More Coalitions For Rudy: First Responders

Day one of Rudy Giuliani's coalitions roll-out was dedicated to small business owners. Day two, per the campaign, will be first responders.

Today, at the Pelham-Batesville Firehouse in Pelham, SC, Giuliani's campaign will announce that ex-NYPD pol. comm/fire comm, Howard Safir will be the national chair of First Responders for Rudy. Also: Rep. Dave Reichert of Washington State, a former sheriff of King County and, importantly in South Carolina, state firefighters association executive director Jim Bowie.

The New York branch of the affinity group will be led by a professor of fire science at John Jay College. Jim Boyle is also a former FDNY firefighter and ex-president of the firefighters' union in the city.

Other states represented on the national "board" include Illinois (Feb. 5), Florida (Jan. 29), and Iowa.. (?)

Ex-FBI counterrrorism/counterintelligence manager Pat D'Amuro will be another national co-chair for New York; he'll also probably play a key role in setting counterrorism policy in a Giuliani administration.

Comments

Shame on Rudy for exploiting the First Responders once again. He recently LIED that he worked as much as workers did at WTC site. But NYT showed that Rudy spent 29 hrs at the site while a single worker spent median of 962 hours.

Giuliani is determined to take every opportunity to exploit the memory of 9/11 for political gain, rather than honor the incredible sacrifices of our first responders. He has an underlying contempt for the folks who ended up sacrificing their health or even their lives during the clean-up process.

Rudy made a criminal like Bernie Kerik, once his personal driver, his police chief. Why did he recommend him for the post of Chief of Homeland Security?

Giuliani is still employing his childhood friend and a priest, Monsignor Alan Placa, who is accused of Child Molestation in his law firm. Giuliani employs Placa as a consultant at Giuliani Partners despite a Suffolk County, NY, grand jury report that accuses Placa of sexually abusing children, as well as helping cover up the sexual abuse of children by other priests. Why is Rudy protecting a credibly accused child molester?

Thomas Ravenel, the chairman of Rudy's campaign in South Carolina, was indicted for conspiracy to distribute crack. So the law and order Rudy hires gems like Kerik and Ravenel!

Rudy is a fraud, thats all.

Posted by pando | August 29, 2007 12:35 PM

Are these real organizations or are they like "Firefighters for Rudy"?

From the always excellent Talking Points Memo:

The idea, obviously, was that this "group" of firefighters is countering the fire union's claims. So all we want to know is the following: When was this group formed? And how many members does it have? A Google search turned up nothing at all illuminating. So we left detailed questions about the group's formation and membership with the Giuliani campaign's communications director about it. No answer yet.

Also intriguing: For some reason, even though the group's executive director, Tim Brown, is offered as a contact on the release, when you call the number offered you get directed to the Rudy campaign press office. When you ask for Brown, you're directed to a press officer.

At any rate, when we asked Brown if he was the executive director of Firefighters for Rudy, he said that he was. When we asked if he was an aide on the campaign, he paused for awhile before saying, "yeah." When we asked him what his title on the campaign was, he said -- you guessed it -- "executive director of Firefighters for Rudy."

...

So we then posed the question of how many members it has. At that point, he said he was going to have "other folks" get back to us.

Aaarrrrghhhh! Frustration. If the executive director of this group doesn't know how many members it has, then who does?

Posted by Steve-0 | August 29, 2007 2:53 PM