Everyone's writing their personal 9/11 stories today, Phil Anderson, Robert Harding, and I'm sure there are many more such examples. It seems incumbent on us New Yorkers to take the day and make it somehow especially meaningful, to take a step out of the ordinary and then think about what happened, and what it may all mean.

The truth of the matter is that today was for me a superficially perfectly normal day, maybe a little more hectic, since I'd been invited to that Service Forum we mentioned earlier, and had to finish today's agenda with some hours fewer than are normally available. And of course, I'm always behind; my apologies to today's crop of poison-pen email authors, I haven't gotten to your various grievances yet, and probably won't.

The year after it happened - you didn't even use to have define what you meant by it, so heavily laden was the collective memory - I took the camera down to the site, and shot some of what I believe are the best pictures I've ever taken, with my new camera, the one that I bought to capture and preserve the suddenly endangered landscape of the City, my home.

A year after that, I again took the camera down to the Trade Center site - which I think all of us would appreciate finally being not a site, but an actual tower again, thank you very much - and took some more photos; nothing really spectacular. In 2004, I spent the day campaigning against George Bush, in my mind the best memorial to the tragic mass murders possible to make. In 2005, if memory serves, I spent the day launching a web site about the heroes of the day and their stories. The year after that, 9/11 fell on the eve of the bitter NY-11 primary; the Chris Owens campaign did a memorial event, something tasteful and subdued that also provided a forum for Lynn Woolsey and the incomparable Maxine Waters.

In 2007, I'm not even sure what I did.  read more »

Perhaps the most annoying part of Rudy Giuliani's Presidential campaign is the candidate's insistent flogging of 9/11, of the dead of that day and of the heroism of others. Giuliani has managed, with remarkably little public questioning, to clutch at the heartstrings of the nation, and to channel grief and horror into a narrative that places his aspirations to advancement squarely in the center of the national consciousness.

If you think you've seen this before, you have: Giuliani's maneuvering recalls nothing so much as George Bush's 2000 positioning as 'a uniter, not a divider', a branding effort born out of a deliberate misrepresentation of his record in Texas. Of course, then as now, the press disseminated the glowing falsehoods and drowned out any facts that might sow discord with the comfortable storyline. Then as now, the actual record of a republican candidate is one of cronyism and incompetence.

This time around, however, there are some uncomfortable questions occasioned by a pile of corpses sitting squarely on the former mayor's doorstep. These are, of course, the firefighters that rushed into the burning towers on 9/11 with malfunctioning radios, to be killed in their hundreds.

The Real Rudy is taking on the history and asking some questions that the former mayor's speechifying and truthiness have failed to address.

The Albany Project sums up:  read more »

It's not exactly a secret that Rudy Giuliani is whoring the 9/11 attacks in his quest for a promotion to the White House. And I suppose you have to feel for the man - it's difficult to hawk mass death in an uplifting and tasteful way.

Too bad he and his supporters aren't even trying. Atrios calls it humping the corpse.

A supporter of Rudy Giuliani's is throwing a party that aims to raise $9.11 per person for the Republican's presidential campaign.

Abraham Sofaer is having a fundraiser at his Palo Alto, Calif., home on Wednesday, when Giuliani backers across the country are participating in the campaign's national house party night.

But Sofaer said he had nothing to do with the "$9.11 for Rudy" theme.

"There are some young people who came up with it," Sofaer said when reached by telephone Monday evening. He referred other questions to Giuliani's campaign.

Nice. That's one way to monetize the death of civilians under your watch. Now, I had always thought that Rudy had reached his personal taste abyss by telling his then-wife about his wish to divorce her via a press conference.

But Rudy, obviously, can dig deeper than that.

Six years ago, terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center, killing almost 3,000 New Yorkers in the process, and ripping a hole in our skyline that has yet to be healed. That day, the global normalcy that London, Jerusalem, Madrid, Rome, Tokyo and Berlin are familiar with visited these shores, and is now here to stay.

The question before us today is this: what's the meaning of this event, and how do we best memorialize and commemorate it? Is it like this?

What is appropriate? Is it appropriate for Rudy Giuliani to pimp the dead of 9/11 in a bid for the White House? Is it, for that matter, appropriate for the young republicans to scream terrorism when they're accosted at a bar, more or less (no, it's not)?

What is appropriate, frankly, is to point out one stark fact: the man who ordered, by his own admission, the attack on New York is still free. Osama bin Laden remains beyond the reach of American justice.  read more »

Via TheRealRudy.org comes documented, audiovisual evidence of Rudy Giuliani's most recent lie about 9/11.

In an interview, Giuliani made the following claim about the siting of the City's Emergency Command Center in TWC 7:

My Director of Emergency Management recommended 7 World Trade Center.

The response of that unlikely scapegoat, Jerry Bauer:

I have no idea what he's talking about.

Watch the video after the flip.  read more »