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On September 11th, 2001, on what was a perfect morning -- right up until the very moment a Boeing 767-223-ER slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center -- I stood on the corner of Delancey and Ridge Streets in downtown Manhattan.

I was working on an election campaign – it was primary day in New York – and little did I realize that politics, culture and our entire trajectory as a nation was about to change forever. I had been alerted to the first crash by a friend calling my cell phone, but it was as I was staring at the gaping hole in this New York City landmark, in horror, shock set in as I saw a second plane approaching.

I can see it all in slow motion these days – the airplane seemed to glide in almost effortlessly, and as I and others around stood unable to move, a loud explosion echoed through the canyons of lower Manhattan as a fireball erupted that almost seemed to reach where I was standing. It was, for lack of a better term, surreal.

For me, the journey forward from that day would be a difficult one. I was born and raised in Manhattan and was young enough that I couldn’t remember the city without those two awe-inspiring landmarks. It is what I would use to figure out where I was going whenever I came up from the subway system.

I had to process the knowledge that I had been in the North Tower only 16 hours before the attack. Because I had been delivering campaign literature to a volunteer who lived in the neighborhood and thought to myself, “I haven’t been in the Twin Towers for a while.”

What sticks with me most, though, is that after seeing the second plane hit, a lanky, salt-and-pepper-bearded man standing next to me who was holding his bike at his side, saying, “this is terrible; we’re going to be at war tomorrow.”

He wasn’t far off the mark. He only underestimated the wars.

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To dismiss Whitestock as "more religious than political" is to forget that for Glenn Beck's audience, politics are never separate from religion. Interviews with his audience members confirm what I've said for a long time now: conservative orthodoxy has become a cult, and Glenn Beck is a cult leader. And no, I am not exaggerating. As marketing guru Patrick Hanlon puts it,

One of the things that helps great companies endure—aside from innovation and product—is culture. Companies that survive their founders have a community and a culture uniquely their own. If that culture is attractive, consumers are drawn to them like iron filings to a magneto. The act of creating such enduring culture is one of the key responsibilities of leadership. (Emphasis mine)

Beck is not merely self-promoting, but rebranding right wing Judeo-Christian identity politics. In his book Primal Branding, Hanlon identifies seven elements of the successful brand: (1) a creation story, (2) a creed, (3) rituals, (4) icons, (5) sacred words, (6) non-believers, and (7) a leader who overcomes opposition. All seven elements were present last Saturday, and they were all aimed squarely at the demographic for which Beck and Goldline aim: willfully ignorant white evangelicals. Sarah Palin drew the charismatics, the rabbi and the Indian chief invoked the Book of Mormon, and Alveda King was a sop to African-American prosperity gopel. The substitution of faith for fact was complete when the Reverend C.L. Jackson called Beck "a son of God." This was Beck's attempt at covering his racism with religion; but it only works on the kind of suckers who buy bus tickets to a revivial.

Moreover, Whitestock came amid a new "silly season" of right-wing Islamophobia afflicting the country like a bad flu. There was no imam among the token interfaith chaplaincy praising Beck; this was deliberate, as Islam has been turned into the new monolith of evil for the right to invoke McCarthy-style. Understanding this structure of the new right is the first step to unmaking it.

Good strategy. They're really going to look bad if they openly work against financial reform. What they'll do when no one's looking, well, that's another story:

President Obama challenged some of the nation’s most influential bankers on Thursday to call off their “battalions of financial industry lobbyists” and embrace a new regulatory structure meant to avert another economic crisis.

Speaking in the bankers’ backyard, at the Cooper Union in Manhattan, Mr. Obama castigated a “failure of responsibility” by Wall Street that led to the financial crisis of 2008, and he pressed his case for what he called “a common-sense, reasonable, non-ideological” system of tighter regulation to prevent any recurrence. He took issue with the claim that his proposal would institutionalize the idea of future bailouts of huge banks.

