Sep
27
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Sep
27
Michael Winship
So shocked were certain elements of the right by the vigor and ire with which Bill Clinton came out swinging on Fox News Sunday, they resorted to a stupefyingly base explanation. Matt Drudge and the right wing website Little Green Footballs, to name two, suggested that the former president may have been drinking.
“I don’t think it was only anger,” the Green Footballs blog insinuated, like some querulous quidnunc (take that, William Safire). “There were slurred words and strange broken sentences.”
Jesus. That sound you hear is the bottom of the barrel being scraped. At the risk of stating the obvious and dignifying the smear with even the slightest further discussion, it’s well known that Clinton barely touches the stuff. This was pointed out as recently as David Remnick’s profile in the September 18 issue of The New Yorker.
If it was even remotely plausible, the Democrats might be tempted to respond as Abraham Lincoln famously — and apocryphally — did when confronted with reports of Ulysses S. Grant’s drunkenness. Find out which brand of whiskey he’s drinking, Lincoln said, and send a case to each of my generals. The Democratic version would see carboys of Clinton’s Choice shipped by overnight Fedex to all the party’s House and Senate candidates.
“President Clinton came in prepared to respond to any attack on his record,” his spokesman Jay Carson said. “When [Fox News’ Chris] Wallace questioned his record on terrorism, he responded forcefully, as any Democrat would or should.”
The broader Clinton kafuffle aside, what struck me about the spurious implication of a spirit-enhanced performance was how casually and often cruelly people joke about alcohol. Both its pervasiveness and the social stigma attached to alcoholism — treating it as symptom of moral turpitude rather than the disease it is — are writ large in the political world.
Booze lubricates the Washington social and political machine, and claims a tragic share of casualties there. So it was especially heartening to read in last Tuesday’s New York Times of the “uncommon political marriage” between Minnesota Republican Congressman Jim Ramstad and Rhode Island Democratic Congressman Patrick Kennedy.
Kennedy, 39, son of Ted Kennedy, is four months sober, following a bizarre automobile accident outside the United States Capitol and a subsequent period of rehab at the Mayo Clinic. Ramstad, 60, with a quarter century of sobriety, is Kennedy’s Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor.
The Times reported, “The day after the accident, Mr. Kennedy received a phone call from Mr. Ramstad, a recovering alcoholic who has been an evangelist in Congress for addiction treatment and 12-step recovery programs. The men did not know each other well.
“But in battling their addictions, the two built a fast kinship that flouts the partisan divisions of Congress, their own divergent politics and the conditional nature of so many friendships in Washington.”
As former Georgia Senator Max Cleland, himself in recovery, observed, “This is a story of a shared and common humanity and overcoming political differences in a town known for its inhumanity.”
Coincidentally, Monday evening, I attended a friend’s Manhattan book signing. He’s another man in recovery who grew up in the world of politics, another offspring in the spotlight and shadow of a famous father.
William Cope Moyers, son of my public television colleague Bill Moyers, has written an absorbing, heartfelt and frequently painful account of his own slide into drug and alcohol addiction. The book’s called “Broken,” because, as William says, “I’m still not fixed yet, I’m healing.” It takes him on the journey from a privileged childhood of promise to a failed career and marriage to crackhouse pits in New York and Atlanta, followed by a slow, arduous return to sobriety and fulfillment.
Now twelve years in recovery, Moyers is vice president for external affairs at the Hazelden Foundation, the alcohol and drug rehabilitation center in Minnesota. In that role, he has come to believe that, “The war on drugs must shift from an obsessive focus on trying to reduce the supply through interdiction and criminal justice to what works the best — recovery. Perhaps someday that will happen. In the meantime, people addicted to alcohol and other drugs, their loved ones and the communities where they live, are desperate for help.”
The federal government is spending about $20 billion a year on the war on drugs. Currently, only about 18% of that money goes for recovery programs, prevention, addiction research and education.
As the Times reported, both Rep. Kennedy and his sponsor, Rep. Ramstad, “are active in a House caucus of about 60 representatives that promotes legislation for treatment of addiction and mental illness. Some of the members are addicts themselves, or recovering addicts, Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Ramstad say, but neither would estimate how many.”
