An Obama Supporter on the Debates So Far
Obama supporter Alice Butler
AV’s traveling elections correspondent, Jon Winet, writes in from northern Nevada:
We had hoped to catch up with Erie County GOP Chair Domagalski Jim to get his views on the Biden-Palin VP debate, but were unable to reach him.
We were able to chat Sunday evening on the phone with Oakland California resident and retired Social Security Administration Regional Human Resources Director Alice Butler, (also featured in an earlier video interview).
Butler is an active Obama supporter. Listen to her reaction to the debates here.
McCain and the Keating 5
Charles Keating
In the last few days there has been an uptick in personal attacks by the McCain camp on Barack Obama (he pals around with terrorists, he doesn’t see the country the way most Americans do, he dishonors our troops, etc.). Obama supporters are swinging back, beginning by reviving John McCain’s role in the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s, and his relationship with Charles Keating of Lincoln Savings & Loan.
Check out this site, which promises to release a full-fledged documentary on the subject at noon today. The trailer is there now.
McCain has called his association with Keating “the worst mistake of his life.”
I would assume that the timing of this piece’s release was determined long before the decision by McCain’s campaign to unleash the negative; tomorrow’s debate is, after all, about the economy, and you can bet that Obama will call up the association between McCain and the savings and loan scandal to capitalize on public perception that Obama is more capable of dealing with the current financial crisis than McCain. The question is whether McCain will be able to anser that perception, or whether he will try instead to change the subject—to the war or to Obama himself.
October 3, 2008
More City Hall Phone Pranks
Let’s say you have a club that meets every so often to discuss political matters. Let’s also say that sometimes your views clash with city hall.
What would you think if you received a notice from the Department of Permit & Inspection Services Rental Registration Program telling you that you were in violation of 264-4a of the City of Buffalo Charter and Ordinances, and that if you didn’t take action within 5 days you’d be open to an inspection and/or court action and a possible order to vacate all dwelling units involved? Additionally, you could be subject to a $75 fine.
That’s what just happened to the First Amendment Club.
If you received a letter like that, wouldn’t you want to call the number they tell you to call to address this urgent matter?
Sucker! It’s just another example of those whacky tricksters down at city hall, setting up a phone prank like the problematic 311 line.
Check out what happens when you call by clicking here.
I guess that’s one way to encourage people to drive over to city hall and feed those spiffy new parking kiosks.
Wells Fargo To Buy Wachovia
Rumors had been swirling that troubled Wachovia Bank was being eyed for a federally backed takeover by Citigroup, but instead it looks like it might be purchased by Wells Fargo for $15.1 billion, without government assistance. And what everyone in town wants to know is this: What’s the Buffalo connection?
Well, it all started back on May 20, 1818, in the small village of Pompey, New York, south of Syracuse. The boy born there on that date would have to support himself from the age of 13 on, working for a man named Daniel Butts, carrying village mail. Later, he worked as a grocery clerk.
In 1845, when he was still 25, railroads and canal boats only traveled as far west as Buffalo. That was the year an express carrying business running from Buffalo to Cleveland, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Chicago was born. Daniel Dunning, Henry Wells, and our hero, William G. Fargo, formed Wells & Co. Later, the company would morph into a little enterprise called American Express.
When gold was discovered in California, Wells, Fargo and another partner in American Express named John Butterfield saw an opportunity to make a bundle transporting freight from the booming west to the business centers of the east. They formed a separate business in San Francisco called Wells Fargo & Company in 1852. From then until 1869, when the transcontinental railroad was completed with the driving of the golden spike at Promontory Summit, Utah, Wells Fargo enjoyed a virtual monopoly in the transport business, running deliveries throughout the wild west while simultaneously creating a dramatic American image that has been used by Hollywood from its very beginning—the stagecoach. It remains the Wells Fargo corporate symbol.
Fargo built a huge mansion on 5.5 acres of land in Buffalo, bordered by Jersey, West, Pennsylvania, and…Fargo streets. Presidents and other luminaries like Mark Twain visited there. Inside, there was a fully functioning barber shop. One can imagine Fargo sitting down every morning to receive his daily shave, freshly steamed towels on hand.
 Here's a photo of the place as it looked in 1900, shortly before it burned to the ground. |
 And here's a picture of the hall... |
Fargo went on to become mayor of Buffalo from 1862-1866, during part of the Civil War.
Of course, the Wells Fargo that’s purchasing Wachovia is more than a few steps removed from this great American tycoon, but hey, it’s a connection all the same.
You can visit and pay your respects at his impressive obelisk in Forest Lawn Cemetery. His family rest in section AA. He has rested there since 1881.