“That may make for a good sound bite, but it’s not factually accurate,” Mr. Obama said. “It is not true. In fact, the system as it stands is what led to a series of massive, costly taxpayer bailouts. And it’s only with reform that we can we avoid a similar outcome in the future. In other words, a vote for reform is a vote to put a stop to taxpayer-funded bailouts. That’s the truth. End of story.”

He said scrupulous business leaders had no reason to resist his regulation plan. “The only people who ought to fear the kind of oversight and transparency that we’re proposing are those whose conduct will fail this scrutiny,” he said.

He wants the following items included in the final bill:

Protect taxpayers from too-big-to-fail firms

Impose the Volcker rule, named for former Fed Chair Paul Volcker, which stops firms from making large bets with their own money, or “proprietary trading”

Make derivatives trades transparent

Create a consumer protection agency

Institute pay reforms to give investors a say over executive pay.

Market reaction? A shrug.

The Havana Note: Joe Lieberman will seek a pardon for a convicted terrorist who led a bombing spree across Manhattan

DownWithTyranny! While we're on the subject of dangerous Republicrats...

Cogitamus: A Republican soldier caught in a lie? That's Unpossible!

Blue Girl, Red State: According to the Associated Press, this is what "winning the war" looks like: The enemy we have been fighting--and that has been killing Americans--has now been integrated into the government that we have been supporting with our blood and treasure.

HOLY CRAP: McCain's Catholic problem...Postcards From God...Jesus-crazed Republican legislator discovers wife-beating is unpopular...Iowa GOP (see:Evangelical) delegation blackballs Charles Grassley...The Great Desecration...Evangelical Christian tyranny is rife in the Military...Democratic National Convention to open with interfaith service led by Pentecostal minister...Methodist minister arrested in Karl Rove protest...Church v. State, Immigation Edition...How Archaeology killed Biblical History...White guys telling us what we need and deserve

Altercation:

The Federici family and the E Street family have requested that, in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Danny Federici Melanoma Fund. The fund's website is now up and running, where it is described as "dedicated to the research and development of new and effective treatments for melanoma through funding for additional clinical trials based upon Danny's melanoma treatments and other methods headed by Dr. Paul Chapman [at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center]. Our other objective is to raise awareness for this aggressive disease."

I met Danny before he got back together with Springsteen's band in the 90's and he was a very kind and gentle man who really loved his music and his family.

Today is the anniversary of my mom's passing away. She suffered with Diabetes (a terrible disease) for many, many years which left her legally blind for a while and in April of 2003---she was diagnosed with a form of bone cancer that quickly spread throughout her body.

I was fortunate enough to talk with her on the phone for a few minutes the day before she died and I was able to tell her how much I loved her. She was barely lucid yet somehow knew I was on the phone. "I can hear you, Johnny. I'm not in pain," she said. " I'm proud of you." " I love you mom," was all I could say. "Johnny, I have to go," and then she drifted off.

She was like many Italian moms in New York, marrying a guy named Rocky and raising two kids in the early fifties. She valued family above all, was semi-religious and was one of the many working class moms that handled the checkbook and worked a second job whenever possible to help make ends meet.

She had an inner strength about her that I never really understood or appreciated until I started to have my own physical problems and made the rounds through our health care system. She had to take insulin twice a day just to stay alive and endured many experimental eye surgery's in Manhattan and Johns Hopkins in the early eighties just to try and stave off blindness---which in the end was the one thing that scared her the most. But she always fought through it and lived many years beyond the conventional medical predictions.

She died comfortably with my sister and father (they were married for over 50 years) at her side as I traveled to Florida to see her. I don't usually write these type of posts, but I just wanted to say, "I miss you, Mom."

03/12/1930--04/23/2004

Josephine Amato RIP

Sometimes the jokes just write themselves:

While grappling with MSNBC and CNN for viewers, Fox News has also been battling a smaller, more insidious enemy closer to home: bed bugs in its Midtown Manhattan newsroom. In an interview on Monday, Warren Vandeveer, senior vice president for operations and engineering at Fox News, said the cable channel had realized it had a problem a few weeks ago, when an employee “caught a bug and showed it to us.” An exterminator determined that the incursion was limited to a “very small area in the newsroom.” But the source of the bugs was not determined until the exterminator inspected the homes of about 20 employees. Mr. Vandeveer said the exterminator later described one employee’s home as having “the worst infestation he had seen in 25 years in the business.”