All of them should read “Broken,” and when the new Congress convenes next January, their caucus can work harder to allocate more funding for prevention and recovery — and legislate rules that will require insurance companies to lift restrictions on benefits for dependency treatment.
Rep. Ramstad has his own dream, he told the Times: “If we could turn Congress into one big AA meeting, where people would be required to say what they mean and mean what they say, it would be a lot better Congress.”
One day at a time, congressman, one day at a time.
copyright 2006 Messenger Post Newspapers
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Sep
23
How Long Must We Sing this Song
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I would have pegged President Bush for a big C&W fan–the Toby Keith type. But apparently he’s got a litte U2 somewhere deep down in his presidential soul. Check out this video:
Sep
19
Still a Few Bugs in the System
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Michael Winship
New York State has another year to go before we start using them new-fangled, electronic voting machines. But if a look at what’s happening in other parts of the country is any indication, we are blessed by the delay. Under current circumstances, we should be dragged kicking and screaming into the future.
The computer-based systems are so screwed up, voting absentee may be the only safe way you can be sure your ballot will be counted.
In fact, Denver’s Rocky Mountain News reported last week that the Colorado Democratic Party had urged state voters to do just that, “to avoid potential fraud, after a key state official said in a deposition that he certified the computer voting equipment even though he has no college education in computer science and did little security testing.”
That’s an understatement — the apparatchik in question said he performed 15 minutes of security checks and made no attempt to hack into the system, which even to an aging Luddite like me would seem to be, like, Plan A from the High Tech Crimestoppers’ Notebook.
Thursday’s USA Today reported, “The fall elections shape up as the most technologically perilous since 2000, election officials say, because 30% of the nation’s voting jurisdictions will be using new equipment. They include large parts of Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, scenes of key Senate races. ‘If you’re ever going to have a problem, it’s going to be that first election,’ says Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services.
“Since 2000, nearly half of US counties have switched from punch cards, lever machines and paper ballots to electronic voting or optical-scan ballots read by a computer. They continue to rely on poll workers who are on average 72 years old and lack computer experience.”
Sunday’s Washington Post chimed in that problems. “have contributed to doubts among some experts about whether the new systems are reliable and whether election officials are adequately prepared to use them.
“In a polarized political climate, in which elections are routinely marked by litigation and allegations of incompetent administration or outright tampering, some worry that voting problems could cast a Florida-style shadow over this fall’s midterm elections.”
Thus far, some ten states have experienced trouble during this year’s primary season. As New Yorkers confidently clicked the pulldown levers of our rickety but relatively efficient machines during last Tuesday’s primary, folks in parts of Maryland were stymied when the proper computer access cards weren’t delivered to precinct workers in one county. In another, computers messed up party affiliations and were unable to transmit results to the central tabulating operation.
The machine used in Maryland, Diebold’s AccuVote-TS, had an especially bad week. In addition to the Maryland snafus, a computer research team at Princeton University performed a security analysis of the AccuVote-TS and reported, “Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss.”
What’s more, the team stated, such evil software can be installed surreptitiously in as little as a minute and viruses can spread the program from machine to machine during “normal pre- and post-election activity.”
(You can see a visual demonstration here.)
And, just to add insult to injury, Ed Felton, of the “Freedom to Tinker” blog, accidentally discovered that the access panel door on the AccuVote-TS — “the door that protects the memory card that stores the votes, and is the main barrier to the injection of a virus — can be opened with a standard key that is widely available on the Internet.” That is, the kind of key you use to open a hotel room mini-bar.
“We bought several keys from an office furniture key shop,” Felton writes. “They open the voting machine, too. We ordered another key on eBay from a jukebox supply shop. The keys can be purchased from many online merchants.”
Understandably, Diebold is screaming bloody murder, insisting that the security software on the unit Princeton investigated is two years out of date and that proper procedures were not followed. But one thing seems clear: in the face of this and all that’s been going on in the wild and wacky world of electronic elections, if New York must make the move, optical scan systems are the way to go.
