Global

If the Geneva Conventions somewhere allow for the beheadings and torture of Non Combatants. Sit back and write about flower arrangements or something like that. If you have never fought for more than a good parking spot, than shut up and sit down. You have no Idea, except of course from reading the ramblings by another who has never been there.

Mark A. Shells
South Carolina
14 year Military Veteran

Freshets of creativity and excitement pulsing into the nation's bloodstream and improvements in the general quality of life have nothing to do with the presidential elections rolling around every four years, which rouse expectations far in excess of what they actually deserve. As registers of liberal or conservative political potency, American presidential elections seldom coincide with shifts in the tempo of political energy across the country. As vehicles for the ventilation of popular concerns, they are hopelessly inadequate and should be severely downgraded on the entertainment calendars.

A recent obituary in the New York Times told about Frank Smith, "who as an inmate leader at Attica prison was tortured by officers in the aftermath of the prisoner uprising of 1971 and then spent a quarter century successfully fighting for legal damages." Working as a paralegal after his release, Smith was a pivotal force behind a 26-year civil action lawsuit that won a $12 million settlement.

Smith's life changed forever on Sept. 13, 1971 -- the day when New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller ordered 500 state troopers to attack the upstate Attica Correctional Facility, killing 29 inmates and 10 guards held as hostages. The raid wounded at least 86 other people.

The media coverage was atrocious. Outright lies were front-page news, "informing" the public that prisoners had slit the throats of hostages when the troopers' assault began. Corrective facts came later, with much smaller headlines, after autopsies revealed that no throats had been cut. Only when their claims were exposed as deceptions did top state officials admit the truth.

 From where I was sitting, John Kerry's performance at last week's Democratic Convention was the most powerful argument yet offered for voting for Ralph Nader. And the fact that Michael Moore dropped to his knees over the weekend in the company of Bill Maher begging Nader to withdraw only fuels my certainty. Across this year Moore has swiveled from Wesley Clark to Kerry, denied to Jay Leno that he supports the Democrats and fibbed about his advice to Nader in 2000, so who wants to be in the same corner as him, assuming he stayed in one corner long enough for anyone to identify it? Here's John Kerry, offering himself as a man of war, as a former prosecutor, as a candidate who hasn't got one single substantive, useful idea about turning the U.S. economy around and improving the overall state of the world. The only difference from Bush he can identify is that he went to Vietnam, killed Vietnamese and collected a bunch of medals, which some of his Navy colleagues who fought there at the same time say he didn't deserve.

The same broadcast networks that eagerly devote endless prime-time hours to vacuous sitcoms and unreal "reality shows" couldn't spare a total of more than a few hours last week for live coverage of the Democratic National Convention.

It's true that complaining about scant news coverage from NBC, ABC and CBS is a bit like griping about small portions of meals from restaurants that serve lousy food. But still: the conventions are worth watching, if only to keep up with the rhetorical needles that party strategists are trying to thread these days.

Gathering for the convention in Boston, several network anchors participated in a high-profile panel at Harvard University. One of the more interesting moments came when the panelists responded to a question about the scant amount of air time the commercial broadcast networks were devoting to the convention.

The last thing this community needs is a lecture from George Bush on worker productivity and what we need to do to keep America’s jobs in America. If he was serious about keeping America’s jobs in America he wouldn’t be giving tax breaks to companies who move their jobs overseas. If he was serious about keeping America’s jobs in America, he would fight for America’s workers instead of having a trade enforcement record that even Republican Senator George Voinovich calls “abysmal.”

Using our own Timken Steelworkers as a backdrop, George Bush told Canton last year that his tax cut would create a million new jobs by the end of 2004. He said his tax cut would create half a million new jobs in Ohio alone. A year later, the Timken Company is making record profits and announced the potential lay off of 1300 workers. Unemployment in Ohio continues to go up and we are still looking for the 485,000 jobs George Bush promised Ohio. In the last week alone, Stark County lost another two hundred steelworker jobs with the closure World Kitchens.

We write with an almost overwhelming sense of disgust and anger.

Yesterday, Governor Pataki vetoed the minimum-wage bill. To say this caught us by surprise is an understatement. The political class had confidently and uniformly predicted that he would sign the bill.

But perhaps we shouldn't be shocked.

This is a governor with a history of unbridled hostility to funding schools attended by poor children. This is a governor whose recent budget proposals once again slash benefits for the weak and powerless, even as he curries favor with the powerful. Vetoing the minimum-wage merely expands the range of people who can feel the Pataki lash.

The reasons given in his veto message are laughable and often factually wrong. You can read it on our web site.

The hype and hysteria reached even the sleepy North Shore of Boston. In the weeks leading up to the summer's seminal event in The Big City, local police chiefs were predicting endless commutes and near-constant gridlock. Many advised locals to "go to New Hampshire for the week and don't look back." Thanks to the comfort of an overwhelming Police (State) presence, the terrorists, tourists, troublemakers and travelers were kept at bay.