Update: What are the previous post-convention bounces of the men who lost to the incumbent? Interesting post on FreeRepublic.com.

And speaking of Ohio, "The Corner" looks at why Kerry and Edwards and their families were in a Wendy's in the first place.

Another Update:

While Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, and their families were having a “lite” lunch at Wendy’s in the Town of Newburgh Friday, drumming up local support right after the national convention in Boston, their real lunches were waiting on their bus.

A member of the Kerry advance team called Nikola’s Restaurant at the Newburgh Yacht Club the night before and ordered 19 five-star lunches to go that would be picked up at noon Friday. Management at the restaurant, which is operated by CIA graduate chef Michael Dederick, was told the meals would be for the Kerry and Edwards families and actor Ben Affleck who was with them on the tour.

The gourmet meals to go included shrimp vindallo, grilled diver sea scallops, prosciutto, wrapped stuffed chicken, and steak salad. The meals came to about $200.

That sounds much more like John and Teresa's style--which is fine (I certainly can't begrudge anybody liking fine cuisine over hamburgers). But in the battle of the millionaires, Bush pulls off "regular guy" far, far better than Kerry, who inevitably falls on his face when he tries to get out of Boston Brahmin mode.

Just Good Friends of the Last Update: Power Line notes how the polling data in the Newsweek is skewed towards Democrats and asks, "Is anyone aware of an instance in which a member of the elite media has oversampled Republicans in one of these highly promoted presidential horse-race polls?"

« Close It

Funny how the mainstream media never mentions what the average soldier thinks of Kerry, his would be commander-in-chief (I hear he's an ex-soldier too. Kerry served in Vietnam, but he rarely mentions it these days). You'd think that with a nation simultaneously at war and deciding on a president, that would be, you know, news.

Update: Score one for the Washington Post, who reported the incident with the Marines.

Another Update: Hugh Hewitt adds:

Bottom line: This is how the overwhelming number active duty military in this country feel about the Democratic Party and its Michael Moore-loving elites. Clip and save and reread when you hear Kerry-Edwards talking about how they will strengthen the military. The would-be commander-in-chief doesn't have the respect of the men and women he seeks to command. George W. Bush does. So whose judgment do you trust when it comes to which man is better equipped to lead the military and guide the war? The active duty soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, or John Kerry's band of brothers?

Kerry's band of brothers? You mean these two guys?

The Other Another Update: Hewitt links to a news article which polled current and retired military to discover (surprise) the majority prefer Bush over Kerry.

The Return of The Son of Shut Up And Play Your Update:"You know, after all that hullabaloo over the 'fake turkey,' I wonder if anyone's going to pick up on this..." I think Evan Thomas of Newsweek would probably say no.

« Close It

James Lileks on Kerry and Vietnam:

"I defended this country as a young man, and I will defend it as President."

This really intrigues me. I agree that Vietnam was a defense of the United States, inasmuch as we were trying to blunt the advance of Communism. So: only Nixon can go to China. (Only Kirk can go to Chronos, for you Star Trek geeks.) Only Kerry can confirm that Vietnam was a just war. This completely upends conventional wisdom about the Vietnamese war, and requires a certain amount of historical amnesia. Why does this get glossed over? The illegitimacy of the Vietnam war (non-UN approved, after all) is a key doctrine of the Church of the Boomers; to say that service in Vietnam was done in defense of the United States is like announcing that Judas Ischariot was the most faithful of the disciples. Imagine if you were a preacher who attempted such a revision. Imagine your private thrill when everyone in the congregation nodded assent. The past was more malleable than you had ever expected.

JFK, you neo-conservative hawk you! So for the next three months or so, Vietnam was a just war, after 30 years of rhetoric to the contrary from the left--John Kerry's left?

But then, doesn't that mean that Kerry has just invalidated his Winter Soldier speech of 1971?

Orrin Judd writes that Vietnam traps Kerry in "in a weird political calculus":

A: The only thing he's ever done in his life, so far as we can tell, is serve honorably in Vietnam.

B: However, he thinks that war was evil and he a war criminal.

C: He thinks has to project a sufficiently powerful image that we'll hire him to fight this war.

D: However, he opposes it, almost equating it to Vietnam.

