Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

Labels: 2008 election, Republicans, Rudy, Rudy Giuliani

Rudy Giuliani has hit the skids in a Florida freefall that could shatter his presidential campaign and leave a two-man Republican contest in the state between John McCain and Mitt Romney, a Miami Herald poll shows.

Despite hovering over Florida voters for weeks, Giuliani is tied for third place with the scarcely visible Mike Huckabee in a statewide poll of 800 likely voters.

With his poll numbers slipping back home in the Northeast, Giuliani's campaign will implode if he can't turn it around in the six days left before Florida's Jan. 29 vote, the final gateway before a blitz of primaries around the nation that could sew up the race.

''He may be running for president, but with these numbers he wouldn't be elected governor of Florida,'' said Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway, whose firm conducted the survey with Democratic pollsters Schroth, Eldon & Associates for The Herald, The St. Petersburg Times and Bay News 9. Alluding to the timeworn song, Conway added: ``If he can't make it there in Florida, he can't make it anywhere.''

Asked about the 13 percent of the voters who haven't made up their minds, pollster Rob Schroth said he didn't expect them to fuel a Giuliani comeback.

''Giuliani for all intents and purposes has virtually no chance to win in Florida,'' he said.

...the leading Republicans are waging fierce campaigns in Florida, the biggest prize yet of the primary season. McCain is narrowly leading the Republican field with 25 percent of the vote, followed by Romney with 23 percent. The gap is within the poll's margin of error, placing the Arizona senator and the former Massachusetts governor in a statistical tie.

Statewide, Giuliani received support from 15 percent, down from 36 percent in a Miami Herald poll in November. The poll was conducted Jan. 20-22, after Fred Thompson came up short in the South Carolina primary but before he quit the race Tuesday afternoon.

Huckabee, a charismatic former Baptist minister, is popular among frequent churchgoers, young voters and residents of the conservative Panhandle of the state, according to the poll. Romney was the second choice for born-again Christians, suggesting that his Mormon religion is not a political liability. His stronghold is the southwest part of the state.

''Giuliani has gone from a prohibitive favorite to a second-tier candidate. . . and the drop is traceable to dramatic erosion in South Florida,'' said Tom Eldon, Schroth's pollingpartner.

After retreating from New Hampshire weeks ago, Giuliani's campaign decided to hunker down in Florida and argued that the state would catapult him to the nomination. What the campaign failed to anticipate was that his poll numbers would plunge as rivals picked off smaller states with earlier contests.

''This Giuliani campaign strategy of betting it all on Florida somehow miscalculated how Florida voters would disregard his performance in other states -- it does matter to them if somebody has been a loser,'' Conway said.

''Giuliani's decision to pull out of the early states is going to go down in history,'' Eldon added.

Labels: 2008 election, elections, Florida, politics, presidential candidates, Republicans, Rudy, Rudy Giuliani

Giuliani firetruck ride splits firefighters
BY MARC CAPUTO
Rudy Giuliani's plan to ride in a Miami-Dade firetruck in Sunday's Three Kings parade has outraged some firefighters who say the presidential candidate has ''lied'' about his 9/11 record because he did too little to equip and protect emergency workers.

The controversy -- unwittingly set in motion by County Commissioner Rebeca Sosa -- has politically pitted firefighters against one another in Miami-Dade as well as in New York. To quiet the feud, the IAFF's local Miami-Dade chapter, 1403, will cover its numbers on the union-owned firetruck by draping it with an American flag.

Giuliani's campaign said he will probably ride in the truck and walk beside it with firefighters.

The campaign responded to questions about his record with a statement that stressed his generous spending on New York emergency management agencies. It also dismissed some firefighter attacks on his mayoral record as a partisan smear linked to the Democratic-leaning International Association of Fire Fighters union, which released a popular but questionable YouTube video and website calling the Republican's leadership an ``Urban Legend.''

Jim Riches, a recently retired New York firefighter featured in the union's media, told The Miami Herald that Giuliani doesn't deserve to go anywhere near a flag-draped firetruck.

''This is improper. Rudy lied about what he did on 9/11. He's giving the appearance he's backed by firefighters and he isn't,'' Riches said, ``Rudy has to go all the way down to Florida to get firefighters to stand next to him because he can't get that support in New York.'' ...

...Riches said he believes his son, Jimmy Riches, died in the north tower of the World Trade Center because the radio system and command were so ineffective that he never got the word to evacuate.

''We had the same radio system we had when the World Trade Center was attacked in 1993,'' he said. ``We didn't have respirators to help with the cleanup and rescue, so now 70 percent of first responders are sick. And he promoted people to the top who all ran before the towers fell.''

