7 July 2005
Spectator
The view from hereGiambra loses it on the home front
Recent polls show that an overwhelming majority of Eerie County residents think Joel Giambra should resign. Seventy-nine percent of those polls wanted Giambra to quit and that was without even knowing that Giambra had verbally assaulted Legislator Elise Cusack, then nine-months pregnant, in the county parking garage, calling her the "c" word. Now there's leadership in action. People also don't know that Giambra tried to kick the Buffalo Fire Department's HazMat team off his property last week AFTER Giambra himself had summoned them to investigate a mysterious powder contained in a letter mailed to his house. When the firefighters showed up, Giambra verbally assaulted them when they insisted on following protocols for such incidents. Giambra went so far as to tell the HazMat team to get off his property and that he wanted county officials to investigate. Joel's behavior is getting more bizarre. Long before he led the county into the financial toilet, Giambra spent his entire political career in city jobs. He knows that when an emergency is called in, it gets investigated according to standard procedures. As county executive, Giambra knows (or should know) that the county has similar procedures. But when the Buffalo HazMat team responds to Giambra's own call for assistance, they get nothing but verbal abuse from the guy they are trying to help. Maybe Joel does need an extended vacation.
Ni-Mo as crook and menace
Once upon a time, the sanctioned monopolies that are public utilities were active allies in the efforts to restore economic vitality in American cities. Those days are sadly passed as more and more of these utilities are co-opted by simple greed. The Spectator was reminded of this recently when television news covered the incredible case of Niagara Mohawk turning off power to a Buffalo firehouse. What an incredible spectacle that was, coming on the heels of the public embarrassment in the national media that Erie County needed a handout (no pun intended) of toilet paper for county workers. Can you imagine anyone shutting off power to a fire station? Before you say "no, I can't," recall that this is the same electric company that was discovered to have overcharged the City of Buffalo tens of millions of dollars. When the overcharge was noted and the City asked for its money back, Ni-Mo refunded about a third of what they'd stolen. The rest, Ni-Mo officials said, had been stolen well beyond the statute of limitations on refunds and thus, they would keep the overcharge. In other words, the city didn't catch them in time so they saw fit to keep the excess charges. Mayor Masiello meekly said OK and the matter was dropped (and the overcharged funds pocketed). Forget that on any given day, 20% of the street lights in the city are out but the city still gets charged for them. When Ni-Mo didn't get their money from the landlord who owned the building housing the fire station, the power company shut them down. Public safety was secondary to private profit.
D.C. scoundrels still at it
Bush, DeLay, Frist, and Company have shut down citizen access to bankruptcy as a means of getting a fresh start. How do they reconcile that with the notion that United Airlines can simply walk away from its pension obligations to their workforce and lay those obligations at the feet of the government? Is the Spectator the only one who sees a contradiction here? Or how about the recent pay raise for Congress - their eighth in 12 years - when they haven't deigned to raise the minimum wage for American workers in years? Where's the outrage?
Dry eyes for Judy Miller
You will pardon Spectator for not shedding any tears for Judith Miller, the Times reporter now in the slammer for refusing to name her "source" in the Valerie Plame outing. Miller, bless her little pinhead, never wrote a story about Plame so how could anyone be a "source" for a non-story? Everyone knows that the only reason Karl Rove and the White House were contacting reporters at all was as payback of Plame's hubby's op-ed regarding the fallacious claim of Iraq's attempted acquisition of yellow cake uranium that Bush spewed in his State of the Union speech. There was utterly no news value in releasing the fact that Plame was an undercover CIA operative. That's why Miller didn't write a story. It was all about payback. Who cares if it is a felony to do so? Certainly not Bob Novak, the vacuous dick who did write a story revealing to the world what Valerie Plame did for a living. This White House says it's doing God's work so anyone who gets in its way is fair game. Miller wants to spend her days in jail in a symbolic paean to journalistic morality and ethics; this after she authored all that propaganda and pap that helped get the country to buy into war in Iraq. Good for her - and for us. Now, we might get some respite from the Bush bullshit she was peddling.
Copyright 2005 by Buffalo Report, Inc.