New Yorkers Paying for Giuliani's Booty Calls?

Or as Josh Marshall (of TPM) calls it "Government Funded Shagging."

[This is the missing "miscellaneous" items that I didn't blog about in yesterday's post plus the juicy new Rudy Giuliani stuff.]

ooooo this is very juicy stuff, very juicy stuff that combines both scandalous sex (he was visiting a mistress...you know, cheating on his wife...again) and ripping off the tax payers.

As New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons, according to previously undisclosed government records.

The documents, obtained by Politico under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, show that the mayoral costs had nothing to do with the functions of the little-known city offices that defrayed his tabs, including agencies responsible for regulating loft apartments, aiding the disabled and providing lawyers for indigent defendants.

At the time, the mayor’s office refused to explain the accounting to city auditors, citing “security.”

Mmmm, delicious. You know, it is well known that this guy is a serial womanizer and that he's never been able to remain faithful to any woman so it's not as if this is a surprise. But this does reinforce that image and provides a good story easy for media dissemination that will continually highlight such personal flaws.

Now, we all have personal flaws (ask Bill Clinton) so I don't think these things necessarily should disqualify one from office but there is more to this than simple infidelity:

1) He is running for the Republican nomination and he is trying to court the votes of conservatives including social conservatives. When you run a party so freakin high and mighty and "morality" based you would think that, I don't know...stuff like this matters.

2) It's not just infidelity, it is corruption, abuse of power, and a scandal that shows how Rudy has taken the taxpayers of New York for their money, all so he could get him some tail. Add this with the stench of corruption that follows him due to his (former) best buddy Bernie Kerik -- who ALSO used taxpayer money to get him some sex -- and there is a perfect narrative that Democrats and other Republican candidates can use to pummel Giuliani with.

I hope this seriously undermines his campaing because I DO NOT LIKE GIULIANI!! Look at my profile, click the video, watch it....you'll understand why I'm so afraid that a man like this could even possibly be the next President of the United States.

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FBI: Widely Reported Threat to Fort Huachuca unfounded

Just read, the original scare was like a Republicans wet dream..

A plot by dozens of foreign terrorists who purportedly planned to attack Fort Huachuca with rocket propelled grenades and mines has proved unfounded, an FBI spokesman said Monday.

The threat, detailed by a local television station and The Washington Times [had to be..] after information was recently leaked to them, involved Iraqi and Afghan terrorists working with a Mexican drug cartel to smuggle themselves and weapons across the U.S. border.

It's got it all. Iraqis, Afghans, terrorist attacks at home, plus they even managed to add in Mexicans kingpins and smuggling things across the border!! It's a damn wingnuts wetdream. It's the kind of headlines that they dream about. The kind of headline that would produce instant wood at a very embarrassing moment that one time in gym class when I was in front of everyone doing sit up...*cough* sorry...anyways...

Seriously though, all that's missing from the story is to add that the terrorists were also gay and made man-love with the Mexicans prior to the operation, while a group of black thugs performed an abortion and then had sex before marriage.

And there was a midget...yeah, I bet you didn't know they hated midgets.

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UN Human Development Report: World Must Fix Climate in 10 years

Unless the international community agrees to cut carbon emissions by half over the next generation, climate change is likely to cause large-scale human and economic setbacks and irreversible ecological catastrophes, a U.N. report said on Tuesday.

The U.N. Human Development Report issued one of the strongest warnings yet of the lasting impact of climate change on living standards and a strong call for urgent collective action. "We could be on the verge of seeing human development reverse for the first time in 30 years," Kevin Watkins, lead author of the report, told Reuters.

The report, presented in Brasilia on Tuesday, sets targets and a road map to reduce carbon emissions before a U.N. climate summit next month in Bali, Indonesia. Emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere help trap heat and lead to global warming.

"The message for Bali is the world cannot afford to wait. It has less than a decade to change course," said Watkins, a senior research fellow at Britain's Oxford University. Dangerous climate change will be unavoidable if in the next 15 years emissions follow the same trend as the past 15 years, the report said.

To avoid catastrophic impact, the rise in global temperature must be limited to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius). But carbon emissions mostly from cars and power plants are twice the level needed to meet that target, the U.N. authors said.

Climate change threatens to condemn millions of people to poverty, the UNDP said. Climate disasters between 2000 and 2004 affected 262 million people, 98 percent of them in the developing world. The poor are often forced to sell productive assets or save on food, health, and education, creating "life-long cycles of disadvantage."

HOMES, FOOD, WATER IMPERILED

A temperature rise of between 5.4 and 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit (3 and 4 degrees Celsius) would displace 340 million people through flooding, droughts would diminish farm output, and retreating glaciers would cut off drinking water from as many as 1.8 billion people, the report said.

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Evidence for a Parallel Universe? - I don't to even understand most of the stuff here, but I thought it might be interesting to someone. Hey does anyone remember that show 'Sliders'? I used to watch that show all the time!!

