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The Weblog at The View from the Core - Tuesday, February 24, 2004
   
   

Get the FBI Into Sodom San Francisco?

If the alleged commission of possible felonies by public officials and employees is, or could be considered to be, "political corruption", why not?

See California Penal Code § 115:

115. (a) Every person who knowingly procures or offers any false or forged instrument to be filed, registered, or recorded in any public office within this state, which instrument, if genuine, might be filed, registered, or recorded under any law of this state or of the United States, is guilty of a felony.
(b) Each instrument which is procured or offered to be filed, registered, or recorded in violation of subdivision (a) shall constitute a separate violation of this section....

P.S. See also Wanted: Gavin Newsom.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 02/24/04 06:06:35 PM
Categorized as Political.


   
   

Winter Soldier

Somebody had the brilliant idea of getting that domain name before supporters of John Kerry did.

Freepers are setting up Winter Soldier, including lengthy excerpts (with photographs) from The New Soldier.

See also The (In)famous Book Cover and "The Book on John Kerry".

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 02/24/04 05:38:47 PM
Categorized as John Kerry & Political.


   
   

John Kerry Is In Really Big Trouble

Yet another right-wing extremist publication, assuredly taking orders from Karl Rove, is smearing the presidential candidate.

This time... The Village Voice.

An article today by Sydney Schanberg (brackets and quoted ellipses in original):

Senator John Kerry, a decorated battle veteran, was courageous as a navy lieutenant in the Vietnam War. But he was not so courageous more than two decades later, when he covered up voluminous evidence that a significant number of live American prisoners — perhaps hundreds — were never acknowledged or returned after the war-ending treaty was signed in January 1973.
The Massachusetts senator, now seeking the presidency, carried out this subterfuge a little over a decade ago — shredding documents, suppressing testimony, and sanitizing the committee's final report — when he was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on P.O.W./ M.I.A. Affairs....
Here are details of a few of the specific steps Kerry took to hide evidence about these P.O.W.'s.

  • He gave orders to his committee staff to shred crucial intelligence documents. The shredding stopped only when some intelligence staffers staged a protest. Some wrote internal memos calling for a criminal investigation. One such memo — from John F. McCreary, a lawyer and staff intelligence analyst — reported that the committee's chief counsel, J. William Codinha, a longtime Kerry friend, "ridiculed the staff members" and said, "Who's the injured party?" When staffers cited "the 2,494 families of the unaccounted-for U.S. servicemen, among others," the McCreary memo continued, Codinha said: "Who's going to tell them? It's classified."

    Kerry defended the shredding by saying the documents weren't originals, only copies—but the staff's fear was that with the destruction of the copies, the information would never get into the public domain, which it didn't. Kerry had promised the staff that all documents acquired and prepared by the committee would be turned over to the National Archives at the committee's expiration. This didn't happen. Both the staff and independent researchers reported that many critical documents were withheld.

