Friday, November 09, 2007

Who is the greater fruitcake - Giuliani or Ron Paul?

Actually, the good Dr. Paul is at least the Fruitcake Rudy Giuliani is.

The difference is that Rudy is an meglomaniacal authoritarian fruitcake with severe narcissism and its accompanying grandiosity.

Dr. Paul is an ultra-Libertarian almost Anarchist fruitcake who has been infected by Ayn Rand, Von Mises and Hayek and with his education consisting of nothing more than physician's trade school, he doesn't have the necessary education to understand the fallacies of those writings (and doesn't want to learn.)

While both are fruitcakes, Giuliani is the much more dangerous one. He is the one with no ability to judge people (as a prosecutor he put away high ranking members of the Mob. As mayor of New York he appointed a mobbed up cop, Bernie Kerek, to the top police position in the city after being warned about him), the man who will tell any lie to get higher office and repeats the same lies even after being caught in the lie, and a man whose tenure as New York Mayor was marked mostly by corruption, incompetence, and ignoring the law and legally prescribed procedures.

In comparison, Dr. Paul is simply a passive fruitcake. His idea of the proper jobs for government are ....... (hear the wind whistling through the leaves as you listen for something to be there?)

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

"a man whose tenure as New York Mayor was marked mostly by corruption, incompetence, and ignoring the law and legally prescribed procedures."

Please provide some proof of this statement.

I worked for New York City during the Guiliani administration in the New York City Law Department. The last word I would attribute to the Guiliani Mayoral days was corrupt. So where did you get your references?

If you do not have any and can't back up this statement, you owe your readers an apology

Richard said...

Sure. Read Rachel Morris' article in Washington Monthly Rudy Awakening.

Then look at this sample of the discussion of radios for the Fire Department. Rudy set up a sweetheart deal with Motorla that resulted in new radios that did not work, something that escaped notice because of the lack of testing before they were issued. The absence of radios that would do the job probably killed over 200 New York City Firemen who otherwise could have been recalled before the WTC collapsed on 9/11. The only two reasons for this decision would be utter incompetence or that Motorola paid him off. Those two are not mutually exclusive. Both are possible.

He hired his mob-up driver as head of the Rykers system, then made him Commissioner of police. This was after Rudy was told by his subordinates that Kerek was unsuited for the job. See TPM's ultimate Kerek Scandal List! Why would he have hired a mobbed-up cop if he were not himself corrupt? Besides corruption, incompetence and bad judgment are also good explanations, none of them mutually exclusive.

Rudy's location of the command center in the WTC when it was a known target and had previously been hit shows that he was thinking in terms of sex with his mistress rather than running recovery operations in New York City. This is pure corruption.

This is only a taste. There is a lot more against Rudy.

Richard said...

For reasons to consider Dr. Ron Paul a fruitcake, take a look at his views as indicated by the Bills he has submitted while in the House. I have a post Here is what is wrong with Ron Paul.

Anonymous said...

Ok, now you are just showing your ignorance. The radios in service on 9/11 were not the Motorolla radios that were part of the "sweatheart" deal...those were pulled in April 2001 for various problems. The radios on 9/11 were revamped, recrystaled radios that had been in service for about 10 years. Moreover, the "sweatheart" deal that you discuss was a similar no-bid deal that was in place in Chicago and Boston for the same radios. So there was no inside sweatheart deal.

Also, the fact that it was no-bid is not entirely accurate. The New York City Procurement Policy Board Rules (PPB Rules) provides that if goods can only be secured through one of three methods: Competitive bidding, sole source acquisition and negotiated aquisition. See section 3-01 of the PPB Rules. It is the agency (i.e., in this case the FDNY), not the Mayor who determines which method of acquisition is appropriate. After the award, no matter which method is used, the NYC Comptroller registers the contract and sends out an award letter. REgistration by the Comptroller is a necessary step before award. The NYC Comptroller is a seperatly elected official. Throughout the Guilliani administration, the Comptroller was a democrat. I beleive for the entire Guilliani Administration it was Alan Hevesi. So if anything, the responsibility for the radios is on Hevesi, not Guiliani.