Rather than use a touchscreen system, like an ATM, optical scanners read a paper ballot that’s filled out like an SAT answer form or a lottery ticket. I saw them in operation in Arizona during the 2004 election and to my unschooled eye, although clunkier than the jazzy touchscreens, they seemed to be efficient and relatively secure, although not foolproof. They leave a paper trail for audits and recounts and allow the voter to verify their vote has been correctly recorded.
We just need to move with caution. Former Ohio Governor Dick Celeste, who co-chaired a study of electronic voting with former Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh, told the Washington Post, “It’s hard to put a factor on how ill-prepared we are… What we know is, these technologies require significant testing and debugging to make them work.”
In truth, I’ve got nothing against electronic voting per se. As the Princeton researchers said, “We’re not opposed to all use of computers in elections but we do insist on having adequate safeguards in place.”
I’ve got nothing against spinach either. But look at the headlines. I want to be sure it’s safe, clean and thoroughly debugged before I’m made to eat it.
copyright 2006 Messenger Post Newspapers
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Sep
11
This portrait of Betty Shabazz, the late widow of Malcom X, is one of the paintings by Thomas Manning that will not be on display at USM. Manning is serving an 80 year sentance in prison for, among other things, the murder of a New Jersey State trooper. The controversy surrounding the showing of art work by Manning and others led to a cancellation of a planned exhibition and forum at USM. I have now learned that most of that show will be appearing at a downtown Portland gallery. In addition some of the art work will be on display during an “art walk” this week that will take place between USM and Congress Square.
The main stream media will be on this story tomorrow, but in a (for now) exclusive, here is an interview with Ray Levasseur, one of the organizers of both the cancelled USM exhibition and the art walk. Levasseur served 20 years in a federal prison for a series of bombings carried out by the radical United Freedom Front. I interviewed him in his apartment this afternoon.
Sep
11
As American as Apple Pie
Filed Under Michael Winship | 2 Comments
Michael Winship
We are a city of incongruities. So I guess I shouldn’t have thought it odd when, early Sunday evening, I ran into two London bobbies, in full dress uniform, walking up Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue, as if they were patrolling Piccadilly.
They and 65 other British policemen were here to attend a ceremony at Battery Park City downtown, representing the 67 UK citizens killed on 9/11. Their presence has become one of our new annual traditions, like the enormous American flag that hangs overlooking Ground Zero every year, the Tribute in Light memorial that for one evening illuminates the night sky of lower Manhattan, the reading of the names of the dead.
This year, I set out just minutes before the first moment of silence at 8:46 a.m., when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the north tower. For most, it was a regular workday — over at the 6th Precinct on West 10th Street, the service remembering the two neighborhood policemen who died on 9/11 seemed briefer than in the past. At the ceremony’s conclusion, after a minute of silence, a young policewoman piped up, “Well, back to business,” and the gathering quickly dispersed.
Yet, everyone seemed quieter than usual as they walked to work or rode the buses and subways. Friends confirmed the feeling. And were more people wearing black, or was it just the usual, New York City fashion statement?
All seemed normal at the Christopher Street PATH train station. Five years ago, with the destruction of the PATH station at the Trade Center, Christopher Street became the southernmost hub and commuters silently lined up around the block to get in, like Londoners during the Blitz.
Traffic on the West Side Highway seemed normal, too. After 9/11, television microwave trucks had lined the road and for months, 24/7, an unending procession of trucks unloaded debris here onto barges docked along the Hudson. Now a man walked along carrying a painting of a blonde woman in a pink kimono holding a lily. A motley crew of eight or so gathered on a traffic island, veterans of “Point Thank You,” the meeting place for folks who used to cheer the fire trucks, police cars and ambulances as they sped up and down the highway.
But as I got closer to Ground Zero, police had closed half the road and blocked off many of the streets leading into the site. I walked over to Church Street and worked my way through the crowds on the east side of the pit. There were fewer flowered wreaths and photos, but every year the scene seems to get a bit more zoo-like. A man dressed in a bird suit urged passersby to “Have a Kind Day.” A group of Buddhist monks in saffron chanted and beat drums, but above the din, I could start to hear the families reading the names of their loved ones.
