HOW JOHN EDWARDS SHOT HIMSELF IN BOTH FEET IT WASN'T JUST THE $400 HAIRCUT. "HATCH"-ING DEFEAT
UP FRONT News February 1, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
As many readers of UP FRONT News are aware, I was an early supporter of John Edwards. Responding to his message directed at making domestic poverty a priority campaign issue, I did some volunteer work for him when he ran for president in 2004. Indeed I was directly involved in setting up a debate at the Peter's Place drop-in center for homeless people featuring Edwards' representative Terence Tolbert against John Kerry's sister Greenwich Village resident Peggy Kerry. Tolbert "won" the debate easily.
Some months later, when I was trying to locate Mr. Tolbert, I learned that he was no longer associated politically with Mr. Edwards and was working in a political capacity for Michael Bloomberg. Strange bedfellows? Maybe. Indeed when I spoke to Mr. Edwards when he came to New York in 2005 to campaign for Democratic mayoral candidate Fernando Ferrer, and urged him to consider running again for the presidency, I also told him that Mr. Tolbert was working for Bloomberg, something that apparently came as a surprise to Mr. Edwards.
In any event, among my important political links to Mr. Edwards for a long time has been Steven Gradman, a college professor of political science who for many years has been the organizer of the NYC Edwards meetup. When I first discussed my plans to run for the U.S. Senate against the Republicrat Hillary Clinton, his initial reaction was "Oh, she's not so bad."
Quite appparently I was able to convince Mr. Gradman that Mrs. Clinton is not merely a recurrently lapsed liberal but that in fact, her rhetoric notwithstanding, she shares much politically and even characterologically with George W. Bush, and when it comes to Machia- vellian politics, Big Dick Cheney. Mr. Gradman is an authentic progressive with a strong commitment to human rights and is an active environmentalist. He is well known in progres- sive Democratic Party circles in New York.
And so I was very gratified when Steven Gradman agreed to serve as the volunteer Media Coordinator for my Democratic write-in campaign for the U.S. Senate, even as he continued to run the Edwards NYC meetups. Mr. Gradman assisted me in arranging speaking appearances for me with some Democratic clubs. I usually followed his political advice, which is based not only in a sound progressive base but also on much knowledge of the personalities involved in New York politics.
Mr. Gradman sometimes found himself in uncomfortable political positions, particularly with the emergence of a pseudo-"liberal' Senate candidate named Jonathan Tasini, who entered the race long after I did. It soon became apparent that Tasini was one of a number of "left" New York political activists (many associated with the almost lily-white Green Party) who are connected to the political extremist Lyndon H. laRouche, Jr. and his local surrogates such as the African-American racist Lenora Fulani and the Jewish racist and cult leader "Dr." Fred Newman. for more on all this, visit http://www.tomweissdemocratforussenate.blogspot.com/,
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/ and http://www.dennisking.org/. Tasini's chances of beating Hilllary Clinton were not much better than Geoffrey Blank's or, in that spirit, Saddam Hussein's. Tasini's purpose in running was to pull as many votes away as possible from me. He could do that by virtue of the fact that he had some things that I did not. He had some money (enabling him to pay some partially indentured servants to circulate pettions for him to get on the ballot for the Democratic primary. And he had the backing of the local LaRouche fifth columnists.
LaRouche, a conviced felon, is a registered Democrat who lives in Loudon County (Leesburg) Virginia with his wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche in a Hitler-style fortified compound known as the Ibikus Farm. He claims to live on Social Security but, even allowing for the years he spent in a couple of federal penitentiaries after his conviction for mail fraud, he is very, very rich and lives off of all sorts of ill-gotten gains. His crypto-fascist influence, which infects both major political parties, extends deep into New York via the activities of surrogates such as Fulani, Newman, Blank, Democrat Charles Lenchner, and Green Party tapeworms such as Paul Zulkowitz, Gerald Kann, and George Tatevosyan as well as other threat-generating operatives like Les Jamieson (of "9/11 Truth") and Gary Phaneuf, aka the Staten Island Stalker.
Tasini responded to my candicacy by generating a series of LaRouche/Geoffrey Blank-style threats and other criminal harassments against me, all of which have been reported to the appropriate law enforcement authorities on local and federal levels. Those harassments were perpetrated on behalf of the "Mr. Magoo"-resembling Tasini by people such as LaRoucheite Lenchner and a woman named Tracy Denton, who comes out out of the Howard Dean hierarchy but acts like a LaRouche-ite. she is among those who helped civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel lose his races to become NYC Public Advocate with her lily-white gentrified approach to organizing and fundraising. Denton once tried to have me arrested at the endorsement meeting of Democracy for New York City, the local branch of Dean's Democracy for America. Ms. Denton's notion of "democracy" has much in common with the "people's democracies" that prevailed in Eastern Europe from 1945 until the collapse of that great "democracy" known as the Soviet Union.
