OPINIONS OF ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES, A MINOR GREEK GODDESS. She can be reached at: ECHIDNE-OF-THE-SNAKES.COM

Friday, September 30, 2005

The Bennett Slip 



It's showing. You must have read or heard all about what Bill Bennett said recently but if you haven't here is the bit from Bennett's own show:

CALLER: I noticed the national media, you know, they talk a lot about the loss of revenue, or the inability of the government to fund Social Security, and I was curious, and I've read articles in recent months here, that the abortions that have happened since Roe v. Wade, the lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30-something years, could fund Social Security as we know it today. And the media just doesn't -- never touches this at all.

BENNETT: Assuming they're all productive citizens?

CALLER: Assuming that they are. Even if only a portion of them were, it would be an enormous amount of revenue.

BENNETT: Maybe, maybe, but we don't know what the costs would be, too. I think as -- abortion disproportionately occur among single women? No.

CALLER: I don't know the exact statistics, but quite a bit are, yeah.

BENNETT: All right, well, I mean, I just don't know. I would not argue for the pro-life position based on this, because you don't know. I mean, it cuts both -- you know, one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up. Well --

CALLER: Well, I don't think that statistic is accurate.

BENNETT: Well, I don't think it is either, I don't think it is either, because first of all, there is just too much that you don't know. But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.

Quite a few people are discussing Bennett's statement out of context but even within context it's fairly bad. He picks African-Americans as the group to use in his stupid example, and that is racist. Because if he had really wanted to make the point by picking a group with very high crime rates he should have suggested aborting all male fetuses. And don't you now go saying that I have advocated that, because I didn't. I just pointed out how one can see that Bennett uses an "out-group" for his example, and by doing that he others the members of that group.

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Krugman 



He has written such a true piece that it's a crime I can't just print it all here. But I can give you a sample, about "That's the way it is":

Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. He sold all his stock in HCA, which his father helped found, just days before the stock plunged. Two years ago, Mr. Frist claimed that he did not even know if he owned HCA stock.

According to a new U.S. government index, the effect of greenhouse gases is up 20 percent since 1990.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a 33-year-old Wall Street insider with little experience in regulation but close ties to drug firms, was made a deputy commissioner at the F.D.A. in July. (This story, picked up by Time magazine, was originally reported by Alicia Mundy of The Seattle Times.)

The Artic ice cap is shrinking at an alarming rate.

Two of the three senior positions at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration are vacant. The third is held by Jonathan Snare, a former lobbyist. Texans for Public Justice, a watchdog group, reports that he worked on efforts to keep ephedra, a dietary supplement that was banned by the F.D.A., legal.

And so it goes on, from yet another proof of criminality or incompetency in the Bush administration to something that is really worrying (avian flu, for example) for everyone else except this obsessive-compulsive government of ours. Never mind hurricane rescue preparadness, never mind dirty nuclear bombs, never mind the avian flu or global warming. What really matters is to dismantle the Social Security system, to fight brown people somewhere outside the U.S., and to gather as much money as possible into the neocon coffers. And to ban gay marriage and guarantee that women are in the kitchen with lots of children. - Not that Krugman said all of this; I just latched on to get my rant in as well.

But the point he makes is a very important one. This government is adrift in a hurricane of greed and ineptitude and we are all going to suffer for it.

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Hank 




Hank


Hank is under anesthesia right now. Her left front shoulder is being x-rayed. She should come home tonight.

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Iraq. A Mess. 



I don't write much about Iraq because it pains me far too much. I demonstrated against the war before it started because the whole plan was clearly hatched up by total lunatics and every scenario I tried out in my head ended up in too much blood flowing for no great results. And once the invasion started it was already too late for all practical purposes. To make a difference by writing about it, I mean, including a difference for the wingnuts. If they had followed my advice they'd be a lot better off today.

There is nothing I'd like better than to be proved wrong about Iraq, for the sake of all the innocent Iraqis, but this is very unlikely:

Sunni-led insurgents killed at least five people in a crowded vegetable market on Friday, the Muslim day of worship, police said. New information also emerged about coordinated suicide and mortar attacks the day before in another mostly Shiite city that left nearly 100 people dead.

Elsewhere, in the southern city of Basra, an Iraqi police convoy was ambushed late Thursday, killing four policemen and wounding one, said police Capt. Mushtaq Khazim.

The new surge of violence before an Oct. 15 referendum on Iraq's constitution has killed at least 190 people, including 13 U.S. service members, in the past five days.

The insurgents have vowed to wreck the referendum, whose passage is crucial to prospects for starting a withdrawal of American troops.

Al-Qaida in Iraq, the country's most feared insurgent group, has declared ``all-out war'' on the Shiite majority that dominates Iraq's government, and moderate Sunni Arab leaders have urged their community to reject the constitution, saying it will fragment Iraq and leave them weak compared to Shiites and Kurds.

And soon we may see the most awful of the torture photographs from Abu Ghraib. See why I don't want to write about it all?

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Ahnuld's Veto Day in California 



Arnold Schwartzenegger, the Governator of California, has today vetoed the bill to legalize gay marriage. He also vetoed several other bills:

On a day when the governor rejected 52 bills, he discarded proposals that would have helped consumers buy cheaper prescription drugs from Canada. He refused to expand punishments for employers that flout minimum wage laws, pay women less than men or resist paying workers' compensation claims.

He declined to protect nurses from being required to work overtime or having to lift patients on their own. And he vetoed legislation to allow workers locked out by employees during pay disputes to collect unemployment benefits.

The governor also vetoed a bill to create greater oversight of the state's $3-billion stem cell research program.

Schwarzenegger enjoys a solid 33% approval rating... But an e-mail from prochoiceamerica.org informs us that he also

signed a measure intended to ensure that pharmacists do not deny women emergency contraception. The bill by Sen. Deborah Ortiz, D-Sacramento, was prompted by publicized cases in which pharmacists, refused to fill prescriptions for emergency contraception known as "morning after" pills, out of moral concerns."