October 2, 2008
Erie County GOP Chair on Palin
Erie County GOP Chair Jim Domagalski
AV’s roving elections correspondent Jon Winet spoke to Erie County GOP Chairman Jim Domagalski at about 4pm this afternoon, to get his prognosis on tonight’s Palin v. Biden VP showdown.
Once the on-hold muzak stops (who has that on their phone system?), Domagalski stays pretty tightly on message. Listen to it here. Note his comments on Katie Couric, who, he insinuates, probably doesn’t have much to say about specific Supreme Court cases either.
Winet is checking in with Domagalski after the debate as well, so check back to see whether her performance improves his mood.
Seeking Drummers to Set World Record
One month from today, at 2pm on Sunday, November 2, the Millenium Hotel on Walden Avenue next to the Galleria will be the site of a Guinness Book of World Records attempt: To gather at least 300 drummers and percussionists together to simultaneously perform the garage rock anthem “Louie, Louie.”
The event, called “The Big Beat,” is being sponsored by Buffalo Drum Outlet and Five Star Drum Shops. Local contestants will be competing against 10 other Five Star Drum Shops across the US and Canada. All local drummers are urged to take part. A $10 entrance fee is required (or $10 worth of canned goods), and entrants are then encouraged to collect at least $100 in donations from friends and supporters. Why? Because all proceeds from this event will be turned over to East Side soup kitchen the Response to Love Center, as well as Mr. Holland’s Opus, a national organization that provides schools with new band and orchestra instruments. Prizes will be awarded to the drummers who raise the most money.
The first 200 registrants will receive a goodie bag full of drum products and—listen closely, drummers—placement near the front of the stage! You heard me. Not way in the back on a broken-down riser like most gigs, tempted to throw sticks at the back of the lead singer.
To quote the Kingsmen’s classic hit, “Okay, let’s give it to ‘em, right now!”
Call 716-684-0082 or visit buffalodrumoutlet.com for more information.
Project Censored
This report from Amanda Witherell of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, which each year publishes a roundup of Project Censored’s most underreported stories of the year:
The daily dispatches and nightly newscasts of the mainstream media regularly cover terrorism, but rarely discuss how the fear of attacks is used to manipulate the public and set policy. That’s the common thread of many unreported stories last year, according to an analysis by Project Censored.
Since 1976, Sonoma State University has released an annual survey of the top 25 stories the mainstream media failed to report or reported poorly. Culled from worldwide alternative news sources, vetted by students and faculty, and ranked by judges, the stories were not necessarily overtly censored. But their controversial subjects, challenges to the status quo, or general under-the-radar subject matter might have kept them from the front pages. Project Censored recounts them, accompanied by media analysis, in a book of the same name published annually by Seven Stories Press.
“This year, war and civil liberties stood out,” Peter Phillips, project director since 1996, said of the top stories. “They’re closely related and part of the War on Terror that has been the dominant theme of Project Censored for seven years, since 9/11.”
Whether it’s preventing what one piece of legislation calls “homegrown terrorism” by federally funding the study of radicalism, using vague concerns about security to quietly expand NAFTA, or refusing to count the number of Iraqi civilians killed in the war, the threat of terrorism is being used to silence people and expand power.
“The war on terror is a sort of mind terror,” said Nancy Snow, one of the project’s 24 judges and an associate professor of public diplomacy at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. Snow — who has taught classes on war, media, and propaganda — elaborated: “You can’t declare war on terror. It’s a tactic used by groups to gain publicity and it will remain with us. But it’s unlikely that [the number of terrorist acts] will spike. It spikes in the minds of people.”
She pointed out that the number of terrorist attacks has dropped worldwide since 2003. Some use the absence of fresh attacks as evidence that the so-called war on terror is working. But a RAND Corporation study for the Department of Defense released in August said the war on terror hasn’t effectively undermined Al Qaeda. It suggested the phrase be replaced with the less loaded term “counterterrorism.”
Both Phillips and Snow agree that comprehensive, contextual reporting is missing from most of the coverage. “That’s one of my criticisms of the media,” Snow said. “They spotlight issues and don’t look at the entire landscape.”
This year the landscape of Project Censored itself is expanding. After talking with educators who bemoan the ongoing decline of news quality and want to help, Phillips launched the Truth Emergency Project, in which Sonoma State partners with 23 other universities. All will host classes for students to search out untold stories, vet them for accuracy, and submit them for consideration to Project Censored.
“There’s a renaissance of independent media,” Phillips said. He thinks bloggers and citizen journalists are filling crucial roles left vacant by staff cutbacks throughout the mainstream media. And, he said, it’s time for universities, educators, and media experts to step in and help. “It’s not just reforming the media, but supporting them in as many ways as they need, like validating stories by fact-checking.”
