Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

This is what’s happened with John McCain with the Paris Hilton ads. They’re trying to say that Barack Obama’s the most popular person in the world. Now, liberals are making fun of those ads, but the ads are very sophisticated and very dangerous. Obama has a very short period of time in which to understand what’s happened, because they’re doing two different things. It comes in two steps.

Obama is so popular. Obama receives all this adulation. All of us would like that somewhat. So they build up our envy. But, then, in the next step, they say it’s unfair that he has it. He’s not qualified. He doesn’t care about us. We’re suffering. He just goes about collecting his adoration and adulation. Now, that is a powerful, powerful message. It taps people’s envy, and it is going to make them hate Obama.– Dr. Bryant Welch, author of State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind

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BuzzFlash gets sent a ton of review books, and we try to consider each one, but can only post a limited number of them. One reason for that is we only want to offer books that we recommend with a positive review.

And sometimes that is a book that hasn’t received its due in the marketplace or in the corporate media. That is the case with State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind.

As we noted in our review of the book:

This is one of those few books — and a bit under-noticed — that is a virtual Rosetta stone to understanding how so many Americans are living in an alternative reality.

They have been emotionally and psychologically manipulated by a “manufactured reality” of the right wing consortium: think tanks, public relations spin, advertising techniques, corporate media, psychological tactics, and politicians, among others.

The author, a psychologist/attorney, compares the process we have gone through as a nation in the last 30 years — and particularly the last 8 years — to a film from 1944: “Gaslight” (starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman). Directed by George Cukor, it is distinctly Hitchcockian in its rendering.

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After she tried to rent out her home, Kiana Alexander found it burned to the ground.

By Lizzy Ratner

The stories sound like strange echoes from another era, as if someone had wound up the old Victrola of history and let the Dixie tunes rip. They begin on a half-abandoned street in St. Bernard Parish, an aggressively white community on the southeastern edge of New Orleans. That is where Daphne Clark, 39, an African-American supervisor at a group home, rented a house with help from a rental voucher last year, and that is where the harassment began. First, the Confederate flag hoisted over a neighbor’s house followed by stares and sneers; then the official torment by the parish government as it waged a post-Hurricane Katrina crusade against the specter of rental housing. For Clark, this took the form of a series of “notices of violation” warning her that the parish would disconnect her utilities–not because she had done anything wrong but because her landlord had failed to apply for a rental permit, as required by a new parish law. According to Hestel Stout, a white contractor working on Clark’s house, the parish official who delivered one of these notices explained to him, “How would you like those types living next to you?”

Around this time, in nearby Jefferson Parish, Leatrice Hollis was enduring her own losing battle with the forces of housing prejudice. The founder and director of People’s Community Subsidiary, a nonprofit housing development agency, Hollis had just completed plans for a mixed-income development that would have created forty-nine occupant-owned homes, with twenty-five going to moderate- and low-income “first responders.” But just as she was ready to close the deal, Parish Councilman Chris Roberts declared that he wouldn’t approve parish funding for any affordable housing in his district. The project was killed.

And then there is the tale of Maria Tejeda, 48, a receptionist and janitor who lived in the Redwood Apartments complex–in apartment L, “as in love”–before the storm. Located in Kenner, the Redwood complex was a 400-unit subsidized housing development and longtime anchor for the area’s Latino community. But after the storm, the city decided not to rebuild it. And in April, just two weeks after nearly 1,500 poor and mostly black and brown people lined up overnight to apply for affordable housing vouchers, the parish council unanimously passed a yearlong moratorium on the building of multifamily housing–a measure that effectively halts affordable housing construction in Kenner and leaves people like Tejeda struggling to pay market-rate rent in New Orleans, miles from her community and 12-year-old son. “Maybe in the future I could find me a nice place for me and my child to live,” she sighed.

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More extraordinary than these extreme raids is the fact that they are generating so little attention and even less outcry.