Thus, I can't give Ahnuld a zero approval rating here.

Poor governator. He's not finding politics quite as much fun as he may have thought at the beginning. I almost feel guilty for adding this funny "California Dreaming" to the end of this post, courtesy of Little Sister:

Der New 2005 California State Employee Handbook

By Arnold Schwarzenegger

Sick Days

Ve vill no longer accept a doktor's shtatement as proof of sickness.
If you are able to go to the doktor, you are able to come to verk.

Personal Days

Each employee vill receive 104 personal days a year. Dey are called
Saturday and Sunday.

Lunch Break

Skinny people get 30 minutes for lunch as they need to eat more, so
that dey can look healthy. Normal size people get 15 minutes for lunch
to get balanced meal to maintain their average figure. Fat people get
5 minutes for lunch, because dat's all der time needed to drink der
Shlim Fast.

Dress Code

It is advised that you come to verk dressed according to your salary.
If ve see you vearing $350 Prada sneakers, and carrying a $600 Gucci
Bag, ve assume you are doing vell financially and derefore you do not
need a raise. If you dress poorly, you need to learn to manage your
money better, so dat you may buy nicer clothes, and derefore you do
not need a raise. If you dress in-betveen, you are right vere you need
to be and derefore you do not need a raise.

Bereavement Leave

Dis is no excuse for missing verk. Dere is notting you can do for dead
friends, relatives, or co-verkers. Every effort should be made to have
non-employees attend to da arranchments. In rare cases vere employee
involvement is necessary, da funeral should be scheduled in da late
afternoon. Ve vill be glad to allow you to vork troo your lunch hour
and subsequently leave vone hour early.

Restroom Use

Entirely too much time is being spent in da restroom. Dere is now a
shtricht 3-minute time limit in der shtalls. At der end of tree
minutes, an alarm vill sound, der toilet paper roll vill retract, the
shtall door vill open and a picture vill be taken. After your second
offense, your picture vill be posted on der company bulletin board
under da "Chronic Offenders" category.

Tank you for your loyalty to our great shtate. Ve are here to provide
a positive employment experience.

Tank You, Der Governater


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Thursday, September 29, 2005

The Friday Dump 



It is usual for certain types of news to be released on Fridays, especially anything that the powers-that-be would prefer not widely discussed. So I am wondering if this is the reason that it is on a Friday that Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter imprisoned during the course of the Plame investigation, has agreed to testify after all.

Probably a red herring. The whole investigation has been full of red herrings, and I doubt that we have seen the end of them yet. But for what it's worth, here is what Miller herself says:

I am leaving jail today because my source has now voluntarily and personally released me from my promise of confidentiality regarding our conversations relating to the Wilson-Plame matter. My attorneys have also reached agreement with the Office of Special Counsel regarding the nature and scope of my testimony, which satisfies my obligation as a reporter to keep faith with my sources.

This enables me to appear before the Grand Jury tomorrow. I'll say nothing more until after my testimony. I do, however, want to thank The New York Times, and my husband, family and friends, for their unwavering support. I am also grateful to the many fellow journalists and citizens from the United States and around the world, who stood with me in fighting for the cause of the free flow of information. It was a source of strength through a difficult three months to know they understood what I did was to affirm one of my profession's highest principles.


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If You Want To See A Funny Picture 



go and visit the derenegade. This one makes me think all sorts of possible thought bubbles one could add to the president's head.

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Haiku Time 



Because I don't feel like writing anything serious right now. I can't write haikus in English yet, but I bet that you can! So write me one about some recent political event or whatever else has caught your attention using only three lines with five, seven and five syllables.

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Mystery Man Confirmed 



Nobody really knows what John Roberts will do on the bench. The wingnuts think that he will get rid of abortion and affirmative action and civil rights and otherwise make things pleasant for corporations and the radical religious right. The Democrats hope that he won't do those things, or at least not very vigorously, and even if he does he won't be any worse than Rehnquist was. It's the next nominee that will be important for the Democrats to fight. That seems to be the consensus on the left.

It was clear from the very beginning that Roberts would sail through. After all, he at least knows how to do law and that's about as good as any wingnut offer we will get. But he is very young to be the Chief Justice, and whatever he will turn out to be will affect us for a very long time. This and the next Supreme Court nomination may well turn out to be the most damaging parts of the Bush era and the very odd 2004 elections.

I hope that I am overly pessimistic here, naturally. So it is with some pleasure that I turn to the other mystery man confirmation, that of Roy Blunt to step into the pants of Tom DeLay. What happened to Dreier's nomination? The rumors are that he didn't get it because of his gayness. Could that possibly be true?

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Gloating 



That was my first reaction on reading David Brooks's most recent babble in the New York Times. But it was short-lived, I swear, and quickly passed into a study of what Brooks is saying about Tom DeLay's recent troubles, and this is that pretty much DeLay is over, and that the whole Bush administration is a mess. Heh. (Pardon me.)

Brooks uses sports metaphors in his column, calling DeLay "the designated hitter". He argues that DeLay is a good man who has done nothing for his own advancement. Instead, all he has done was for the team: the Republican party.

If Brooks is right (I have no way of knowing) it might be time to look at this team concept and the use of sports and war metaphors in general in political commenting. Feminists have long pointed out how this particular way of viewing politics makes it hard for women to run for elected office, because the concepts of war and sports are still fundamentally seen as masculine. But it is pretty clear that running politics like it was a war or a baseball game isn't ultimately good for the country, either.

Yes, I was gloating. It's a nice feeling, all warm and fuzzy and full of little lightning strikes of pure exhilaration. After all these years I'm allowed to feel warm and fuzzy for a few seconds. But Brooks doesn't really want that: he concludes his little piece by implying that the Democrats are not going to be any better at all:

Politics is a team sport. Nobody can get anything done alone. But in today's Washington, loyalty to the team displaces loyalty to the truth. Loyalty to the team explains why President Bush doesn't fire people who serve him poorly, and why, as a result, his policies are often not well executed.

