Whatever Barack Obama was puffing on before he sat down last week with that editorial board in Reno, he certainly stirred up a hornet’s nest. I came across this essay. Interesting.
Bill Clinton is one of my favorite politicians. I appreciate the joy he brings to being in the public sphere. His presidency was a triumph. He accomplished a lot, especially for the economy, the environment and the general feeling he left that he had brought our nation back from the brink where the Reagan and the first Bush maladministrations left us.
Bill Clinton showed his fortitude and courage at the lowest moments in his political career. Anyone would have understood (well, maybe not) and forgiven him if he’d decided he did not feel up to delivering the 1998 State of the Union Address. Ken Starr and his posse were braying at the door. There were traps, perjury and whatever else, everywhere. And, in a closet somewhere, hid a certain stained blue dress.
Bill Clinton walked into the well of Congress in January 1998 defiant and strode out triumphant having delivered one of the best speech of his life.
That performance quelled, for a moment, the storms that would engulf him for much of 1998, one demeaning revelation after the other. But his travails served to focus him on his job as president. He expertly steered the ship of state and when he turned up in January 1999 to deliver the State of the Union Address, he reported to the country that he was just fine, thank you. And the nation, not half bad. The best economic climate in a generation and much, much, more.
Bill Clinton left office one of the highest rated presidents and he has continued to do good works even as he joined the ranks of one of the wealthiest men on the planet.
But Clinton is also a tragic figure. He possesses such prodigious talent, such intellect, yet barely scratched the surface of what he could have accomplished as president. He still has ambitions, things he wants to accomplish for the nation and for himself. I suspect that is why he’s fighting so hard to get his wife elected president. You cannot fault a man for that.
The problem is that the strain on him is showing.
Where is the old happy warrior? Why has Barack Obama’s candidacy so spooked him? Obama is Clinton’s truest heir. His pitch to the Reno, Nev., Journal Gazette, despite the backhanded slap at Bill, is classic Clintonism.
Whatever happens in this election, I want the old Bill back.
I guess you could say I like a lot of things–Soccer, the Yankees, Soccer, theater, Soccer, movies, Soccer, ’em, Soccer, Soccer, Soccer, Soccer. Anyway, I love this blog!
This is an old story but . . .
Tom Robbins of the village voice, one of my favorite writers, covered Obama talking and raising money in Jersey City last week:
Every pundit and pollster was still insisting that something
must have gone badly wrong for Barack Obama the night
before in the snows of New Hampshire as the line down
John F. Kennedy Boulevard in Jersey City kept growing last
Wednesday. The line went down the street and around the
corner at St. Peter’s College, and it was clear by 3 p.m. that
at least a third of those waiting patiently for the rally with
the Democratic senator from Illinois weren’t even going to
make it into the gym at the school’s Yanitelli Center, which
had a capacity 2,000 people.
Read the rest of his piece here
March 21, 2002
Opponents of a proposed 400-bed homeless shelter in Williamsburg rallied against the plan last night, calling on Mayor Bloomberg to cancel it.
“What they’re creating is a warehouse for homeless men,” said Jose Leon.
Opening the East Williamsburg Industrial Park facility, at an old factory at 89 Porter Ave., is the first half of a plan to close the 800-bed 30th Street men’s shelter at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. The city will build a second 400-bed facility in the Bronx.
The Giuliani administration signed a $180 million, 22-year contract with the Manhattan-based Doe Fund to operate the shelter, immediately drawing the ire of Brooklyn elected officials and community activists, who sued the city.
Marty Needelman, a lawyer with Brooklyn Legal Services, said the city used subterfuge to avoid input from the community. But the city maintained the plan did not require review because, in part, the Doe Fund is a nongovernmental firm buying a building from a private seller.
“It’s a bad precedent,” Needelman said. “If the city can get away with avoiding the land-review process through this technicality on a $180-million project, then they can do that on a lot of other projects and undermine one of the critical features of the City Charter.”
Lower courts have ruled against the project opponents, but they have filed notice that they intend to appeal.
