November 13th
posted: November 13, 2007 3:19 EST
His campaign down the tubes, the feeble presidential candidate finally hits YouTube with a shock-and-awe ad.
By Michael Roberts, Westword (Denver)
To paraphrase Dick Cheney, Rep. Tom Tancredo's quizzical presidential campaign is in its last throes. But it's going out with a bang -- literally -- with a commercial running in Iowa that makes Lyndon Johnson's infamous 1964 mushroom-cloud spot look subtle.
The ad (click here) begins with Tancredo offering an endorsement of the message that follows: "Hi, I'm Tom Tancredo, and I approve this message because someone needs to say it." An instant later, the screen fills with overtly scary, often overexposed images of a hooded man placing a bomb in a book bag and heading to a mall. Meanwhile, a narrator who bears a striking aural resemblance to Boris Karloff in The Grinch Who Stole Christmas declares: "There are consequences to open borders beyond the twenty million aliens who've come to take our jobs. Islamic terrorists now freely roam U.S. soil." Next, he adds, "Jihadists who froth with hate here to do as they have in London and Spain and Russia," with the locations in question punctuated by shots of a blasted bus, a destroyed train and a lifeless, bloodied young boy. Then it's back to the mall, and once the voice intones, "The price we pay for spineless politicians who refuse to defend our borders against those who come to kill," we see the figure set down the book bag just prior to a fade to black and the sound of an explosion. The final graphic reads: "Tancredo... before it's too late."
Over the top? Oh man -- but it's also very much in keeping with Tancredo's true-believer style, which is analyzed in Westword's 2003 profile. During his early days as a Colorado state representative, Tancredo was known as one of the "House crazies." Iowans who see his latest commercial may well revive the nickname.
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posted: November 13, 2007 3:09 EST
Dim pol Fife Symington blinded by the bright lights on Larry King's show.
By Tony Ortega, Village Voice
Before people get too worked up about disgraced former Arizona governor Fife Symington’s “disclosure” that he saw the 1997 “UFO” known as the Phoenix Lights—the subject of a breathless segment on the Larry King Live show last week—a few words about that phenomenon from someone who actually investigated it.
In 1997, Symington was in the middle of the bank-fraud scandal that would bounce him from office, but that’s not my way of questioning what he saw in the sky—thousands of Arizonans did, in fact, witness the famous Phoenix Lights that March. But from the start, bad reporting of the facts, hyperventilating by UFO “experts,” and constant stupidity from television reporters in particular resulted in a false impression that has hardened into seeming fact a decade later—that the “vee” of lights seen flying over the entire length of the state was explained away by the Air Force as flares dropped from military planes.
That is not the case. But it’s not hard to see why people think as much. Because the bare facts of what happened that night almost never get told by a confused press, even ten years later.
Here’s the truth: there were two, distinct events that happened the night of March 13, 1997 in the skies over Arizona, which I reported in great detail in a story that appeared a year later in the Phoenix New Times. The first event was the famous “vee,” which appeared over northern Arizona and gradually traveled south over nearly the entire length of the state, eventually passing south of Tucson. This is the “wedge-shaped” object that Symington and hundreds or even thousands of others saw—including two of my colleagues at the New Times. Timings of the “vee” sighting started at about 8:15 over the Prescott area, and it was seen south of Tucson by about 8:45. That’s 200 miles in 30 minutes, suggesting an air speed of 400 miles per hour.
News of the sighting spread fast, drawing out many other people who began looking at the sky, some with camcorders. And it was this second wave of observers who caught the second event of the night at about 10 pm, a set of nine lights falling behind the Sierra Estrella, a mountain ridge to the southwest of Phoenix. Television reporters were the first to suggest that this was a series of flares dropped over the North Tac range behind the Estrella. But naturally, people who had seen only the 8:30 “vee” were incredulous—how could “flares” dropped from planes fly over the entire state in a vee formation?
Well, they couldn’t, of course. But to this day, reporters almost never distinguish between the two events and the explanations that were soon presented for each.
