a New York Times story examined Rudy Giuliani‘s schedule in the months after 9/11 to verify his controversial claim that, like rescue workers, he’d spent long hours at ground zero, and so was “in that sense … one of them.” In fact, the Times found, he only spent 29 hours at the terror site between Sept. 17 and Dec. 16.
What was he doing instead? Giuliani’s beloved New York Yankees made it to the World Series in 2001. We decided to compare the time he spent on baseball to the time he spent at the ruins of the World Trade Center.
The results were, considering the mayor’s long-standing devotion to the Bronx Bombers, unsurprising. By our count, Giuliani spent about 58 hours at Yankees games or flying to them in the 40 days between Sept. 25 and Nov. 4, roughly twice as long as he spent at ground zero in the 90 days between Sept. 17 and Dec. 16. By his own standard, Giuliani was one of the Yankees more than he was one of the rescue workers.
Daily Archives: August 20, 2007
Giuliani spent more time at baseball games than at ground zero.
Why Michael Vick will never play in the NFL again
Some people think Michael Vick will play again in the NFL. That it’s “silly” to think he won’t.
Ha. Who’s being silly? He’ll never play in the NFL again. I mean, the Falcons were getting fed up with him. His on field accomplishments were limited. His off field behavior sucked. He shot the bird to the fans on television. He lied to the commissioner and the Falcons.
He’ s not much of a quarterback. Basically, the only thing he does well is run from the quarterback position. You’ll never win with that. The Falcons are basically a .500 team with Vick, and it’s on a downhill course. WTF?
He doesn’t have another position, and don’t tell me he could be a running back or a punt returner or a wide receiver. He’s never played those positions, and they do have necessary skill sets and physical demands.
He is going to prison, where he will hang out with a bunch of bad dudes with bad habits.
He isn’t very nice.
He’s already been in the NFL longer than the average career.
He’ll be rusty.
He won’t be very popular.
Gambling, drugs, dogfighting, cruelty, arrogance, stupidity, no position, felon, ex inmate, 29 years old…
and he’ll be on probation in some sense, from a legal standpoint. He may face state charges for killing dogs.
If you sign Vick, you have to pay the veteran minimum, which is substantial money. You have to cut somebody to keep Vick. There are 50 other players on the roster, and probably not many of them are pals of Michael Vick; Vick doesn’t have any friends.
Even Al Davis wouldn’t touch this guy. Seriously. Name a franchise that would?
I would even be surprised if he doesn’t get AT LEAST a three year suspension, because of the gambling, that would mean he’s thirty before he could even be available.
won’t happen.
‘Foreign Policy’ survey: ‘Surge’ is a failure
The prestigious journal Foreign Policy is running its third Terrorism Index piece, constructed FP and the Center for American Progress, by a polling of a hundred experts. AKA 100 people with smarts.
It’s ugly, people.
Nearly every foreign policy of the U.S. government—from domestic surveillance activities and the detention of terrorist suspects at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to U.S. energy policies and efforts in the Middle East peace process—was sharply criticized by the experts. More than 6 in 10 experts, for instance, believe U.S. energy policies are negatively affecting the country’s national security.
The experts were similarly critical of the CIA’s rendition of terrorist suspects to countries known to torture prisoners and the Pentagon’s policy of trying detainees before military tribunals.
No effort of the U.S. government was more harshly criticized, however, than the war in Iraq. In fact, that conflict appears to be the root cause of the experts’ pessimism about the state of national security. Nearly all—92 percent—of the index’s experts said the war in Iraq negatively affects U.S. national security, an increase of 5 percentage points from a year ago. Negative perceptions of the war in Iraq are shared across the political spectrum, with 84 percent of those who describe themselves as conservative taking a dim view of the war’s impact. More than half of the experts now oppose the White House’s decision to “surge” additional troops into Baghdad, a remarkable 22 percentage-point increase from just six months ago. Almost 7 in 10 now support a drawdown and redeployment of U.S. forces out of Iraq…
It’s a long piece, worth a read; here is a bit more on the surge:
More than half say the surge is having a negative impact on U.S. national security, up 22 percentage points from just six months ago. This sentiment was shared across party lines, with 64 percent of conservative experts saying the surge is having either a negative impact or no impact at all. When the experts were asked to grade the government’s handling of the Iraq war, the news was even worse. They gave the overall effort in Iraq an average point score of just 2.9 on a 10-point scale. The government’s public diplomacy record was the only policy that scored lower.
I’m sure that the Kagans, Joe Lieberman and Tony Snow can find some pony in all this, but even old Tom “F.U.” Friedman seems to be giving up on the whole thing; that, to me, is the most important development.
Filed under George W. Bush: is he really THAT bad?, Iraq, Middle East
Tom Friedman gets it, finally, on Iraq
what, no more Friedman units?
Tom Friedman finally abandons his “let’s give it 6 more months” patter. While not exactly advocating withdrawal, he is no longer hawkish. Of course, he blames most of the problems on the Iraqis.
Indeed, it is good news if casualties are down everywhere that U.S. troops have made their presence felt. But all that tells me is something that was obvious from the start of the war, which Donald Rumsfeld ignored: where you put in large numbers of U.S. troops you get security, and where you don’t you get insecurity.
There’s only one thing at this stage that would truly impress me, and it is this: proof that there is an Iraq, proof that there is a coalition of Iraqi Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds who share our vision of a unified, multiparty, power-sharing, democratizing Iraq and who are willing to forge a social contract that will allow them to maintain such an Iraq — without U.S. troops.
Because if that is not the case, even if U.S. troops create more pockets of security via the surge, they will have no one to hand these pockets to who can maintain them without us. In other words, the only people who can prove that the surge is working are the Iraqis, and the way they prove that is by showing that violence is down in areas where there are no U.S. troops or where U.S. troops have come and gone.
…
I admire their efforts, and those of their soldiers, to try to salvage something decent in Iraq, especially when you see who we are losing to — Sunni suicide jihadists and Shiite militants, who murder fellow Muslims by the dozen and whose retrograde visions offer Iraqis only a future of tears. But we could never defeat them on our own. It takes a village, and right now too many of the Iraqi villagers won’t work together.
