A month ago, I gave a Diary
plug to Kathy Gori's new podcasting program, The Gori Details. Now that she has her
Web site up and running, I'm going to do it again. To whet your appetite, I'm going to include some excerpts from her interviews with Mary Schiavo, the former Inspector General of Department of Transportation, and with John Courage, the Democratic candidate who's seeking the 21st congressional district seat in Texas.
But, first, I'm going to tell you a little about Gori. If you read the previous Diary on August 18, you may want to skip my brief interview with her and go right to hers with Schiavo and Courage, which begin deep in the extended box. Or you can go directly to her site and listen to those interviews, or others, including one with Ned Lamont.
Kathy Gori
As I wrote previously, sometimes you meet someone and instantly connect. It can take just a few minutes of conversation, and you just know that this is a person you could sit down and talk with nonstop for the next 12 hours and not notice the clock? And do it the next day and the next? Kathy Gori is that kind of person.
The sizzle you get in conversation with her matches exactly what you get from her the podcast interviews she's now doing regularly with politicians, newsmakers, authors and other people who interest her.
Kathy calls her podcasting project The Gori Details, turning a last name which meant pain on the elementary school playground into an asset. Between sessions with the likes of Watergate figure John Dean and one of the left's favorite Middle East scholars, Juan Cole, in the next few weeks, Kathy will be interviewing many of the Democratic Congressional candidates, like Courage and Lamont, who are seeking to send Rubber Stamp Republicans (and their puppets) back to their home districts for good.
In 1996-2000, Gori co-hosted "Up for Air" on KPFK, Pacifica radio's Los Angeles station, won the National Federation Of Community Broadcasters' 1998 Silver Reel for 2nd best morning drive show in the country, and was named one of the 10 best deejays by the Los Angeles Times. Even if you're not from California, you may have heard her giving voice to animated characters, dubbing films and making radio commercials. Based in Sonoma, California, she and her husband, Alan Berger - who produces The Gori Details - earn their living writing screenplays.
Since Kathy's addicted to blogs, my obvious question was, why not start your own? What is it about podcasting?
"It's kind of a new thing, a hybrid, a talking blog, which sounds like something from Jurassic Park. Why podcasting? I write for a living. And after writing all day, the last thing I want to do is sit down and write some more. But I want to participate. I get angry at the reporters on TV who are never asking the questions that I'd like to have answered. So I'd like to take a shot at it, that's all."
Podcasting also fits the skill set she acquired in 10 years as a radio professional and "news junkie."
"Four years co-hosting the morning show on KPFK ... where every morning, four mornings a week, six interviews a show, I talked to everybody under the sun, about politics, news, you name it. I've always enjoyed radio, and podcasting is a great way to do it, without having to get up at 5 o'clock in the morning and drive 25 miles to the station."
She would have begun The Gori Details years ago. But podcasting technology wasn't available. She's quickly learned the new equipment and new software and gotten past the early glitches inevitable for someone used to working inside a radio station with experts taking care of the technical end of things.
Mary Schiavo
Mary Schiavo used to make her living ordering people to smuggle knives and guns and fake bombs through airport security and onto planes. Not for malicious purposes, but as part of her job as Inspector General of the United States Department of Transportation, These attempts to beat security succeeded 75 percent of time.
After reporting her findings to Congress in 1991, the Federal Aviation Administration promised to fix the problems. When she repeated her smuggling operations in 1995 and '96, her team still found severe gaps in security. The FAA "went into overdrive to try to get the report classified," Schiavo says. "They were clearly waiting for people to die. I prepared for my letter of resignation."
A licensed pilot from the age of 18, Schiavo worked as an Assistant U.S. Attorney and a federal organized crime prosecutor for the Department of Justice before she became inspector general. She has received numerous awards and honors, including the Aviation Laurel, 1996 Aviation Laurel Citation, Glamour Magazine's 1997 Woman of the Year, 1998 NADA/F Aviation Safety award, and the 2002 American Society for Public Administration Lawrence J. Truitt Award for her outstanding leadership and professional contributions to aviation safety and security. Her book, Flying Blind, Flying Safe was a best seller. Currently, she is a partner at the Los Angeles law firm of Motley Rice, where she represents clients in all major aviation-related litigation, including a class-action suit by 6161 family members, passengers and crew aboard the four planes hijacked on September 11.