Glenn Greenwald

As the police attacks on protesters in Minnesota continue — see this video of the police swarming a bus transporting members of Earth Justice, seizing the bus and leaving the group members stranded on the side of the highway — it appears increasingly clear that it is the Federal Government that is directing this intimidation campaign. Minnesota Public Radio reported yesterday that “the searches were led by the Ramsey County Sheriff’s office. Deputies coordinated searches with the Minneapolis and St. Paul police departments and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

Today’s Star Tribune added that the raids were specifically “aided by informants planted in protest groups.” Back in May, Marcy Wheeler presciently noted that the Minneapolis Joint Terrorist Task Force — an inter-agency group of federal, state and local law enforcement led by the FBI — was actively recruiting Minneapolis residents to serve as plants, to infiltrate “vegan groups” and other left-wing activist groups and report back to the Task Force about what they were doing. There seems to be little doubt that it was this domestic spying by the Federal Government that led to the excessive and truly despicable home assaults by the police yesterday.

So here we have a massive assault led by Federal Government law enforcement agencies on left-wing dissidents and protesters who have committed no acts of violence or illegality whatsoever, preceded by months-long espionage efforts to track what they do. And as extraordinary as that conduct is, more extraordinary is the fact that they have received virtually no attention from the national media and little outcry from anyone. And it’s not difficult to see why. As the recent “overhaul” of the 30-year-old FISA law illustrated — preceded by the endless expansion of surveillance state powers, justified first by the War on Drugs and then the War on Terror — we’ve essentially decided that we want our Government to spy on us without limits. There is literally no police power that the state can exercise that will cause much protest from the political and media class and, therefore, from the citizenry.

Beyond that, there is a widespread sense that the targets of these raids deserve what they get, even if nothing they’ve done is remotely illegal. We love to proclaim how much we cherish our “freedoms” in the abstract, but we despise those who actually exercise them. The Constitution, right in the very First Amendment, protects free speech and free assembly precisely because those liberties are central to a healthy republic — but we’ve decided that anyone who would actually express truly dissident views or do anything other than sit meekly and quietly in their homes are dirty trouble-makers up to no good, and it’s therefore probably for the best if our Government keeps them in check, spies on them, even gets a little rough with them.

After all, if you don’t want the FBI spying on you, or the Police surrounding and then invading your home with rifles and seizing your computers, there’s a very simple solution: don’t protest the Government. Just sit quietly in your house and mind your own business. That way, the Government will have no reason to monitor what you say and feel the need to intimidate you by invading your home. Anyone who decides to protest — especially with something as unruly and disrespectful as an unauthorized street march — gets what they deserve.

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Bristol Palin does appear to be pregnant, while Sarah Palin, does not look pregnant at all!

Whoah! Talk about skeletons coming out of the closet! Sources are saying that Sarah Palin’s daughter, Bristol Palin,16, became pregnant, and that Sarah Palin pretended the baby was her own! This would have been her “fifth child” that has Down’s Syndrome. So did Sarah Palin fake her pregnancy or is this just a rumor?

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Steven Weber

Kudos to The New York Times for giving one of its esteemed columnists an opportunity to at last strip away the tweedy right wing pretense of his position and let his freak flag fly.

David “Shecky” Brooks pricelessly lampoons those hilariously fruity Democrats with a rib-tickling monologue of raucous barbs this side of Cracked Magazine or the time me and Steve Mandato made a bong out of my uncle’s artificial arm. What a time Brooks has, exposing the Democrats’ enthusiasm for their chosen leader for the sheer fribble it is. Fribble, I say! Skewer ‘em, Dave!

Clearly, once Mr. Brooks lays down his glasses he is a very different man. Whoa, does he take it to those unpatriotic chai drinking granola eaters! With the rapier he has been concealing for too long beneath his network of chastity trusses and horsehair bikini underpants, he slices the Democratic National Convention, its nominee and the tens of thousands — no, tens of millions — of fraudulent, Liberal celebrants with a bilious ease not seen since Dennis Miller unleashed his own caustic inner pissy boy to the acclaim of large swaths of crickets.

Clearly aiming to ensnare the sons and daughters of the demographic they ingeniously tapped into by taking William “Baggy Pants” Kristol onto the masthead, Brooks’s trademark yuks have found their mark. And how: Single parent upbringing? Zing! Community service? Zing! Oil dependence? Zing! Stop it! You’re killing us! Really! Can’t wait to see the stuff he does on those other shallow, feel-good manifestos The Constitution and The Bible. Red meat for Brooks the Butcher! Chop it up, you zany bastard, you!