The flares over the Estrella were soon cleared up. The Air Force, after some maddening early denials, eventually owned up that the Maryland Air National Guard had dropped them over the North Tac range. So much for the 10 pm sighting.
But what rarely gets reported is that the famous vee was also solved quite early. First of all, contrary to what you usually hear, there was a videotape made of the vee. I saw it after questioning the person who shot it (he also shot the 10 pm flares over the Estrella), and the video quite clearly shows the lights moving in relation to each other, rather than as lights on a solid object.
The human eye, however, seeing point sources of light in a dark Arizona sky, will tend to fill in the space between the lights in a contrast effect—convincing the eyewitness that he’s seen a solid object. Again, however, videotape of the ‘vee’ clearly showed that this was not the case.
(My personal favorite of all the accounts that night is a sighting that was convincing proof that the “vee” was not solid. A man saw it pass directly over the face of the Moon, and instead of a solid object, he saw five contrails pass over the Moon, making the Moon look blurry. Now, instead of concluding that he’d seen five planes flying in formation with their exhaust plumes plainly showing against the Moon, he instead insisted that the “captain” flying the alien triangular craft had turned it transparent just at the right moment so that he could see the Moon through it!)
Also, reports that the vee was low overhead and moving slowly have to be discounted. The human eye is notoriously unable to judge the distance to overhead point sources of light in a dark sky. Simple physics dictates that in order to fly from Prescott to Tucson in 30 minutes the vee was moving very fast, and, logic dictates, at a high altitude.
But there’s an even better reason to believe that the vee was not what Symington and others believed. As I reported in June of 1997, there was a credible report of the vee’s nature that was received immediately by UFO “experts” but not followed up—at least until I checked it out. It turned out that an amateur astronomer, Mitch Stanley, had been outside that night using a Dobsonian telescope, and had captured the vee in his field of view, giving him a view 60 times the magnification of the human eye. (I’m a builder of telescopes, and I thoroughly checked out his telescope and quizzed him about his use of it. There was no reason to question this young man’s veracity.) That March evening, his mother was standing nearby and could see that he was looking at the vee through the scope (I questioned them both) and they both say this was his response when she asked him what it was: “Planes.”
What I reported a decade ago:
What looked like individual lights to the naked eye actually split into two under the resolving power of the telescope. The lights were located on the undersides of squarish wings, Mitch says. And the planes themselves seemed small, like light private planes. Stanley watched them for about a minute, and then turned away. It was the last thing the amateur astronomer wanted to look at. "They were just planes, I didn't want to look at them," Stanley says when he's asked why he didn't stare at them longer. He is certain about what he saw: "They were planes. There's no way I could have mistaken that."
The only real mystery of the Phoenix Lights is which group of planes this was. I suggested that Stanley’s description (squarish wings) sounded like A-10s, not private planes. But the Maryland National Guard denied that they had flown over that path before dropping flares later.
Ten years later, however, the Phoenix Lights still live because it’s claimed by UFO supporters that the only explanation for the flying vee was that the Air Force called it flares. You’ll hear that explanation ridiculed again tonight on Larry King Live, and the “UFO community” will no doubt consider it a huge victory. So much for common sense.
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November 1st
posted: November 1, 2007 4:47 EST
When global-warming experts want to come in out of the cold, they turn to Konrad Steffen.
By Joel Warner, Westword (Denver)
In the middle of a table in Konrad Steffen's office at the University of Colorado at Boulder sits a strikingly beautiful globe made of hand-carved gemstones. Steffen, a geography professor, knows very well that sooner or later the globe will have to be revised. The coastline will shift, swallowing the Nile River megadelta, flooding low-lying expanses of Bangladesh, encroaching onto the Florida panhandle.
On the globe, the changes will be a difference of millimeters, but on a worldwide scale, they could mean the displacement of tens of millions of people. One of the main reasons: the Greenland ice sheet, a gargantuan expanse of ice roughly the size of the Gulf of Mexico, is melting — and it's doing so faster than anyone imagined.