  • Another protest memo from the staff reported: "An internal Department of Defense Memorandum identifies Frances Zwenig [Kerry's staff director] as the conduit to the Department of Defense for the acquisition of sensitive and restricted information from this Committee . . . lines of investigation have been seriously compromised by leaks" to the Pentagon and "other agencies of the executive branch." It also said the Zwenig leaks were "endangering the lives and livelihood of two witnesses."
  • A number of staffers became increasingly upset about Kerry's close relationship with the Department of Defense, which was supposed to be under examination. (Dick Cheney was then defense secretary.) It had become clear that Kerry, Zwenig, and others close to the chairman, such as Senator John McCain of Arizona, a dominant committee member, had gotten cozy with the officials and agencies supposedly being probed for obscuring P.O.W. information over the years. Committee hearings, for example, were being orchestrated to suit the examinees, who were receiving lists of potential questions in advance. Another internal memo from the period, by a staffer who requested anonymity, said: "Speaking for the other investigators, I can say we are sick and tired of this investigation being controlled by those we are supposedly investigating."
  • The Kerry investigative technique was equally soft in many other critical ways. He rejected all suggestions that the committee require former presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush to testify. All were in the Oval Office during the Vietnam era and its aftermath. They had information critical to the committee, for each president was carefully and regularly briefed by his national security adviser and others about P.O.W. developments. It was a huge issue at that time.
  • Kerry also refused to subpoena the Nixon office tapes (yes, the Watergate tapes) from the early months of 1973 when the P.O.W.'s were an intense subject because of the peace talks and the prisoner return that followed. (Nixon had rejected committee requests to provide the tapes voluntarily.) Information had seeped out for years that during the Paris talks and afterward, Nixon had been briefed in detail by then national security advisor Brent Scowcroft and others about the existence of P.O.W.'s whom Hanoi was not admitting to. Nixon, distracted by Watergate, apparently decided it was crucial to get out of the Vietnam mess immediately, even if it cost those lives. Maybe he thought there would be other chances down the road to bring these men back. So he approved the peace treaty and on March 29, 1973, the day the last of the 591 acknowledged prisoners were released in Hanoi, Nixon announced on national television: "All of our American P.O.W.'s are on their way home." ....
In the end, the fact that Senator Kerry covered up crucial evidence as committee chairman didn't seem to bother too many Massachusetts voters when he came up for re-election — or the recent voters in primary states. So I wouldn't predict it will be much of an issue in the presidential election come November. It seems there is no constituency in America for missing Vietnam P.O.W.'s except for their families and some veterans of that war.
A year after he issued the committee report, on the night of January 26, 1994, Kerry was on the Senate floor pushing through a resolution calling on President Clinton to lift the 19-year-old trade embargo against Vietnam. In the debate, Kerry belittled the opposition, saying that those who still believed in abandoned P.O.W.'s were perpetrating a hoax. "This process," he declaimed, "has been led by a certain number of charlatans and exploiters, and we should not allow fiction to cloud what we are trying to do here."
Kerry's resolution passed, by a vote of 62 to 38. Sadly for him, the passage of ten thousand resolutions cannot make up for wants in a man's character.

How about that? Nixon comes off better in this piece than Kerry does. In The Village Voice! Who'da-ever-thunkit? (That vast right-wing conspiracy must be even vaster than we thought.)

Also by the same author, "Did America Abandon Vietnam War POWs?" Part 1 and Part 2.

P.S. The Blog from the Core beat The Corner on this.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 02/24/04 05:27:50 PM
Categorized as John Kerry & Political.


   
   

White House's Homophobia Sparks War of Hatred Against "Gays"

That's how the homosexualists will put it.

Today, George W. Bush backs an amendment to the federal constitution to protect the definition of marriage as a union between one man and one woman:

.... Today I call upon the Congress to promptly pass, and to send to the states for ratification, an amendment to our Constitution defining and protecting marriage as a union of man and woman as husband and wife. The amendment should fully protect marriage, while leaving the state legislatures free to make their own choices in defining legal arrangements other than marriage....

The president of the United States has, of course, no constitutional or statutory role in amending the federal constitution: his approval is not legally required, and his disapproval would be legally irrelevant.

Nonetheless, I think the president's support, especially in an election year, is critical for getting an amendment passed. Note, he did not say "the" amendment, but "an" amendment, so he isn't committed to supporting only the Musgrave Amendment. But here is the text of that amendment:

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.

And this move certainly ups the ante for the Democrats, whose nominating convention will be held in Gaymarriagechusetts, and for their eventual nominee, especially if he does turn out to be the junior senator from Gaymarriagechusetts.

BTW, here's a possible suggestion for those opposed to amending the federal constitution for a public-policy purpose: get judges to quit "finding" "rights" in the constitution(s) that are not there, and we'll stop talking about constitutional amendments.

See also Why You Need to Write to Support the Federal Marriage Amendment.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 02/24/04 12:10:33 PM
Categorized as George W. Bush & Political & Social/Cultural.


   
   

"The Instructor Flew at Me Like a Vulture"

Californians' tax dollars at work.