When you add all that up he's implicitly (sometimes explicitly) denigrating his own service to the cause of freedom and that of our current military, while asking to lead them (and us). No wonder he looked like Richard Nixon last night--this is one tortured dude.

Kerry's trying to portray himself as a hawk--but he glossed over his 20 years in the Senate. And I mean gloss: as Jim Geraghty writes, "In John Kerry’s speech last night, 73 of the 5343 words were about his Senate record: a total of 26 seconds."

Of course, it was in the Senate where Kerry's reputation as the definitive flip-flopper was born. Jonah Goldberg writes:

For most, a yes/no vote is like a light switch — only two possible positions. But for Kerry, everything has a dimmer knob. He rejects the notion that the bulb must be on or off. He thinks he can blend black and white into shades of gray — illuminating here, obscuring there.

This theme plays out over and over again in his biography, most famously in his record as both a decorated veteran and demagogic anti-war activist. He was for the Vietnam War before he was against it. In Kerry's world, squares can be circles, straight lines crooked, cats dogs. To borrow from the immortal Yogi Berra, when Kerry comes to a fork in the road, he takes it.

In many respects, such cognitive dissonance is a continuation of pre-9/11 political trends. The first George Bush said he had "more will than wallet." Bill Clinton promised a "third way" that "rejected the false choices" between right and left. And George W. Bush's uniting-not-dividing compassionate conservatism was more of a Republican version of Clintonian triangulation than a Republican alternative to it.

But Kerry's tactical gamble is bolder. His predecessors were all elected when the Cold War was ending or over, and a nation at peace can afford to roll the dice. Kerry is running during a war that some consider vital, some see as confusing and others dismiss as unnecessary. Kerry wants to win over all three groups by agreeing with all of them. He does this by talking in paragraphs of boring logical-loop-the-loop sentences that seem to be written in vanishing ink. But he's also trying to downplay the importance of the war. Kerry wants to "handle" the war on terrorism, not dedicate himself to it.

As Steve Green noted, Kerry's line that he won't attack until there is "A threat that is real and eminent" means:

So much for preemptive war -- a goddamn tragic necessity in the age of terror.

John Kerry isn't serious about this war. Iraq was a battle, not the war. He won't initiate any other battles; he'll only respond. He just said so.

Nobody who is serious about protecting the US today can vote for this guy.

It's one thing to hold your nose and vote for a candidate--but Kerry's election means that somebody is going to get screwed: either the leftwing anti-war types who'd rather have Dean or Nader, if they thought either guy was electable, or the people of the Middle East. If Kerry goes to war against a terrorist target--and like the speculation regarding LBJ and Vietnam, Kerry might feel very inclined to push the issue to prove he actually is a hawk, the Deaniacs and Naderites will be very, very angry with their man. But if he doesn't keep up the process of liberation that President Bush has started against the Axis of Evil, we return to the Neville Chamberlain-like Bill Clinton years, and await the next--and probably bigger--9/11.

Scott W. Johnson of Power Line concludes, "Despite its quicksilver shiftiness, Kerry's speech will come back to haunt him in the campaign".

And how.

« Close It

Left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore on Tuesday appeared to back off his earlier allegation regarding President Bush's involvement in the flights of Saudi Arabian citizens out of the U.S. in the days following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

CNSNews.com asked Moore on Tuesday if he still believed that President Bush was directly involved in approving the flights of Saudi Arabian citizens out of the U.S., given Richard Clarke's admission that he alone authorized the flights. Clarke is a former White House counter-terrorism official and a Bush critic.

"What I said in the film (Fahrenheit 9/11) was that the White House authorized it. Richard Clarke worked for the president, he was part of the White House and he took the word of the FBI," Moore told CNSNews.com, following his fiery speech to a "Take Back America" event, organized by the Campaign for America's Future.

But Moore's response on Tuesday differed from his earlier allegations that Bush took time out of his day on Sept. 11, 2001 to contemplate what he could "do to help the bin Ladens."

Moore told Pacifica radio last October, "So here is Bush trying to deal with everything on Sept. 11, 12, 13th, you know. You remember, everybody remembers, the total state of chaos and people, just everyone, all of us, discombobulated by the whole thing, and he had the time to be thinking -- what can I do to help the bin Ladens right now?"

