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The Weblog at The View from the Core - Thursday, October 21, 2004
   
   

The Widow Heinz Strikes Again. And Again. And Again.

Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode CCCXCI

Barbara Comstock writes at NRO today.

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"Clothing is wonderful, but let them go naked for a while, at least the kids," Teresa Heinz Kerry said last month to New York relief workers sending supplies to victims of Hurricane Ivan. "Let's just say that remark probably wasn't in her talking points," said one Democratic source described at the time as being close to the Kerry campaign.

The recent diversion from the talking points by the woman John Kerry's daughters reportedly refer to as "Step Money" came in an interview with USA Today, in which Teresa apparently decided First Lady Laura Bush was "fair game" for attack: "Well, you know, I don't know Laura Bush. But she seems to be calm, and she has a sparkle in her eye, which is good. But I don't know that she's ever had a real job — I mean, since she's been grown up."

Remember when, during the Democratic convention, Teresa Heinz lectured us: "It is time for the world to hear women's voices — in full and at last"? While the Kerry campaign seems to have sidelined Teresa's "full voice" as much as possible — sending her to such hot battlegrounds as Texas — every once in a while Teresa's true "voice" appears — whether she's telling a reporter to "shove it" or saying a Bush re-election would be "four more years of hell" or saying "only an idiot" wouldn't support her husband's big-government health-care plan.

Teresa issued a lame apology yesterday for her Laura Bush slight, saying: "I had forgotten that Mrs. Bush had worked as a schoolteacher and librarian, and there couldn't be a more important job than teaching our children. As someone who has been both a full time mom and full time in the workforce, I know we all have valuable experiences that shape who we are. I appreciate and honor Mrs. Bush's service to the country as first lady, and am sincerely sorry I had not remembered her important work in the past."

Okay, so she sort of apologizes to teachers and librarians for saying theirs aren't "real jobs." Did she really forget Laura Bush was a librarian and teacher? It's not like the First Lady's past is a big secret.

But Teresa still hasn't apologized to stay-at-home mothers for implying that they don't have "real jobs." Certainly, we aren't supposed to believe that she "forgot" Laura Bush was a mom. Most of us moms — whether working moms or stay-at-home moms (I've been both) — consider that occupation more than a full-time job. Then again, most of us don't have the staff of six that, as the New York Times reports, accommodate every whim of Teresa Heinz's and John Kerry's at their many mansions around the country.

One wonders what a "real job" is in the THK book — but we can imagine (something to do with servants writing a six-million-dollar check to keep your husband's campaign afloat?). What slipped out from Teresa "in full and at last" was the culturally elite prima donna that the Kerry staff have worked hard to keep under wraps. No doubt Kerry and his staff are all indebted to Teresa's bankrolling skills — but "Step Money" is causing problems on the home front.

— Barbara Comstock is a former Department of Justice spokeswoman and currently a principal with Blank Rome Government Relations.

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Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 10/21/04 06:07:13 PM
Categorized as Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode.


   
   

Autumn Morning in the Mon Valley

Before the fog had lifted across the river, Tuesday, October 19, 2004.

Autumn Morning in the Mon Valley

Autumn Morning in the Mon Valley

Autumn Morning in the Mon Valley

Autumn Morning in the Mon Valley

Autumn Morning in the Mon Valley

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 10/21/04 05:37:21 PM
Categorized as Photos.


   
   

Group of Billionaires Secretly Plots to Keep Kerry Out of White House!!!!!!!!!!!!

If that were true, Faithful Reader, you surely wouldn't need to read The Blog from the Core to find out about it. Dan & Peter & Tom would lead with that story, night after night after night. NYT would flood the zone, and the rest of the media would follow their lead, like sheep following the bellwether.

