G
greg3347
Guest
On Aug 17, 4:02 pm, "Freedom Fighter" <libe...@once.net> wrote:
> "Ted" <tedor...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
>
> news:1187385882.499917.192380@q3g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
>
> > On Aug 17, 11:42 am, chicanohist...@yahoo.com wrote:
> >>http://www.iowapolitics.com/index.iml?Article=102795
>
> < snip >
>
> > Rudy G. is just another pandering piece of political dung.
> > ted
>
> Far worse than that, I'm afraid -
>
> AMERICA'S MARTINET: The DANGEROUS Candidacy of Rudy Giuliani
>
> The mass media sometimes calls him "America's mayor." Critics label him a
> dangerous fascist. Whether he's the alleged hero who "took charge" on
> September 11, 2001, or the frightening face of a new American Reich, it
> appears Rudolph Giuliani will carry George W. Bush's torch into the 2008
> presidential election.
>
> When Giuliani emerged from the toxic dust of the World Trade Center the
> national media caught a quick case of amnesia, preferring the iconic image
> of a "hero" over reality. They quickly forgot Giuliani's dismal tenure in
> mayoral office, his life-costing failures to address the threat of
> terrorism, and his sorry performance on the morning of September 11, 2001.
>
> Before picking up the "hero" moniker, Giuliani was commonly referred to in
> the city he governed as a despotic fascist and a mean-spirited thug. These
> accusations didn't just come from civil libertarians either. Former New
> York Mayor Ed Koch likened Giuliani to former Chilean dictator Augusto
> Pinochet. According to Koch, Giuliani "uses the levers of power to punish
> any critic." Koch went on to explain, "He doesn't have that right - that's
> why the First Amendment is so important." Yes, and by the end of 2002 the
> courts had found Giuliani in violation of that constitutional pillar of
> American freedom twenty-seven times!
>
> More than 35 successful lawsuits were brought against Giuliani and his
> administration for blocking free speech. In his book Speaking Freely, First
> Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams said Giuliani had an "insistence on doing the
> one thing that the First Amendment most clearly forbids:
> using the power of government to restrict or punish speech critical of
> government itself."
>
> Giuliani's disdain for freedom of speech is best exemplified by the case of
> Robert Lederman, an artist that drew caricatures of Giuliani as a dictator
> and depicted his policies as transforming New York into a police state.
> Lederman was ARRESTED FORTY-ONE TIMES during Giuliani's reign, not by street
> cops but police brass under Giuliani's orders, for displaying his art at
> political demonstrations and on the streets of New York. All were false
> arrests, as Lederman was never convicted of a crime.
>
> In a similar fashion and again in brazen violation of the First Amendment,
> Giuliani ordered paid advertisements for New York Magazine removed from
> public buses because the ads touted the magazine as "possibly the only good
> thing in New York Rudy hasn't taken credit for." Giuliani's response to
> criticism thus often proves it was highly justified.
>
> According to the New York Times, the Daily News, and the New York Post, now
> New York State Governor Eliot Spitzer went on record in October 1998,
> saying, "the current Mayor thinks he's a dictator, and does not have
> sufficient respect not only for other branches of government, but also for
> the citizenry and its opportunities to speak out and be heard."
>
> Spitzer's statements, like Lederman's false arrests, stemmed from Giuliani's
> totalitarian "zero tolerance" policies, which he claimed would improve the
> "quality of life" in New York by punishing trivial violations such as
> jaywalking, drinking in public, marijuana possession, and panhandling, and
> even non-violations such as Lederman's persistent expressions of free
> speech. Under this policy, New Yorkers were handcuffed and dragged off to
> jail for peacefully drinking beer on their front stoops - the New York City
> equivalent of hanging out on the porch. Marijuana possession arrests
> increased by well over 4,000 percent. Arrests were even made for such
> things as riding a bike without a bell on it and sitting on milk crates on
> the sidewalk.
>
> Giuliani's courtship of rogue police officers and seduction of the NYPD to
> become his personal Gestapo began in September 1992, when he addressed an
> angry rally of cops protesting then-mayor Dinkins's proposal for a civilian
> board to review police misconduct.
>
> It was a rowdy, often threatening, crowd. Hundreds of white off-duty cops
> drank heavily (a violation for which, under Giuliani, many citizens would
> later be arrested), and a few waved signs like "Dump the Washroom
> Attendant," a racist reference to mayor Dinkins. Twice, Giuliani called the
> Dinkins proposal "bullshit." The crowd cheered, and Giuliani was jubilant.
> "Rudy was out there inciting white cops to riot," Mr. Dinkins stated.
>
> As mayor, Giuliani's racial and ethnic biases and favoritisms were blatant.