Riches learned of Giuliani's invitation in an e-mail to all Metro-Dade Firefighters union members that listed local firefighter Joaquin Del Cueto as a contact. Closing with ''ALL HANDS ON DECK!!!'' the e-mail invites members to meet Giuliani, wear Giuliani T-shirts and walk beside the firetruck to ``GET OUT THE VOTE!!!!'' ...

Labels: 2008 election, Florida, presidential candidates, Republicans, Rudy

Labels: GWOT, Rudy

So not only is Rudy Giuliani a terrible guy to be married to (you'll find out when he throws you over for a NEW socialite, Judith...) he's also a bald-faced (no pun intended) liar, when it comes to his citation of statistics.

Previous:

• Don't call it a hit job
• The Elderly White Man Talking Show, starring Anderson Cooper
• The Rudy and Judy Show! Sponsored by, the Taxpayers of New York City
• He said it
• More Rudy on the ReidBlog

Labels: 2008 election, cheaters, presidential candidates, Republicans, Rudy, Rudy and Judy, Rudy Giuliani

Labels: 2008 election, cheaters, presidential candidates, Republicans, Rudy, Rudy and Judy, Rudy Giuliani

Labels: 2008, elections, hypocrites, news and politics, presidential candidates, Republicans, Rudy, Rudy Giuliani

Rudy with his pal and supporter Sean Hannity on Fox News, the network
run by Roger Ailes -- who is also an advisor to ... Rudy's campaign

Labels: neocons, Rudy, scary right wingers

A 15-page "memorandum for the record," prepared by a commission counsel and dated April 20, 2004, quotes Giuliani conceding that it wasn't until "after 9/11" that "we brought in people to brief us on al Qaeda." According to the memorandum, Giuliani told two commission members and five staffers: "But we had nothing like this pre 9/11, which was a mistake, because if experts share a lot of info," there would be a "better chance of someone making heads and tails" of the "situation." (Such memoranda are not verbatim transcripts of the confidential commission interviews, but are described on the cover page as "100 percent accurate" notes taken by staffers, stamped "commission sensitive/unclassified" on the top of each page.)

Asked about the “flow of information about al Qaeda threats from 1998-2001,” Giuliani said: “At the time, I wasn’t told it was al Qaeda, but now that I look back at it, I think it was al Qaeda.” He also said that as part of one of his post-9/11 briefings, “we had in Bodansky, who had written a book on bin Laden.” Giuliani was referring to Yossef Bodanksy, the author of Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America, which was published in 1999 and predicted “spectacular terrorist strikes in Washington and/or New York.” Giuliani wrote in his own book, Leadership, that Judi Nathan got him a copy of Bodansky’s prophetic work “shortly after 9/11,” and that he covered it in “highlighter and notes,” citing his study of it as an example of how he “mastered a subject.” Apparently, he also invited Bodansky to address key members of his staff.

Giuliani attributed his pre-9/11 shortcomings in part to the FBI, which was run by his close friend (and current endorser) Louis Freeh, and to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, an FBI-directed partnership with the NYPD. "We already had JTTF, and got flow information no one else got," he explained. "But did we get the flow of information we wanted? No. We would be told about a threat, but not about the underlying nature of the threat. I wanted all the same information the FBI had, and we didn't get that until after 9/11. Immediately after 9/11, we were made a complete partner." He added: "Without 9/11, I never would have been able to send an adviser to FBI briefings."

Labels: 2008, elections, politics, presidential candidates, Republicans, Rudy, Rudy Giuliani

Labels: 2008, elections, Hillary Clinton, presidential candidates, Rudy

Former Environmental Protection Agency Chief Christine Whitman is testifying at a congressional hearing about the environmental impact of the September 11th attacks in Washington today.

Whitman took the stand at the hearing, led by Manhattan Congressman Jerrold Nadler, to answer questions about the cleanup of the Trade Center site. The former EPA head famously declared the air around the site to be safe to breathe just days after the attacks. But in the nearly six years since, thousands of first responders have come down with respiratory problems.

Speaking on WNBC yesterday, Whitman criticized former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his staff for not adequately protecting workers, saying the city should have made them wear respirators.

"It wasn't nearly as clear who was in charge. The city is the primary responder,” said Whitman. “And then you have OSHA can't enforce – interestingly enough OSHA regulations can't be imposed on public servants and those were mostly, by the time you started the real clean-up, firefighters, emergency responders. EPA was not in charge of being able to enforce that."

“Every effort was made by Mayor Giuliani and his staff to ensure the safety of all workers at Ground Zero in the aftermath of this unprecedented act of terror," said former deputy mayor Joe Lhota in the press release. "All workers at Ground Zero were instructed repeatedly to wear their respirators. This is well-documented and indisputable. No one from the City ever tried to block the Environmental Protection Agency. Any statement or suggestion to the contrary is simply baseless. Administrator Whitman never voiced any of these concerns at the time – not at the daily meetings which included federal, state and local officials, not at any press conferences. Doing so now is revisionist at best.”

