The BEAST: Buffalo's Best Fiend

RNC Coverage:

Pestering our Overlords Michael Higgins

“Fox News sucks! Fox News sucks! Fox News sucks!”

A group of demonstrators gathered near the rear bumper of a black Fox News van and chanted abuse at two of Rupert Murdoch’s employees, who sat and took it with fatuous smiles.

It was late in United for Peace & Justice’s march Sunday, at a corner of Fifth Avenue in the 20s. The group of demonstrators had already filed past Madison Square Garden, shaking their fists and shouting slogans at the empty arena that would be filled for the next few days with Republican delegates...more

Greatest American Zero Al Uthman

...It seems the Republicans are sticking with what got them here in the first place: content-free appeals to fear and anger, incessant evocations of the specter of 9/11, and revenge-driven saber rattling. And nothing else.

There’s a good reason for that. The Republicans have done such a profoundly crappy job of steering the ship of state that they can’t possibly defend their own record. And they can’t even whisper about the economy, because they seem to have gotten away with the grandest transfer of wealth in history, and they don’t want to jinx it...more

Purchasing Power to the People Ken Barnes

There were hundreds of cops in Penn station, huddled in groups, pushing each other, grabbing each other’s ass and collecting overtime. Beneath Madison Square Garden, you could feel the frat-boy/Gestapo vibe as the biggest, richest, most powerful frat of them all, G(amma) O(mega) P(i), was in town for the Republican National Convention, with New York’s finest is acting as their personal body guards, along with the national guard and state troopers... more

Politics & Media:

Milk Spilled, Thousands Die Matt Taibbi

WITH ALL DUE respect to the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, who was polite to me when we spoke on the phone earlier this year, I had to laugh at his 3000-word "We Fucked Up on Iraq" piece that came out last month.

Kurtz's Aug. 12 piece, entitled "The Post on WMDs: An Inside Story; Prewar Articles Questioning Threat Often Didn't Make Front Page," was the latest in what is likely to be a long series of tepid media mea culpas about pre-war Iraq reporting. The piece comes on the heels of the New York Times' infamous "The Bitch Set Us Up" piece from this past May, in which that paper implicitly blamed hyperambitious hormone-case Judith Miller for its hilarious prewar failures... more

Dogfight: The Gendered Degeneration of Politics Stan Goff

And so today we come to the comic political opera of the Swift Boat tempest, with the George W. Bush publicity apparatus baited by the John Kerry publicity apparatus. Now the spectacle is a strident dick-measuring contest over military service records.

It goes without saying – or does it? – that the image of the warrior-king and the pseudo-events of political conventions have now decisively sidelined any meaningful public discourse about the actual situation in which the world finds itself.

I think we can salvage some meaning… by looking more closely not at the electoral implications of this political dogfight, but at the cultural ones... more

Buffalo in Briefs

Scarface Strikes Again - Joel Giambra’s been very publicly blasé about blowing off the scandal in the Aurora Highway Division involving his buddy, former supervisor Doug Naylon, calling the eight month investigation a waste of taxpayer money. Give it to Giambra for having the nerve to preach about wasting taxpayer funds—then again, he’s an expert... more

Anatomy of a Copyright Case Stephanie Cole

First, let us make no mistake: copyright infringement is against the law, can be a crime, and is taken seriously by both copyright holders and law enforcement. The civil cases (entity v. entity) can lead to damage claims of up to $150,000 per willful violation, while the criminal actions (government v. entity) can lead to sentences as high as five years in the slammer... more

COBRA Joins Forces With al Qaeda

GI JOE HEADQUARTERS (AP): In a shocking twist on the war on terror, representatives from GI Joe confirmed today that COBRA is now officially collaborating with Islamic terrorist group Al-Qaeda.

Rumors were put to rest today when photos appeared of high-ranking Al-Qaeda officials buying COBRA vehicles and artillery... more

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