But in May, Clarke admitted that he alone approved the exit of bin Laden's relatives -- contradicting one of the central premises of Moore's film.

The decision to approve the flights, Clarke admitted, had been his own. The request "didn't get any higher than me," he told The Hill newspaper.

"On 9/11, 9/12 and 9/13, many things didn't get any higher than me. I decided it in consultation with the FBI," Clarke said of the flight carrying bin Laden's relatives.

Does this mean that Moore will now sue himself?

Shortly after F9/11 debuted, Brent Bozell wrote:

For the Left, this film is a test to separate the wheat from the chaff, the honorable from the dishonorable, the serious from the unserious. In the Clinton years, conservatives needed to step away from the unsubstantiated videos that talked in conspiratorial tones about all of Clinton’s heinous secret crimes. To be taken seriously, every liberal today should criticize “Fahrenheit 9-11" as an affront to journalism and civil discourse.

Instead, Carter invites him to his box seat in the convention hall, President Clinton praises it, and Senator Kerry implies to Larry King that the film is an accurate portrayal of history.

Not smart, fellas. As Bill Hobbs wrote at the start of the month, Fahrenheit 9/11 was a great chance for Kerry to have his "Sister Souljah" moment.

Too late now.

« Close It

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.

In the last 24 hours we have seen facilities now being created for the greatest and most complex exploration in man's history. We have felt the ground shake and the air shattered by the testing of a Saturn C-1 booster rocket, many times as powerful as the Atlas which launched John Glenn, generating power equivalent to 10,000 automobiles with their accelerators on the floor. We have seen the site where five F-1 rocket engines, each one as powerful as all eight engines of the Saturn combined, will be clustered together to make the advanced Saturn missile, assembled in a new building to be built at Cape Canaveral as tall as a 48 story structure, as wide as a city block, and as long as two lengths of this [football] field.

On July 27, 2004, Mary Beth Cahill, the other JFK's campaign manager spoke to Fox News' Brit Hume about NASA:

Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill claims 'dirty tricks' by NASA after it released 'surprise' photographs showing the Dem presidential hopeful dressed in a space suit crawling through a rocket hatch.

Cahill, asked by Fox News whether it was a dirty trick, said: 'Well, what do you think?' No photos were supposed to be taken, she said.

Begin Transcript:

HUME: I must ask you about this photograph that suddenly turned up and fell in our laps last night nobody thought it was come. nobody had reported on the event which led to-t but there he was, the senator, on all fours in this very peculiar outfit, which i guess nasa had given him. how did that come about?

CAHILL: well, yesterday senator John Glenn, obviously he was an astronaut in his previous life sexrvings senator carr took a tour of a bio facility at nasa. it was just the two of them, and the nasa staff, and all of a sudden this is a leaked photo.

HUME: it was leaked?

CAHILL: yes.

HUME: it was made by nasa, right?

CAHILL: yes, it was.

HUME: so the campaign had no idea there would be any photographs.

CAHILL: none.

HUME: when it was agreed he would put on his th costume.

CAHILL: there was no press there. there was -- nothing. all of the sudden these photographs are out.

HUME: do you smell a dirty trick here?

CAHILL: well, what do you think?

HUME: that NASA is not a particularly political organization.

CAHILL: this was a pledge i want tour, obviously that, senator glenn and senator kerry were taking at cape canaveral, and all of the sudden these photographs appeared, and, you know, take it as you may.

From "We choose to go to the moon" to NASA is trying deliberately to screw Senator Kerry. What on earth (or any planet) has happened to the Democrats?

Update: More here, including an existentially tacky "he said/she said argument" between Cape Kennedy and Camp Kerry.

Another Update: Captain Ed writes:

The Left likes to talk about how paranoid Nixon was, but these days Nixon almost seems like Pollyanna compared to the Democrats. According to Mary Beth Cahill, John Kerry is so stupid that he doesn't realize that when someone points a camera at him and asks him to smile, he doesn't know they're taking a photograph, even when the flash goes off, and even when he's asked to pose with three other Democratic politicians. Is that what Cahill wants us to believe?

