM Grand is big. It took a little while to get to the room and we wandered around in the casino a bit.
Minutes after we got in the room a knock at the door- A gift basket of goodies for my b-day from my Aunt Myrna and Uncle Bob. Good way to start the trip!
We decided to go down to the casino and get a start at winning some $$.
I played Craps for about an hour or so. For the rest of the entry I will not be quoting actual amounts of money lost as some people may be offended :). Suffice to say, I didn't win.
Back up to the room, ordered room service (since I hadn't had dinner yet) plus a couple bloody mary's and eventually called it a night.
Thursday am- straight to the pool (uh, except first a 2 hour detour at BlackJack tables- which got us comped dinners at the MGM Buffet). An hour or so at the pool and some frozen margaritas later, we were done.
The rest of the day was a blurred mixture of food, drinks and gambling. Dinner at the buffet was yummy and filling...
Friday was my birthday and it was great. Started with breakfast at Rainforest Cafe. A frog there wished me a happy birthday. Had yummy french toast too.
Then off to Turnberry to meet my Aunt Sandy, Uncle Murray and cousin Lori. Had lunch there at the club (and they sang happy birthday) then were off to the spa for massages. I had the Hot Stone massage and Eric, my masseuse, was awesome. Thanks Mommy and Daddy for the b-day present.
Then back to MGM (via limo- oh yeah!) to get ready for the evening (but first a slight detour at the Craps tables).
Back up to the room, had a bottle of Champagne waiting (thanks Mikey!) and met up with my friend Tom.
After downing the bottle we were off to the Paris Hotel for dinner. We ate at Ah Sin which offered super yummy Asian cuisine while sitting outside across from the Bellagio fountains. A great view and the food was awesome.
Spent a couple hours at the Casino at Paris, then off to Mandalay Bay and the Foundation Room. The Foundation Room is the House of Blues private VIP lounge at the top of Mandalay Bay. Thanks Shari for putting us on the list! We spent some time there enjoying the scenery and the cocktails. But I think 32 was having it's way with me because I was totally wiped out at this point and we eventually headed back to MGM.
Saturday Alecia and I decided to get away from the casino and went to the Las Vegas Premium Outlets where we could actually get something tangible for the money we were spending (versus giving it away at the casino)...
After outlet shopping, back to MGM (detour at Craps table) where we met up with fellow Multiplier, Iceman, at the Zuri Lounge. Had a great time there (and a few more margaritas later)... off to the airport for our 11p flights.
I upgraded to first class on the way home because I figured, I was already down ($) for the trip, may as well go off in style!
Anyway, had a great trip- thanks to everyone who contributed to it and we'll do it again next year!!
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