Almost immediately after pledging on Buffalo Issue Alerts to stop posting CACGEC updates at that listserv, Joel Rose posted this:

In the fight to keep casino gambling out of Buffalo and Erie County, the tide has turned, and we can now see victory within our sights. We have battles yet to wage, but Judge William Skretny’s decision of July 8, 2008, marked the turning point in our efforts.

As promised, we’re having a victory celebration party! We don’t have the details worked out yet, but we do have a place and a date, as well as a probable time. So I wanted to let you all know as soon as possible so you could mark the event on your calendars.

Date: Friday, August 15, 2008
Time: 7-10 pm (tentative, subject to change)
Place: Niagara Frontier American Legion Post 1041
533 Amherst Street (at Grant)
Buffalo, N.Y. 14207

By the way:

Bingo Night at the Niagara Frontier American Legion Post 1041 is Mondays at 7:30. KTHXBAI.

Here’s the new cover, courtesy of the Albany Project:

There is much back and forth over whether this image is funny, not funny, helpful, or harmful. The cartoonist basically threw every dimwitted right-wing smear against the Obamas into one image. My own opinion is that it’s pretty darn funny.

With that said, the debate over this cover is missing the real, important issue. That is, the New Yorker is still publishing magazines and has found a way to become talked-about among people who don’t drink at the Algonquin or summer in the Hamptons.

But only in Cloudcuckooland, which has a new resident.

To compare what happened in Zimbabwe - (the ruling party was unhappy with the result, so it rigged the results to require a run-off and permit it to wage all-out political war against the opposition) - to what happened in Florida and Michigan this year is so baseless, so beyond the pale, so Godwinian in its obnoxiousness.

We already saw yesterday that Senator Clinton likened the Florida and Michigan primaries to what happened to Democrats in Florida in 2000. To Democrats, those are fighting words - especially given the fact that Clinton uttered them in Boca Raton, where many elderly Jewish voters miraculously chose to ignore Pat Buchanan’s anti-Semitism to vote for him in 2000.

The ultimate irony here doesn’t have to do with the fact that Clinton said she’d follow the rules set forth by the DNC and then decided not to when it suited her. The irony is that Florida and Michigan intentionally and knowingly violated DNC rules and pushed their primaries up to January so that they would have a similar impact on the primary race as Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. The DNC warned those states in 2007 that any effort to do that would result in those states’ delegates not being seated.

If people in Florida and Michigan are angry and their “disenfranchisement”, they have only to look to their state party organizations, which had been forewarned of the consequences far in advance. If Hillary Clinton is so shocked by the disenfranchisement of Florida and Michigan Democrats, then the time to speak up was back in 2007 when she was the presumptive nominee - not now, when she’ll quite obviously do and say anything to harm the person who has since become the presumptive nominee. She could have objected to the DNC, or tried to change those states’ parties minds.

And the further irony is that if Florida and Michigan had pushed their primaries back to May or June, they would have been far more important to the process overall than they ever could have imagined.

The saddest thing, however, is that the mismanagement of the Clinton 2008 campaign has revealed her to be a poor strategist and a worse manager. It has revealed her to be petty, hypocritical, false, and vindictive to millions of people who had respected and supporter her in other endeavors.

I look forward to her continued service in the United States Senate, which is nothing to sneeze at. I think that her current petulant and harmful behavior has prevented her from being any sort of VP contender.

Proletarians of the world, unite!

No.

My parents actually fled socialism in the mid-60s to come to this country and make a better life for them and me. So, no, I don’t remotely consider myself a supporter of the system that my parents fled.

But because I believe in the idea that society should pay for things like Fire protection, Police protection, health care for the poor and elderly, etc., the Ron Paul people are so happy to label me a “socialist”, without regard for what that word means generally (a hundred different things), or more specifically that it is an epithet that, to me, are fighting words.

Seriously, however, being called a “socialist” by the likes of the local Ron Paul supporters is something I take as a compliment. Because in practice, that’s all they do.

Yes, they put up signs and rally in Niagara Square for their candidate. But they also come on the internet and, like the sandwich-board messiah of yore, predict the end of the world in intemperate tones. Other than that, it comes down to labeling those who disagree with their opinions as “socialists”, “sheeple”, equating them with SLA-era Patty Hearst, and accusing them of being complicit in perpetuating a fascist/socialist/nazi America.

Yet these insult-hurling, people-labeling, philosopher-adoring people complain bitterly when insults are hurled at them, when they are labeled, and when their views are mocked as strenuously as they mock others. I believe the market gives them the liberty to purchase some cheese with their whine.

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan gave a speech in the shadow of the Berlin Wall and the Brandenburg Gate, imploring the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to “tear down this wall”. Two years later, it came down as a democratic revolution swept over the Warsaw Pact countries within the course of about 5 months.

The Berlin Wall wasn’t just a physical barrier. It was symbolic - it was the very embodiment of the East’s lack of freedom. It prevented its prisoners from visiting the West, where they would certainly come quickly to realize the inferiority of the brutal totalitarian state in which they lived. It was also one of the most brutally fortified de facto international frontiers in existence.

During the Berlin Wall’s 1963 - 1989 history, there were 5,000 escape attempts and 239 people perished trying to escape a communist totalitarian dictatorship and make a better, freer life in the West.

In 2007, a group of non-profits and community activists calling itself the “Waterfront Coalition” drenched itself in offensiveness and irony.

In order to protest one “wall” - the bermed Route 5 - the Waterfront Coalition purchased space on an actual wall. A billboard.

The billboard asks Governor Spitzer to “tear down this wall”. Evidently, it’s referring to Route 5, and not the billboard itself.

In making its point, the Waterfront Coalition invokes Reagan’s 1987 speech.

I will withhold, for now, comment on the substance of the Waterfront Coalition’s 40-minute long press conference where a representative from every. single. member. group. felt compelled to speak. WNYMedia will have video of that up later today.

But to equate Route 5 with the Berlin Wall is one thing and one thing only: an outrage.

Has Route 5 murdered or purged tens of millions of innocent people? Is Route 5 peppered with guardposts from which snipers target hapless pedestrians trying to cross from swamp to weeds? Is the grassy area between Route 5 and the incomprehensible maze that passes for Fuhrmann Boulevard laden with tank traps and mines to prevent progress or murder pedestrians?

To equate a bermed Route 5 - or even the Skyway, for that matter - with the Berlin Wall is absolute and utter bullshit, and those people who thought it would be pithy and on-point should be f*cking ashamed of themselves.

The only thing Route 5 is a barrier to is people’s views of the grain elevators and the Clean Water Act violation that runs around them.

Oh, and incidentally, the Riverkeeper once released this rendering of a “Citizen’s [sic] Vision for the Lakefront”:

Yes, that’s the Skyway and a bermed Route 5 in there.