Loyalty to the team is why I often leave meals with politicians thinking "reasonable in private," but then I see them ranting like cartoon characters on TV. Loyalty to the team is why someone like Chuck Hagel is despised in Republican ranks even though, whether you agree or not, he is courageously speaking his mind.

Will we learn from DeLay's fall about the self-destructive nature of the team mentality? Of course not. The Democrats have drawn the 10-years-out-of-date conclusion that in order to win, they need to be just like Tom DeLay. They need to rigidly hew to orthodoxy. They need Deaniac hyperpartisanship. They need to organize their hatreds around Bush the way the Republicans did around Clinton.

Funny. Didn't Brooks quite recently write that the Democrats are all scattered and confused because they never had this wonderful era of ideological purification that the Republicans went through? Or was it Tierney? In any case I have no doubt that there are corrupt Democrats. There are even corrupt priests, I've been told. But the danger of excessive party discipline on the left is very distant, to be anticipated around the time when the Devil opens the skating rinks in Hell.

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Wednesday, September 28, 2005

And the Enron Era Continues 



Now in trailers:

Four hundred squat white trailers sat on train cars in the Norfolk Southern rail yard Tuesday, waiting for the long trip to the Gulf of Mexico. In Nappanee, 15 miles away, 200 or more are produced each day.

This is what $521 million in Federal Emergency Management Agency contracts looks like: Gulf Stream Coach Inc.'s bare bones Cavalier trailers. They have a steel chassis, a wood frame and white aluminum siding. There's a couch, a kitchen table, a three-burner stove, a double sink and a refrigerator. Each has an adult-size bed and a set of bunk beds, and they can be hooked up to air conditioning and sewer and water lines. A toilet, a shower, and a place to wash your face complete the unit.

Demand couldn't be greater.

"As fast as we can put them on there, they're moving them down there," said Gulf Stream marketing director Steven Lidy, watching the company's trailers being hitched for the ride to the rail yard Tuesday.

The giant award to Gulf Stream for 50,000 housing units is part of unprecedented federal spending to answer one of the basic needs caused by the hurricane disasters of Katrina and Rita: providing an estimated 600,000 displaced people with housing.

The trailers are emblematic of the scale and scope of the federal effort in the region. The spending is a window into the urgent, sometimes haphazard contracting process, much of it done with little or no competitive bidding, like Gulf Stream's contract.
(Bolds mine.)

Little or no competitive bidding. This is because of the urgency, you see. It's also a lot easier to just look up who has already gotten federal money and to hand out more to the same companies.

But it would be very interesting to see what the actual contracts look like. For example, it isn't too hard to find out how much a trailer like the ones supplied by Gulf Stream would retail. Then one could compare that price to the prices in this contract, to get a starting point.

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DeLay in the Enron Era 



I'm listening to Al Franken's show on Air America and he is just telling how Tom DeLay has stepped down as the House Majority Leader because he has been indicted in a criminal investigation. Maybe times are finally changing; I remember writing about one of DeLay's schemes about a year ago and even then it seemed not quite ethical (channeling donations to the Republican party via something that looked like it was funding children's welfare).

Add DeLay to what is happening to Frist. Then stir in a little bit of Karl Rove's problems. Sprinkle liberally with Michael Brown and FEMA. If desired, add a little bit of alcohol use by the president...

The Enron Stew.
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Here are more details on DeLay's current dilemma, via Atrios:

A Travis County grand jury today indicted U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay on one count of criminal conspiracy, prompting the Sugar Land Republican to give up his leadership post in Congress.

"I have notified (House Speaker Dennis Hastert) that I will temporarily step aside from my position as majority leader pursuant to rules of the House Republican Conference and the actions of the Travis County District Attorney today," DeLay said in a statement.

The charge, a state jail felony punishable by up to two years incarceration, stems from his role with his political committee, Texans for a Republican Majority, a now-defunct organization that already had been indicted on charges of illegally using corporate money during the 2002 legislative elections.



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Tuesday, September 27, 2005

John Conyers Writes Letters 



With apologies to Atrios from whom I stole this nifty little title. Here is an example of a letter by Representative Conyers on the treatment of arrested peace protesters:

September 27, 2005

Office of the Chief

United States Park Police

Dwight E. Pettiford

1100 Ohio Drive S.W.

Washington, D. C. 20242

Dear Chief Pettiford:

I am writing to request information regarding the treatment of individuals arrested on September 26, 2005 in front of the White House and processed at the United States Park Police Anacostia Station.

Yesterday 384 protestors, including peace activist Cindy Sheehan, were arrested outside the White House and were brought to United States Park Police Anacostia Station. I was very surprised to learn that many of those arrested were kept handcuffed in vans and buses for up to 12 hours before they were charged and released. Some of those were released at 4:30 in the morning after being arrested at 4:00 the previous afternoon. Many of those held captive the longest were grandmothers and senior citizens. Those released after midnight were unfamiliar with Washington, DC and had no means to travel back to their hotels once the metro had closed. Anacostia is not frequented by taxicabs after midnight.

I have the following questions regarding the treatment of those arrested yesterday:

1. Why was the Anacostia Station chosen as the sole location to process all 384 arrestees when there were several other Park Police stations in the greater Washington, DC area?

2. In what other circumstances have arrestees been detained by U.S. Park Police for periods exceeding twelve hours before being charged with a crime?

3. In what other circumstances have arrestees been detained by U.S. Park Police, and kept handcuffed on buses for periods exceeding ten hours?

4. What is the established U.S. Park Police procedure for processing large numbers of arrestees in the Washington, DC area?

Please respond to the Judiciary Committee Minority Office at 2142 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC 20515, telephone number 202-225-6504, fax number 202-225-4423.

