Politics

I’ll be starting here.

If you’re interested in getting a Blue Button, we just updated the web site with more information on how to get one, including a list of galleries that have them.

Here is a map of all of the feeder marches planned to join the anti-war rally around 1st Avenue/49th Street this Saturday, Feb. 15.

The city has not approved any marches, only the stationary rally.

The same web site provides legal info regarding your rights as a demonstrator in NYC.

After my experience with the Matthew Shepard march in 1998, I don’t trust the police to follow the law. Their approach has often been to break it anyway and let people sue.

A federal judge has denied a permit allowing the anti-war march on February 15 to march to the U.N., saying that heightened security concerns posed by up to 100,000 protesters would threaten the public safety and security of the U.N. Instead a stationary rally will be allowed five blocks away. The judge says it is constitutional to ban all marching in Mahattan.

NY Newsday also reports that the NYPD has approved no permits for demonstrations since the fall of 2002.

Apparently things like the St. Patrick’s Day Parade don’t have the same kinds of security concerns that political speech does.

A reminder: I’ll be joining this group, assembling at the NYPL on Fifth Avenue. If you’re going to be there, send me an email if you don’t have already have my cell phone number, so we can meet up.

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Update: Jim Henley has good ongoing coverage of this.

The Economist has an interesting article on a recent paper by Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern. The article has a link to the full paper for my hardcore economics readers. As someone who travels there regularly, I have always been uncomfortable with standard economic analyses that show that Europe is much poorer than us, because I just don’t see it, even ignoring the median vs. mean issues involved in comparing countries with radically different wealth distribution profiles.

A significant part of his argument is that GDP is so bad at measuring things like quality of life. Our spending on air conditioning and heat, because our climate is harsher, counts towards our higher GDP. So does our inefficient transportation system — we spend more on cars and roads rather than on public transit — and the fact that we spend much more on home and business security plus prisons, since we have a much higher crime rate.

Not content with harassing the children of WTC victims for being unpatriotic, Bill O’Reilly refers to Mexicans as wetbacks, or coyotes.

Carpeicthus supplies us with a transcript from Bill O’Reilly, where he attacks the son of a WTC victim for being unpatriotic, for bringing up the fact that we trained the mujahadeens in Afghanistan, who trained al Quaeda.

…

O’REILLY: You are mouthing a far left position that is a marginal position in this society, which you’re entitled to.
GLICK: It’s marginal — right.
O’REILLY: You’re entitled to it, all right, but you’re — you see, even — I’m sure your beliefs are sincere, but what upsets me is I don’t think your father would be approving of this.
GLICK: Well, actually, my father thought that Bush’s presidency was illegitimate.
O’REILLY: Maybe he did, but…
GLICK: I also didn’t think that Bush…
O’REILLY: … I don’t think he’d be equating this country as a terrorist nation as you are.
GLICK: Well, I wasn’t saying that it was necessarily like that.
O’REILLY: Yes, you are. You signed…
GLICK: What I’m saying is…
O’REILLY: … this, and that absolutely said that.
GLICK: … is that in — six months before the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan, starting in the Carter administration and continuing and escalating while Bush’s father was head of the CIA, we recruited a hundred thousand radical mujahadeens to combat a democratic government in Afghanistan, the Turaki government.
O’REILLY: All right. I don’t want to…
GLICK: Maybe…
O’REILLY: I don’t want to debate world politics with you.
GLICK: Well, why not? This is about world politics.
O’REILLY: Because, No. 1, I don’t really care what you think.
GLICK: Well, OK.
O’REILLY: You’re — I want to…
GLICK: But you do care because you…
O’REILLY: No, no. Look…
GLICK: The reason why you care is because you evoke 9/11…
O’REILLY: Here’s why I care.
GLICK: … to rationalize…
O’REILLY: Here’s why I care…
GLICK: Let me finish. You evoke 9/11 to rationalize everything from domestic plunder to imperialistic aggression worldwide.
O’REILLY: OK. That’s a bunch…
GLICK: You evoke sympathy with the 9/11 families.
O’REILLY: That’s a bunch of crap. I’ve done more for the 9/11 families by their own admission — I’ve done more for them than you will ever hope to do.
GLICK: OK.
O’REILLY: So you keep your mouth shut when you sit here exploiting those people.
GLICK: Well, you’re not representing me. You’re not representing me.
O’REILLY: And I’d never represent you. You know why?
GLICK: Why?
O’REILLY: Because you have a warped view of this world and a warped view of this country.

…

Go read the whole thing. O’Reilly eventually has his mic cut rather than debate him, and apologizes to his listeners that he put such a person on his how.

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Update: Tom Tomorrow seems to have a more “official” transcript.

Peter Turnley is a photographer who refused to join the pool covering the first Gulf War, because he knew that it was designed to be “a major impediment for photojournalists in their quest to communicate the realities of war”. He has now published his photos of that war online.

They appeared to have changed the caption to this picture in the online version of the story about the raid on a London Mosque.

My print edition had this:

Lost your chewing gum?

I was shocked when I saw this. What’s next? Asking Jews at the Wailing Wall whether that’s a nervous tic?

Here is where I’ll be for the anti-war demo on February 15.

Note that there is still no march permit. NYC has refused to grant one so far.

Sunday’s NY Times had a column by Thomas Friedman on Iraq/American/Europe that was laughably bad. I can’t believe it even ran. I wanted to write something about it, but Tom Coates at plasticbag.org has done a much better job.