Well that it for tonight. I have a lot of thinking to do (decisions) and I've put off thinking about it long enough. But I needed everything off my plate first so here I am two days in a row.

Goodnight

The Return of the Roundup

[I'm not saying the blogging hiatus is done for sure....but suddenly I had the energy to do a regular post, as opposed to the lazy stuff I've been doing the last couple post (for the MySpace blog at least).

In good news, I finally did what I should have done long ago: I uninstalled and then re-installed Firefox. God, I LOVE Firefox!! Internet Explorer is horrible. I mean, how is it that I updated to a newer version yesterday and its actually slower, and more prone to crash and lose all tabs than the older version? Maybe its no coincidence that today is the day I chose to start blogging again.]

[End of Post Update: I decided against adding a Miscellaneous section, opting to add those in a latter post, or perhaps in a stand alone post]

For todays roundup I have a few things in store:

- The Middle East Peace Summit in Annapolis
- Immigration and Racism
- Miscellaneous (but interesting stuff)

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The Middle East Peace Summit in Annapolis

Recently Israel and the Palestinians (and by that I mean only the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority...more on that in the next story) have come together, along with with the US and representatives of various Arab governments in an international summit to revive the stalled Peace Process. (AFP)

Israel and the Palestinians opened a major international conference here Tuesday with a pledge to immediately resume talks frozen for seven years and seek a deal by the end of 2008.

Flanked by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas, US President George W. Bush read out a joint statement agreed just moments before the meeting began in Annapolis, Maryland.

"We agree to engage in vigorous, ongoing and continuous negotiations and shall make every effort to conclude an agreement before the end of 2008," the statement said.

Abbas said the conference and international climate presented an exceptional opportunity for peace that would "not repeat itself," while Olmert vowed Israel was prepared to make a "painful compromise" to achieve peace.

Launching the biggest initiative of his presidency to revive the Middle East Peace process, Bush, who is nearing the end of his eight-year term, said the time was now ripe for an end to the six-decade conflict.

"In light of recent developments, some have suggested that now is not the right time to pursue peace. I disagree," Bush told delegates from more than 50 countries and organizations.

"I believe that now is precisely the right time to begin these negotiations -- for a number of reasons," he insisted, citing a new willingness among the leaders of both sides, and global support for fresh negotiations.

Also he added "the time is right because a battle is underway for the future of the Middle East -- and we must not cede victory to the extremists."

Now, I'm not sure how this international summit will end, but I have nothing but all the best wishes that President Bush (and I have no choice but place my faith in him here...), the Israelis, Palestinians, and the surrounding Arab countries can really come together and hammer a peace deal.

Such a deal would be such a great achievement and development in the Middle East (and for perceptions of the US in the Middle East).

In an administration that has failed in everything, and deservedly wrought the shame and criticism of the whole world, I seriously would not mind one bit if he partially saved his legacy and pulled out something good with this summit...in fact I would be ecstatic for a true deal.

With that said, it should never be forgotten that the deterioration of Israel/Palestinian relations was enabled in no small part by the "green-light" President Bush gave at the beginning of his administration for Israel to "get tough" with the Palestinians. Well, they certainly did, and violence ensued for quite a while, making coming together for negotiations again extremely unlikely until now.

But there are some concerns with the conference. For one neither Hamas will attend, nor will Iran attend.

Hamas has denounced the conference and thousand of Hamas supporters waving the group's green flag demonstrated in Gaza City Tuesday to reject the US-championed conference.

Why is this a problem? Well, you may remember a while back that there was a mini-Palestinian civil war between Islam-oriented Hamas and the secular-oriented Fatah, the end result being the forceful expulsion of Fatah from the Gaza Strip.

In other words, the Palestinians and their lands are divided. There is no one person controlling or purporting to speak for all Palestinians. And that complicates the international summit because, without the presence of Hamas (which I doubt the US would accept anyways) at the summit, any agreement entered into by the Palestinian Authority (Fatah) would not cover or bind the other Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. And that is problematic.

And Iran, as one of the big backers of Hamas, and a significant (and ever increasing) power in the region, really should be at that conference as well. Again, I doubt the US would let them in...they would probably think it was rewarding Iran with legitimacy or something...

Actually, I might have jumped the gun a bit since the next link in the roundup deals with the reactions of many foreign policy heavy-weights: Hamas and Iran should be involved in the Summit

Via Steve Clemons of TPMuckracker:

This tidbit just appeared in Robin Wright's recent reporting on the Annapolis Summit in an article titled "Iran: The Uninvited Wildcard in Mideast Talks":

Iran will still have leverage in the event of peace, Arab officials concede. Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal said yesterday that any peace agreement would eventually have to include Hamas, since it controls Gaza and half the Palestinian Authority. Moreover, the two major Palestinian parties -- Hamas and Fatah, which controls the West Bank -- would need to join a national unity government, he said.