Sincerely,


John Conyers, Jr.

Ranking Member

House Committee on the Judiciary




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Sodom and Gomorrh 



Rorschach has a post about an interesting study which argues that the more religious countries may in fact be the more sinful ones:

"In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

"The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so."

Gregory Paul, the author of the study and a social scientist, used data from the International Social Survey Programme, Gallup and other research bodies to reach his conclusions.

He compared social indicators such as murder rates, abortion, suicide and teenage pregnancy.

The study concluded that the US was the world's only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates of gonorrhoea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from " uniquely high" adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested.


The implication is that religion may not be that helpful as an aid towards a more ethical or moral society. Or is it? The problem with correlational studies like this one is that they tell us nothing about causality. In this particular study, for example, we find out that the United States appears to be both more religious and more "sinful" than most Western European countries. But we can't actually conclude that it's the religiousness which causes the sin. It could be the other way round: the sin might drive people to religion, or it could be that there is something else about religious people that makes them both pious and sinful at the same time, or countries which have large religious majorities might have small very sinful minorities who are not religious, or the correlation might be just a historical coincidence.

If we could get data from many time periods and if we could establish that the religiosity was first and then the sinfulness followed we'd have a stronger case for arguing that it's the Bible-thumping which causes extramarital humping and so on.

Despite all these academic and uninteresting reservations I do agree that the study shows us that the Christian Right in the United States is full of baloney when it portrays this country as the last shining and virtuous one among the Sodom and Gomorrh of the corrupt west.

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The Best Bumper Sticker Ever 



Rapture Is Not An Exit Strategy

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The Short and the Sweet 



News about the Bush administration, very condensed because I have to go somewhere.

First, Michael Brown (the one who is going to study his own incompetence and get paid for it) has given us a statement about why he did so poorly as the head of FEMA. It has to do with Democrats.

Second, the Enron era of the administration continues. Curioser and curioser.

Third, via Hesiod, Laura Bush will be participating in reality tv! Because that is what the focus groups show will work to make the president look better, even though the president doesn't listen to focus groups.

The idea is for you to read each of the articles I have linked to. There will be a quiz later on...

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Monday, September 26, 2005

Only In Wingnuttia! 



Raw Story reports that FEMA has rehired Michael Brown, the guy who used to run FEMA (to ground) as a consultant. Guess what his job description is? To evaluate the FEMA response to hurricane Katrina!

Then Osama bin Laden should be the judge in the international court on terrorism.

Pardon me while I go and bang my head against the garage door.

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Cindy Sheehan 



has been arrested outside the White House. At least according to MSNBC. And here is more:

Sheehan and several dozen other protesters sat down on the sidewalk after marching along the pedestrian walkway on Pennsylvania Avenue. Police warned them three times that they were breaking the law by failing to move along, then began making arrests.

Sheehan, 48, was the first taken into custody. She stood up and was led to a police vehicle while protesters chanted, "The whole world is watching."

Sheehan's 24-year-old son, Casey, was killed in an ambush in Sadr City, Iraq, last year. She attracted worldwide attention last month with her 26-day vigil outside
President Bush's Texas ranch.


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More Enron Era 



The Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (aka the catkiller) may be in trouble, perhaps of the type that bothered Martha Stewart (of the iron-your-underwear fame). It is a story of blind trusts and what a blind trust means. Blind trusts are used to absolve federal politicians who own stock from accusations of conflict of interest: if they don't know what stocks they own they can't be accused of conflict of interest with respect to the involved companies. The idea is to hand over the day-to-day running of the portfolio to an outsider who will then take care of it without informing the owner as to its contents. This can't work completely as the politicians do know what they had in their portfolios to begin with. Like, say, shares in a family-owned company:

Blind trusts are designed to keep an arm's-length distance between federal officials and their investments, to avoid conflicts of interest. But documents show that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist knew quite a bit about his accounts from nearly two dozen letters from the trust administrators.

Frist, R-Tennessee, received regular updates of transfers of assets to his blind trusts and sales of assets. He also was able to initiate a stock sale of a hospital chain founded by his family with perfect timing. Shortly after the sale this summer, the stock price dived.

A possible presidential contender in 2008, Frist now faces dual investigations by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and the Securities and Exchange Commission into his stock sales.

Think Progress presents a history of the events in this little scandal. And a little scandal it is, nothing to compare to the big scandals that this administration is busy organizing. It is not even comparable to the hiring scandal my previous Enron era post referred to. But it's a sign of the times, a sign of the Republican strong values and ethics.

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Today's Quiz 



You know how liberal the Hollywood establishment is? The wingnuts moan and groan about it daily, and this moaning and groaning may have had an effect on the new batch of movies just coming out. Does "The Exorcism of Emily Rose" support the theory of Intelligent Design? Is "Just Like Heaven" a retake of the Theresa Schiavo case?

I don't know, but a recent movie review in the New York Times suggests that this might be the case, and that more generally the new movies slant slightly to the right. This quote is on "Just Like Heaven" where the heroine, Elizabeth, lies in coma:

Would I have been happier if Elizabeth died? The very absurdity of the question - what kind of romantic comedy would that be? - is evidence of the film's ingenuity. Who could possibly take the side of medical judgment when love, family, supernatural forces and the very laws of genre are on the other side? And who would bother to notice that the villainous, materialistic doctor, despite having the religiously neutral last name Rushton, is played by Ben Shenkman, a bit of casting that suggests a faint, deniable whiff of anti-Semitism? Similarly, it can't mean much that Elizabeth, the ambitious career woman, is sad and unfulfilled in contrast to her married, stay-at-home-mom sister. Or that the last word you hear (uttered by Jon Heder, first seen in "Napoleon Dynamite") is "righteous."

What caught my eye was the little sentence about "Elizabeth, the ambitious career woman" being "sad and unfulfilled in contrast to her married, stay-at-home sister", and I tried to recall at least one movie in the last ten years which would have depicted an ambitious career woman as happier and more fulfilled than a stay-at-home wife. I can't think of a single movie like that. Can you?

