Posted on 10/17/2007 4:40:11 AM PDT by Liz
After New Yorkers (and others) became outraged that a California supporter threw a fund-raiser for him asking for donations in the denomination of $9.11, the Giuliani campaign quietly began returning the checks. It's a small gesture..... but it's something. Is Giuliani finally recognizing how offensive it is for him to try to own the September 11 tragedy? Is he taking note that if his home city finishes turning against him, he'll have a hard time convincing people that he has a great mayoral legacy? Does this signify personal growth on his part? Eh, probably not. It's just $9.11, people.
I am listening to Laura Ingraham. FDT is ahead in Texas fundraising. Could be why RINO Rick Perry came out so soon, for Rooty.
Yes, although Rudy APPEARS to be leading, it is only by a thin margin. And that Rudy support has been consistent, and not increasing. That is the RINO element of the GOP. All the other candidates could pull together and back their strongest candidate (right now Thompson) and win the nomination. Rudy is probably afraid that is going to happen.
Perry better hope for a Rudy win and a place on the ticket or in the admin. It’s going to be tough for him to go home again after this.
That's how I feel. Just like John McCain has a history that I respect. Yet I can't base my vote on simply that history.
IMHO, we have two very worthy candidates...Thompson and Hunter and I can't understand why they aren't leading the pack.
Rooty Toots really only seems to be leading. He is leading in SOME nationwide polls, but not in any critical primary states.
Yep, both of you are right. This push for Rooty is not working, and it will get worse for him as more people find out certain truths about his liberal history.
People are getting sick of RINOs who side with democrats. They also want these candidates to start talking borders and illegals. The time is now, so they should get cracking on it.
Maybe if Rooty goes down the tubes RINO Rick Perry can get a job on the Border patrol! LOL
I'm as over FNC's love affair with Rudy as I am over Chirsotpher's and Katherine's love affair with Mrs. Bill Clinton.
The funny thing, is that for the mainline Conservative/Republicans in the know, Thompson is leading. RG numbers are coming from those I mention earlier, the ones who have not really looked yet.
If you are comparing the Oklahoma City bombing with 9/11, I think you are utterly naieve.
No offense.
Abortions were down all over the country during the period Rooty takes credit for in NYC. Of course they were still higher in NYC than anywhere else, but he will take the credit when he did nothing to affect the downswing.
He never returned the monies from this event. His clients, AOL/Time Warner hosted it even.
Only in Web Archives now:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030224164739/http://www.nysun.com/sunarticle.asp?artID=315
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Early Friday, Mr. Giuliani�s face, along with that of new Citicorp executive Sallie Krawcheck, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and other political and business figures appeared on the Web site promoting Fortune magazine�s Global Forum conference, to be held November 11 to 13 in Washington. After The New York Sun called Mr. Giuliani�s office to ask about the conference, his photo disappeared from the portion of the Web site devoted to the Arab symposium, although his face still appears on the pages promoting the rest of the symposium. A spokeswoman for Mr. Giuliani declined to comment and conference organizers did not return phone calls.
A special one-day symposium is planned for the conference November 11, cosponsored by the Arab Thought Foundation, a new charity apparently aimed at improving the public image of Saudi Arabia. The charity, based in Syrian-occupied Lebanon, is funded with at least $17 million. According to the Saudi Arabian government, the money comes from members of the Saudi royal family and other wealthy businessmen in the kingdom, including $1.5 million from Bakr bin Laden, the man who controls the bin Laden family�s substantial business interests.
The flap over the upcoming conference illustrates the difficulties Saudi Arabia faces as it tries to repair its image in America, which was badly damaged as a result of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. As has previously been reported elsewhere, the kingdom is paying the Washington-based communications firm Qorvis $200,000 a month for a public relations campaign, including television ads portraying Saudi Arabia as a friend of America. The Arab Thought Foundation and its plans for a Washington conference, however, have so far attracted little Western press attention.
Saudi Arabia�s public relations efforts only go so far, analysts say, because of the underlying differences in values between Saudi Arabia � a kingdom that is openly paying $5,000 to the families of suicide bombers targeting Israeli civilians, a kingdom that was the home of 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers � and America.