From listening to turncoat Juan Williams spout tepid nit-picking on the “all Republican panel” on Larry King (whose suspenders are actually tethering him to an unseen toilet beneath his desk. Rimshot!) to hearing the redoubtable Ted Koppel dismiss the event and its hopeful-for-the-first-time participants the way an aging dowager would dismiss her building’s doorman, what is clear more than anything is the media’s assault on YOU, VOTER.

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On the August 29 broadcast of NBC’s Today, while discussing Sen. Barack Obama’s August 28 speech at the Democratic National Convention, host Matt Lauer said to Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, “[B]efore the speech, you wrote in The Wall Street Journal that you were unimpressed with the staging, the Greek column look, the hugeness of the arena,” and then asked her what she thought of the speech afterward. However, in describing Noonan’s August 28 column to her, Lauer referred to her criticism of the columns and the size of the arena, but did not mention that she had written that the speech “has every possibility of looking like a Nuremberg rally.”

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By Dana Hedgpeth
Washington Post Staff Writer

A Washington law firm filed a lawsuit yesterday against KBR, one of the largest U.S. contractors in Iraq, alleging that the company and its Jordanian subcontractor engaged in the human trafficking of Nepali workers.

Agnieszka Fryszman, a partner at Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll, said 13 Nepali men, between the ages of 18 and 27, were recruited in Nepal to work as kitchen staff in hotels and restaurants in Amman, Jordan. But once the men arrived in Jordan, their passports were seized and they were told they were being sent to a military facility in Iraq, Fryszman said.

As the men were driven in cars to Iraq, they were stopped by insurgents. Twelve were kidnapped and later executed, Fryszman said. The thirteenth man survived and worked in a warehouse in Iraq for 15 months before returning to Nepal.

The lawsuit, filed in a federal court in California on behalf of the workers’ families and the survivor, claims that the trafficking scheme was engineered by KBR and its Jordanian subcontractor, Daoud & Partners, according to Fryszman.

This spring, an administrative law judge at the Department of Labor, which has jurisdiction over cases that involve on the job injuries at overseas military bases, ordered Daoud to pay $1 million to the families of 11 of the victims. Attempts to reach officials at Daoud were unsuccessful. A phone message was left at their office in Dubai and e-mails were sent seeking comment.

Heather Browne, a spokeswoman for KBR wrote in an e-mailed statement: “KBR has not seen the lawsuit so it is premature for us to comment at this time. The safety and security of all employees and those the company serves remains KBR’s top priority. The company in no way condones or tolerates unethical or illegal behavior.”

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Eerie Parallels, Goldie Hawn Expert Says

Andy Borowitz

The GOP campaign for the White House is looking more and more like the screenplay for an unproduced Goldie Hawn film from the 1980’s, a Goldie Hawn film expert said today.

Davis Logsdon, who teaches at the University of Minnesota’s School of Film and is considered the world’s foremost expert in the cinema of Goldie Hawn, said that in choosing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate Sen. John McCain was taking a leaf from an unproduced Hawn vehicle from 1984 titled “Contestant in Chief.”

“In the screenplay, an evil presidential candidate chooses the American he thinks is the least likely to catch on to his nefarious plans to destroy the country,” Professor Logsdon said.  “Enter Goldie, a former beauty pageant contestant, small-town mayor and hockey mom.”

In keeping with the formula of Goldie Hawn movies in the 1980’s, “She turns out to be smarter than she looks and exposes her running mate on national TV, becoming President herself in the process.”

But Professor Logsdon cautioned that in the case of this year’s GOP ticket, life will probably imitate art only up to a point: “In real life, if Gov. Palin becomes President she will most likely ban abortions, destroy wildlife habitats and blow up the world.”

Elsewhere, Gov. Palin said she was looking forward to the vice-presidential debate, or as she called it, “the talent competition.”

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by: rba

In a last-ditch effort to recover the brains of CSRs*, a team of forensic proctologists were reduced to the size of large molecules, transferred into glasses filled with liquor, placed on a giant table in the ‘reep’ caucus room with “Drink Me” signs taped to the outsides, and consumed by the swollen-headed (though somewhat dim) members.

As the first teams reached the cranial cavity they began to send back images of vast empty spaces with only a few marginally connected blood vessels – a huge echo chamber with absolutely no brain mass. Teams eight and fourteen had – luckily as it turns out – been unable to escape the pull of the large intestine, and so nearing the exit orifice almost crashed into a gray millimeters-in-diameter mass directly connected to the walls of the bowel. The brains had been found!