For more points, mention the name of at least one movie where a mother holding a job outside the home is portrayed as happy and fulfilled.


For bonus points, mention a movie in which the ambitious career man is portrayed as sad and unfulfilled in comparison to his less ambitious and more relaxed peers.

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Sunday, September 25, 2005

The Enron Era 



Frank Rich is excellent in his latest New York Times column about the Bush administration's hiring choices:

As recently as 10 days ago, when he resigned before his arrest, Mr. Safavian was the man who set purchasing policy for the entire federal government, including that related to Hurricane Katrina relief. The White House might as well have appointed a contestant from "The Apprentice." Before entering public service, Mr. Safavian's main claim to fame was as a lobbyist whose clients included Indian gaming interests and thuggish African regimes. Mr. Safavian now faces charges of lying and obstructing the investigation of Mr. Abramoff, the Tom DeLay-Ralph Reed-Grover Norquist pal who is being investigated by more agencies than looked into 9/11. Mr. Abramoff's greasy K Street influence-peddling network makes the Warren Harding gang, which operated out of its own infamous "little green house on K Street," look like selfless stewards of the public good.

You know that the arrest of Mr. Safavian, one of three known Abramoff alumni to migrate into the administration, is the start of something big. Alberto Gonzales's Justice Department announced it only after Mr. Safavian had appeared in court and had been released without bail. The gambit was clearly intended to keep the story off television, and it worked.

It won't for long. The Enron odor emanating from Mr. Safavian is of a piece with the rest of the cronyism in the Katrina preparedness package. The handing off of FEMA from President Bush's 2000 campaign manager, Joe Allbaugh, to Mr. Allbaugh's even less qualified buddy, Michael Brown, in 2003 is now notorious. (The two men have been friends for 25 years but were not college roommates, as I wrote here last week.) But that's only the beginning: the placement of hacks like "Brownie" and Mr. Safavian in crucial jobs hasn't been slowed one whit by what went down on their watch in New Orleans.

Witness the nomination of Julie Myers as the new head of immigration and customs enforcement at the Homeland Security Department. Though the White House attacked the diplomat Joseph Wilson for nepotism because he undertook a single pro bono intelligence mission while his wife was at the C.I.A., it thought nothing of handing this huge job to a nepotistic twofer: Ms. Myers is the niece of Gen. Richard Myers and has just married the chief of staff for the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff. Her qualifications for running an agency with more than 20,000 employees and a $4 billion budget include serving as an associate counsel under Kenneth Starr; in that job, she helped mastermind the costly and doomed prosecution of Susan McDougal, and was outwitted at every turn by the defense lawyer Mark Geragos.

Rich goes on to list example after example of very similar hiring choices. Did you know that the Iraq reconstruction process was largely in the hands of inexperienced twenty-somethings whose only relevant experience was being an avid wingnut? Or that being a fundraiser for Bush or his cronies will get you almost any job in this administration, never mind what your actual qualifications might be?

All this might be logical, of course. A party which doesn't believe in the government might well try to run it to ground by appointing lots of really unsuitable people to run things, including FEMA and the reconstruction of Iraq. And friends will always be rewarded, naturally.

But this leaves us taxpayers paying for a party which we were not invited to attend. Even worse, we are expected to pay for the after-party clean-up, too.
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Sadly, the Rich column is now available only in exchange for payment or from the paper edition. But Google is your friend.

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Fall Garden Blogging 




Poppies


My garden looks like shit, so I'm showing a nice picture from a European poppy garden instead. These are not opium poppies; if you want those scatter the seeds from your poppy seed bagel on some fallow ground. Though of course this would be illegal and not very useful as the poppies themselves do nothing much except look ravishing. And then the police will come and burn down your garden.

My actual garden right now consists of lots of six-foot tall plants that have fallen on top of each other. Hank and Henrietta (my dogs) crawl around in the tunnels that are created this way, seeking for good pooping spots. All this is my fault: I Did Not Stake! Always stake. That is the second commandment of the gardener's bible.

The first commandment is: Work The Garden Hard In April and May. I didn't do that, either. I was here blogging away, and enormous waves of guilt are flooding over me right now. But not enormous enough to send me out with a machete and thick gloves, and that's what is needed to clear the garden.

Does George Bush feel similar waves of guilt for ignoring his allotted garden spot for so long?

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Pictures from the Anti-War Rally 



Here and here. The next best thing to actually having been there.

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Saturday, September 24, 2005

The Anti-War Rally 



It is held today in Washington, D.C. and in other cities around the world. The early media coverage is, as usual, interesting in the way it grasps for "balance". Like giving thousands of anti-war protesters roughly the same number of quotes as a handful of pro-war protesters in the same place. Here is an example.

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Enjoy! 



Hmj sent these to me. They are really funny:

Insurance Claims

Below are actual insurance claim form gaffes found by a UK insurance
company:

"I started to turn and it was at this point I noticed a camel and an
elephant tethered at the verge. This distraction caused me to lose
concentration and hit a bollard."

"On the M6 motorway I moved from the center lane to the fast lane but
the other car didn't give way."

"On approach to the traffic lights the car in front suddenly broke."

"Three men approached me from the minibus. I thought they were coming
to apologize. Two of the men grabbed hold of me by the arms, and the
first slapped me several times across the face. I knee'd the man in
the groin, but didn't connect properly, so I kicked him in the shin."

"I didn't think the speed limit applied after midnight."

"I was on my way to see an unconscious patient who had convulsions and
was blocked by a tanker."

"Mr. X is in hospital and says I can use his car and take his wife
while he is there. What shall I do about it?"

"No witnesses would admit having seen the mishap until after it
happened."

"I knew the dog was possessive about the car but I would not have
asked her to drive it if I had thought there was any risk."

"Windscreen broken. Cause unknown. Probably Voodoo."