Tatiana Menaker, who had immigrated from the Soviet Union, writes at FrontPage Magazine, yesterday, about the swarm of naive socialists at San Francisco State University:

While Americans and Iraqis cheered when Saddam Hussein was dragged from his spider hole in December, there were, obviously, a few notable exceptions. While Saddam loyalists and anti-American Arabs pouted in gloom and doom, back in the U.S. an anti-American poetry hit parade, entitled “My America,” was held shortly after Saddam’s capture. It was the grand finale of San Francisco State University’s fall semester.
Even as TV screens showed the captured Hitler of the Middle East in all his pathetic, unkempt glory, the anti-war show on campus continued. As a part of the Creative Writing Department curriculum, more than a hundred and fifty SFSU students were forced to attend this collective primary delusion presented as a poetry reading. Unfortunately, the weakness of the poets’ political intellect was matched by the weakness of their writing. From the lighted stage of the huge auditorium they groaned about American ‘war atrocities’: ....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 02/24/04 07:21:44 AM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.


   
   

Why You Need to Write to Support the Federal Marriage Amendment

A CNS report yesterday:

As thousands of same-sex couples get marriage licenses in San Francisco — by order of the Democratic mayor — a small group of Republicans sees nothing wrong with men marrying men and women marrying women....
Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley (D), a devout Catholic, recently said he would have "no problem" if the Cook County clerk started issuing marriage licenses to homosexuals....

See Letter to Congress Supporting Federal Marriage Amendment and Write to California, Too.

P.S. I see that Stanley Kurtz writes about this at NRO today:

.... Note well, the entire edifice of state and federal Defense of Marriage Acts, including state constitutional amendments, could easily be swept aside by a decision of the United States Supreme Court to impose gay marriage on the nation. Such a decision would most probably be based on equal-protection and due-process grounds — exactly the grounds by which San Francisco now attempts to nullify the clearly expressed will of the people of California. If you believe that anything short of a Federal Marriage Amendment can stop this process, you are dreaming. Acting on this issue is an easy thing to do. Write your representatives in support of the Federal Marriage Amendment, and support the reelection of the president. At a minimum, write to protest the events in San Francisco.
There's been a lot of commentary on how San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom's flouting of the law is not nearly so bad as the conduct of former Alabama chief justice Roy Moore. Moore disobeyed a court order. But Newsom is still making his case, and has not been definitively ordered to cease by a judge. Yet Moore's defiance resulted only in a bit more time during which a memorial to the Ten Commandments remained where it was not supposed to be.
What Mayor Newsom is doing has much deeper social and legal consequences — and is meant to have those consequences. Newsom is intentionally creating legal, political, and cultural facts on the ground designed to overturn current law — both in California and beyond. Newsom is purposely trying to initiate legal challenges to state and federal defense of marriage acts. And he is doing this is [sic] two ways — by encouraging copycat civil disobedience in other parts of the country, and by generating "married" couples who can file lawsuits, in California and beyond. Especially because he is creating couples who can file suits, Newsom's actions are far more disruptive and consequential than Judge Moore's. And the judges who have refused to swiftly shut down this obviously lawless action are equally to blame.
Newsom is using extra-legal means to bring a major national debate to resolution on his own terms. By creating "married" couples, Newsom is trying to put the cultural, political, and legal momentum inherent in "possession" behind his side of the argument. If Newsom is allowed to determine a major policy debate by resort to extra-legal means, the damage to social trust and civil comity in our divided nation will be immense....

(Thanks, Ryan.)

[Follow-up: White House's Homophobia Sparks War of Hatred Against Gays.]

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 02/24/04 07:00:56 AM
Categorized as Political.


   
   

Blog Stuff

These St. Blog's members have been added to Here a Blog, There a Blog:

And quite a few links have been added to Sources of News & Opinion.

Also, the Search Results template and the Links column on the main page were tweaked to display as desired by The Blogster in Netscape and Firefox. Apparently, Internet Explorer will assume a paragraph break where Mozilla-related browsers will not.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 02/24/04 06:10:03 AM
Categorized as Other.


   

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