After careful review, and on the advice of the Commander of the Expedition they were instructed to leave them as they found them, owing to the risk of sudden shock should the brains be reconnected using a full-power-restart.

“They seem to have been functioning that way for decades, so better leave well enough alone”, she said.
:: :: ::

*California Senate Republicans, ca. 2008. For the life imitating fiction see:

- Aurelio Rojas/sacbee: Budget defeated in Senate
- Jim Sanders/sacbee: GOP lawmakers put ‘no new taxes’ pledge in writing

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by Andrew Zajac

Conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh boosted Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s pro-life position and mocked Barack Obama on his radio show yesterday with a make-believe riff in which Obama asked Palin “When you found out your baby would be born with Down syndrome, did you consider killing it before or after the due date?”

Limbaugh’s “humor” caught the fancy of the Republican National Committee, which, in an internal e-mail, proposed using the bit in a YouTube clip.

The e-mail, which was sent to RNC Communications Director Danny Diaz, and mistakenly to a Tribune reporter, was titled “wow…good YouTube potential…”

The rest of it reads:

“Rush, just now imagining a series of questions that Obama can ask Palin, if they ever meet:

One about how to shoot a gun…
One about do you bait your hooks when you go fishing?

And then, this (paraphrase):
“when you learned that you were going to have a Down Syndrome baby, did you consider aborting it, before or after the due date?”"

Here’s a PDF of the e-mail: RNC email

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By E&P Staff

NEW YORK What to do when you are mistakenly sent a highly provocative, even distasteful, email from a political party staffer and are then asked not to publish its contents? The issue came up again today when the Chicago Tribune received an email from a GOP staffer regarding a suggestion that the party post something on YouTube regarding a radio comment by Rush Limbaugh related to Sarah Palin’s new baby and Barack Obama’s view of abortion.

Here is an excerpt from a posting today on the Tribune’s popular blog, The Swamp, by Andrew Zajac.
*

Conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh boosted Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s pro-life position and mocked Barack Obama on his radio show yesterday with a make-believe riff in which Obama asked Palin “When you found out your baby would be born with Down syndrome, did you consider killing it before or after the due date?”

Limbaugh’s “humor” caught the fancy of the Republican National Committee, which, in an internal e-mail, proposed using the bit in a YouTube clip.

The e-mail, which was sent to RNC Communications Director Danny Diaz, and mistakenly to a Tribune reporter, was titled “wow…good YouTube potential…”

In a statement, an RNC spokesman said, “A staffer with separate responsibilities made a poor recommendation that was not heeded. The individual has been spoken to and this will not occur again.”

The staffer who wrote the message said the obvious — that it was sent to the wrong person — but otherwise declined to discuss it.

Diaz asked The Swamp not to post the message and said the RNC had not and would not act on the suggestion, but otherwise declined to talk about it on the record.

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STOP the presses! This election isn’t about the Clintons after all. It isn’t about the Acropolis columns erected at Invesco Field. It isn’t about who is Paris Hilton and who is Hanoi Hilton. (Though it may yet be about who is Sarah Palin.) After a weeklong orgy of inane manufactured melodrama labeled “convention coverage” on television, Barack Obama descended in classic deus ex machina fashion — yes, that’s Greek too — to set the record straight. America is in too much trouble, he said, to indulge in “a big election about small things.”

As has been universally noted, Obama did what he had to do in his acceptance speech. He scrapped the messianic “Change We Can Believe In” for the more concrete policy litany of “The Change We Need.” He bared his glinting Chicago pol’s teeth to John McCain. Obama’s still a skinny guy, but the gladiatorial arena and his eagerness to stand up to bullies (foreign and Republican) made him a plausible Denver Bronco. All week long a media chorus had fretted whether he could pull off a potentially vainglorious stunt before 80,000 screaming fans. Well, yes he can, and so he did.

But was this a surprise? Hardly. No major Obama speech — each breathlessly hyped in advance as do-or-die and as the “the most important of his career” — has been a disaster; most have been triples or home runs, if not grand slams. What is most surprising is how astonished the press still is at each Groundhog Day’s replay of the identical outcome. Indeed, the disconnect between the reality of this campaign and how it is perceived and presented by the mainstream media is now a major part of the year’s story. The press dysfunction is itself a window into the unstable dynamics of Election 2008.