"The car in front hit the pedestrian but he got up so I hit him
again."

"We had completed the turn and had just straightened the car when Miss
X put her foot down hard and headed for the ladies' loo."

"I had been driving for 40 years when I fell asleep at the wheel and
had an accident. I pulled away from the side of the road, glanced at
my mother-in- law and headed over the embankment."

"Coming home, I drove into the wrong house and collided with a tree I
don't have."

"The other car collided with mine without giving warning of its
intention."

"I thought my window was down, but I found out it wasn't when I put my
head through it."

"I collided with a stationary truck coming the other way."

"A truck backed through my windshield into my wife's face."

"A pedestrian hit me and went under my car."

"The guy was all over the road. I had to swerve a number of times
before I hit him."

"In an attempt to kill a fly, I drove into a telephone pole."

"I had been shopping for plants all day and was on my way home. As I
reached an intersection a hedge sprang up obscuring my vision and I
did not see the other car."

"I was on my way to the doctor with rear end trouble when my universal
joint gave way causing me to have an accident."

"To avoid hitting the bumper of the car in front I struck the
pedestrian."

"My car was legally parked as it backed into the other vehicle."

"An invisible car came out of nowhere, struck my car and vanished."

"I am sure the old fellow would never make it to the other side of the
road when I struck him."

"The pedestrian had no idea which way to run, so I ran over him."

"I saw a slow-moving, sad faced old gentleman, as he bounced off the
roof of my car."

"The indirect cause of the accident was a little guy in a small car
with a big mouth."

"I was thrown from the car as it left the road. I was later found in a
ditch by some stray cows."


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Friday, September 23, 2005

Friday Dog Blogging 




Henrietta


This is a few years old. Henrietta no longer wears a flea collar and her eyes are a lot more visible now that her cheeks are silver-colored. But otherwise she looks the same.

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Today's Deep Thought 



From res ipsa loquitur:

1873 dead Americans, $144 billion wasted tax dollars, and an entire country's credibility and goodwill blown to bits around the planet and all they got was another lousy Islamic republic.

They might get a civil war first. Discuss.

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Thursday, September 22, 2005

Operation Offset 



This is the Republican Study Committee's proposal as to how to fund the reconstruction necessary after hurricane Katrina by cutting other federal spending. The real objective is to save the tax cuts for the wealthy and the abolition of the federal estate tax on the inheritances the ultra-wealthy leave behind.

And who is to make the sacrifices instead of Bush's rich base? The elderly, on the whole. The Committee proposes delaying the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill by one year but making the elderly pay for it already by raising the premia as well as by more cost-sharing by the elderly who are unfortunate enough to be ill. Though to be fair to the wingnuts on this committee, they also propose eliminating and/or reducing everything else they happen to hate: The poor will pay more for their federally subsidized Medicaid program (but not the elderly whose nursing-home care is covered by Medicaid, too, as there are too many Republicans with a mom or a dad enjoying these benefits), foreing aid will be cut, including aid to the African continent (have you checked recently what percentage foreign aid is of the federal budget?), and naturally nothing should be given to the National Foundations of the Arts or the Humanities (girlyman stuff) or the Public Broadcasting System (commies!). Read the rest yourselves.

What I found intriguing were the reasons given for various cuts. The most common was the argument that a particular program duplicates the same services available elsewhere, but in several cases the justification was simply that the funding doesn't belong to the federal government. This one, for example, is funny:

Level Funding to Community Health Centers.

This reform would level funding for these federal grants to help medically underserved populations. These programs should be funded locally, not with federal dollars.

Hmm. Medically underserved populations live in inner-city ghettoes are far out in poor rural areas. Local funding?

Other funny justifications abound. Many programs trying to keep illegal drugs away from children are cut or offered reduced funding because studies do not support their efficacy. Yet I see no cuts in the abstinence programs which have been proven to be of very questionable efficacy. And the Legal Services Corporation should be eliminated because, among other things, it has provided "resources for individuals to sue the government for more generous federal benefits".

The problem in trying to pay for the reconstruction effort this way is that those who are going to pay are predominantly the elderly, the poor and various groups who don't carry enough votes to affect the next election. But this isn't a problem for the wingnuts on the Republican Study Committee; instead, it's another chance to forward the wingnut ideology. Operation Upset.

For an alternative proposal that might suit the Democrats, see Think Progress.

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Some Fun... 



Go to Crooks and Liars and watch a video of Phil Donahue making Bill O'Reilly sad.

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What Is News? 



Molly Ivins has, as usual, an excellent new column, this time on the ten most important topics not covered very well in the American media. She says:

I have long been persuaded that the news media collectively will be sent to hell not for our sins of commission, but our sins of omission. The real scandal in the media is not bias, it is laziness. Laziness and bad news judgment. Our failure is what we miss, what we fail to cover, what we let slip by, what we don't give enough attention to - because, after all, we have to cover Jennifer and Brad, and Scott and Laci, and Whosit who disappeared in Aruba without whom the world can scarce carry on.

The number one not-covered item is how the Bush administration moves to eliminate open government. Molly points out that this item has been hard to cover because the process has been in little drips and drops and at no one point in time has there been a clear major step towards an authoritarian government. But the results are all there for any journalist to see:

Gene Robertson, a great news editor, says we tend to miss the stories that seep and creep, the ones whose effects are cumulative, not abrupt. This administration has drastically changed the rules on Freedom of Information Act requests; has changed laws that restrict public access to federal records, mostly by expanding the national security classification; operates in secret under the Patriot Act; and consistently refuses to provide information to Congress and the Government Accountability Office. The cumulative total effect is horrifying.

The whole list is worth reading.

Another way of looking at the question in my title is by following foreign news sources. There are days when I think that the British, for example, live in a different world from the one we inhabit here; so different are the news that are discussed and the slant the discussion takes. If you can access news from several other countries you start getting a better understanding of what is omitted in any one of them, including the U.S..