Even the Coalition for the Homeless — which fights to get the city to live up to its obligations to provide shelter, housing and services for the homeless — is opposed to the project.
“It’s an incredibly shortsighted and poor policy,” Patrick Markee, a senior policy analyst for the Coalition for the Homeless, said of the plan. “Our position has been that that money would be much better spent to open permanent housing for the rising number of homeless men.”
But George McDonald, founder of The Doe Fund, which finds work and provides treatment for homeless men, said the coalition should be working with The Doe Fund, not fighting it, on this project.
“This is a replacement facility, not a new shelter,” McDonald said. “In a system like we have in New York City, you have to have tranistional facilities. You can’t take somebody right off the street and put them in permanent housing.”
But Assemblyman Vito Lopez (D-Williamsburg) asked why it has to be Williamsburg, which has a waste-transfer station that processes 40% of the city’s trash daily and a 200-bed homeless shelter in nearby Greenpoint.
He said he had heard a bio-tech medical research facility is being installed in place of the Manhattan homeless shelter that would be closed down.
“Instead of giving us the homeless shelter, give us the bio-tech research facility,” Lopez said. “It would be a very positive thing for our community because it would create hundreds of jobs.”
Linda Gibbs, commissioner of the city Homeless Services Department, said the project is a necessary service.
“It is not a matter of making a choice between providing permanent housing, or a homeless shelter,” she said. The city has an obligation to provide shelter for anyone who needs it.”
Thursday, November 15, 2001
Even as the grim recovery work at Ground Zero continues, another casualty of the World Trade Center terror attacks has emerged: the controversial African Burial Ground project.
Officials say that some 100 boxes of burial ground artifacts were recovered from a laboratory in the basement of 6 World Trade Center, which was destroyed in the attacks. But it is unknown how many more relics are missing.
Meanwhile, on the back burner, again, is the much-delayed plan to rebury remains of Colonial-era black New Yorkers and their artifacts — personal items found on top of coffins and scattered around the burial ground — at the lower Manhattan site from which they were excavated 10 years ago.
The artifacts recovered Oct. 12 from 6 WTC make up “a sizable portion” of the collection, but it is unclear how much of the total the 100 boxes recovered represents, said Cassandra Henderson of the General Services Administration, the agency responsible for the project.
She said recovery workers got into the ruins a month ago and collected artifacts, files filled with documents, thousands of photographs and computers used by archeologists in analyzing and conserving the artifacts. The recovered material must be cleaned up, studied and catalogued again — and searches done on the files contained in the recovered computers — to determine exactly how much was lost and how much was found, she added.
Construction workers clearing a site for a federal office building at Broadway and Duane St. in 1991 found skeletons and remains determined to be those of hundreds of enslaved African-Americans who lived in that part of Manhattan and buried their dead there from 1712 to 1794.
Agency Under Fire
Despite having spent $20 million to research the remains and artifacts, the General Services Administration has angered activists and community groups who charge that the agency dragged its feet in scheduling a reburial of the unearthed remains.
Charles Barron of the Committee of Descendants of the Afrikan Ancestral Burial Ground says the agency reneged on a promise to rebury the remains Aug. 17, the anniversary of the birth of back-to-Africa activist Marcus Garvey.
“All those artifacts and the remains would have been buried by now,” he said. “Instead, much that is valuable may now be lost, or damaged.”
The agency said it never promised an Aug. 17 reburial. Henderson insisted it wants “to focus totally on the African Burial Ground and honor the remains.” But she conceded it “will be very difficult to do that right now in New York City, with all the concerns we have.”
Barron was not buying that.
“I believe in nothing the GSA says. If they are concerned about all of that, those bones would have already been reburied by now,” he said.
May 16, 2001
The city stepped up its war against the West Nile virus yesterday, targeting storm drains where mosquitoes breed.
Thirty teams of workers fanned out across the five boroughs and dropped larvicide pellets into 8,000 storm drains.
By the end of the month, about 145,000 storm drains will have been treated with larvicide. The teams are marking the treated drains with white enamel spray paint as they go.