Witnessing some of these harassments, as well as those against me that took place in the LaRouche/Fulani-run "Green" Ralph Nader meetups was a guy named Charles Riggs III, a well known liberal Democratic Party activist who has a high level job on the Brian Williams "Nightly News" program at NBC. Riggs, who for a while was a Tasini backer, has a disturbing pattern of not responding to newsworthy e-mails from me such as those relating to the Chinese Communist Genocide in Tibet and the very related matter of opposition to the Beijing Olympics. Could this be because of the fact that the cash cow of the Olympics are to be broadcast by NBC? I think so. Riggs is covering up for his corporate employer.
Unfortunately John Edwards did the same thing. Although I received a number of explicit assurances from Mr. Edwards, mostly through a number of his high-level campaign aides, that he would at least comment on the Tibet and Olympic Games matter, it never happened. Indeed, it became necessary for me on one occasion, with my usually precise timing, to publicly remind him about Tibet in front of several hundred people at one of his fundraising talks at "Strata" in Manhattan. Mr. Edwards was visibly displeased.
He never responded to my e-mailed questions as to whether he has investments in the hedge fund known as "Communist" China.
He also refused to respond to my questions about what was LaRouche-ite Charles Lench-ner doing in his campaign as I had learned from Mr. Gradman.
One of the major reasons why Edwards' once potent campaign wound up popular support-wise something like Rudolph Giuliani's is because of a New York political operator named Peter Hatch. Hatch is connected to a patronage-obsessed "liberal" operation known as the Working Families Party, essentially a populism-spewing machine run as a de facto money generating dictatorship by Dan Cantor. Mr. Gradman knows the details of how the WFP iced my Senatorial candidacy in true Carmine DeSapio (New York)/Richard Daley (Chicago) style and in fact, realizing Tasini's insurmountable deficits charisma and issue-wise, endorsed Hillary Clinton for the Senate.
One of John Edwards' biggest political mistakes was listening to people like Peter hatch and surrendering New York to Hillary Clinton.
Barack Obama did not make the same mistake and that is why he may become president and why John Edwards, if he is lucky, could wind up at best as Obama's running mate. And in any case, should Senator Obama win the Democratic nomination, he would to a lot better by picking John Edwards as his running mate than by snatching defeat from the jaws of victory against the Republicans by making a politically fatal error and selecting Hillary Clinton.
* * * * * * *
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
As many readers of UP FRONT News are aware, I was an early supporter of John Edwards. Responding to his message directed at making domestic poverty a priority campaign issue, I did some volunteer work for him when he ran for president in 2004. Indeed I was directly involved in setting up a debate at the Peter's Place drop-in center for homeless people featuring Edwards' representative Terence Tolbert against John Kerry's sister Greenwich Village resident Peggy Kerry. Tolbert "won" the debate easily.
Some months later, when I was trying to locate Mr. Tolbert, I learned that he was no longer associated politically with Mr. Edwards and was working in a political capacity for Michael Bloomberg. Strange bedfellows? Maybe. Indeed when I spoke to Mr. Edwards when he came to New York in 2005 to campaign for Democratic mayoral candidate Fernando Ferrer, and urged him to consider running again for the presidency, I also told him that Mr. Tolbert was working for Bloomberg, something that apparently came as a surprise to Mr. Edwards.
In any event, among my important political links to Mr. Edwards for a long time has been Steven Gradman, a college professor of political science who for many years has been the organizer of the NYC Edwards meetup. When I first discussed my plans to run for the U.S. Senate against the Republicrat Hillary Clinton, his initial reaction was "Oh, she's not so bad."
Quite appparently I was able to convince Mr. Gradman that Mrs. Clinton is not merely a recurrently lapsed liberal but that in fact, her rhetoric notwithstanding, she shares much politically and even characterologically with George W. Bush, and when it comes to Machia- vellian politics, Big Dick Cheney. Mr. Gradman is an authentic progressive with a strong commitment to human rights and is an active environmentalist. He is well known in progres- sive Democratic Party circles in New York.
And so I was very gratified when Steven Gradman agreed to serve as the volunteer Media Coordinator for my Democratic write-in campaign for the U.S. Senate, even as he continued to run the Edwards NYC meetups. Mr. Gradman assisted me in arranging speaking appearances for me with some Democratic clubs. I usually followed his political advice, which is based not only in a sound progressive base but also on much knowledge of the personalities involved in New York politics.