Labels: 9/11, Rudy, Rudy Giuliani, September 11

Paul Singer is a vulture. And a billionaire. And, with his underlings at Elliott Associates, the number one sugar-daddy donor to the presidential campaign of Rudy Giuliani, dropping $168,400 so far and, according to secret campaign documents, committed to raise $10 million for Rudolf the Great, Emperor of 9/11.

So who is this bird of prey Singer who holds Rudy in his beak?

Unlike feathered predators, Singer preys on the living. Singer figured out a way to siphon off funds intended for debt relief to some of the poorest countries in the world. Nice guy.

And by the way, I didn't come up with the moniker "vulture." Just about everyone, from the new Prime Minister of Britain to the World Bank, calls Singer and his ilk "vultures."

Here's how a vulture operation works. The vulture fund buys up the debt of poor nations cheaply when it is about to be written off and then sue for the full value of the debt plus interest -- sometimes more than ten times what they paid for it. Singer, for example, paid just $10 million for Congo Brazzaville's debt and is now suing for over $400 million.

Singer knew he'd turn a 1000%-plus profit on his $10 million investment with George Bush's help.

Bush convinced the US Congress to forgive the money Congo owes the US taxpayer, but once the US taxpayer forgives Congo's debt, the vulture, Singer, swoops in with lawyers to claim, "Congo now has the money to pay ME."

But wait a minute - the debt money given up by US taxpayers wasn't supposed to go to Rudy's predator Singer. In fact, the US Constitution provides power to the President to stop vultures from suing a foreign country in a US court if the President states such a private lawsuit interferes with America's foreign policy.

Singer, by suing Congo for the taxpayer money meant for debt relief and medicine, is interfering with US foreign policy. Yet Bush has done nothing.

While the President has made big speeches about debt relief for Africa and has even had his picture taken with a Bono, he won't get in the way of Singer's talons. One wonders if the President is influenced by Mr. Singer's strong support for debt relief, that is, debt relief for the Republican Party. The world's top vulture has become top donor to the GOP in New York.

Singer's not alone. He's joined in tearing at the flesh of the Congo's poor by a Washington operator named Michael Francis Sheehan. Sheehan is also known as "Goldfinger."

Besides joining Singer in attacking Congo, Goldfinger has also taken a piece of the debt relief earmarked for AIDS medicine for Zambia. Goldfinger paid $4 million for the right to collect on Zambia's debt - and just won $22 million from Zambia in a UK court, half that nation's debt relief. Goldfinger was able to seize that money because, he boasts in an email, he secretly paid $2 million to the "favorite charity" of Zambia's president. (That former President, Frederick Chiluba, is now under arrest for taking bribes ... but Goldfinger can still collect his pound of flesh.) ...

One wonders whether Rudy -- who has made fear and 9/11 his carrion just as sure as his fundraisers have done with Africa's poor --  should add a thirteenth "commitment" (not one on his marriage, because we all know how much he values commitments of that sort...) to his presidential "to do" list: this one to hedge fund managers everywhere: "I will help you to get even richer, probably at the expense of some black or brown kid with flies in his eyes... just as I have enriched myself on the graves 9/11."

Thank you, Uncle Rudy!

  

Labels: 2008, Africa, GOP, presidential candidates, Republicans, Rudy, Rudy Giuliani

"I agree with what Fareed Zakaria wrote in Newsweek this week, which is that terrorism isn't bombs and explosions and death... terrorism is when you change your society because of those explosions... and you become fearful to the point that you shut out immigration, you shut out student exchanges, you keep people out of buildings ... and begin to act in an almost fascist manner because you're afraid of what might happen to you, and that's when terrorism becomes real, and frighteningly succesful. That's what I believe, and that's why I question the way Giuliani has raised this issue. He raises it as a specter, and in a wierd way, he helps the bad guys."

Labels: Ben Affleck, Chris Matthews, elections, Hardball, media, politics, presidnetial candidates, Rudy, Rudy Giuliani

How could Giuliani say with a straight face that he "hates" abortion," while also seeking public funding for it? How can he hate abortion and contribute to Planned Parenthood in 1993, 1994, 1998 and 1999? And how was he able for many years to defend the horrible procedure by which the brains are sucked from the heads of viable, late-term, un-anesthetized babies? Those beliefs are philosophically and morally incompatible. What kind of man would even try to reconcile them?

This self-styled defender of marriage says he is "proud" of having submitted, as New York's mayor, a bill creating "domestic partnerships" for homosexual couples. Admittedly, many liberal Americans will agree with the social positions espoused by Giuliani. However, I don't believe conservative voters whose support he seeks will be impressed. Presidential elections are won or lost by slim margins. Rudy has an uphill slog ahead of him, even though he is the darling of the media.