Larviciding targets mosquito larva and is a crucial first step in preventing the spread of West Nile virus. The city already has done small scale larviciding in ponds.
Be afraid, skeeters — be very afraid!
“It’s too early in the season to know yet how vigorous the virus is going to be in our area,” said Sandra Mullin, assistant commissioner at the city Health Department. “But we’re doing all that we can, like we did last year, to try to minimize the breeding of mosquitoes.”
The virus, which claimed seven lives in 1999 and two last year, is transmitted to people by mosquitoes. The virus has not yet been detected in the city this year. Five infected birds were found in New Jersey this month.
Crews from the Housing Authority — along with the city’s Environmental Protection, Parks, Sanitation and Health departments — are doing the larviciding work.
The one-year contract was apparently not lucrative enough to draw in bidders earlier this month, including Clarke Mosquito Management, which handled the city’s $4.6 million mosquito control contract last year.
Today the Health Department will find out if anyone bid on contracts to handle both larviciding and adulticiding — the use of pesticides to kill adult mosquitoes.
Scientists and environmentalists say it is a more effective way to control mosquitoes than spraying pesticides.
“If you do larviciding early on, you’ll be less likely to need adulticides later on,” said Dr. Stephen Ostroff of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “It makes no difference to me whether it’s done by the city or done by a private contractor, as long as it is done correctly.”
Clarke was the only company to bid on the city’s original three-year, multimillion mosquito control contract last month.
But the Health Department rebid the contract after Clarke was slapped with a six-figure fine by state environmental officials for using untrained and unsupervised workers to spray pesticides in the city last summer.
May 16, 2001
Transit Authority committee has postponed a vote on proposed subway service changes, including the controversial plan to shorten the G line.
New York City Transit and Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials will instead consider a new proposal that community groups opposed to the TA plan offered on Monday, leaders of the groups said yesterday.
The TA meeting, originally scheduled for tomorrow, will instead be held May 24.
The subway service changes had initially been on the agenda of the MTA board in March, but were taken off the table at the request of Gov. Pataki, and have been under discussion ever since.
John Leon, a consultant to the Noble Street Block Association in Greenpoint, which has led the fight over G train service, said the group had submitted a plan proposing the G train remain as it is, and the F train continue to use the 53rd St. tunnel between Queens and Manhattan.
“This should make the Queens riders happy and, of course, it would make Greenpoint-North Brooklyn G riders happy as well because their train would continue to go to Continental Ave.-Forest Hills,” Leon said. The MTA has proposed ending the G line at Court Square in Long Island City.
Tina Chan, transportation chairwoman for the Queens Civic Congress, said the communities’ proposal — which would have the new V line go through the new 63rd St. tunnel instead of switching the F to the 63rd St. tunnel— answers all of the agency’s concerns while keeping vital subway services to Queens.
“The F train needs to service quite a few important stations on the west side of Queens, such as the Queensboro Plaza, Court Square, and there are quite a few important facilities along the line such as Citibank, LaGuardia College, the School Construction Authority,” she said.
“Most important is that a lot of F train commuters transfer to the No. 6 train at the 53rd and Lexington Ave. station,” she said.
“If you reroute the F train to the 63rd St. tunnel, people would lose that transfer. In order for them to transfer, they are going have to walk out of the station from 63rd St., walk about four blocks to the 59th St. station. We feel that’s just not a viable transfer at all.”
Present at the meeting Monday where the proposals were presented were MTA Executive Director Marc Shaw, TA President Lawrence Reuter, and other TA and MTA staff.
Representatives of the Straphangers Campaign and the Regional Planning Association, an independent planning group, helped the opponents draft the alternate plan.
“The MTA representatives looked at it very objectively and the TA president said he would check it out,” Leon said. “He wasn’t as enthusiastic so we have to wait to see what his ultimate decision is.”
Tom Kelly, spokesman for the MTA, said the community groups made “suggestions” rather than a proposal at Monday’s meetings.
The TA will continue meeting with community groups and listening to their suggestions, he said.