Or, perhaps, it's more likely that John Kerry and his campaign continue to blame his own missteps on others. He didn't fall, that son-of-a-bitch pushed him. They weren't his medals, they were Some Other Guy's, and besides they were ribbons, which mean the same thing as medals, except when they don't. He didn't vote for war, Bush misled him into voting for the war. He voted for the $87 billion before he voted against it. He didn't smile, those NASA bastards used a camera to fool him into thinking that his visit was a secret.

If Kerry isn't man enough to take responsibility for his own actions, why should anyone vote to give him responsibility for leading and protecting the free world?

It sort of reminds me of what Blaine Nye of the Tom Landry-era Dallas Cowboys said about his often imperious coach: "It's not whether you win or lose, but who get's the blame".

« Close It

it's an (unbelievably) safe bet that Coulter's editor at USA Today is somewhere on the left of the political spectrum. It's one thing to be in the tank for your team, but it's another to not understand what sort of lingo its opposition frequently uses to deride them. It's also another to work for a newspaper and not know recent history:

Coulter: A speaker at the Democratic National Convention this year, Al Sharpton, accused white police officers of raping and defacing Tawana Brawley in 1987, lunatic charges that eventually led to a defamation lawsuit against Sharpton and even more eventually, to Sharpton paying a jury award to the defamed plaintiff Steve Pagones. So it’s a real mystery why cops wouldn’t like Democrats.

USA Today editor: IS THAT LAST SENTENCE SARCASTIC? IF SO, YOU SURE LOST ME.

As Ace writes, "See, Al Sharpton defamed prosecutor Steven Pagones, accusing him of kidnapping and raping Tawana Brawley. Now Sharpton is a speaker at the convention. Cops, you see, might not like that."

Was this editor even sentient in the mid to late 1980s? Sharpton and Tawana Brawley were one of the most important and divisive news stories of the era.

I'd go on, but Ace has done a thorough job of doing a double Fisking of sorts--explaining and occasionally critiquing Coulter's original intent and slicing and dicing her clueless editor.

As much as I make sport of the media and complain about how frequently leftwing bias shapes what used to be passed off as objective news reporting, I've rarely called them clueless here before. But it's astonishing that somebody with no feel for recent events or contemporary society is editing writers at USA Today.

*Of course, (Ala Brawley and Sharpton, come to think of it!) there's another possibility here, as one of Ace's commenters indicates. It's possible Coulter was emailed a boilerplate "I'm sorry, but this doesn't meet our standards/this isn't what we're looking for/this is way over the top" rejection, and is cooking the books by making up these comments.

The vast majority of rejection letters I've gotten from editors have all read like they've come from what Florence King once called The Republic of Nice. But every once in a while, I get one with teeth. And as much as Coulter is, as James Lileks once wrote, "a Lumper", I've never thought of her as a liar (Treason, while lumping all Cold War-era Democrats together as being, well, treasonous, contained some 50 pages of footnotes) and I'm willing to give her the benefit of the doubt until, and unless, further evidence emerges.

« Close It

As Charles Johnson writes:

It’s a disappointment to see Sullivan get all sloppy drunk on the Abu Ghraib torture-flavored Koolaid, not to mention the almost stereotypical leftist accusation of an American intelligence debacle—when the intelligence services of every major Western power came to the same conclusions about Saddam’s weapons.

Sullivan has completed his reversion to a September 10 mindset. He thinks the hard work is done, that the worst is over.

But the jihad continues. It’s sad that one of the first to identify and write coherently about the ideology of Islamofascism has become so complacent.

Of course, lots of people saw this coming, as early as March.

Meanwhile, Steve Green (no blind follower of President Bush, but a staunch believer in the war on Islamofascism) runs roughshod over Sullivan's essay, doing something that no kids should try at home: Aggressively Fisking Andrew Sullivan.

Update: Power Line and Michelle Malkin also have some thoughts.

Just Good Friends of the Last Update, No Matter What Rumors You've Heard: For more Blogosphere reaction, check out Memeorandum.

« Close It

Of course, there's a flipside to this: now that the Times has finally admitted their liberal, Manhattan-centric bias, will other newspapers and the TV networks, who rely on the Times to set the agenda, now diversify their news sources?