> For over a century the public use of firecrackers by the Asian-American
> community for their New Years celebration, a religious and cultural
> tradition, had been allowed. In 1997 though Giuliani lined Chinatown
> streets with hundreds of police to suppress this, and even refused to allow
> a permit for a professionally supervised display. The Christian equivalent
> of this would be banning Christmas trees and decorations because they
> occasionally start fires. Giuliani never relented on this. On the Jewish
> festival of Purim however, when fireworks are used in the streets of Jewish
> neighborhoods, the police continued to look the other way! They also
> ignored bonfires set in Jewish neighborhood streets to destroy leavened
> bread before Passover. Can you imagine the police response to this in any
> poor, Black, Hispanic, or Asian-American community? Giuliani's lasting
> legacy is that in New York fireworks are OK on Purim, but celebrate the 4th
> of July with them and you can get busted. So much for "Independence" Day.
>
> Eventually almost 70,000 citizens sued the city for such police abuses as
> strip-searching suspected jaywalkers. In 1999 James Savage, president of
> the New York City police union, referred to Giuliani's zero tolerance policy
> as "a blueprint for a police state and tyranny." Under the guise of fighting
> crime, Giuliani had thus transformed the NYPD into his own private Gestapo,
> going as far as assigning two NYPD detectives, at taxpayer expense, as
> round-the-clock bodyguards for his MISTRESS. This after his closing down
> all the strip clubs on "moral grounds!"
>
> Giuliani shored up control of the police department by appointing crony
> Howard Safir as commissioner. Safir then made the department's Street
> Crimes Unit into what New York journalist Nat Hentoff described as a "rogue
> operation" that made "Dirty Harry look like Mahatma Gandhi." Fashion-wise,
> the unit had a resemblance to Guatemala's notorious military death squads,
> wearing "We Own the Night" t-shirts, and shirts citing Ernest Hemingway's
> "There is no hunting like the hunting of man" quote - quite a variation from
> standard issue uniforms!
>
> This is the police unit that became notorious for shooting innocent African
> immigrant Amadou Diallo FORTY TIMES as he reached for his wallet after being
> ordered to show identification. When New Yorkers took to the streets to
> protest the unjustified killing, Giuliani told the press that people were
> protesting due to "their own personal inadequacies."
>
> Hatian immigrant Abner Louima, arrested in 1997 on a minor charge, was
> brutally beaten on the trip to Brooklyn's 70th precinct. There officers
> took him into a bathroom where convicted rogue cop Justin Volpe sadistically
> shoved a plunger handle up Louima's rectum, then forced the same object into
> his mouth, breaking his teeth. Louima was hospitalized with serious
> injuries, and stated that during his torture one of these sadists said to
> him "This is Giuliani time!"
>
> When Safir left, Giuliani appointed Bernard Kerik to take his place. This
> is the man Giuliani also recommended to head up Homeland Security. Kerik
> later pleaded guilty to accepting gifts and loans from businesses with
> alleged organized crime ties while he served as police commissioner.
>
> Some credit Giuliani's Draconian excesses with the drop in crime during his
> tenure, but he just happened to be in the right place at the right time to
> take credit for this. During this period crime dropped similarly
> nationwide, mostly the result of changing demographics and better policing
> methods.
>
> Eventually the Giuliani-sanctioned anything-goes extremism infected other
> units in the police department. When plainclothes cops asked a black man on
> the street to sell them marijuana, the man, Patrick Dorismond, took offense
> to being called a drug dealer and got into a scuffle with the unidentified
> officers, who then SHOT HIM DEAD. Giuliani issued a knee-jerk defense of
> the killer cops, telling the press that Dorismond was "no altar boy."
> Salon.com pointed out that in fact he WAS an altar boy! Desperate to
> justify the killing, Giuliani ordered the ILLEGAL release of Dorismond's
> sealed juvenile record - for disorderly conduct! It seems that under
> Giuliani, this justifies the death penalty. Giuliani's contribution to
> Dorismond's funeral was a squadron of police in full riot gear, inciting
> violence that would not have occurred without their unnecessary and
> disrespectful presence.
>
> Former schools Chancellor Rudy Crew, a one-time pal of Giuliani, stated:
> "There's something very deeply pathological about Rudy's humanity - He was
> barren, completely emotionally barren, on the issue of race." Giuliani's
> vile racism has even been acknowledged by his successor, Mayor Bloomberg:
> "You forget that every single decision [in the Giuliani administration],
> everybody, every story, everything was always couched in terms of race" -
> quoted in the November 4, 2003 Daily News from Vanity Fair magazine.
>
> By the time his ship came in on September 11, 2001, Giuliani's approval
> rating, according to a Quinnipiac University poll, ...