Over the past few years, the ice sheet spewed 250 gigatons of ice into the ocean, or "two and a half times all the ice in the Alps," Steffen says, turning the globe and planting his finger in the center of Europe.
Last month, former vice president Al Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the Nobel Peace Prize for drawing attention to global warming. Earlier this year, the UN panel had published a report concluding that human influences were likely to blame for planet-wide climate change. The report warned that as rising temperatures melted glaciers and ice sheets and caused the oceans to swell through thermal expansion, sea levels would rise between 18 and 59 centimeters by 2100.
But Steffen, known to everyone as Koni, believes the Greenland ice sheet is deteriorating faster than predicted by these models. By the end of the century, he says, the oceans could rise by roughly three feet.
read on . . .
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posted: November 1, 2007 4:31 EST
Is “Run!” the new strategy against firestorms on California's urban fringe?
By Patrick Range McDonald, Christine Pelisek and Jill Stewart, LA Weekly
LAST WEEK, AS NEARLY ONE-QUARTER of California’s length blazed, the state’s residents were treated to an eerie replay of the October 2003 firestorm that wiped out 3,631 homes and killed 24. From the self-congratulations of big pols to finger pointing over a lack of air support, one of the most troubling aspects of the tragedy — despite the claims of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger — was how little government has changed in response to the lessons of 2003.
With 1,155 homes in cinders on October 24, a cheery Schwarzenegger had gathered with politicians to let Californians know that, “Everything has been, so far, going really well.” In fact, much was not going well. Although communication between agencies appeared to be going more smoothly than during the mishandled Cedar Fire disaster, and lives had clearly been saved by a reverse-911 evacuation system, a political blaze was getting under way.
The New York Times reported the feds had accused Cal Fire, the state’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, of failing in the first critical days to seek federal firefighters and air tankers. Furious San Diego Congressman Duncan Hunter sparred with Cal Fire Chief Ruben Grijalva over the state’s view that “fire spotters” had to accompany military aircraft, and hours passed before the feud was resolved. In Orange County, Fire Chief Chip Prather bitterly pointed to a lack of air support, state Assemblyman Todd Spitzer accused a blue-ribbon commission of punting rather than building up the air fleet, and Congressman Dana Rohrabacher went on KNX News Radio to accuse the Department of Defense of dawdling on adapting C-130 aircraft for fire-fighting.
Yet all week, powerful politicos downplayed the need for more aircraft, including the governor himself. Christine Kehoe of San Diego, the Legislature’s point woman on wildfire response, insisted that a dramatic buildup in air support was not the post-2003 answer to saving vast tracts of wildland-adjacent housing, and accused some critics of “grandstanding.”
“We are spending as much as we possibly can on aircraft,” Kehoe insisted to the L.A. Weekly . Schwarzenegger went even further, complaining, “For someone to complain about aircraft not being available, I think is ridiculous.”
Schwarzenegger, Cal Fire bureaucrats and pilots and many politicians insisted the culprit was not equipment shortages, but the wind. In interview after interview, officials said the Santa Ana winds were often too stiff to use available aircraft, even during the critical “initial attack” phase in which tankers and helicopters can drench fires while the slower-moving ground crews and fire engines race in to respond.
Tension over the issue was extreme.
read on . . .
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posted: November 1, 2007 3:58 EST
Senate Dems caught in a water hazard over torture
By Marc Cooper, LA Weekly
Driving home from a weekend in the mountains on Sunday, listening to news radio, my wife suddenly asked what the term “waterboarding” means.
I explained the gruesome details, which sounded familiar to her as a Chilean who fled the Pinochet dictatorship.
“Oh, you mean torture,” she said. “Why do they make it sound like some sort of new sport?” At which point I suggested she seek nomination as attorney general of the United States.
Her response to the image of someone being tied to a plank and dunked backward into a tub of water seemed a helluva lot more reasonable and authentic than that of Michael Mukasey, the current nominee chosen by the White House to replace Alberto Gonzales. During two days of questioning last week by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mukasey was getting along just swimmingly until he got swept away by a simple, straightforward question: Did he or did he not consider waterboarding to be torture?