Also I am not sure how the location of OEM at 7 WTC shhows he had sex on his mind. 7 WTC is generally a very good place for such a command post. It is close enough that all the relative officials can get there in minutes from city hall, 1 PP, or 66 John Street. Additionally, if the city is under attack there may not be the ability to get to Brooklyn, where the current OEM is located, as the bridges and tunnels could be compromised or jamed with evacuators. Moreover, 7 WTC had been beefed up with security following 1993. There were armed guards on sight, the basement was highly secured and there was 24 hour surveillence. Not a bad place for OEM at all.

Richard said...

I will admit my personal ignorance of how the New York City government operates since I am fortunate enough to live a long way from there. However, Fire Department Captain John Joyce has written a book Radio Silence F.D.N.Y that at the very least points to numerous suspicious and apparently corrupt procedures that were used to buy the motorola radios that did not work, forcing the city to go back to the same motorola radios which had failed at the time of the 1993 attack on the WTC. Somehow a $2.9 million contract to buy 750 replacement radios morphed into a $14 million contract for over 3,000 radios which were never tested before implementation.

The bidding process was apparently simply skipped, as was testing and the approval by the Fire Department Union which, as I understand it, is required by the union contract.

Something very questionable was happening, clearly corrupting high up in the Fire Department and something for which the mayor is directly responsible. Either he knew of the corruption or his failed to be aware of it, which is a maaaive management failure. Neither reflects well on Guiliani.

It also appears that all calls for a commission to look into what happened to hand the firemen radios which did not work (and which were known not to work from 1993) has been avoided.

Here are some quotations I have found from what appear to be reasonable sources:

The Joyce book, co-written with Bill Bowen, a private citizen who lives in California, depicts a cozy relationship between Motorola and the Fire Department, but reserves its harshest criticism and most pointed questions for top officials of the city and the Fire Department.

Among the many unresolved questions raised by the book and/or the Hevesi audit:

How was a $2.9 million solicitation for replacement of about 750 existing Saber-brand Motorola radios turned into a contract for more than 3,000 radios, the XTS-3500 model, at a cost of more than $14 million?

Why, if the original request was for replacement radios, did Fire Commissioner Von Essen later admit to the City Council that the XTS radios were new equipment, which would have required the department to consult with fire unions before purchasing them?

If the department meant to buy new radios all along, where is the documentation that Motorola and the department tested them properly?

Why did the city not force Motorola to disclose the results of earlier tests it claimed it had conducted on the XTS models with emergency responders in other jurisdictions?

At the time, Motorola refused, citing the privacy of corporate "proprietary information." It also refused to divulge the names of other jurisdictions that had bought the radios, although some had been identified earlier in corporate press releases.

Why was Motorola mentioned as the only company the Fire Department dealt with, although city contracting officials said they had contracts with 175 potential suppliers? The city has never identified those suppliers.

Joyce and Bowen dedicated the book to the firefighters who died at the World Trade Center.

http://www.skyscrapersafety.org/html/article_20040720.html
Newsday
Calls for an investigation were first proposed by filmmaker Robert Greenwald who has documented Giuliani's handling of 9/11 in a series of shorts for Brave New Films. In The Real Rudy: Radios, Greenwald documents how radios used by the FDNY on 9/11 were the same ones that malfunctioned during the 1993 attack on the Twin Towers. When - eight years later - Giuliani finally purchased new communications equipment for $14 million from Motorola, it was never field-tested. A week later, the equipment was recalled after a firefighter's mayday went un-heard. Giuliani reissued the old batch of radios. And on 9/11 when a police helicopter warned that the North Tower could collapse, more than 120 firefighters remained inside. -- by Sam Stein of Huffington Post

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=c5a_1193969368

Richard said...

As for the location of the command center in the WTC - it was a known target for attack. There has to be a reason for choosing a likely target for terrorist attack as the location for the command center that is supposed to direct the recovery.

Guiliani set a requirement that he be able to walk to the command center, effectively eliminating all other reasonable locations. That's poor judgment.

He is known to have used the command center to entertain his then mistress. That, too, is poor judgment in itself, but it also suggests that entertaining his mistress was the reason for the first lapse in judgment.

His practice of serial, overlapping polygamy demonstrates how his mind works. Again, it demonstrates his poor judgment as a manager. It also suggests that he suffers from emotional problems that are likely to make him even less suited to be President than those George W. bush has displayed to the public since 2001.

