Rudy's Radio Daze

I saw the movie World Trade Center the other day; the story about the last two NY firefighters to be pulled out of the wreckage alive. The film has them futilely trying to reach anyone on their handheld radios and their inability to do that may help keep Rudy out of the White House. Rudy's sole selling point seems to be the concocted image of him as the Hero of Ground Zero who by magical extension can save us from the nasty men who blow things up.

Mayor Rudy of course didn't buy the more expensive APCO compatible radios but instead gave the no-bid contract (after years of inaction) to supply mobile and handheld radios to police and fire departments to Motorola who had not demonstrated their equipment in field tests and who charged the city $14 million or ten times the proposed price for the system. Is it any surprise that the radios did not work and had to be pulled from the field? As a consequence the fire department had to resort to the decades old radios that had demonstrated their obsolescence after the last WTC attack in 1993.

One of the problems that exists in many areas is the inability of various agencies to communicate directly because some departments have radios that work on different frequencies than others and nearby municipalities may have different systems and channels. This is why radio amateurs are needed to take over when radio towers fall, cell phones go dead and land lines are cut or overloaded. Municipal systems with incompatible frequency assignments and fragile infrastructures are far more vulnerable than people in non-hurricane territory realize.

As happens too often in places like Florida and the gulf coast during hurricanes, NYC became a tower of Babel on 9/11 and it didn't have to happen. Back in the 90's, the Association of Public Safety Officers, or APCO created the Project 25 or P25 standard for radios that are flexible enough to allow them to "talk" with older radios, analog and digital, simplex and duplex with trunked and conventional systems. All the public safety agencies can communicate and police and paramedics can for instance, hear the cries for help from trapped firemen or warn them to get out of a burning building.

Of course the purpose of Republican government is to privatize public funds by distributing them to corporations without competitive bidding or any demonstration of the effectiveness of the product in question. New York seems to have done just that and some people are mad as hell, namely the FDNY who lost so many people because what we had on that day of infamy was a failure to communicate. Firefighters in NYC and across the country along with a New York City Council member are trying to expose Rudy for his incompetence and for having the effrontery to pose as a hero the way he posed for the cameras 6 years ago. Look for the longer story at The REAL Rudy and at today's Huffington Post.

87.0736% extremist

New York Rep. Peter King thinks there are too many mosques in the US. I don't know whether that's true. I can only say that I've seen exactly one since I was old enough to know what a mosque was and I've been old enough for a long time. But Representative King is a Republican, a part of Guiliani's campaign and the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee and so has a personal financial interest in the marketing of hysteria and the promotion of irrational sectarian hatred.

85% of them, however many of them there might be, are controlled by extremist leadership, says Representative King. 85% -- although that number is probably there because it sounds like statistics but would be impossible to confirm or deny -- and besides, extremism is a relative and thus easily invoked term. Extremism can, according to traditional Republican values, be good: "no vice" as that icon of Republican virtue and multiple felon Spiro Agnew once told us. All in all, it's not a good argument, just one of the few left at the bottom of the barrel of bullshit.

Of course I think there are far too many Churches in the US and 87.0736% of them are extremist in that they are promoting the restriction of civil rights according to the teachings they invent for the purpose of undermining democracy and liberty and justice for all. They've succeeded in requiring our children to acknowledge their pantheon of bizarre deities and to swear that magic beings are involved in the government of the US. They have succeeded in replacing our coinage with little copper and paper religious engravings and they are constantly telling us what we can read, see, say and investigate; whom we can spend our lives with, how we can define our families, what we can teach our children about science and mathematics.

They not only promote wars and violence, they teach us that religious wars and violence are good when done in defense of an almighty dictator and are happy to provide all the fictitious history you could ever want to benefit their crusades and their war against science, math, physics, history, law, logic, cosmology, geology, paleontology, meteorology, statistics, probabilities and the origin of species through natural selection.

They promote the kind of mental illness that would allow, for instance, Mitt Romney, a follower of one Joseph Smith: demonstrable liar, forger and sexual pervert, to elevate his campaign to deny civil rights to people his sexually perverted and somewhat unclean looking prophet didn't like. It allows extremist followers of a Roman Bishop like Rudolph Guiliani to close a public museum for Blasphemy because he didn't think we should have the right to view a painting of a magic virgin who has babies with invisible gods that didn't adhere to the precise iconography of his church.

Too many Starbucks, too many SUV's and burger joints and way too Goddamn many churches.