In one of his two books, (Arrogance, I think, but it could have been Bias), Bernard Goldberg suggested that the major TV networks decamp from midtown Manhattan to say, somewhere in the southwest, as it would put them far more in touch with the rest of America.

Naturally, I'm sure any network exec or anchor who actually read Goldberg's suggestion merely responded, "What--and give up the Four Seasons??!!" And to be fair, they do have a point...

A more serious point, which I think Goldberg may have actually addressed, is that while CNN is based in Atlanta, their bias seems far more reflective of Ted Turner's transnational obsessions, than the American city they work out of. And as Eric Muller writes, the Times' isn't a byproduct of the New York area as a whole--it's reflective of the thinking of the majority of the people who live in a region that spans about 40 blocks or so north and south of its offices.

(Via Instapundit.)

« Close It

Back in February, we ran a list of journalists who were willing to admit that they and/or their employers leaned to the left. Obviously this admission by Okrent goes to the top of the list.

To pick up on something we wrote yesterday, discussing the Times' recent and dramatic stock slide:

(As Bernard Goldberg writes in Arrogance, the Times' reporting influences not just what you read in other papers, but what you see on TV as well. Many, many TV news stories begin as Times articles, which TV networks simply hand to their reporters and say, "craft a TV story out of this".)

Which means that Okrent's admission has repercussions throughout virtually all of America's media. For example, the New York Times finally admits it's liberal, but still carries the motto, "All the news that's fit to print".

What does that do to the folks who claim that because Fox sometimes tilts to the right (don't tell Geraldo and Greta, though) that they shouldn't be using "fair and balanced"?

Welcome to the post-Bias world, indeed.

(Via Allahpundit.)

« Close It

The problem is enforcement. Are California Highway Patrol officers and local police officers, armed with stopwatches, going to stand around monitoring every truck and every bus at every stop they make, counting off the minutes?

Curbing pollution is important, but a ban that's utterly unenforceable and would take law enforcement officers away from more important duties is scarcely worth the effort.

More important, trucking companies and bus operators have a vested interest in curbing idling on their own -- the high price of fuel. Isn't the more realistic answer an education program for drivers on how they are wasting their company's money? And isn't their boss likely to get a more positive response than a cop with a stopwatch?

I'm no expert on diesel engines, but I'll bet stopping and resarting them probably wastes more fuel--and possibly generates more polution than idling them.

According to AP, "It will take effect in about six months if it withstands a technical review by the state's Office of Administrative Law."

More red tape from an out of control legislation. Arnold needs to really get a handle on the girlie men--and soon.

(Via Newsfeed.)

« Close It

The Newspaper Association of America is a publishers' organization, concerned with advertising, circulation, and other business-related issues. The American Society of Newspaper Editors has a different brief, concerning itself with the broad issues of news coverage and the newsgathering process—with journalism proper. The nature of their relationship is often likened to that between Church and State; when the two sides are in agreement, it is often a cause for anxiety, at least among the journalists who are always fretting about the perception that they are sacrificing editorial integrity for the sake of ad sales or circulation figures. But on that day in December, the two sides were definitely on the same page and no one was worried about a loss of objectivity.

From one corner came a declaration that diversity was crucial if the news industry was to realize its mission of "service to democracy." From the other corner, a promise "not to stop until we have met our goal of an industry that reflects the diversity of our society." Most of the big-shots in that room hadn't gotten their hands inky in years. But if they had tried to distill the essence of the meeting, their headline might be: "Diversity: Makes Good Editorial Sense; Makes Good Business Sense Too."

Sitting on a bench in the back of the hotel ballroom where guests of the conference were allowed to observe proceedings, I wondered whether I had fallen into some kind of parallel universe where reality was turned inside out. Journalism, as I had known it, was distinguished by its gratuitous cynicism, brash iconoclasm and ready impertinence. As Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen has said, practicing it well requires a "religious belief in absolutely nothing, a conviction that nothing can be taken on faith." But in this room at least, the normal rules of engagement seemed to have been turned on their head, and all the gospel hours of "testifying" that I was hearing produced a sense of cognitive dissonance.