The Truth Emergency Project will also host a news service that aggregates the top 12 independent media sources and posts them on one page. “So you can get an RSS feed from all the major independent news sources we trust,” he said. Discerning newshounds can find reporting from the BBC, Democracy Now!, and Inter Press Service (IPS) in one spot. “The whole criteria,” he said, “is no corporate media.”
Carl Jensen, who started Project Censored in 1976, said the expansion is a new and necessary phase. “It answers the question I was always challenged with: how do you know this is the truth? Having 24 campuses reviewing all the stories and raising questions really provides a good answer. These stories will be vetted more than Sarah Palin.”
Phillips said he hopes to expand to 100 schools within the year, and would like the project to bring more attention to the dire need for public support for high quality news reporting. “I think it’s going to require government subsidies and nonprofit organizations doing community media projects,” he said. “It’s more than just reforming at the FCC level. It’s building independent media from the ground up.”
Phillips likens it to the boom in microbrewed beer and the spread of independently-owned pubs: “If we can have a renaissance in beer-making, following established purity standards, then we can do it with our media, too.” But for now, we have Project Censored, whose top 10 underreported stories for 2008 are:
1. HOW MANY IRAQIS HAVE DIED?
Nobody knows exactly how many lives the Iraq War has claimed. But even more astounding is that so few journalists have mentioned the issue or cited the top estimate: 1.2 million.
During August and September 2007, Opinion Research Business, a British polling group, surveyed 2,414 adults in 15 of 18 Iraqi provinces and found that more than 20 percent had experienced at least one war-related death since March 2003. Using common statistical study methods, it determined that as many as 1.2 million people had been killed since the war began.
The US military, claiming it keeps no count, still employs civilian death data as a marker of progress. For example, in a Sept. 10, 2007, report to Congress, Gen. David Petraeus said, “Civilian deaths of all categories, less natural causes, have also declined considerably, by over 45 percent Iraq-wide since the height of the sectarian violence in December.”
But whose number was he using? Estimates range wildly and are based on a variety of sources, including hospital, morgue, and media reports, as well as in-person surveys.
In October 2006, the British medical journal Lancet published a Johns Hopkins University study vetted by four independent sources that counted 655,000 dead, based on interviews with 1,849 households. It updated a similar study from 2004 that counted 100,000 dead. The Associated Press called it “controversial.”
The AP began its own count in 2005 and by 2006 said that at least 37,547 Iraqis had lost their lives due to war-related violence, but called it a minimum estimate at best and didn’t include insurgent deaths.
Iraq Body Count, a group of US and UK citizens who aggregate numbers from media reports on civilian deaths, puts the figure between 87,000 and 95,000. In January 2008, the World Health Organization and the Iraqi government did door-to-door surveys of nearly 10,000 households and put the number of dead at 151,000.
The 1.2 million figure is out there, too, which is higher than the Rwandan genocide death toll and closing in on the 1.7 million who perished in Cambodia’s killing fields. It raises questions about the real number of deaths from US aerial bombings and house raids, and challenges the common assumption that this is a war in which Iraqis are killing Iraqis.
Justifying the higher number, Michael Schwartz, writing on the blog AfterDowningStreet.org, pointed to a fact reported by the Brookings Institute that US troops have, over the past four years, conducted about 100 house raids a day — a number that has recently increased with assistance from Iraqi soldiers.
Brutality during these house searches has been documented by returning soldiers, Iraqi civilians, and independent journalists (See #9 below). Schwartz suggests the aggressive “element of surprise” tactics employed by soldiers is likely resulting in several thousands of deaths a day that either go unreported or are categorized as insurgent casualties.
The spin is having its intended effect: a February 2007 AP poll showed Americans gave a median estimate of 9,890 Iraqi deaths as a result of the war, a number far below that cited in any credible study.
Sources: “Is the United States killing 10,000 Iraqis every month? Or is it more?” Michael Schwartz, After Downing Street.org, July 6, 2007; “Iraq death toll rivals Rwanda Genocide, Cambodian killing fields,” Joshua Holland, AlterNet, Sept. 17, 2007; “Iraq conflict has killed a million: survey,” Luke Baker, Reuters, Jan. 30, 2008; “Iraq: Not our country to return to,” Maki al-Nazzal and Dahr Jamail, Inter Press Service, March 3, 2008.
[Stories 2-10 after the jump.]