An agreement signed by Israeli and Palestinian leaders would need ratification by their respective parliaments, and Hamas still controls the Palestinian parliament.

"Unless you bring Hamas in tune with what is happening on the peace side, you are really not fulfilling a basic requirement," Faisal said. "One man cannot make peace; not even half a people can make peace," he told a roundtable of U.S. journalists. "There has to be consensus about peace among the Palestinians for this to go smoothly."

I just thought it worth noting that people ranging from former Secretary of State Colin Powell to former New Jersey Governor and Bush administration cabinet member Christine Todd Whitman (who headed the National Democratic Institute election monitoring mission of the 2005 Palestinian elections) to former US Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki to former National Security Advisors Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft to former Senators Nancy Kassebaum Baker, Gary Hart, Lincoln Chafee, Larry Pressler, Birch Bayh and many others from both sides of the aisle agree with the Saudi Foreign Minister.

And that is why it is so important to have Iran at the table: The leverage they have with Hamas, and the pressure only they could put on Hamas could make a deal palatable to both sides that much more likely. Of course this all assumes that Iran would be invited...

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Immigration and Racism

Pat Buchanan is back, and he's coming out with a new book. For those who don't know Pat Buchanan all too well he can properly be described as a big time nativist on immigration, and I would argue...well, he's kinda racist. Let's read what he had to say on Sean Hannity's show.

Buchanan: "America [is] committing suicide" while "Asians, Africans, and Latin American children come to inherit the estate"

MSNBC political analyst Pat Buchanan appeared on the November 26 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes to discuss his new book, Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, And Greed Are Tearing America Apart (Thomas Dunne Books, November 2007), in which he writes that America is "on a path to national suicide" and later asks: "How is America committing suicide?" answering: "Every way a nation can." He proceeds to claim that "[t]he American majority is not reproducing itself. ... Forty-five million of its young have been destroyed in the womb since Roe v. Wade, as Asian, African, and Latin American children come to inherit the estate the lost generation of American children never got to see."

On Hannity & Colmes, Buchanan asserted: "You've got a wholesale invasion, the greatest invasion in human history, coming across your southern border, changing the composition and character of your country. You've got the melting pot that once welded us all together, which has broken down." Co-host Sean Hannity went on to ask him: "Do you really believe that America, the country we all love as we know it, is in jeopardy of existing?" Buchanan responded: "I think America may exist, but I'll tell you this: I do believe we're going to lose the American Southwest. I think it is almost inevitable." He continued: "If we do not put a fence on that border ...you're going to have 100 million Hispanics in the country, most of them new immigrants from Mexico, which believes that belongs to them.

There are several things here which set me off.

First is this whole nutball conspiracy that grips the imaginations of Republicans, conservatives, and anti-immigrant people that Mexicans coming into the US want to bring the Southwest US back to Mexico and they are achieving this by demographics first, and when there are soooo many Mexicans you can't go 2 steps, they suddenly secede back to Mexico....

Yeah, I KNOW that sounds crazy!!! But these people live in real fear of such a ridiculous notion...as if that would ever happen!!

That's just crazy, but it is the next thing which really rubs me the wrong way about these people.

Read what he says again: The implicit assumption, the implicit argument that Buchanan and people like him make are that anybody that is not from the white-majority (even US citizens by birth like myself who happens to be Mexican-descended) is not really American like white people are the "real Americans."

"as Asian, African, and Latin American children come to inherit the estate the lost generation of American children never got to see."

And this is what makes some of these nativists racist: They believe, I mean it goes without saying for them, that only Americans of the "majority" (i.e. White) are true Americans. What it also means is that Buchanan and his type would never consider me, my family, nor most of my friends as "real Americans." Because my parents where both from Mexico, am I not an American like all others?

And that really does piss me off. The nerve of this jackass to tell us who is the real American and who isn't!!

And if you think about it, it's so amazingly ridiculous: Unlike many countries, being American has never been about any particular race or ethnicity. It is the very nature of this nation that it has served as a place where many peoples, races, colors, and religions have come together, all at once different, and at the same time all American.

Because being American is not about any race, it is about what binds all these people of such diverse backgrounds as one people: It is not any one religion, or race, but a shared abstract identity of being American.

Our shared American history, our shared perception as being American, and our shared veneration of our "civic-religion" that is our knowledge, respect, and veneration for The American System as it is embodied in the system passed down to us from the Founders in the United States Constitution.

This is not Japan, where ethnicity and nationality are more closely involved in what goes into definining what "being Japanese" means. In America, it is more abstract...and in that way it has the potential to be much more inclusive. One of the reasons, I suspect, that this nation has always benefited and gained from every wave of immigration it has seen, and not suffered so much as in many European nations:

Here it doesn't matter where you come, or where your parents came from because any and all people can become Americans.

And they are all "real" American, no matter what people like Buchanan have to say.