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Hurricanes 



If you live anywhere along the probable route of Rita, please leave. Take your family, friends, pets and neighbors and leave. If you have two cars lend the keys of the second one to someone who doesn't have a car. Then leave. If you can't leave find a high place. My blessings on all of you.

There are still uncollected corpses in New Orleans.

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How Democrats Voted on Roberts 



From LATimes:

By a vote of 13-5, the Senate Judiciary Committee today recommended that the Senate confirm the nomination of John G. Roberts Jr. to be chief justice of the United States.

Three Democrats joined all 10 Republicans supporting the nomination. The full Senate is expected to vote on the nomination next week, with little doubt that Roberts will be confirmed, and in time to take his seat on the high court bench in time for its first session of the term, on Oct. 3.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, was among the last whose vote was in question to disclose her decision, as the committee began its final pre-vote debate on Roberts. She voted against confirmation.

She was joined by Sens. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Joseph Biden of Delaware, and Richard Durbin of Illinois, all Democrats. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the senior Democrat on the panel, and fellow Democratic Sens. Russell D. Feingold and Herbert Kohl, both of Wisconsin, voted in favor of confirmation.

Explaining her decision, Feinstein, a California Democrat who has at times aligned herself with the party's moderates, said she had been disappointed with answers Roberts had provided during committee hearings. She said he had had the opportunity to distance himself from particularly conservative approaches he had taken to social policy ad legal issues as young aide in the Reagan administration's Justice Department and White House.

She also said that when asked about abortion, he had answered that he had used language much like that of Justice Clarence Thomas, when Thomas was confirmed, indicating that he had no quarrel with the precedents the court had established.

"I became concerned that the phrase 'I have no quarrel' is a term of art of equivocation," Feinstein said, adding: "I'm the only woman on this committee and when I started I said that would be my bar, and he didn't cross that bar."

I still would have liked to see what Roberts said on those cases the Bush administration refused to release to the committee members. Next time even more information might be withheld and the Democrats would have a tough time arguing that it should be offered given that they surrendered on Roberts.

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Wednesday, September 21, 2005

News From Penisland 



A joke courtesy of the Heretik about some recent events in the liberal blogosphere: First a group of feminist bloggers (smart ones, too) published a letter about John Roberts and then Armando on Daily Kos sort of gave an answer to it. The gist of the interaction has to do with the importance of the pro-choice stance in the Democratic Party. Armando thinks that the party should be a big tent, with room for people who don't believe in the woman's right to choose but who are otherwise in agreement with Armando. The idea is to use them to get into power and then somehow ignore them on all the so-called social issues. This is probably easier said than done, and the pro-life Democrats are quite likely to vote with the wingnuts on any women's rights issue. Which of course makes the whole big tent strategy meaningless for anyone whose first priority is the rights of women: the tent will collapse on them.

The real question is whether the woman's right to reproductive choice is one of the tentpoles or not, among ideals such as economic and racial justice, gay and lesbian rights and environmental protection. If it no longer has this role then the big tent might end up spacious indeed as most pro-choice women stop bothering to vote.

The political game question is quite different. It has to do with the idea of getting into power and winning with the idea of grabbing all those independents who hover in the middle and would be Democrats if only the Democrats were more like the wingnuts. This might make sense if there indeed are many such independents, all "single-issue" voters on abortion which I very much doubt. Those voters are already voting for Republicans.
The costs of such an unlikely victory are fairly high if you happen to be a feminist, for "social conservatives" are not just against abortion. They are pretty much against the whole idea of equal rights for women (and gays and lesbians). They are opposed to mothers in the labor force and gender equality in education. They are opposed to same-sex marriage and to a military consisting of anything but heterosexual males. And so on.

Then there is the "single-issue" voter argument. Should the Democrats cater to those who vote on the basis of a single issue such as abortion? Armando would say no. I always find it interesting to read comments threads about the care and feeding of the single-issue voter. The single-issue pro-lifer is taken seriously, explained carefully and seen as eminently wooable. The single-issue pro-choicer is often asked to make the necessary mature compromises for common good, and then many of these pro-choicers try to explain why they can't make thse compromises, why certain issues are like water and bread for them, necessary for anything else even to register much. Some use examples such as whether a white supremacist would be welcomed with open arms into the Democratic big tent. The answers this elicits explain carefully how this country now agrees that racism is bad but the question of women's rights is still debated. The point this misses (among others) is the way pro-choice women feel when their political opponents are embraced by those they thought were on the same side. Betrayal might a be a good summary of this feeling.

Politics does involve compromising and some things are best done holding ones nose. But it is hard to see what remains of the Democratic ideas if compromising means letting go of the idea of equal opportunity, and that is what I believe social conservatism ultimately means. For women, at least.

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Ares and Friends? 



I haven't talked much about my divine pals recently, largely because I've been hiding from them. There was this little incident at a cocktail party on Olympus having to do with snakes and underpants, and I'm not popular these days. But Ares dropped by. Did I tell you that he is still HAWT! And thick as a board.

I made the mistake of telling him all my blogging woes, especially my current frustration that silly right-wingers get things published in the New York Times and I can't even get an answer to the angry and educational e-mails I send them. Ares offered to toss a few thunderbolts on the newspaper's headquarters which I nixed.

Talking about blogging with him was a humongous mistake, because he suddenly decided that what this world needs is a Greek guygod blogger called Ares, and that the cushiest way of getting there would be for him to co-blog with me. With me. On my blog. Which would be renamed "Ares and Friends".

I made excuses. My blog was too puny for his greatness, too wimpy, too snakey. He waved them all aside (with most of my good china on the dining-room table), he would fix all these problems, he would insert the sorely needed humorous and upbeat element, he would post lots of pictures of naked women with Ares in action, he would become a billionaire and so on. He would write long posts on baseball (about which he knows nothing).