>
> read more
> "Ted" <tedor...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
>
> news:1187385882.499917.192380@q3g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
>
> > On Aug 17, 11:42 am, chicanohist...@yahoo.com wrote:
> >>http://www.iowapolitics.com/index.iml?Article=102795
>
> < snip >
>
> > Rudy G. is just another pandering piece of political dung.
> > ted
>
> Far worse than that, I'm afraid -
>
> AMERICA'S MARTINET: The DANGEROUS Candidacy of Rudy Giuliani
>
> The mass media sometimes calls him "America's mayor." Critics label him a
> dangerous fascist. Whether he's the alleged hero who "took charge" on
> September 11, 2001, or the frightening face of a new American Reich, it
> appears Rudolph Giuliani will carry George W. Bush's torch into the 2008
> presidential election.
>
> When Giuliani emerged from the toxic dust of the World Trade Center the
> national media caught a quick case of amnesia, preferring the iconic image
> of a "hero" over reality. They quickly forgot Giuliani's dismal tenure in
> mayoral office, his life-costing failures to address the threat of
> terrorism, and his sorry performance on the morning of September 11, 2001.
>
> Before picking up the "hero" moniker, Giuliani was commonly referred to in
> the city he governed as a despotic fascist and a mean-spirited thug. These
> accusations didn't just come from civil libertarians either. Former New
> York Mayor Ed Koch likened Giuliani to former Chilean dictator Augusto
> Pinochet. According to Koch, Giuliani "uses the levers of power to punish
> any critic." Koch went on to explain, "He doesn't have that right - that's
> why the First Amendment is so important." Yes, and by the end of 2002 the
> courts had found Giuliani in violation of that constitutional pillar of
> American freedom twenty-seven times!
>
> More than 35 successful lawsuits were brought against Giuliani and his
> administration for blocking free speech. In his book Speaking Freely, First
> Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams said Giuliani had an "insistence on doing the
> one thing that the First Amendment most clearly forbids:
> using the power of government to restrict or punish speech critical of
> government itself."
>
> Giuliani's disdain for freedom of speech is best exemplified by the case of
> Robert Lederman, an artist that drew caricatures of Giuliani as a dictator
> and depicted his policies as transforming New York into a police state.
> Lederman was ARRESTED FORTY-ONE TIMES during Giuliani's reign, not by street
> cops but police brass under Giuliani's orders, for displaying his art at
> political demonstrations and on the streets of New York. All were false
> arrests, as Lederman was never convicted of a crime.
>
> In a similar fashion and again in brazen violation of the First Amendment,
> Giuliani ordered paid advertisements for New York Magazine removed from
> public buses because the ads touted the magazine as "possibly the only good
> thing in New York Rudy hasn't taken credit for." Giuliani's response to
> criticism thus often proves it was highly justified.
>
> According to the New York Times, the Daily News, and the New York Post, now
> New York State Governor Eliot Spitzer went on record in October 1998,
> saying, "the current Mayor thinks he's a dictator, and does not have
> sufficient respect not only for other branches of government, but also for
> the citizenry and its opportunities to speak out and be heard."
>
> Spitzer's statements, like Lederman's false arrests, stemmed from Giuliani's
> totalitarian "zero tolerance" policies, which he claimed would improve the
> "quality of life" in New York by punishing trivial violations such as
> jaywalking, drinking in public, marijuana possession, and panhandling, and
> even non-violations such as Lederman's persistent expressions of free
> speech. Under this policy, New Yorkers were handcuffed and dragged off to
> jail for peacefully drinking beer on their front stoops - the New York City
> equivalent of hanging out on the porch. Marijuana possession arrests
> increased by well over 4,000 percent. Arrests were even made for such
> things as riding a bike without a bell on it and sitting on milk crates on
> the sidewalk.
>
> Giuliani's courtship of rogue police officers and seduction of the NYPD to
> become his personal Gestapo began in September 1992, when he addressed an
> angry rally of cops protesting then-mayor Dinkins's proposal for a civilian
> board to review police misconduct.
>
> It was a rowdy, often threatening, crowd. Hundreds of white off-duty cops
> drank heavily (a violation for which, under Giuliani, many citizens would
> later be arrested), and a few waved signs like "Dump the Washroom
> Attendant," a racist reference to mayor Dinkins. Twice, Giuliani called the
> Dinkins proposal "bullshit." The crowd cheered, and Giuliani was jubilant.
> "Rudy was out there inciting white cops to riot," Mr. Dinkins stated.
>
> As mayor, Giuliani's racial and ethnic biases and favoritisms were blatant.