The inside perimeter of the site was lined with black tarps so those on the outside couldn’t peer in, but the voices rang out. By the time of the fourth moment of silence, marking the minute when the second tower fell, they barely had made it through the first half of the alphabet. “I hope the golf courses are great in heaven,” one family member signed off. “Baby, save a spot for me. I love you,” said another. One woman recited the lyrics of an old popular song: “How far would I travel to be where you are? How far is the journey from here to a star?”
Across the street, four replicas of the Liberty Bell, trucked in from Wilmington, Delaware, tolled in succession, and scores of people, mostly young, clad in black tee shirts with the slogan “Investigate 9-11!” got in people’s faces like Scientologists. They thrust out pamphlets and DVD’s declaring the 9/11 Commission Report a fairy tale, the terrorist tragedy the work of a dark government conspiracy.
On this day, it felt wrong, disrespectful. Besides, believing in such a conspiracy assumes a level of competence not evidenced by this government. Just ask the denizens of Baghdad or the bayou.
It seemed as egregious as that ABC TV “Path to 9/11″ movie this week, the one that posited a conspiracy of dunces, primarily in the Clinton White House, bobbling all attempts to get Osama before he got us. Not that dumb mistakes weren’t made during those years, but the screenplay was factually, intellectually and emotionally dishonest, distorting truth beyond the precipice of libel.
Directed and written by men with strong, right-wing, evangelical ties, the film pilloried Clinton’s administration but barely managed to reference such things as the infamous August 6, 2001, intelligence brief warning President Bush, “Bin Ladin (sic) Determined to Strike in US.” (And, of course, made no mention of the president’s dismissive response — according to Ron Suskind’s book “The One Percent Doctrine” — “All right, you’ve covered your ass now.”)
I’d rather remember the pies. You heard me. Pies. Apple pies.
In the wake of the disaster, Pam Post, a woman in my upstate New York hometown, decided that what the search and rescue workers at Ground Zero needed was something as American as, well, apple pie. All the businesses, schools and churches joined the bakeoff. Volunteers chipped in with their time, ovens, ingredients and pie tins. Kids decorated the boxes and in the end, some 800 pies were loaded onto a truck and pointed toward Manhattan.
I got a phone call asking for help. The Red Cross and Salvation Army had turned the pies down — charities were overwhelmed with contributions. I was useless, but eventually, the desserts made their way to the Episcopalian Church’s General Theological Seminary and other appropriate downtown destinations. They were, one worker declared, “The best pies ever.”
A small gesture, perhaps, but those pies are representative of the spirit we’ve lost. In the face of adversity, instead of undaunted and defiant hope, sacrifice and FDR’s famous “warm courage of national unity,” we’re fed a recipe of recklessness, fear and hate that runs counter to the core values of our democracy. Is there an enemy out there? You bet. But many of our wounds are self-inflicted.
copyright 2006 Messenger Post Newspapers
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Sep
5
A Modest Distance from Hell
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Michael Winship
Everyone always says it was a picture-perfect day, and true, the sun was shining and the sky was bright and blue, but the morning felt humid to me.
We lived in the West Village, between Hudson and Greenwich Streets. The Trade Center was at the end of Greenwich Street. We had slept in a little late. Kathleen leapt up to shower and dress, I a little behind her.
She ran off to vote in the primary and go to work. I was just getting into the shower when the buzzer connected to our front gate went off. “Damn,” I thought. “Must be the Fedex guy.”
I got on the intercom and heard Kathy’s voice. Get down here quick, she said, the World Trade Center’s on fire! I pulled on a pair of shorts and a tee shirt, grabbed my keys, and with remnants of shaving cream still on my face, ran barefoot to the end of the block.
Looking downtown, black smoke was streaming from the top of the north tower, and we could see a gash on the left side, about a quarter of the way down the building, burning orange and a bright cherry red.
About thirty of us stood in the intersection, watching in hypnotized horror, unsure what had happened. Many were on cell phones and finally, someone said, “It’s a plane.”