There are other moral concerns about Giuliani's candidacy that conservatives should find troubling. He has been married three times, and his second wife was forced to go to court to keep his mistress out of the mayoral mansion while the Giuliani family still lived there. Talk about tap dancing. Also during that time, the mayor used public funds to provide security services for his girlfriend. The second Mrs. Giuliani finally had enough of his philandering and, as the story goes, forced him to move out. He lived with friends for a while and then married his mistress. Unlike some other Republican presidential candidates, Giuliani appears not to have remorse for cheating on his wife.

Harry Truman asked, "How can I trust a man if his wife can't?" It is a very good question. Here's another one: Is Rudy Giuliani presidential timber? I think not. Can we really trust a chief executive who waffles and feigns support for policies that run contrary to his alleged beliefs? Of greater concern is how he would function in office. Will we learn after it is too late just what the former mayor really thinks? What we know about him already is troubling enough.

One more question: Shouldn't the American people be able to expect a certain decorum and dignity from the man who occupies the White House? On this measure, as well, Giuliani fails miserably. Much has been written in the blogosphere about his three public appearances in drag. In each instance, he tried to be funny by dressing like a woman. Can you imagine Ronald Reagan, who loved a good joke, doing something so ignoble in pursuit of a cheap guffaw? Not on your life.

Update 2: You might want to add welfare reform and illegal immigration to Rudy's list of conservative wrongs. A couple of things I grabbed from the aforementined RedState comments section: On September 11, 1996 (ironic, no?) Giuliani delivered a speech giving rather tepid support to the vaunted welfare reform bill signed by then President Bill Clinton. Besides not really being strongly for it, despite his current claims to welfare cutting fame, Giuliani also delivered this interesting aside:

... there is one aspect of the bill that has immediate application, and one that I believe raises serious constitutional and legal questions. And it is part of the Bill people pay very little attention to, and I'm not certain many knew it was in the bill when they passed it. It's a provision that attempts to reverse an executive order that New York City has had in existence since 1988 which basically says that New York City will create a zone of protection for illegal and undocumented immigrants who are seeking the protection of the police or seeking medical services because they are sick or attempting to or actually putting their children in public schools so they can be educated.

New York City's Executive Order 124, signed by Mayor Koch in 1988 protected people in that endeavor by instructing employees of New York City that they are not to turn in those names into the Immigration and Naturalization Service. That has been the source of great debate from the time Mayor Koch signed it until now. There has been at least three or four attempts by Congress to reverse that executive order.

I'm sure many of you may not remember this, but because I was intimately involved with it I remember it very well. In one of the late versions of the crime bill there was an amendment and the purpose of this amendment was to say that if any city wanted to benefit from the proceeds of the crime bill or money coming from the crime bill, they could not have an executive order like Executive Order 124; they would have to reverse it.

In fact, that same year, as part of an education bill in which education funds were being distributed to the various states throughout the country there was a provision included in it that said if you did anything like Executive Order 124 and give this kind of protection you would be deprived of funds for education and, due to very strong lobbying efforts, I'm delighted to say these provisions were defeated in the past. ...

By the way, Giuliani's camp has issued a statement on today's "path to citizenship" compromise that's as ambiguous as Rudy's MSNBC debate answers about abortion.

Labels: christians, elections, news and politics, politics, presidential candidates, religious right, Rudy, Rudy Giuliani

John McCain will be there, as will Hillary Rodham Clinton, John Edwards and half a dozen other presidential candidates. But when firefighters hold a candidates' forum today in Washington, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the contender most closely identified with their profession, will not attend.

In the past several days, a private tussle over Giuliani's participation — he was out, then in, then out again — has turned into a public spat with the International Association of Fire Fighters. That, in turn, has highlighted an uncomfortable paradox of Giuliani's campaign.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, when he was mayor of New York City, he has been linked in the public mind to firefighters and police officers, whom he regularly hails as heroes as he campaigns around the country.

Yet the firefighters and police officers who know Giuliani best, those in New York City, have mixed views of him, ranging from admiration to outright hostility.

That has filtered through to leaders of their national associations accusing Giuliani of trying to cut short the effort to find victims' remains in the trade center wreckage.

They also contend that his administration mishandled the development of a radio system that could have saved lives on 9/11, and that he blundered in putting the city's emergency command center in the trade center.

• What excatly are 'Christian values?'
• Today's GOP: the party of cheating ass bastards
• Who loves ya, Rudy?
• My heart belongs to daddy ... not

Labels: 2008, presidential elections, Rudy, Rudy Giuliani