> For over a century the public use of firecrackers by the Asian-American
> community for their New Years celebration, a religious and cultural
> tradition, had been allowed. In 1997 though Giuliani lined Chinatown
> streets with hundreds of police to suppress this, and even refused to allow
> a permit for a professionally supervised display. The Christian equivalent
> of this would be banning Christmas trees and decorations because they
> occasionally start fires. Giuliani never relented on this. On the Jewish
> festival of Purim however, when fireworks are used in the streets of Jewish
> neighborhoods, the police continued to look the other way! They also
> ignored bonfires set in Jewish neighborhood streets to destroy leavened
> bread before Passover. Can you imagine the police response to this in any
> poor, Black, Hispanic, or Asian-American community? Giuliani's lasting
> legacy is that in New York fireworks are OK on Purim, but celebrate the 4th
> of July with them and you can get busted. So much for "Independence" Day.
>
> Eventually almost 70,000 citizens sued the city for such police abuses as
> strip-searching suspected jaywalkers. In 1999 James Savage, president of
> the New York City police union, referred to Giuliani's zero tolerance policy
> as "a blueprint for a police state and tyranny." Under the guise of fighting
> crime, Giuliani had thus transformed the NYPD into his own private Gestapo,
> going as far as assigning two NYPD detectives, at taxpayer expense, as
> round-the-clock bodyguards for his MISTRESS. This after his closing down
> all the strip clubs on "moral grounds!"
>
> Giuliani shored up control of the police department by appointing crony
> Howard Safir as commissioner. Safir then made the department's Street
> Crimes Unit into what New York journalist Nat Hentoff described as a "rogue
> operation" that made "Dirty Harry look like Mahatma Gandhi." Fashion-wise,
> the unit had a resemblance to Guatemala's notorious military death squads,
> wearing "We Own the Night" t-shirts, and shirts citing Ernest Hemingway's
> "There is no hunting like the hunting of man" quote - quite a variation from
> standard issue uniforms!
>
> This is the police unit that became notorious for shooting innocent African
> immigrant Amadou Diallo FORTY TIMES as he reached for his wallet after being
> ordered to show identification. When New Yorkers took to the streets to
> protest the unjustified killing, Giuliani told the press that people were
> protesting due to "their own personal inadequacies."
>
> Hatian immigrant Abner Louima, arrested in 1997 on a minor charge, was
> brutally beaten on the trip to Brooklyn's 70th precinct. There officers
> took him into a bathroom where convicted rogue cop Justin Volpe sadistically
> shoved a plunger handle up Louima's rectum, then forced the same object into
> his mouth, breaking his teeth. Louima was hospitalized with serious
> injuries, and stated that during his torture one of these sadists said to
> him "This is Giuliani time!"
>
> When Safir left, Giuliani appointed Bernard Kerik to take his place. This
> is the man Giuliani also recommended to head up Homeland Security. Kerik
> later pleaded guilty to accepting gifts and loans from businesses with
> alleged organized crime ties while he served as police commissioner.
>
> Some credit Giuliani's Draconian excesses with the drop in crime during his
> tenure, but he just happened to be in the right place at the right time to
> take credit for this. During this period crime dropped similarly
> nationwide, mostly the result of changing demographics and better policing
> methods.
>
> Eventually the Giuliani-sanctioned anything-goes extremism infected other
> units in the police department. When plainclothes cops asked a black man on
> the street to sell them marijuana, the man, Patrick Dorismond, took offense
> to being called a drug dealer and got into a scuffle with the unidentified
> officers, who then SHOT HIM DEAD. Giuliani issued a knee-jerk defense of
> the killer cops, telling the press that Dorismond was "no altar boy."
> Salon.com pointed out that in fact he WAS an altar boy! Desperate to
> justify the killing, Giuliani ordered the ILLEGAL release of Dorismond's
> sealed juvenile record - for disorderly conduct! It seems that under
> Giuliani, this justifies the death penalty. Giuliani's contribution to
> Dorismond's funeral was a squadron of police in full riot gear, inciting
> violence that would not have occurred without their unnecessary and
> disrespectful presence.
>
> Former schools Chancellor Rudy Crew, a one-time pal of Giuliani, stated:
> "There's something very deeply pathological about Rudy's humanity - He was
> barren, completely emotionally barren, on the issue of race." Giuliani's
> vile racism has even been acknowledged by his successor, Mayor Bloomberg:
> "You forget that every single decision [in the Giuliani administration],
> everybody, every story, everything was always couched in terms of race" -
> quoted in the November 4, 2003 Daily News from Vanity Fair magazine.
>
> By the time his ship came in on September 11, 2001, Giuliani's approval
> rating, according to a Quinnipiac University poll, ...
>
> read more