At the Democratic convention, as during primary season, almost every oversold plotline was wrong. Those Hillary dead-enders — played on TV by a fringe posse of women roaming Denver in search of camera time — would re-enact Chicago 1968. With Hillary’s tacit approval, the roll call would devolve into a classic Democratic civil war. Sulky Bill would wreak havoc once center stage.

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Even Whole Foods and its upper-middle-class customers are feeling the pinch.

By Jill Richardson, AlterNet

It’s no secret that food prices are going up. Bloomberg News reported this month that we are experiencing the highest rate of food inflation in 28 years, and both corn and soy hit record high prices during July.

Consumers are doing what they can to cope with these rising prices — but does that mean staying away from organic food that may already be pricier? And if so, could a lull in organic sales make farmers and retailers shy away from the organic market as a result?

What better place to look for trends than the poster child for high food prices: my local Whole Foods. Referred to by many as “Whole Paycheck,” Whole Foods made headlines in the New York Times this month for seeking to change its high-priced image: “Now, in a sign of the times, the company is offering deeper discounts, adding lower-priced store brands and emphasizing value in its advertising. It is even inviting customers to show up for budget-focused store tours like those led by Mr. Hebb, a Whole Foods employee.”

A year ago I left a job in the Whole Foods bakery, where I served coffee, baked bread and scooped gelato. Now, I visited the same store where I worked to discover that the bakery’s “Every Day Value” items (whole wheat bread and blueberry bran muffins) rose in price by a dollar each in the last year. I also remembered that the store occasionally put items on sale and frequently posted signs advertising value when I worked there, so I wondered if the New York Times was correct.

Carolyn Kates, the marketing assistant at my local Whole Foods, had some answers. With company profits falling 13 percent in the third quarter this year, Whole Foods sees the need to move away from its “Whole Paycheck” image. And now that even its upper-middle-class customer base is feeling the pinch, the store needs to convince shoppers to try its lower-priced grocery items, particularly its private-label brands, 365 and 365 Organic.

Why the drop in profits?

While the price of oil is apparent when people go to the pump, folks are now beginning to realize that filling up at the grocery store is getting more expensive too, and for similar reasons.

As recent studies such as “Diet, Energy, and Global Warming” by Gidon Eshel and Pamela A. Martin show, we almost literally eat oil. It takes oil to plant, harvest, transport and process the wheat in the wheat bread and bran muffins that rose in price; fertilizers used in conventional agriculture are often petroleum-based as well. When oil prices rise, food prices are soon to follow. This affects consumers, retailers and farmers.

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by dogemperor

The big news, obviously, in the blogosphere today is John McCain’s surprise pick for the Republican veep nominee–a relative unknown by the name of Sarah Palin, whom–at least in the more conventional political circles–would appear to be a complete cypher.

Unfortunately, if one digs just a bit deeper, Palin is found to have some very interesting–and very disturbing–connections…among them, being potentially the first Assemblies-linked VP candidate and having a number of links to dominionist groups targeting kids via “bait and switch” evangelism.

Sarah Palin’s connections that McCain doesn’t want you to know about

There are quite a number of extremely troubling links between Sarah Palin and neopentecostal dominionists–enough that, in truth, she may be ultimately as much of a “dream candidate” for the dominionist movement as Mike Huckabee was.  Even worse, she’s running in a manner that has been frighteningly successful for dominionist groups since the early 80’s–specifically, as a “stealth candidate”.

Palin’s Assemblies linkage

The first link in and of itself is a doozy–and one of the most damning indeed. No less than the official newsletter of the Assemblies of God of Alaska promotes her proudly as one of the denomination’s own, and she was actually feted at an official function of the Assemblies’ Alaska District as recently as this year:

The opening night banquet of the 2008 Alaska District Council was honored to have Governor Sarah Palin address the delegates and guests. Governor Palin spoke of her appreciation for the Assemblies of God and requested that the Council pray for both her and the State of Alaska. Superintendent Ted Boatsman, who was Palin’s junior high pastor at Wasilla Assembly of God, along with Pastor Mike Rose of Juneau Christian Center, where Palin presently attends church when in Juneau, laid hands on the Governor and led the Council in prayer.