The real story, though, is one they have ignored: Group of Billionaires Secretly Plots to Kick Bush Out of White House:

On August 6th, a week after the Democratic Convention, a clandestine summit meeting took place at the Aspen Institute, in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. The participants, all Democrats, were sworn to secrecy, and few of them will discuss the event. One thing that is certain, however, is that the guests formed a tableau that not many people would associate with the Democratic Party of the past. Five billionaires joined half a dozen liberal leaders in a lengthy conversation about the future of progressive politics in America. The billionaires were not especially close socially, nor were they in complete agreement about politics or strategy. Yet they shared a common goal: to use their fortunes to engineer the defeat of President George W. Bush in the 2004 election.
“No one was supposed to know about this,” an assistant to one participant told me, declining to be named. “We don’t want people thinking it’s a cabal, or some sort of Masonic plot!” His concern was understandable: the prospect of rich men concentrating their wealth in order to sway an American election was an inflammatory one, particularly given the Democratic Party’s populist rhetoric. This private meeting of plutocrats was an unintended consequence of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance-reform law of 2002. Previously, wealthy donors had contributed “soft money” to the political parties, which controlled how the funds were spent. The reform legislation had banned such gifts, forcing donors to find new ways of influencing the political process.
The meeting’s organizer was Peter B. Lewis, the seventy-year-old reclusive chairman of the Progressive Corporation, an insurance company based in Cleveland, Ohio. He has spent much of 2004 discreetly directing millions of dollars to liberal groups allied with the Democratic Party, such as America Coming Together and MoveOn.org, while cruising the Mediterranean Sea on his two-hundred-and-fifty-foot yacht, Lone Ranger. The yacht has communications equipment that allows Lewis to monitor political developments in America while sunbathing off the coast of Italy. Lewis, a major backer of efforts to decriminalize marijuana, has helped underwrite campaigns to hold referenda on decriminalization in Arizona and California. (In 2000, he was arrested in New Zealand for possessing marijuana.) According to Lewis’s friends, he concluded that it would be best to remain a shadow figure in the 2004 campaign; he has declined all requests for interviews.
Flying in from Arizona was John Sperling, an octogenarian businessman who in 1976 created the for-profit University of Phoenix. Sperling is also the co-author of a recent book, “The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America,” which suggests that the 2004 election is a contest between “‘God, Family, and Flag’ folks” — who live in the South, the Great Plains, the Rockies, and Appalachia — and forward-thinking metropolitans who support “economic modernity,” “religious moderation,” and “excellence in education and science.”
Herb and Marion Sandler, a California couple in their seventies, came to Aspen looking for ways to give back to a country that had allowed them to prosper. The founders of Golden West Financial Corporation, a savings-and-loan company worth seventeen billion dollars, the Sandlers are devoted to the idea of preserving progressive income taxes and inheritance taxes.
The wealthiest participant at this meeting of hard-core partisans — and the one whose presence was the most surprising — was George Soros, the seventy-four-year-old Wall Street speculator turned philanthropist. Soros, who was born in Budapest in 1930, is short, with a crest of gray hair, owlish glasses surrounding blue eyes, and a hearing aid in one ear. At Aspen, his deep Hungarian accent, and his taste for abstract ideas, made him seem like a European professor who had walked into the wrong seminar. “The participants kind of talked past each other,” a person who attended the meeting told me.
To the distress of some of the strategists present, the billionaires spent much of the time bemoaning the superior powers of the G.O.P. In exasperation, one participant, Harold Ickes, Bill Clinton’s former deputy chief of staff, attempted to rally the group with a look back at liberalism’s legacy of achievement, from the civil-rights era to the feminist movement. Much remained to be accomplished, he suggested....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 10/21/04 07:54:56 AM
Categorized as Media & Political.


   
   

The 9-11 Commission Report

I don't think I blogged this before. I sort of remember wanting to wait until it was published in HTML as well as PDF, which is now the case.

[Follow-up: The 9-11 Commission Report II.]

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 10/21/04 07:27:18 AM
Categorized as Speeches and Suchlike.


   
   

Insight Scoop

A young weblog by authors & staff at Ignatius Press.

Vide.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 10/21/04 07:12:27 AM
Categorized as Blogosphere Stuff.


   

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