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Politics : Proof that John Kerry is Unfit for Command -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (5029)	8/31/2004 12:43:09 AM
From: calgal	Respond to of 27181

McCain, Giuliani Trumpet Bush Leadership newsmax.com

To: calgal who wrote (5029)	8/31/2004 12:43:21 AM
From: calgal	Respond to of 27181

Kerry's jaundiced view washingtontimes.com

To: calgal who wrote (5029)	8/31/2004 12:45:06 AM
From: calgal	Respond to of 27181

GOP assails Kerry as convention begins washingtontimes.com By David Espo ASSOCIATED PRESS

To: calgal who wrote (5029)	8/31/2004 12:47:05 AM
From: calgal	Respond to of 27181

The right economic agenda URL:http://www.washingtontimes.com/commentary/20040830-081253-2595r.htm By Stephen Moore

To: calgal who wrote (5029)	8/31/2004 12:47:15 AM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 27181

USED TO THINK that there was nothing wrong with street activists that a good scrubbing and a few rubber bullets couldn't fix. But that's before I met Adam Eidinger on the sidewalks of Washington, D.C. The first time I saw him in 2001, he stood nine feet tall. He was on stilts, and hadn't quite gotten the hang of them yet. He was scraping his glasses on tree branches and risking impalement on SUV antennas, but Adam kept at it to advertise an upcoming inaugural protest. "We don't want to yell at Republicans, we want to engage them," he said. I hung out with his people, then wrote them up in snarky fashion. His comrades sent me several irate letters. But Adam, who runs his own progressive public relations collective, never complained. He just kept on calling me every time nuclear weapons needed to be abolished or hemp regulations needed to be relaxed. Adam, it seemed, would not be deterred. Adam believes. We arranged a reunion on the streets of Manhattan for Sunday's mass protest of the Republican Convention. Now 30 years old, the former Eagle Scout and Naval Academy aspirant has been through seven arrests and countless court dates. He's had handcuffs affixed so tightly by D.C. police that he couldn't feel his thumb for a month. He says he was dragged by his hair and beat up by Philadelphia cops when he wouldn't give them his name once in custody, after undercover officers infiltrated his puppet warehouse at the 2000 Republican convention. ("I should've seen it," he says, kicking himself. "They were all burly guys who ate cheeseburgers among all these emaciated vegans.") But he is still at it, as he has been since the anti-globalization movement created a permanent underclass of free-range activists in the late 1990s. Today, Adam is not the stilt-walker. He is the "Dragon Master." He is overseeing the operation of a gigantic papier-mâché dragon, called, rather inelegantly, the "Dragon of Self-Determination." As dragon-names go, it's no "Puff," but it's all about the message. Requiring around 15 people to operate everything from it's fly-away tail to it's munching jaws, which chomp on a Pinocchio-nosed George W. Bush blow-up doll, the dragon attracts all sorts of curiosity-seekers- from Communist Revolutionary youth to soot-caked anarchists who look like Dick Van Dyke's chimney-sweep kick-line from Mary Poppins. There are all manner of distractions, from reunions with former holding-pen mates to the pro-bono lawyer who asks, "Is this the socialist group?" ("Aren't they all?" I respond.) But Adam, who sports a Brillo Pad of hair and Buddy Holly-hipster glasses, never loses sight of his Dragon-Master responsibilities. He lashes car batteries to the dragon's wood-rickshaw frame in tight Eagle Scout knots, in order to power the sound system. He barks orders at his affinity group, telling people they're permitted out of the dragon torso to take bathroom breaks, but they must find their own substitutes. He apologizes that the PVC pipes feeding into the dragon nostrils will not be smoking as they have at other protests. This is, after all, Mayor Bloomberg's New York. weeklystandard.com