Palin, who was elected Governor in 2007, is Alaska’s youngest governor and the first female governor of the state. She just recently gave birth to her fifth child, Trig. Palin spoke of the faith challenge she faced when learning that Trig would be a Downs Syndrome child. However, she and her husband, Todd, believe that every child is a gift of God, deserving of life, and that God was asking them to accept His will for their lives. The Alaska District Council believes that the State of Alaska is blessed to have a woman of faith and courage as Governor.

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Members of Joel’s Army are fighting to bring about the millennial reign of Christ.

By Casey Sanchez, Southern Poverty Law Center

LAKELAND, Fla. — Todd Bentley has a long night ahead of him, resurrecting the dead, healing the blind, and exploding cancerous tumors. Since April 3, the 32-year-old, heavily tattooed, body-pierced, shaved-head Canadian preacher has been leading a continuous “supernatural healing revival” in central Florida. To contain the 10,000-plus crowds flocking from around the globe, Bentley has rented baseball stadiums, arenas and airport hangars at a cost of up to $15,000 a day. Many in attendance are church pastors themselves who believe Bentley to be a prophet and don’t bat an eye when he tells them he’s seen King David and spoken with the Apostle Paul in heaven. “He was looking very Jewish,” Bentley notes.

Tattooed across his sternum are military dog tags that read “Joel’s Army.” They’re evidence of Bentley’s generalship in a rapidly growing apocalyptic movement that’s gone largely unnoticed by watchdogs of the theocratic right. According to Bentley and a handful of other “hyper-charismatic” preachers advancing the same agenda, Joel’s Army is prophesied to become an Armageddon-ready military force of young people with a divine mandate to physically impose Christian “dominion” on non-believers.

“An end-time army has one common purpose — to aggressively take ground for the kingdom of God under the authority of Jesus Christ, the Dread Champion,” Bentley declares on the website for his ministry school in British Columbia, Canada. “The trumpet is sounding, calling on-fire, revolutionary believers to enlist in Joel’s Army. … Many are now ready to be mobilized to establish and advance God’s kingdom on earth.”

Joel’s Army followers, many of them teenagers and young adults who believe they’re members of the final generation to come of age before the end of the world, are breaking away in droves from mainline Pentecostal churches. Numbering in the tens of thousands, they base their beliefs on an esoteric reading of the second chapter of the Old Testament Book of Joel, in which an avenging swarm of locusts attacks Israel. In their view, the locusts are a metaphor for Joel’s Army.

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By BOB TEDESCHI
NEW HAVEN

JOSEPH PORTER stood just 5-foot-4 and described himself as a farmhand when he stepped into a sprawling Union Army camp here in December 1863 to join 1,000 or so volunteers.

Six months past his 17th birthday at the time, he was handed a blue cotton uniform and the rank of private in the 29th Regiment, but no gun. Guns were for white soldiers, and the 29th, like the famed Massachusetts 54th, was an all-black unit, Connecticut’s only one during the Civil War. In place of rifles and bayonets, Private Porter and his fellow soldiers marched with sticks through land now anchored by ball fields and shuttered factories in this largely Hispanic enclave bordering the inner harbor.

The diminutive Private Porter never returned to New Haven once he left for battle in March, but his presence can again be noted here. Late next month the city will dedicate a memorial to the 29th at Criscuolo Park, celebrating some of the 200,000 African-Americans who fought for the Union.

There were farmers, bricklayers and delivery men; fugitive slaves, freed men and tradesmen who had never known bondage. They converged on a muddy, stinking pasture that 145 years hence offers a considerably more appealing spot for enshrinement.

The monument already stands, albeit shrouded with duct tape and black plastic to thwart early viewings. Blown open on a recent morning, though, the plastic revealed the memorial’s centerpiece: an eight-foot-tall black granite column etched with the images of Alexander H. Newton and Daniel S. Lathrop, the two regiment members who achieved the unit’s highest rank, sergeant major.

The statues of the two men appear to look out toward the great-great-grandson of one of the soldiers of the 29th, Harrison Mero, who helped lead the effort to build the monument. Mr. Mero, a retired affirmative-action program director in New Haven, smiled as he gazed at the memorial, which was a long time in coming. “The original idea was for this to be just a big hunk of rock with names on it,” Mr. Mero said. “That wouldn’t cut it.”

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