Mukasey circularly paddled around the query and finally wound up saying: “I don’t know what’s involved in waterboarding.”
My wife has an excuse. She’s a Spanish teacher whose native language isn’t English. But what’s Mukasey’s story? He’s a retired federal judge and former prosecutor from New York handpicked to replace the very man who gained infamy, in part, by authorizing torture techniques. Does Mukasey need a little memory refresher? Would committee chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) have gotten a more forthright answer if, instead of pursuing his polite questioning, he had pushed aside Larry Craig and held down Mukasey’s head in a nearby Senate toilet bowl for 30 seconds?
“If it amounts to torture, it is not constitutional,” Mukasey said. But he refused to say that waterboarding was torture. Then it got worse. When asked by Democrats whether a U.S. president can blithely bypass a statute, if he can put himself above the law as George W. Bush did in authorizing his warrantless-surveillance program, all of a sudden Mukasey regained his legal memory and, essentially, said “Yes.” His affirmative answer was appropriately cloaked in legalese mumbo jumbo, but his endorsement of extralegal powers by an American president was unequivocal.
Kudos, then, to Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, whose third-tier, nothing-to-lose presidential campaign has let him sprout a formidable pair of cojones . Earlier this week, Dodd said he had already made up his mind to vote no on Mukasey’s confirmation.
“That is about as basic as it gets. You must obey the law. Everyone must,” Dodd said, referring to Mukasey’s odd and chilling legal theory that the president of the United States is somehow not bound to respect the rule of law.
read on . . .
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posted: November 1, 2007 3:53 EST
Oh yeah? How Mukasey and Kerik are haunting Rudy's run.
By Wayne Barrett, Village Voice
The Democrats who questioned attorney general nominee Michael Mukasey at his recent Senate confirmation hearing outdid one another in a frustrating effort to get the former judge to assert his independence from the Bush White House. With his predecessor, Bush pal Alberto Gonzales, finally forced from office, the senators were hoping for a nominee with fewer complicating relationships.
Fat chance. The question for Mukasey is not what he'll do at Justice for the soon-to-be- departing Republican president, but what he'll do for the putative next one, his lifelong friend Rudy Giuliani. Mukasey and Giuliani were young federal prosecutors together in the early 1970s and then practiced at the same Manhattan law firm, Patterson Belknap, where Mukasey returned in 2006 when he retired after 18 years on the federal bench in New York. Giuliani chose Mukasey to swear him in at his inaugurals in 1994 and 1998.
The question of Mukasey's strong ties to Giuliani got the light touch from Senator Pat Leahy, the Judiciary Committee chairman who opened the two-day proceeding by saying that he assumed Mukasey would "totally recuse" himself from "any involvement with Mr. Giuliani or any other candidate for president." Mukasey laughed at the question, as if the answer was obvious, and quickly agreed. But that chuckle rings a little hollow when you look at who had come with him to the hearing: his wife Susan, who volunteered almost daily in the Giuliani mayoral campaigns; his stepson Marc, who was a staff assistant in one campaign and currently is a partner at the Texas-based law firm that Giuliani recently joined, Bracewell & Giuliani; and Louis Freeh, the former FBI director who recently endorsed Giuliani and worked closely with him as a federal prosecutor. Marc Mukasey is currently representing Giuliani Partners in the federal probe of Bernard Kerik, a onetime member of the consulting firm. Freeh's appearance, sitting beside the family, was a stark indication of just how unconsciously political Mukasey's key relationships are. (For Democrats on the committee, the sight of Freeh, who led multiple probes of both Clintons, might have been an indication of Mukasey's partisanship. In Freeh's recent autobiography, he concluded that "the presidency hit an all-time low" under Bill Clinton—who named him to head the FBI, only to wind up as the target of multiple Freeh probes—adding that if he were Clinton, "I might never show my face in public again.")