Kathy had to get to her newsroom. She hurriedly kissed me goodbye and dashed off. I briefly considered getting my camera, but it felt ghoulish. I watched a bit longer, walked home, just half a block, and in those few seconds, the second jet hit.
A few years before, at a party we had met an elderly woman who was at Pearl Harbor. She talked about standing on a hilltop and watching the Zeroes vector in on Battleship Row. That’s what it felt like.
Church bells started ringing and didn’t stop until noon. We lived only a few blocks from St. Vincent’s Hospital, and for the first two days, the sirens were constant day and night. Everything below 14th Street was sealed off, designated “the frozen zone.” To get in or out of our neighborhood, we had to show proof of identity and residence. National Guardsmen and police from around the country were at every corner.
By the fourth day, the sirens had stopped. Emergency vehicles kept roaring up Hudson Street, but now they were just using their flashers, whether out of courtesy or futility, I don’t know. The air had filled with the heavy, acrid smell of melting glass, plastic, insulation and metal. People in our neighborhood wore facemasks or kerchiefs around their mouths and noses.
The handbills with photocopied pictures of loved ones and phone numbers asking for help proliferated, taped to every wall, lamppost and window. I walked over by St. Vincent’s, still surrounded by rescue vehicles and microwave trucks. There was a big tanker truck of fresh water parked on West 11th Street, and the slightly mad, Lewis Carroll-like sight of chefs from the city’s best restaurants, dressed in enormous toques and spotless white uniforms, dashing wheeled steam tables of hot, gourmet food to the emergency workers. They did everything but break into a chorus of “Be Our Guest.” Fighter jets roared over our neighborhood. President Bush was arriving for his tour of Ground Zero.
We went out to Long Island Saturday afternoon, determined to attend the 70th birthday of our friend Jack. On the train, there was an exhausted fireman, sprawled across a row of seats, deeply asleep, still in his thick black rubber coat with yellow stripes. There also was a drunken metalworker covered in ash and dirt. As he sat in his hardhat, tee shirt and jeans, he told us he had been taken off the job building the new American Airlines terminal at JFK and sent to work at Ground Zero. There was no way — NO WAY — he was going back there. It was just too horrible.
The following week, after a night of rain, a new smell arrived, a heavy one of rich, fertilized earth with a strong whiff of mildew. Most of us thought we knew what it was, but few said so out loud. It permeated our entire apartment. A couple of nights, the smell of burning was so strong, we had to close the windows, turn on the air conditioning and light candles to mask it.
The smell would last until November; the pile would smoke and burn through the holidays. Every time the shovels, bulldozers and cranes exposed another layer, oxygen met fuel and heat and the fires began anew.
Two vast and trunkless legs once stood. In 102 minutes they were gone. On Sunday, the number of American military deaths in “the global war on terror” reached 2,974, officially exceeding the number of Americans and foreign nationals killed in the 9/11 attacks, not counting the 19 terrorists who hijacked the planes.
Monday’s edition of the British newspaper, The Independent, reported, “Far from ending terrorism, George Bush’s tactics of using overwhelming military might to fight extremism appear to have rebounded, spawning an epidemic of global terrorism that has claimed an estimated 72,265 lives since 2001, most of them Iraqi civilians…
“A US led-invasion swept away the Taliban regime in a matter of weeks, and did the same to Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party in 2003, but far from bringing stability and democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq, the outcome has been one of constant warfare.”
Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden is nowhere to be found. And the king whispers, look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
copyright 2006 Messenger Post Newspapers
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All newspaper editors want to know what their readers like. If you would like to read this feature in your local newspaper, please do not hesitate to share your enthusiasm with your local newspaper editor.
Sep
1
This Might Explain a Lot
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I must admit, I’ve been spending a fair amount of time sailing lately and have been a bit out of the loop when it comes to national politics, so you can imagine my surprise when I saw the above picture on the Washington Post website. It appears that Republican National Chairman Ken Mehlman and Confirmed Nutjob John Mark Karr are the SAME PERSON! (At least according to the Post.)