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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rascal who wrote (10303)	10/2/2003 9:32:02 AM
From: gamesmistress	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793759

Is Maureen Dowd channeling Hedda Hopper or Louella Parsons, or what??? And as for the Wilson/Plame plight, I am reminded of my mother's standard line, when I whined and moaned and bitched about something, "I feel for you, but I can't quite reach you." :-)

To: Rascal who wrote (10303)	10/2/2003 9:38:10 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793759

Guess I deserve it. I have been feeding you "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly," on Clark. Let's here it for New York City! This problem is out of control in Downtown LA for the same reasons as NYC. The "Homeless Lobby." __________________________________________________________________________________ A VICTORY OVER 'HOMELESS' HOOEY By HEATHER MAC DONALD - NEW YORK POST October 2, 2003 -- CONGRATULATIONS to the Bloomberg administration for conclusively demonstrating the hypocrisy of "homeless" advocates. New York City has finally won the right to evict violent and disruptive vagrants from its "homeless" shelters. In so doing, it has definitively exposed the advocates' big lie: that they want the homeless off the streets. State law has long given the city the power to temporarily ban unruly individuals from shelters if they repeatedly violate behavioral rules. The advocates, however, successfully sued to prevent the city from employing that power. A court last week reversed the advocates' destructive reign over shelter management and allowed the city to enforce safety in its massive shelter system. In response, the advocates are emitting their usual whine: The city's heartless action will result in more people on the streets. What a joke. For 20 years, the homeless industry has been dedicated to keeping deranged addicts, alcoholics and criminals on the streets and out of treatment. Remember Billie Boggs (a. k. a. Joyce Brown), the psychotic colonizer of a steam grate on Second Avenue who became liberals' favorite symbol of the right to live on the streets? From her sidewalk campsite, Brown ran into traffic, threatened passersby, covered herself in feces and tore up, burned and urinated on paper money given to her by pedestrians. Her sisters begged that she be hospitalized for her drug-exacerbated psychoses, and New York Mayor Ed Koch agreed. But the New York Civil Liberties Union successfully fought Koch's effort to get her off the streets and into treatment. The left-wing trial judge who ordered Brown back onto the steam grate set a decades-long pattern: His unctuous moralizing was directly at odds with his actions. "It is my hope that the plight [Brown] represents will also offend moral conscience and rouse it to action," wrote Judge Robert Lippmann self-righteously. But the Koch administration was taking action; it was Lippmann and the advocates who were abandoning a deranged woman to the streets. This pattern has never been broken. When the Dinkins government tried to get vagrants into shelters before the Democratic National Convention, the advocates went berserk, accusing the mayor of trying to clean up the city at the expense of vagrants' alleged right to the streets. Every Giuliani effort to enforce laws against street disorder provoked a similar outcry: How dare you try to protect the mentally ill and the addicted from violence and frostbite and gangrene by taking them into shelter, the advocates screamed, they belong on the streets. The advocates' favorite justification for keeping vagrants in view was that the "shelters were dangerous." But in a perfect catch-22, the reason the shelters were (or appeared) dangerous was that the advocates wouldn't let the city keep them safe by suspending the trouble-makers. Faced with the shameless hypocrisy of their big lie, the advocates resorted to petty little lies. During a debate I had with her on the television station NY1, Mary Brosnahan of the Coalition for the Homeless claimed that it was the guards who made the shelters dangerous, not the inmates. This statement was preposterous. While there are undoubtedly guards who abuse their power, those occasions are de minimis compared to the times when thuggish vagrants threaten others. It is beyond the ken of the advocates that the purpose of rules is prophylactic - to shape behavior even without enforcement. Some violent shelter residents will certainly be evicted. Others, however, will start to reform their conduct when faced with the mere prospect of discipline. And if the advocates are right that it is fear of the shelters that keeps so many derelicts on the streets, the number of people who now will start using shelters will overwhelm the number of people who will be kicked out. Enforcing expectations of reasonable behavior is not just essential to shelter management, it is a vital prerequisite to bringing vagrants back into society. Until street colonists learn to obey the most minimal rules for decent conduct, they cannot expect to hold a job or an apartment. But that is not what the advocates seek. Keeping the "homeless" on the streets is essential to fundraising. But it also serves an ideological need, as demonstrated by Judge Lippmann: railing against a heartless capitalist society even as you prevent that society from exercising its compassion. Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor at the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. Adapted from www.city-journal.org nypost.com

To: Rascal who wrote (10303)	10/2/2003 1:01:23 PM
From: JohnM	Respond to of 793759

The Dowd column is particularly well done today. Thanks for posting it, R.