The 9/11 Families United to Bankrupt Terrorism seeks to hold al Qaeda's financiers accountable under the civil justice system for their role in the September 11 attack. The lawsuit, filed in 2002, has been transformed into multidistrict litigation in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Here's an excerpt from Gori's interview with Schiavo (any transcription errors are mine):
Gori: The thing about this Motley Rice case with the people who did not take the compensation from the fund and are instead choosing to go to court, is the fact that the courts are really digging in their heels, they really would not like to see this case not to go forward. The thing that bothers me about this whole thing is when I've looked up this stuff, the U.S. federal government has never paid out money to anyone who was victimized by an accident or terrorist event in the past. Something happened, it happened. You had to sue the airline or whoever. All of a sudden, now, when September 11 happens, they're right there with a checkbook. Why is this? Why would they rather just pay out in a way that they haven't done before? They even did the 1993 people who were injured and killed in the World Trade Center in 1993 bombing retroactively. They added [them] on to the 9/11 [victims compensation] fund.
Schiavo: Right. Well, you know, there are several ways to look at it, but I always look at as what really happened in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. ... Because I was just curious about what was going on in the government and the bailout bill and the limitations of liability, and I actually got on a plane and I went to Washington to see what was going on and to talk to the people. When I was Inspector General, I had to report to Congress and the Senate, so I had a pretty good relationship with a number of members of Congress and Senators, and I wanted to know what the airlines were doing in terms of lobbying. And what was astonishing is they started the lobbying on September 11.
There was one Senator, in particular, who said, "I was watching on September 11 the, you know, the burning of the buildings and the site and all that, and in strolled the first lobbyist." And they hit Congress, they started hitting the Senate on 9/11 to get these liabilities restrictions in place. And what they argued was that this would destroy the aviation system, people would be walking, all the airlines would go out of business, that they had to put these liability limitations in place, not for the good of aviation security, not for benevolent reasons that we should, you know, we have to take care of all these people right away, we're going to pay immediately ... so these people can handle what they need to live and those kinds of things. No. The reason that they cited was to protect the financial well-being of the aviation industry. And I thought it was very interesting because it certainly does not suggest a ...wide, sweeping national security reason why you should cut off a person's rights. And what astonished me is that almost without exception, the entire Senate and Congress voted for that pretty much on the say-so of aviation interests and did so with great haste and speed.
Gori: I know the government didn't want to even commission an official report on 9/11. It wasn't until the families of September 11 and a lot of the other groups got behind them and said, no, you must investigate this, you must have an official report. I'm wondering if there's ... more paper, more phone calls, more transcripts, more whatever that they just don't want to come out in the trial.
Schiavo: Oh, absolutely. And ... we've seen it first-hand. We have obtained information ... that was previously published, and things which the government simply did not want us to have, and, of course, it's the United States government that has fought to prevent us from having it. Some of the documents that I obtained, literally, some were mailed to me in plain brown envelopes to me, which laid openly and easily accessible at the checkpoints of the airports throughout the country, were then seized by the government. We had ... investigators hit the government reading rooms ... the public place access for documents in the reading rooms. And what we had discovered is that the government had retroactively after 9/11 removed things, just expunged the public record, including, for example, comments by airlines, which were public record before 9/11, about various security things, and which most of the time said we don't want to do this because it costs a lot of money.
So we did see a wholesale, I hate to use this term because it sounds like such an old, trite cliché, but a wholesale government cover-up of how much was known about the aviation risk before 9/11. I find that outrageous because I think that people are able to use the information ... for changes for safety. As far as protecting us from terrorists ... it's a little too late if that was really their reason. But we know that wasn't their reason. They only did it after we sought it in the litigation.
Here's an excerpt of her interview with candidate John Courage (again, any transcription errors are mine):
John Courage
Gori:What made you decide to take this leap and run for Congress?
Courage: Well, I'm sure like most people, we're really concerned about the direction of this country. And I certainly have been. As a teacher I was particularly aggravated that we didn't get the correct kind of support, or consistent support, for public education. And when I tried to find out what my Congressman was doing to support public education, I found he wasn't. I also ... did a little more research and found out he didn't support health care, he didn't support education, he didn't support Social Security. When I couldn't find anyone else to run against him, I stepped up.