On another level, though, the zealotry was entirely understandable. In the preceding few years, the cause of diversity had become a crusade across the length and breadth of the American media, and would be a defining and dominating force in journalism in the decade to come. Almost every day after that 1992 meeting, one could hear echoes from it in newspaper stories and nightly network broadcasts. Diversity was the new religion, and anybody who wanted to be anybody in the news industry had to rally behind it.

At news organizations both large and small, print and broadcast, managers were rushing to change "the way we view each other and the way we view the news," in the words of Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times. They were embracing an array of measures designed to increase minority representation both on their news staffs and on their news pages. In a profession historically wary of championing social causes, diversity had become the social cause, a path to salvation that would both improve the quality of American journalism and make it more attractive to art increasingly diverse set of readers.

According to McGowan, during the meeting, Sulzberger said, "Diversity not only makes good moral sense, it makes good business sense too".

Perhaps if he meant diversity of ideas, including those of non-liberals, he'd be on to something. But like academia, diversity in the media meant little more than an increased obsession with skin color and sexual orientation, not an increased emphasis on diversity of ideas and opinion.

While Sulzberger felt that diversity made good business sense, Howell Raines, whom Sulzberger chose to replace Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld when he stepped down just before September 11, 2001, took it one step further, saying that same year that the Times' diversity campaign, "has made our staff better and, more importantly, more diverse". In other words, for Raines, diversity was more important than quality for the world's most influential newspaper, in the world's most important and competitive city.

Two years later, the Jayson Blair scandal rocked not only the Times, but the entire newspaper industry, ultimately resulting in Raines' firing. And simultaneously, and not coincidentally, an increasingly large number of Weblogs and Websites were fact-checking the Times to within an inch of its life, and finding numerous faults in its coverage--which, even as the paper was claiming diversity was its most important goal, was becoming not only increasingly leftwing in its bias, but under Raines' watch, becoming an activist paper trying to shape the news instead of merely reporting it, resulting in its embarrassingly silly run-in with the Augusta National Golf Course.

Even before the Blair scandal, sales fell remarkably at the world's most influential newspaper. (As Bernard Goldberg writes in Arrogance, the Times' reporting influences not just what you read in other papers, but what you see on TV as well. Many, many TV news stories begin as Times articles, which TV networks simply hand to their reporters and say, "craft a TV story out of this".) Coming after 9/11, this was a period of intense news activity. As Ken Layne wrote in May of last year:

The New York Times' circulation fell 5.3 percent, nearly triple the drop of the next biggest loser (the Washington Post at 1.92 percent). In six months, the NYT's weekday circulation dropped by more than 60,000 copies. That means the number of papers sold dropped by an average of 10,000 every month between October 2002 and March 2003.

This was not exactly a slow news period: North Korea admitted it had a nuclear weapons program, the D.C. sniper was on the loose, a French tanker was attacked off the coast of Yemen, terrorists killed hundreds in Bali and the Philippines, Republicans swept mid-term elections (save for the Democratic sweep in California), ANSWER led protests around the world, "Old Europe" fought its last battle, there were massive anti-mullah demonstrations in Iran, Trent Lott went down, UN weapons inspectors went nowhere, Venezuela went crazy, Columbia didn't make it home, the Axis of Weasels was exposed, everybody got worked up about a nightclub fire, there was that little War in Iraq, etc.

Did the replacement of Howell Raines improve The Times' bottom line?

Not if you count their stock price, which hit a one year low on Friday.

As Glenn Reynolds (who was once dubbed "The New York Times of the Blogosphere") writes, "Was it something we said?" Well, yes it was. The new, new media rolls on, continuing to shed light on what Mickey Kaus dubbed the liberal cocoon, and bringing true diversity to news and opinion. And unlike at the Times, the Blogosphere's biases are usually right out in the open, allowing readers to pick and choose those writers whose worldviews best match their own, or exposing them to opinions that's never, ever get in their local newspaper--especially if it's the Grey Lady.

Can the Times break out of their cycle? Without serious change, it doesn't look good. As I wrote last month about newspapers in general:

Their primary readers are increasingly, exclusively the left. And they either had to have seen this coming, or be clueless as to the unintended consequences of the direction that they set out in. So as not alienate their remaining readers, it becomes increasingly more important to keep them in the liberal cocoon. And the cocoon narrows that much more--on both the readers and the press.

And the shareholders.