Anonymous said...

neither Cpt. Joyce nor Bowen were involved with the appropriation for the radios. Neither Cpt. Joyce nor Bowen were involved with the testing of the radios. It is easy to look back and with hindsight say what should have or could have been done. The truth is that the motorolla radios are in use in alot of major citys in the US and their use, and their procurement, in NYC was not unusual.

As for OEM being at tower 7, as I stated, its was generally not a bad location. Could there have been others? yes. But after the 1993 attacks security was beefed up, the location was secured and it was central to most of the government offices, i.e., city hall, 1 police plaza, 66 john street, Chambers Street, etc. Locating it outside of Manahattan is not always such a good idea either for the reasons I stated.

As for Rudy bringing his girl friend to OEM, come on. That is pure mud slinging and I will not engage in such debate

Richard said...

The reason you won't engage in debate on Rudy's girl friend is that his behavior is indefensible and well-documented.

As for Rudy's failure to ensure that the Fire Department had working radios, see my current post on the subject. As Mayor, Rudy was directly responsible for everything the Fire Department did or failed to do. He cannot pass that responsibility off to someone else. He was "the man." And he failed.

I don't know if Rudy himself got any graft out of the sole source contract to Motorola that failed to deliver, but his failure to get any recorded portion of the graft does not relieve him from direct responsibility as Mayor for the resulting failure of those radios and the deaths of those Firemen. They are on Rudy's head. He failed as a leader, even if he didn't get any graft. And he is attempting to run for President on his record as a (failed) leader.

Anonymous said...

No, the reason I wont comment on Rudy and Judy Nathan, is the rumors are false. As theNew York Times as even admitted:

"The headlines have dogged Rudolph W. Giuliani's presidential campaign for weeks. "Security costs for trysts draw attention," said one. The articles questioned whether, as mayor, Mr. Giuliani tried to hide his visits to Judith Nathan in the Hamptons by burying the associated security costs in the budgets of obscure mayoral agencies like the Loft Board.

The answer is not likely, according to a review of the city records originally cited as the basis for the assertion.

All eight of Mr. Giuliani's trips to the Hamptons in 1999 and 2000, including the period when his relationship was a secret, were charged to his own mayoral expense account, according to the records.

After his affair became public, the mayor's office in 2001 did charge several trips to the Hamptons to the Assigned Counsel Plan, which was designed to coordinate legal efforts for the poor.

But the total cost of those trips, $2,474, represents less than 1 percent of the $281,338 in travel expenses that was charged to the obscure agencies.

And those expenses were not incurred until two years after Mr. Giuliani's office first began to shift some mayoral travel expenses to lesser-known units.

It's still not clear why Mr. Giuliani's office did that, or why it began prepaying his American express bills, both practices that other administrations frowned upon. Former Giuliani administration officials say the shifting of expenses was a temporary, and appropriate maneuver until the Police Department reimbursed the mayor's office for the security expenses.

The Bloomberg administration is still looking for the backup records for $40,000 of the $632,119 in travel costs that Mr. Giuliani's office incurred between May 1999 and December 2001, when Mr. Giuliani left office.

But the records reviewed so far, which account for 93 percent of the mayor travel expenses for that period, suggest that Mr. Giuliani's efforts to see Ms. Nathan, who is now his wife, had nothing to do with any accounting legerdemain."


Again, on the radios, I disagree with you. First, the "old" radios, were recrystaled and were tested and had worked in tests. The "new" radios, based on "an entirely new communications technology" is the system used in Chicago and Boston, and is not untested.

The interesting thing, the thing that really failed is the part that you never touch on. The fact is that the true failure of 9/11 was not the FDNY's poor radios, or the location of OEM, but the fact that FDNY, NYPD, PANYNJ, EMS, etc., cannot talk to each other over their radios. To this day, the combined emergency services on New York City cannot talk to each other over their radios. Not on a comand level, not on a user level. The second greatest failure of 9/11, and something that has been debated in NYC for the last 20 years, was no one was in control of the scene at the WTC. The FDNY union and the NYPD union have waged war over who has control at an emergency site. Couple that with the fact that overall command of the site was a bi-state agency, with its own security force (the PANYNJ PD), and there was chaos that day. Trust me i know, I stood accross the street as the second plain hit the towers.

But you wouldn't know all that, and yet insist on trying to smear Rudy for something that was not his fault, and justify it based on rumors of his sex life.