Mukasey has so far indicated that he will recuse himself in the ongoing probe of Kerik, the ex–police commissioner and onetime Giuliani-backed nominee for homeland security secretary, who has already pleaded guilty in a state case and is facing a mountain of federal charges. But Mukasey's recusal shouldn't really be a problem. The Justice Department agreed months ago to extend the statute of limitations on the case against Kerik to November 17, when his expected indictment may suddenly emerge as a national story haunting the Giuliani campaign. The case is so layered in conflict that Alberto Gonzales is a likely witness. It was Gonzales who vetted Kerik for the homeland-security post in 2004 and was swamped by false claims about him emanating from the fax machines and computers at Giuliani Partners' Times Square headquarters. The Washington Post reported in April that Kerik was "likely" to be indicted for "bald-faced lies" during the White House clearance process, including possible misstatements on forms filled out with the assistance of Giuliani's firm.
read on . . .
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posted: November 1, 2007 3:42 EST
By Michael Clancy, Village Voice
It wasn't much of shock this morning when prosecutors dropped the case against Lindley DeVecchio, the former FBI agent accused of collaborating with mobsters on four murders.
The case was teetering on collapse Tuesday afternoon after the Voice published Tom Robbins' "Tall Tales of a Mafia Mistress", sending both the defense and prosecutors scrambling. The story revealed that the prosecution's star witness, Linda Schiro, contradicted her sworn testimony at the trial in interviews she had in 1997 with Robbins and another reporter, Jerry Capeci. On the stand, she said DeVecchio had a hand in four rubouts. In those interviews, she said DeVecchio only helped ice Patrick Porco.
The Daily News noted that Robbins, whose stories put ex-Giuliani administration official Russell Harding in the clink, has the distinction of writing stories that got one man locked up and helped another guy get out.
• • •
Listen to "The Schiro Tapes."
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posted: November 1, 2007 3:40 EST
A witness for the prosecution of an ex-FBI agent once told a different story
By Tom Robbins, Village Voice
Linda Schiro, the key prosecution witness in the startling murder trial of former FBI agent R. Lindley DeVecchio, took the stand Monday, and it was hard not to find her deadly story convincing.
In a soft voice and a strong South Brooklyn accent, Schiro, 62, nervously but soberly laid out how Lin DeVecchio had regularly visited the homes she shared in Bensonhurst with the love of her life, a swaggering Mafia soldier and secret government informant named Greg Scarpa Sr. On four of those visits, Schiro said, DeVecchio had provided Scarpa with the lethal information that her gangster lover then used to murder four people.
To hear Schiro tell it, there wasn’t much difference between the gangster and the FBI agent. “You know, you have to take care of this, she’s going to be a problem,” she quoted DeVecchio as saying prior to the 1984 murder of a beautiful girlfriend of a high-level member of Scarpa’s Colombo crime family who was allegedly talking to law enforcement.
She had the agent, a smirk on his face, talking the same way in 1987 about a drug-addled member of Scarpa’s crew. “You know,” Schiro said DeVecchio told Scarpa, “we gotta take care of this guy before he starts talking.” The crew member was soon dead as well.
When Supreme Court Justice Gustin Reichbach called the first break of the day, reporters polled one another as to whether this crucial witness was believable.
“If I was him,” said one old hand, pointing at the defendant, “I’d be getting on the A train right now, headed for JFK and a plane someplace far away. He’s dead.” A veteran reporter sitting next to him nodded in agreement.
The first time I heard Linda Schiro, she also sounded convincing.
That was 10 years ago, when Schiro sat down to talk with me and Jerry Capeci, then and now the city’s most knowledgeable organized-crime reporter. But the story she told us then is dramatically different from the one she has now sworn to as the truth.
read on . . .
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October 29th
posted: October 29, 2007 9:13 EST
A fed up writers’ union hopes to appeal to a sense of fair play. In Hollywood.