« Close It

That was Stewart, who's lead a life far stranger than his antics at football games. This biography matches almost indentically to the images that ESPN was displaying today, which included this bizarre, tragic ending:

All of this strange behavior finally came to a head in late September of '92, when Rockin' Rollen was arrested after holding a maid hostage in the Hyatt Hotel next to Los Angeles International Airport. Rollen--according to the Sept 23rd LA Times article--held the police at bay with threats that he had a bomb. When the standoff continued well into the evening police officers used what they called "Flash-bang" grenades to stun a wigless Rainbow Man and storm the seventh room floor where he was holding siege. A 38 year old house keeper was found un-injured after having locked herself in the bathroom. The police officers apparently decided to make their move after Rollen threatened to fire a pistol at planes landing at the airport. A few hours after the incident, as the police were driving Rollen away, reporters asked him why he had done it.

"To get the word out ," he shouted back at them flashing his famous whacky smile.

The incident began at 9:15 AM on Sept. 22 when Rollen walked unnoticed into a vacant room at the Hyatt, taking the cleaning lady, Paula Madera, by surprise. Madera immediately ran into the bathroom and wisely locked herself in, figuring rightly that Rollen was some kind of crazy. It was at this point in the proceedings The Rainbow Man for some reason decided to light two small fires that attracted attention to himself.

In short order, LAPD had ordered up the SWAT Team, bomb squad and several fire trucks to deal with the situation. While all this commotion was going on outside, Rollen was posting biblical placards in his hotel room window, so they could be read from the ground below. One was an apocalyptic verse from the New Testament referring to the passage: "The heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat..."

At 5:45 PM--when Stewart threatened to harm his hostage and start taking pot shots at jetliners as they passed near the hotel--the police decided to act. Shortly after, the SWAT team stormed the room, using the aforementioned flash-bang grenades to disorient Rockin' Rollen. At the scene police found Rollen's infamous blue, red, yellow, green, purple and pink Afro wig, along with a high caliber pistol, various incendiary devices, three days of food and Bibles, religious tracts and poetry.

* * * On July 13, 1993, Rockin' Rollen Stewart was found guilty for the Sept '92 "hostage drama" and sentenced to three life prison terms. This might seem extreme when one takes into account that Rollen Stewart never hurt a flea, though many saw him as "a David Koresh waiting to happen. He has the same beliefs and he stands by them so strongly he's willing to die or kill for them," said deputy district attorney Sally Lipscomb.

Others disagreed. An LA Times letter to the editor--written shortly after Rockin' Rollen's conviction--called rightly into question the inequality of the American justice system in regards to The Rainbow Man. The text read: "Tell me how this adds up right? A drunk driver in Ventura, after four years in the courts, gets less than two years for killing three young men, while Rollen Stewart, the Rainbow Man, gets three life sentences for holding someone hostage and displaying religious placards. Does more money for more lawyers equal more justice? Seems so, but I never got past quantum mechanics." -Paul Garson

During sentencing in the L.A. Superior Courtroom, pandemonium erupted, as Rockin' Rollen began a rambling end o' the world rant, screaming at the top of his immensely quotable lungs. Upon being wrestled to the floor by deputies, he shouted: "Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they're doing!" While all this commotion was going on, the maid who had been trapped in the hotel room by Rockin' Rollen, wept in the rear of the courtroom.

* * * The L.A. Times from Sept 25 '92 stated that Rockin' Rollen had contemplated killing President Bush and took steps toward assassinating then Presidential candidate Bill Clinton. According to District Attorney David Conn, Rollen purchased a .45 caliber handgun at the same time of Clinton's campaign visit to L.A. Rollen went to the Boneventure where Clinton was staying with plans to shoot him, but did not carry them out because of the heavy security surrounding Slick Willie. At around the same time he was also spotted at a speech given by the Arkansas governer.

Naturally, in this Rupert Pupkin/Travis Bickle world we live in, somebody whose behavior is this nuts is prime fodder for a documentary film. And in 1997, The Rainbow Man/John 3:16 was released--and is now on DVD.

Why am I posting this? No reason, except having Googled Stewart's bio to discover who the Rainbow Man was after watching a silent broadcast of ESPN, I figured I might as well share the results.

« Close It