Gori: Well, you know, Lamar Smith, what I read about his record, he's sort of like a 2-year-old. The only word he seems to know is "no." Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. His position, of course, on the Iraq War, which I think is going to be a very important factor this year ... Texas has sent, as California has, too, a lot of their people to this war, and ...
Courage: Absolutely. A lot of people I know.
Gori: And so many people have ...our soldiers, the people that are over there, are not properly supplied. It's one thing to send people, but then take care of them when they come back also.
Courage: I think that was probably the greatest problem that we had. Now I didn't agree with the war in Iraq at the beginning. I certainly supported our efforts to fight the terrorists in Afghanistan. But the war in Iraq was a whole different ballgame. It seems we sent our troops over there unprepared, unsupported, unsupplied. As a result now, we're in the middle of a war that seems endless and hopeless. And the American people do not support this war.
And you know I'm a veteran, as you said. I wore a uniform. I carried a weapon. I stood at posts defending my country. So I understand what it means to be and serve in the military. I also understand what it means to expect your government to be there for you, to support your effort. ...We just didn't have a plan to not only to win the battle, we didn't have a plan to win the peace.
Gori: Texas in the past has always been a very Democratic state, and then it went through changes, and George Bush was the governor, and you guys were kind of the canary in the coal mine for all the experiments we've been submitted to ... the No Child Left Behind thing, all the crazy experiments with education, a lot of the environmental depredations that went on in Texas. We're all living in Texas now.
Courage: Well, you know, Texas is really sorry that we gave the rest of the country George Bush. And we're really ready to take him back and put him out to his ranch, or his ranchette, out in Crawford, and hopefully that's going to happen sooner rather than later. ... We've got to get him and all the Republican leadership out of Washington just as quickly as we can. That's what my campaign is about. I'm running to bring change to the Congress. I'm running because we've got such a corrupt culture of incumbency. And that culture is costing us. The cost of corruption is so great that it's really putting us in a very dangerous situation with our civil liberties as well as our economic condition, especially for future generations.
{snip}
Gori: One thing I don't understand, because they have seized control of the government, and they've got basically all the branches locked down tight, why are they so angry? When you see them on television ... if I were running everything, I'd be the nicest person in the world. Now I'm not running everything, they are, why are they screaming all the time?
Courage: Oh, it's fear. They're fear-mongers. They're chickenhawks and fear-mongers, and their goal is to keep America frightened and talk about how strong we need to be in our fight against terrorism. But we're being weakened in the very foundations of our society. The Republican Administration has done everything it can to cut back on programs that Americans need, that undermine the very foundation of the American society that provides a quality education and good health care and civil liberties protection. And they do that by frightening a lot of the American public.
{snip}
Gori: How are you dealing with voter registration there in your area? How's it coming?
Courage: We're really working on that and making that a strong part of this campaign. We have a lot of colleges and universities in and around our district and we work a lot with those students. We've got many, many people who are registered who simply don't vote. And so a lot of our effort is to just help educate, inform and motivate people to exercise that right to vote. It's just so important now, and I think people are really waking up and realizing that. For too long people said, well, my vote doesn't count and all these politicians are the same. Well, I'm showing them a different kind of a politician. I'm not a lifelong politician. I'm not rich. I don't come from some well-to-do, elite family. I'm a teacher. I'm a working man. My family is like that. That's what the people in our district want to represent them in Congress. They're waking up to get involved.
Gori: Well, the expression I loved was figuring out who it is that's stealing their chickens. ... I come from a blue-collar family and people, I mean, my family, thank goodness, are liberal Democrats, but we have a couple of relatives that are on the other side. And it's almost like they've had lobotomies, you know? These are not people with money. These are not people ... getting any advantage from any of the things that this group in Washington has passed, and yet they still cling to it.
Courage: Well, for too many years, the Republicans sold a bill of goods to middle America, saying that you, too, can become a Republican. All you need to do is vote like we do and you'll gain all the riches and wealth and power that we have. A lot of middle-class Americans, hard-working families, they don't have the time to sit down and investigate the truth behind the Republican lies. And so they bought in, they drank the Kool-Aid. And before it kills them, we're trying to give them the cure.
You can help John Courage spread his message by encouraging your friends in District 21 to vote for him. You can contribute money to his campaign by going to his Web site here or to the ActBlue Web site here.
And don't forget to check out Gori's interviews with John Dean, Juan Cole and Ned Lamont here