Tu est Petraeus

et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam

- with apology to Matthew 16:18

There are a lot of disgusting things going on in the world, but Rudy Guiliani hasn't made a fuss about them. He is however in full faux outrage mode at present and it's all about the lack of respect George Bush's pet General is getting for what seems to many to have been more of a pep talk than an open and honest assessment of conditions in Iraq. Petraeus may be an ass kisser, but the red marks on his backside are from Rudy's lipstick.

Certainly Rudy wouldn't be defending the GAO report if it were being inquired into by Hillary Clinton, but then the GAO isn't the hand chosen spokesman for wars and their indefinite continuation. About the most we can say for Petraeus and his report is that he may be right that Bush did not clear it beforehand, but he did choose Petraeus, reputation for sycophancy and all, in pretty much the same way he has chosen everyone in his circle. You swear on the bible and with lips on Bush's butt. He chose Petraeus because the barrel of reasons for the war is about empty and he had to have something apparently rock solid to build his church of war upon.

The notion that respect for generals should prevent scrutiny of their reports even when world stability, the economy and millions of lives are at stake, is reprehensible even for a grandstanding drag queen with delusions of grandeur like Rudy who seems far too often and much too conveniently to forget who works for whom. Evidence of the administration's respect for the American people has been harder to find than evidence for Saddam's chemical, nuclear and biological weapons facilities.

I never had any respect for Guiliani and any vestige of respect for Petraeus was substantially dried up when he pulled the malodorous cliche so many war lovers rely on: that we only have freedom of speech because soldiers gave it to us. It's a partial truth at best and partial truths are the worst kind of lies. Nobody is fighting to preserve the Bill of Rights in Iraq and few if any administrations have done more to weaken and nullify our civil rights than this one. By trying to make our long term occupation of an oil producing country; building airfields, bases, fortified embassies to facilitate making Iraq an economic subsidiary of the US and the international oil companies seem all about our civil liberties, Petraeus has indeed betrayed us and betrayed the people to whom we were supposed to be bringing freedom and independence. By playing along with the bomb-and-switch game of falsely identifying Iraq with al Qaeda and 9/11, he has betrayed us.

Rudy's Iron curtain

"Your papers please." It was always said with some kind of Hollywood Russian or German accent at some border crossing; some dingy alley with wet cobblestones in the dark of some Eastern European night. The Gestapo agent, or the Man from the Stasi or KGB in a leather trench coat would urge you into the back seat of a Lada or black Mercedes and you were off to some nameless cellar to be tortured and held forever without charges. I grew up in the years after WW II and movies were like that. We were so proud of being a free country and we called ourselves the Free World and the free world wasn't a place where everyone was watching you and an anonymous tip would cause you to disappear in the night.

The Reaction talks this morning about Rudy Guiliani's plan to require all visitors to the US to carry a card with photo and fingerprints and for which, if they fit the profile, they can be asked at any time. If they don't comply they can be "thrown out" of the country. That will sound great to those who view foreigners as swarthy, suspicious, sinister undesirables and will sound like a reason to shun the US by doctors, scientists, engineers, businessmen, journalists, artists, writers, students, tourists and people visiting their relatives who thought a passport was enough.

Perhaps I'm being touchy about the possibility of national ID cards for all Americans, but I don't think so. the SAFE card plan seems like only the first step. A citizen, after all, will have to prove he is not an alien without a card and for that he will need citizenship papers with him at all times, particularly if he has an accent or isn't European looking or has a good Florida tan and a beard, as I do. It's an idea that's been floated about since September of 2001 by fear mongers like Rudy who want to appear as though they are defending America by suggesting the indefensible. The United States of America never was intended to be a police state, a place where you can be challenged, where you can be presumed guilty and spied upon and have your privacy invaded at the whim of anyone and your rights violated, your property confiscated and your head held under water without recourse to justice. It was never intended to be a place where someone can stop you on the street or kick your door down at midnight asking for papers. It was never intended to be led by people like Rudy Giuliani

Rudy, who looks as disgusting in his 9/11 hero costume as he does in drag, has a record of justifying means by their intended ends. He's the mayor after all, who tried to close the Brooklyn Museum and shut down the subway line because it contained a painting he erroneously thought was "blasphemous." Yes, indeed, requiring people to carry ID cards they way they do in China and requiring them to prove legal status at the whim of any policeman would be very useful in exercising total control. It's easy to sell a police state to frightened people and Benito - excuse me, Rudy - seems never to miss a chance to tell us how scary those foreign terrorists are.

No foreign saboteurs or terrorists can ever be more than a thorn in our side. Rudy Guiliani and the party of George Bush can be a knife in our heart.