Look at the dot….
Category Archives: terrorism
9-11 Plus 20
I doubt I will go to witness the ceremony of remembrance at the 9-11 Memorial this year, the twentieth anniversary of the terrorist attack. I am never comfortable when I am at the 16-acre site of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. It’s not the memories. Those come and go depending on what is going on in the world. It’s the images which lingered before me for months after that day. Now they almost never return. Unless I am at the site.
On September 11, 2001, my wife Amy and I lived in Battery Park City in lower Manhattan. We had moved there from midtown just a few months earlier. Our apartment building was at the south end of the neighborhood, south and west of WTC Tower #2. I was the New York Bureau Chief and Senior Correspondent for public television’s Nightly Business Report and the newsroom/production facility/broadcast studio was just across West Street, even closer to the tower, due south of the site. Tower #2 filled the window of my bedroom, and of my office.
Read moreTwice Impeached
Another record for the man who is everything. Donald Trump is now the only person to have been impeached twice by the House of Representatives. Whether or not he is found guilty when tried by the Senate, he also has the distinction of being a president of the United States accused by a bipartisan coalition. Ten Republican House members voted to impeach the titular head of their party. Four others abstained from the vote.
It is not difficult to see why. The impeachment came one week after a violent mob, encouraged by Trump, came to Washington and attacked Congress in an attempt to keep it from counting the certified election results sent in by all fifty states and the District of Columbia. Trump, leader of the executive branch of government, was demanding the mob stop the legislative branch from performing its constitutional and statutory function and instead disenfranchise millions of voters and install Trump as a literal dictator.
Read moreTrump’s gestapo comes to portland
Hard to believe but the fears I raised in my last column have now been realized and the situation is far worse.
The headlines exploded around the world on the morning of July 15th, summed up best by this Oregon PBS report, “Federal Law Enforcement Use Unmarked Vehicles to Grab Protestors Off Portland Streets.”
It is positively frightening. And it can happen to you. It can happen to me. It can happen to any one of us.
Read moreThe Preachers of Hate
The last of eleven funerals was held today. Eleven people, shot dead in simply because they were Jewish.
A federal grand jury has charged 46 year-old Robert Bowers with 44 crimes including hate crimes resulting in death. Bowers has pleaded not guilty. So we’ll do the journalism thing and note that he is the “alleged” assailant and that he is considered innocent until proven guilty. We will also note that the indictment alleges that on the morning of the Sabbath, October 27, 2018, Bowers drove to the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, entered the building with multiple firearms, and opened fire. He also engaged public safety officers, wounding several before he was wounded and captured. While inside the Synagogue, Bowers made several statements indicating his desire to “kill Jews.”
It was the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history. But of course Jews have faced many millennia of persecution and oppression and even in America Jews are no strangers to anti-Semitic incidents, which an Anti-Defamation League audit found rose 57% in 2017.
No. Just No.
I’ve had it. I’ve had it with whataboutism. I’m done with false equivalency. No more political correctness. You can take your gaslighting someplace else. I’m tired of demonizing, of disinformation, of scapegoating, of rationalization and of lying and deception of all kinds.
Thirteen pipe bombs were sent to prominent Democrats, including former presidents Obama and Clinton, and other Trump critics. That’s a fact. The FBI has arrested Cesar Sayoc, 56, and charged him with a long list of crimes in connection with the bombs. That’s a fact. They also impounded a white van, which they say was Sayoc’s, its windows covered with political images and stickers of President Trump and his critics, including pictures of some of the bomb recipients with gun sights superimposed on their images. That’s another fact.
Scott Gurvey 