October 1, 2008
Junk Food for Junk Bonds
This morning, in Fountain Plaza downtown, the Coalition for Economic Justice greeted morning commuters with a bake sale to raise money for the Wall Street bailout:
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September 30, 2008
The Twisted Economics of John McCain
Filmmaker Robert Greenwald has compiled a revealing look at John McCain’s flip-flopping positions on the economy. He’s against regulation, he’s for regulation, he doesn’t know anything about economics, he’s an expert on economics. Make up your own mind.
Season Ticket: Four and Counting
Wide receiver Lee Evans
Bills historian Dave Staba contextualizes the team’s 4-0 start:
Winning your first four games, an accomplishment Buffalo achieved with Sunday’s 31-14 win in St. Louis, does not guarantee a great season. Over the nearly half-century since the creation of the current Bills, though, it comes pretty close.
Seven previous editions have opened with at least four straight triumphs. Two won a league championship, two others earned a Super Bowl berth, one reached the conference title game and another remains the subject of the franchise’s most tantalizing what-if discussion.
Only once, in 1975, did a Buffalo team win four games before losing one, yet fail to reach the playoffs.
Blame that one on O.J. Simpson, since it’s easy and fun and he’s otherwise occupied with all that Las-Vegas-hotel-room unpleasantness. As in his 2,003-yard season two years before, the future repeat felony defendant set a National Football League record, this time by scoring 23 touchdowns, yet his team—perhaps drained by the force its superstar’s ego —somehow faltered before the postseason.
The other six 4-0 starters account for most of the franchise’s high points.
After four years of slow starts and general mediocrity, the 1964 Bills thrashed their first four opponents by a combined score of 117-53 and didn’t stop slapping people around until they reached 9-0. The freakishly talented Cookie Gilchrist led an offense quarterbacked by Jack Kemp, with occasional assistance from Daryle Lamonica, while a star-laden defense established itself as the most dominant in the sport. Buffalo finished 12-2, winning the American Football League crown—the biggest prize available at the time—with a 20-7 win over San Diego.
Even without Gilchrist, whose equally outsized personality led to his banishment to Denver by coach Lou Saban shortly after the win over the Chargers, the next season started nearly as well and ended in almost exactly the same fashion. A 4-0 beginning turned into a 10-3-1 season capped by a 23-0 defeat of the Chargers.
Those Bills didn’t make it to the Super Bowl because there wasn’t one yet. The ’91 and ’92 teams should have been so fortunate. They opened 5-0 and 4-0, but ended in much less glamorous fashion, getting walloped by Washington and Dallas, respectively, in the sport’s annual apocalyptic finale.
At least they got there, though, which is more than could be said of the 1988 squad, the first of the great Jim Kelly-Bruce Smith-Thurman Thomas-Andre Reed teams. After sweeping the season’s first quarter and entering its final month at 11-1, the Bills lost three of their last four and, along the way, surrendered home-field advantage for the AFC title game to Cincinnati, a pivotal factor in a 21-10 loss to the Bengals.
Which brings us to 1980. In their third year under coach Chuck Knox, the Bills fully emerged from the post-O.J. Dark Ages by beating Miami for the first time in more than a decade, a goalpost-destroying feat that springboarded them to a 5-0 start.
Blending a strong young defense, solid special teams and versatile rookie running back Joe Cribbs with the maturation of long-maligned quarterback Joe Ferguson, Buffalo won its first division title since 1966 with an overtime win against the Los Angeles Rams.
That victory triggered an iconic moment, as half-dressed players led by Fred Smerlas emerged from the locker room for a curtain call, dancing at midfield to the strains of “Talking Proud,” the now-easily-mocked ode to civic pride that somehow failed to stem the exodus of industrial jobs that was only just beginning.
Thanks to the wonder of YouTube, that season and that song can be relived here.
Of course, it has an unhappy ending. Ferguson sprained an ankle in the regular season’s penultimate game and was still hobbling when the Bills visited San Diego for a first-round playoff game three weeks later. Still, he had the Bills ahead by a point with two minutes left, when safety Bill Simpson infamously whiffed on Chargers’ receiver Ron Smith, who scored the winning touchdown in the most shocking of fashions.
The Chargers were upset a week later by the Raiders, who would have had to travel to Buffalo for the AFC title game had Simpson’s grip been more firm. And Oakland went on to win the Super Bowl rather easily against Philadelphia. So if Ferguson had only stayed healthy, well, you know.
With a quarterback quickly emerging as one of the game’s most poised, a young running back who can run and catch and defensive and kicking-game units that produce game-turning plays on a weekly basis, this year’s Bills most closely resemble the 1980 edition to this point in the season.
All they need now is a theme song.
Dave Staba has covered the Bills since 1990. He welcomes e-mail at dstaba13@aol.com. A full report on Sunday’s game will appear in the October 2 issue of Artvoice.
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