To: Rascal who wrote (10303)	10/2/2003 2:24:42 PM
From: Neeka	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793759

Here's your punishment for today And here's yours........;) M General Democrat October 1, 2003 ACCORDING TO a new survey, six out of 10 Americans can't name a single Democrat running for president. And that poll was actually taken among the 10 current Democratic candidates. According to the survey answers, "the military guy" leads with 19 percent, followed by "that doctor – what's his name?" with 12 percent, and "the French-looking guy" with 9 percent. Since Wesley Clark entered the race, Democrats have been salivating over the prospect of a presidential candidate who is a four-star general – and has the politics of Susan Sarandon! Clark's entry into the race was seen as a setback for John Kerry, the only other Democratic contender with combat experience. (Although back in the 1970s, Dennis Kucinich served in the Kiss Army.) Before Clark becomes the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question, consider that Clark's main claim to fame is that he played a pivotal role in what most of his supporters passionately believe was an illegal, immoral war of American imperialism in Vietnam. How does that earn you points with Democrats? Clark's other credential to lead the free world was that he supervised the "liberation" of Kosovo by ordering our pilots to drop bombs from 15,000 feet at a tremendous cost in innocent civilian life in a 100 percent humanitarian war against a country that posed absolutely no threat to the United States – imminent or otherwise – and without the approval of the almighty United Nations. So you can see why Clark supported, then opposed, then supported, then opposed the current war in Iraq. Say, is there a website where I can get up-to-the-minute updates on Wesley Clark's current position on the war in Iraq, kind of like a Nasdaq ticker? Possible Clark campaign slogans are already starting to emerge: "I Was Into Quagmires Before Quagmires Were Cool" "Honk if You Got Bombed in Kosovo" "Only Fired by the Pentagon Once!" "The OTHER Bush-Bashing Rhodes Scholar From Arkansas" "No, Really, Vice President Would Be Fine" On "Meet the Press," on June 15, 2003, Clark told Tim Russert that he got a lot of calls after 9-11 telling him to go on television and say, "This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein." Asked who had told him that, Clark said: "[T]he White House; it came from people around the White House. It came from all over." But under cross-examination by Sean Hannity on Fox News Channel a few weeks later, Clark would say only that he had gotten a call from "a fellow in Canada who is part of a Middle Eastern think tank who gets inside intelligence information." So in two weeks' time, Clark had gone from "the White House" to "people close to the White House" to "some guy in Canada." Clark is for abortion, for tax hikes, for affirmative action and against the war in Iraq. But he served in Vietnam. So he's basically Howard Dean with scarier flashbacks. Howard Dean is not a general, but he is a doctor. Democrats are enthusiastic about Dean since they figure that if this Democrat were ever caught with a naked intern, he could just say it was her annual physical. Dean has leapt beyond criticizing Bush and is now embracing terrorists. He has called Hamas terrorists "soldiers in a war" and said the U.S. should not take sides between Israel and Palestinian suicide bombers. This has won him a spot in the hearts of the Democratic Party base – middle-class white kids from Ben-and-Jerryville who smash Starbucks windows whenever bankers are in town for a meeting. If Dean doesn't get the Democratic nomination, perhaps he could throw his hat in the ring to replace Arafat. The also-rans are trying to distinguish themselves by competing to see who can denounce George Bush with greater vigor. Sen. John Kerry has said we need to "de-Americanize" the war – I guess on the theory that the "de-Americanizing" process has worked out so well for the Democratic Party. He is furious at Bush for prosecuting a war Kerry voted for, saying the difference is, "I would have been patient." He would have had to be extremely patient in the case of Germany, inasmuch as Gerhard Schroeder announced before the war began that he would never authorize war in Iraq under any circumstances. Florida Sen. Bob Graham recently told the Council on Foreign Relations that in "answer to any questions about the Bush administration on the war on terror," the answer is: "'No,' they are not doing a good job." This would explain Graham's commanding lead among members of his own household, although his maid is still "Undecided." Dick Gephardt has taken to calling President Bush a "miserable failure" – as opposed to Gephardt, who is a "happy failure." Things have gotten pretty bad when you're being called a "failure" by a guy who spent 30 years sucking up to labor but still can't get the AFL-CIO to endorse him. Dennis Kucinich recently proposed a new U.S. policy for Iraq, known in military circles as "unconditional surrender." He wants all U.S. troops to leave immediately and be replaced by U.N. troops. The head of the U.N. Human Rights Commission – Syria – would surely have things back to normal in no time. Kucinich has also offered his services as a consultant to any city in Iraq that's thinking about filing for bankruptcy. According to most polls, the Democrat who stands the best chance to beat Bush is a guy named "Generic." anncoulter.org

To: Rascal who wrote (10303)	10/2/2003 4:08:37 PM
From: unclewest	Respond to of 793759

At first she said she was an energy analyst, but confided sometime around the first kiss that she was in the C.I.A. "I had a security clearance," grinned Mr. Wilson I said it would be her yapping and bragging about her position. Wilson bragging about a security clearance means nothing...The pertinent question is did he have a need to know she worked for the CIA. The answer to that is NO. In fact she was likely required to report him after 2 or 3 dates and get clearance herself just to continue seeing him. How many men did she kiss and how many did she tell she is a CIA agent? Is that how all the men in DC knew about her job?