Mr. Gradman sometimes found himself in uncomfortable political positions, particularly with the emergence of a pseudo-"liberal' Senate candidate named Jonathan Tasini, who entered the race long after I did. It soon became apparent that Tasini was one of a number of "left" New York political activists (many associated with the almost lily-white Green Party) who are connected to the political extremist Lyndon H. laRouche, Jr. and his local surrogates such as the African-American racist Lenora Fulani and the Jewish racist and cult leader "Dr." Fred Newman. for more on all this, visit http://www.tomweissdemocratforussenate.blogspot.com/,
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/ and http://www.dennisking.org/. Tasini's chances of beating Hilllary Clinton were not much better than Geoffrey Blank's or, in that spirit, Saddam Hussein's. Tasini's purpose in running was to pull as many votes away as possible from me. He could do that by virtue of the fact that he had some things that I did not. He had some money (enabling him to pay some partially indentured servants to circulate pettions for him to get on the ballot for the Democratic primary. And he had the backing of the local LaRouche fifth columnists.
LaRouche, a conviced felon, is a registered Democrat who lives in Loudon County (Leesburg) Virginia with his wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche in a Hitler-style fortified compound known as the Ibikus Farm. He claims to live on Social Security but, even allowing for the years he spent in a couple of federal penitentiaries after his conviction for mail fraud, he is very, very rich and lives off of all sorts of ill-gotten gains. His crypto-fascist influence, which infects both major political parties, extends deep into New York via the activities of surrogates such as Fulani, Newman, Blank, Democrat Charles Lenchner, and Green Party tapeworms such as Paul Zulkowitz, Gerald Kann, and George Tatevosyan as well as other threat-generating operatives like Les Jamieson (of "9/11 Truth") and Gary Phaneuf, aka the Staten Island Stalker.
Tasini responded to my candicacy by generating a series of LaRouche/Geoffrey Blank-style threats and other criminal harassments against me, all of which have been reported to the appropriate law enforcement authorities on local and federal levels. Those harassments were perpetrated on behalf of the "Mr. Magoo"-resembling Tasini by people such as LaRoucheite Lenchner and a woman named Tracy Denton, who comes out out of the Howard Dean hierarchy but acts like a LaRouche-ite. she is among those who helped civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel lose his races to become NYC Public Advocate with her lily-white gentrified approach to organizing and fundraising. Denton once tried to have me arrested at the endorsement meeting of Democracy for New York City, the local branch of Dean's Democracy for America. Ms. Denton's notion of "democracy" has much in common with the "people's democracies" that prevailed in Eastern Europe from 1945 until the collapse of that great "democracy" known as the Soviet Union.
Witnessing some of these harassments, as well as those against me that took place in the LaRouche/Fulani-run "Green" Ralph Nader meetups was a guy named Charles Riggs III, a well known liberal Democratic Party activist who has a high level job on the Brian Williams "Nightly News" program at NBC. Riggs, who for a while was a Tasini backer, has a disturbing pattern of not responding to newsworthy e-mails from me such as those relating to the Chinese Communist Genocide in Tibet and the very related matter of opposition to the Beijing Olympics. Could this be because of the fact that the cash cow of the Olympics are to be broadcast by NBC? I think so. Riggs is covering up for his corporate employer.
Unfortunately John Edwards did the same thing. Although I received a number of explicit assurances from Mr. Edwards, mostly through a number of his high-level campaign aides, that he would at least comment on the Tibet and Olympic Games matter, it never happened. Indeed, it became necessary for me on one occasion, with my usually precise timing, to publicly remind him about Tibet in front of several hundred people at one of his fundraising talks at "Strata" in Manhattan. Mr. Edwards was visibly displeased.
He never responded to my e-mailed questions as to whether he has investments in the hedge fund known as "Communist" China.
He also refused to respond to my questions about what was LaRouche-ite Charles Lench-ner doing in his campaign as I had learned from Mr. Gradman.
One of the major reasons why Edwards' once potent campaign wound up popular support-wise something like Rudolph Giuliani's is because of a New York political operator named Peter Hatch. Hatch is connected to a patronage-obsessed "liberal" operation known as the Working Families Party, essentially a populism-spewing machine run as a de facto money generating dictatorship by Dan Cantor. Mr. Gradman knows the details of how the WFP iced my Senatorial candidacy in true Carmine DeSapio (New York)/Richard Daley (Chicago) style and in fact, realizing Tasini's insurmountable deficits charisma and issue-wise, endorsed Hillary Clinton for the Senate.
One of John Edwards' biggest political mistakes was listening to people like Peter hatch and surrendering New York to Hillary Clinton.
Barack Obama did not make the same mistake and that is why he may become president and why John Edwards, if he is lucky, could wind up at best as Obama's running mate. And in any case, should Senator Obama win the Democratic nomination, he would to a lot better by picking John Edwards as his running mate than by snatching defeat from the jaws of victory against the Republicans by making a politically fatal error and selecting Hillary Clinton.
* * * * * * *
posted by Tom Weiss at 1:56 PM
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