That hasn�t stopped the Saudis from trying � with the assistance, in this case, of Fortune magazine, a New York-based business magazine that is a unit of AOL Time Warner. Every year Fortune sponsors a�global business conference; last year it was in Hong Kong and featured keynote speeches by President Clinton and Chinese president Jiang Zemin. This year, however, is the first time that there will be a special symposium on �The Arab Countries: Issues, Answers and Opportunities.�
The director of the Saudi Institute, an independent watchdog group based in Washington, Ali Al-Ahmed, said the Arab Thought Foundation does not represent Arab thought at all.
�It represents a narrow element in the Arab world that is under the control of the same oppressive regimes that we abhor. What do you expect from an organization that is under the control of an absolute monarchy? Freedom of thought? No. This is basically a vehicle to shield the Arab regimes from criticism,� Mr. Al-Ahmed said.
A consultant on Saudi Arabia, Simon Henderson, said he is in favor of improved relations between American and the kingdom, �but that should come through greater openness and greater clarity rather than PR campaigns.�
Mr. Henderson said he was �surprised� that Fortune is having the meeting, �which might appear to be part of a Saudi PR campaign.�
The former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak of Israel�s Labor Party, is listed as an �invited� speaker. No speakers from the Israeli government are scheduled to take part, perhaps because the Arabs refuse to meet with Israeli government representatives. A spokeswoman at the Israeli embassy in Washington said she was not aware of the event.
The author of a new book, �The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa�ud from Tradition to Terror,� Stephen Schwartz, said the foundation �is not a neutral institution, it exists to advance the interests of the Saudi ruling class and the Saudi elite.�
�It is not a grant-making, social science institute�the U.S. should be asking hard questions of the Saudis, not papering over the differences,� Mr. Schwartz, who is also policy analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said. �It would be marvelous if the Fortune people and the Arab Thought Foundation made a demand of the Saudi government to make a full, transparent accounting of Saudi involvement and Wahhabi extremism in 9/11.�
Opening the Arab symposium are the editorial director of Fortune, Geoffrey Colvin, and Prince Bandar bin Khalid Al-Faisal, the grandson of the late Saudi King Faisal and the son of Prince Khalid Al-Faisal, the governor of Saudi Arabia�s Asir region � an area where the most fundamentalist sect of Islam, Wahhabism, runs rampant and where a majority of the September 11 highjackers hail from. Prince Khalid Al-Faisal is the chairman of the Arab Thought Foundation.
Prince Khalid Al-Faisal said that the Arab Thought Foundation will offer an independent forum for intellectuals, women and members of the business community to freely discuss religious, economic, cultural and other issues, the Associated Press has reported. The New York Sun called the Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington Friday, but a receptionist said no one was available to comment.
Also scheduled to take part in the Washington Conference is the editor in chief of Arab News, Khaled Al-Maeena. Arab News is the English-language Saudi newspaper that has recently published articles referring to the �subhuman Zionist lobby� and reporting straightforwardly a claim that �Yankee Jew media dominance threatens the lives of U.S. citizens.� A September 21 cartoon in the paper portrays President Bush morphing into Adolf Hitler. Mr. Al-Maeena is identified on the symposium program as a member of the Arab Thought Foundation.
Mr. Al-Maeena is scheduled to speak on �Challenges of Interdependence: The Arab-USA Defense Cooperation.
A woman who says her Saudi ex-husband abducted her two daughters and that they are now being held against their will in Saudi Arabia, Pat Roush, was critical of the symposium as well.
�I would hope that these very same American public relations firms and lobbyists that are organizing this type of publicity campaign or �symposium� for the Saudi Arabian government in hopes of getting the support of the Fortune 500 companies would have a conscience when it comes to American women and children that the Saudis are holding against their will in the kingdom,� Ms. Roush told the Sun. �If the Saudis really want to redeem themselves in the eyes of the American people, not only the money mongers and State Department puppets that are attending this conference, they should free our people and allow them to come home to their American families.�
Mr. Spitzer, Ms. Krawcheck and Mr. Rumsfeld are apparently appearing at the main part of the conference, not the Arab symposium, but their images and names are being used to promote it on the Web, as was Mr. Giuliani�s until the Sun inquired about it.
rudy deserves to be subjected to the same level of scrutiny as JFkerry. CJ, your professional medical opinion please...botox or no? i know your specialty is authenticating boobs, but work with me here... ; )
I find you offensive; but that is besides the point. You just twisted the postings for your convenience. Surprise! Not!