By D. Heimpel, LA Weekly
“You get asked by the network to do another season,” 35-year-old Dennis Michael Nemec said last week, “you feel like you are getting traction.” But with his union nudging closer to a potential strike against major studios well equipped to weather a long work stoppage, he says, “The notion that a strike could pull the rug out from under you is very daunting.” As he thinks about the prospect of 100 or more people who work on his show suddenly unemployed around the holidays, he adds, “It certainly doesn’t help me sleep at night.”
Nemec just wants to work. But if the Writers Guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers decide to fight, it could not only cost the industry hundreds of millions of dollars — it could also derail the careers of thousands.
Marshall Goldberg, a writer who, unlike his colleagues, found writing work after the long and painful 1988 writers’ strike, sees a walkout as almost inevitable, saying, “To make an omelet you have to break some eggs.” Still, he’s worried about the “sacrifices and costs. It’s not just dollars, it’s career momentum.”
The writers’ key goals, as they approach the October 31 expiration of the three-year agreement between the guild and the alliance, are to resist numerous rollbacks sought by the producers to make sure they get a fair shake on new media, and to rectify the WGA’s hasty acceptance, years ago, of a pay formula for writers’ work that went to video. That deal provided the writers residuals based on just 20 percent of gross sales. Distributors kept the lion’s share of the money from gross sales — an acknowledgment of the then-high price of manufacturing videos. But as profits for video, DVD and now downloads have shot up and the price of manufacturing has dropped dramatically, the writers’ cut has stayed the same.
“The guild’s loudness today comes from a sense of being screwed on the residual formula for video,” an insider with extensive negotiation experience says. With the Internet promising to revolutionize content delivery, writers want to be sure they don’t get screwed again.
read on . . .
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posted: October 29, 2007 9:05 EST
Glenn Beck gloats while L.A. blazes
By Marc Cooper, LA Weekly
WHERE I LIVE, ON THE EDGE of Topanga Canyon, our cars are dusted with ash and our nostrils tickled with the scent of charred wood. We’ve got one eye on a darkened skyline and the other on the tube, lest we be warned to get out, and get out now.
It’s hardly the first time much of L.A. or — in this case — entire swaths of California have been ablaze. Every five or 10 years, it seems, some sort of biblical inferno sweeps through and brazenly reminds us who, or what, is really in charge. By nature’s whim, a population sometimes lulled into believing that it alone — or at least its representatives — determines the course of history is humbled by forces it cannot comprehend or properly anticipate.
But this round of wildfires coincides with a time in which more than hillsides and homes are being incinerated. There’s also a part of our national character that’s been consumed. This week’s firestorms bear no blame for the ongoing degradation of our civic culture. They merely and starkly illuminate it.
I refer to the comments made last week by CNN host Glenn Beck on his nationally syndicated radio show. As the news buzzed that flames in Malibu were roaring down the hillsides and licking the Pacific, driving some Hollywood big names into a panicked exile, Beck could hardly contain his delight.
“We all love America. We just disagree on how we should function, what we should do, big government, small government. It doesn’t mean you hate America,” he told his audience. “I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today.”
Ordinarily, I’d laugh off such a jackass remark. But it’s not so funny when the soot is falling in your own yard, when as many as a half million people in 265,000 households have been forced to evacuate, when a thousand homes have been wiped out, when one victim has died and at least a dozen others have suffered burns, when firefighters say they are stretched beyond limits and are worried about losing further control of the more than 15 separate raging fires, when a state of emergency has been declared, and when the governor has mobilized 1,500 National Guard troops to help stem the disaster.
You really have to wonder what sort of nitwit would get on the radio and gloat over this catastrophe. What sort of pea-brain actually believes that capitalist millionaires like Jeff Katzenberg and David Geffen are America-hating firebrands who merit getting burned out of their homes?
Glenn Beck, of course, is the one who really hates America. At a minimum, he openly detests an American democracy that allows the sort of tepid, and — yes — often self-serving, hypocritical and annoying, public political activism of a Barbra, a Cher and some of their beachside neighbors. But they really are a joke, not a threat to be vaguely compared to Osama bin Laden.
read on . . .
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