Re: Unpopular President
On Nov 3, 2006, at 1:18 PM, John Thornton wrote:
His hotel is also heavily fortified with heavy military vehicles
from the National Guard station along with dozens of large dump
trucks forming a ring around the block where he is staying. This
too is new. They didn’t do this during his last visit nor during
the VP’s visit a few months ago. Has he become more worried about
being attacked than he was only 2 years ago?
Security paranoia is off the charts. I visited someone at the
Citicorp building the other day - they’re x-raying bags. To get into
CNN you have to pass two layers of security - Time Warner first, CNN
upstairs. The Time Warner Center itself is surrounded with bomb
barriers. Ditto that Jewish Community Center featured in the article
about sexless marriages that Michael Hoover posted yesterday. The
memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising - a flat stone in the
sidewalk, essentially - in Riverside Park is surrounded by vehicle
barriers. The main entrance to the Columbia campus now has a vehicle
barrier. It takes a picture ID to get into the building where WBAI’s
studios are. Up Wall Street from the WBAI building is a maze of cops,
barriers, fences, dump trucks - and now and then, cops armed with
machine guns around the NYSE. It’s all taken as normal, not signs of
a society in trouble.
Doug