You said: “and let me know if anyone running could ever do something similar.”
I said Frank Keating.
Well, if boobs are involved, Rudy certainly qualifies. :)
he was a decent looking guy with hideous hair back then, wasn’t he?
Oy. That hair. Nooooooooooooo!
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Harry made the following statement to a press conference on June 24, 1994, in the former Stonewall Inn on Sheridan Square in New York, site of the riots that launched the modern gay movement in June 1969. The press conference was called to announce the Spirit of Stonewall (SOS) contingent in the Stonewall 25 march two days later. It was moderated by SOS co-organizer and indefatigable activist Bill Dobbs. Other participants were Christine Martin, sex educator and documentary filmmaker; Glenda Orgasm (aka Glenn Belverio), drag queen activist and filmmaker; Scott O�Hara, editor and publisher of Steam magazine; Val Langmuir of Feminists Against Censorship (London); Julia Smedley, member of Stonewall Now; and Charley Shively of Fag Rag and professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts.
This statement was transcribed from a videotape of the press conference. A much shorter version�which omits any mention of NAMBLA or SOS, as well as the entire last half of the statement and the first paragraph�appeared in Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder Harry Hay, ed. Will Roscoe (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), p. 303. These omissions seem odd in view of the fact that Harry read from a written text. The truncated version also used capital letters for words such as �Brothers and Sisters� and �Queers,� a convention that is not followed here since this complete version is not based on a written text.
Sir Julian Huxley, the great English biologist, said, at the beginning of this century, no negative trait�and, as you know, a negative trait is one that does not reproduce itself�no negative trait ever appears, and reappears, millennia after millennia after millennia, unless it in some way serves the survival of that species. We gays and lesbians may embody, or have discovered, some things that you folks desperately need to know about.I�m here today as a survivor, as well as the founder of the first ongoing gay organization in the United States, the Mattachine Society, first formed in 1950 in Los Angeles, and now, naturally, a member of SOS, the Spirit of Stonewall, because things we discovered about ourselves and principles we developed in 1950 to �53 are now being trashed by queers who don�t know their own history, all over the place.
We decided from the beginning that, first, because we were still discovering our parameters, we wouldn�t censure each other. If people like NAMBLA self-identify themselves to me as gays and lesbians, I accept them as brothers and sisters with love.
Second, when we decided to rejoin the social or political mainstream again, we would integrate as the group we saw ourselves to be, complete with our own set of values, or we would not integrate at all.
And third, we would no longer permit any heteros�nationally or internationally, individually or collectively�to tell us who we are, what persons our groups should or should not consist of. We assert our right to self-determination, we assert our right to collective self-definition. We queers will decide for ourselves who our members should be.
Members of SOS, notably NAMBLA, have been accused of child molestation. Insofar as child molestation is concerned, the most common form is the sexual coercion by which gay and lesbian children are bedeviled into hetero identities and behaviors. And this is practiced daily by the whole national and international hetero community�parents, family, teachers, preachers, doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs, not to overlook U.S. senators and pooh-bah media.
This outrageous coercion of gay kids into hetero identities and behaviors against their wills is not only sexually abusive, it is spiritually devastating rape, because the child unbeknowingly is being led into developing self-loathing at the same time. For this gigantic criminal trespass against not only today�s children but against all of us also�all of us�since childhood, from the queers my age of 82 down through all the generations of queers assembled here in New York, to the gay kids still being bedeviled by sexual coercion against their wills, we the international gay and lesbian people here this week should unite to sue the whole guilty heterosexual community lock, stock, and barrel to within an inch of their lives, and for every nickel they�ve got, as a beginning of compensation. And while we�re at it, we should request our first-class citizenship as well. This could be the class-action suit of the century.
Copyright © NAMBLA, 2003. All rights reserved.
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