Sunday, May 13, 2001
The United States government believes that Charles Arce of Brooklyn kept faith with his country. He went to Korea with the Army more than half a century ago and almost certainly died there.
Now, his country would like to keep faith with his memory and his family. But it isn’t easy to do so many years later.
One trail of Charles Arce’s family petered out at a Brooklyn Bridge entrance, where the family’s 41-43 Sands St. residence is now a parking lot.
Similarly, the 130 Fulton St. residence of Ramon Arce, an uncle listed with the Army as Charles’ beneficiary, no longer exists.
Visits to three other Brooklyn locations where his family lived before Arce enlisted with the Army to fight in Korea proved just as futile.
It has been more than 50 years since Pfc. Charles Arce, seven weeks short of his 20th birthday, went missing in action and was presumed killed in the brutal battle of Unsan in the early months of the Korean War.
As arduous and painstaking as the task of finding and recovering the remains of nearly 8,200 American servicemen missing in action from the Korean War has been, finding their living relatives is proving just as difficult, said Therese Fisher, director of genealogy at The American History Company.
The Army hired the company, which does genealogical research and publishes history books, to track down the relatives as part of the overall outreach of the U.S. Department of Defense to contact them.
Access to North Korea has improved in recent years and joint American and Korean teams have been recovering remains of servicemen in areas where American units fought during the war.
But finding relatives is another matter, said Maj. Horace Bowden, operations officer for the Repatriation and Family Affairs Division of the U.S. Army Casualty and Memorial Affairs Operation Center.
“After 50 years, the trail has gone pretty dark,” Bowden said.
The Army’s database has about 2,500 families. The identification process includes using mitochondrial DNA, meaning samples collected from the mother’s side of a serviceman’s family, to identify recovered remains.
Some of those remains may belong to Charles Arce, but the Army needs to make contact with his relations to verify that.
“Just because we’re looking for Charles Arce’s family doesn’t mean we have a set of bones, or remains that we believe to be his,” Bowden cautioned.
Army spokeswoman Shari Lawrence said the work of recovering remains and trying to connect them to family is extremely important.
“It’s a commitment we make to our soldiers that, if they’re injured or killed, that we will bring them home as quickly as possible,” Lawrence said. “It’s an obligation we have … whenever we know where they are and we can identify them as Americans, we will bring them home.”
Arce’s mother and father, Pedro and Dolores, came to Brooklyn from Puerto Rico in 1920. Born in Brooklyn on Dec. 21, 1930, Arce enlisted in the Army on Sept. 8, 1948. He soon found himself on the Korean peninsula as the Cold War turned hot when North Korea’s Stalinist government mounted an invasion of South Korea in June 1950.
The United States, heading the United Nations forces, jumped in to head off the aggression.
China, wary of U.S. forces so near its territory, sent human-wave attacks to aid the North Koreans. In fact, Chinese soldiers routed Arce’s 8th Calvary Regiment and the 1st Calvary Division on Nov. 1, 1950.
Arce was declared missing in action the next day. Very few American soldiers survived the battle over the next few days.
“It appears no one ever saw him killed,” Fisher said.
Arce was automatically promoted to the rank of corporal in 1953, but then was declared dead on Dec. 31 that year.
Complicating the search is a disastrous 1972 fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, part of the National Archives, that destroyed about 80% of personnel files of anyone discharged from the Army between Nov. 1, 1912 and Jan. 1, 1960. The Army wasn’t even able to provide a photograph of Arce.
Fisher, whose company boasts a 100% success rate finding families of servicemen so far, said the missing records are crucial. She is left to trying to track down the family the old-fashioned way — using the telephone book. She has called most people named Arce in Brooklyn without luck.
Anyone with information about Arce or his family should call the Army at (800) 892-2490. For anyone with information about relatives of other MIA servicemen, the Navy’s number is (800) 443-9298; Air Force is (800) 531-5501 and the Marine Corps is (800) 847-1597. Families of American civilians missing in combat should contact the State Department at (202) 647-6769.
Original Story Date: 05/13/01