Open Thread below... and rest in peace, Anthony Minghella and Arthur C. Clarke.

Here is some raw footage of the steam pipe blast that occurred in Manhattan this afternoon.

Download | play Download | play (h/t Scarce for video)

NY Times:

A steam pipe explosion beneath a street near Grand Central Terminal this evening propelled a giant scalding jet of brownish steam toward the sky, sending commuters who had been heading home stampeding to safety.

New York City officials said one person was killed and more than 20 were injured, two of them critically.

The blast, on East 41st Street at Lexington Avenue, raised fears of terrorism, but officials were quick to dismiss that possibility.

I have a friend who was just blocks away from the WTC when the towers fell and her apartment was engulfed in ash for hours and hours. When we finally got in contact again and she shared with me how horrifying the experience had been, I admit that one of the first things I thought about was all that free flying asbestos from the buildings. My friend moved to Los Angeles a year later. But that year of living (and breathing) the air near Ground Zero has resulted in a permanent cough. And now, we get this:

TIME:

An appeals court ruling could spell trouble for New Yorkers suing the Environmental Protection Agency and its former chief for saying that sooty Lower Manhattan air was safe to breathe after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

A three judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declared this week that EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman and other agency officials can't be held constitutionally liable for making rosy declarations about air quality after the World Trade Center's destruction.

The opinion, written by the court's chief judge, Dennis Jacobs, said opening EPA workers up to lawsuits for giving out bad information during a crisis could have a catastrophic side effect.

"Officials might default to silence in the face of the public's urgent need for information," Jacobs wrote.[..]

Some preliminary scientific studies have indicated that as many as 400,000 people were exposed to toxic ground zero dust. Hundreds and perhaps thousands of people have fallen ill, and several have died from lung ailments blamed on inhaled Trade Center ash.

(graphic via The NY Times)

Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died Wednesday night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island....read on

"Slaughterhouse-Five," was the book that turned me on to Kurt....I'll find some video of him later today....He had a few things to say about the administration.

UPDATE: PBS's NOW did an excellent profile on Vonnegut some time ago. Hear the man in his own words here.

I think I might have to write a diet book based on blogging about Republicans, because this story has sure sickened me to the point of not eating again. Dear God, what would you say to the children of the victims of 9/11? "Daddy loved you very much and you can think of him every time we drive on West 64th to Amsterdam Drive"? It's just sickening.

Kansas City Star: (h/t Sisyphus Shrugged)

The pulverized remains of bodies from the World Trade Center disaster site were used by city workers to fill ruts and potholes, a city contractor says in a sworn affidavit filed Friday in Manhattan Federal Court.

Eric Beck says debris powders - known as fines - were put in a pothole-fill mixture by crews at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, N.Y., where more than 1.65 million tons of World Trade Center debris were deposited after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"I observed the New York City Department of Sanitation taking these fines from the conveyor belts of our machines, loading it onto tractors and using it to pave roads and fill in potholes, dips and ruts," Eric Beck said.

Beck was the senior supervisor for Taylor Recycling, a private contractor hired to sift through debris trucked to Fresh Kills after the trade center attacks. Before the arrival of Taylor's equipment at Fresh Kills in October 2001, the debris was sifted manually by workers using rakes and shovels.

Beck's affidavit was filed by lawyers for the families of Sept. 11 victims who are suing the city in hopes of creating a formal burial place for debris that they say contains human remains.

"It's devastating," Norman Siegel, an attorney representing the families, said of Beck's statement. "When the 9/11 families found about this, they were wiped out."

No wonder the FDNY wasn't too happy with Giuliani. What a way to honor our fallen heroes.