There was only one thing to do. I told him about the war in Iraq and urged him to go and see George Bush for an advice-giving session. It almost worked, but he's still sleeping off the nectar in my spare bedroom.

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Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Sexism Hurts Men, Too? 



Well, I happen to think that this is true, but I recently read it in a different context, a medical one:

In a somewhat unexpected finding, societal male dominance over women -- patriarchy -- may help explain why men have a lower life expectancy than women worldwide.

British researchers analyzed rates of female murders and male death rates from all causes in 51 countries in Europe, Asia, Australasia, and North and South America. The prevalence of violence against women was used to indicate the extent of patriarchal control in each of the countries. Socioeconomic factors were also taken into consideration.

The study found that women lived longer than men in all 51 countries. The study also found that those countries with higher rates of female murders (indicating higher levels of patriarchy) also had higher rates for male death and shorter male life expectancies, compared to countries with lower female murder rates, the researchers said.

In fact, statistical analysis showed that variations between countries in rates of violence against women accounted for close to half (49 percent) of the variation in male death rates, the researchers noted.

Lots of examples here about the difficulties of studying something that doesn't have an easy measurable equivalent (patriarchy) and of the use of data outside laboratory conditions. Most social science studies use such data, of course, and it is almost always possible to argue that a study may not have taken into account all possible explanatory causes or controlled for them adequately. For example, the study I'm discussing here seems to have taken into account poverty rates and such, but did they also check to see if the male mortality rates correlated with male murder rates? And what about female mortality rates in general? Did they show the same pattern as the male rates?

Perhaps they did all these things. Which means that I should dig up the original study and look at it. Sigh. Maybe I will if I feel especially good.

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Funny.... 



It looks like a Democrat accidentally got a Republican memo on the soundbites to be used on immigration. See Raw Story.

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The Mrs. Degree 



The New York Times gives us a little article with the title: Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood. These types of articles are a recurring event, happening every few years since the 1970's: the story how highly educated women are deciding not to work, after all, or not to work full-time. The story is also always written as a purely private decision, astonishingly pristine in having nothing to do with the way the labor market is structured or the fact that it is women who are expected to care for the children, or indeed having nothing to do with anything else except the young women themselves. They just wake up one morning having decided that they don't want to be lawyers or physicians or economists, after all.

It is very hard to judge the relevancy or validity of such stories because of this recurrent appearance. It can't always be true that suddenly women are acting differently than they have just done, and mostly these stories appear to be planted to have the newspaper's circulation go up.

So I am hesitant to interpret this newest wave of the same story as indicative of actual change. In fact, if you read the article carefully the fact that this is not a change in actual behavior is fairly obvious. For example:

For most of the young women who responded to e-mail questions, a major factor shaping their attitudes seemed to be their experience with their own mothers, about three out of five of whom did not work at all, took several years off or worked only part time.

Then contrast this to the survey results the article talks about, a survey about two Ivy League colleges, which found that sixty percent of the interviewed freshmen and seniors (all women) planned to take at least some time off or to work part-time. Exactly the same percentage as with the mothers' cohort!

Then you might point out, if you are a sharp-eyed reader, that this means that forty percent of those interviewed don't plan to take any time off at all, and that the time others plan to take off may not amount to much more than a few years. In fact, if you read the article really carefully you will find that seventy percent plan to continue working either full-time or part-time, and that among the remaining thirty percent some, at least, are only planning a short career-interruption.

Just think about this. Then think about the title of the piece: Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood. Hmmmmmm.

And then think about this bit:

Yet the likelihood that so many young women plan to opt out of high-powered careers presents a conundrum.

"It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?" said Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, who served as dean for coeducation in the late 1970's and early 1980's.

It is a complicated issue and one that most schools have not addressed. The women they are counting on to lead society are likely to marry men who will make enough money to give them a real choice about whether to be full-time mothers, unlike those women who must work out of economic necessity.

It is less than clear what universities should, or could, do about it. For one, a person's expectations at age 18 are less than perfect predictors of their life choices 10 years later. And in any case, admissions officers are not likely to ask applicants whether they plan to become stay-at-home moms.

I can almost hear the gently purring threat there: We should weed out those applicants who plan to take any time off during their working lives, because they are going to waste the education and our investments in it. Because this would be hard to do based on what naive eighteen-year old students say, let's just use sex as a proxy and weed out most women.

This is an argument that was once used to set maximum quotas on women in medical schools. It was believed that the expensive training, federally subsidized to boot, should be only available for a few women because allowing women to enter freely would fritter away the expensive education on people who will never wield the scalpel. Similar arguments are brought out all the time to "explain" why there are so few women in whatever area of the society you might look at.

We don't do this with men. Men are brought up to expect that they work full-time all their lives, that they are somehow not capable of taking breaks and staying with their children, and we don't even ask young men entering college about their home-family balance plans. Because it is not seen as their problem. Or their choice, but it is a choice with a very large price tag in terms of lost retirement income, for example.

I probably shouldn't have written about this story, given that it is a nonstory as I have demonstrated above. But I find it annoying how these stories are written, the woman deciding on her very own or at most thinking about her mother's role in the family and wondering if she should replicate it or not. The writer could have mentioned how the media has been full of articles and books discouraging women by writing about the horrible difficulties of combining career and family (but only for women) and of articles and books about the solution of opting out (but only for women). The writer could have mentioned how the maternity leave is still about three months long and how very few companies allow highly educated people to work less than eighty hours a week. Or stressed a little more the 24/7 upbringing of girls into the care-giving role in this country and the almost total lack of societal support for this.

But it is more fun to just make up a story and go and interview some people (mostly those who are not planning to work full-time) and then to suggest that this is a really severe problem for the elite colleges, one having its roots in the young women themselves. Though it's not really a problem at all because the young women themselves don't see it that way, perhaps because at eighteen thirty is really, really old and most of ones life will take place before that age! Perhaps because they are mostly eighteen and have not spent very much time thinking about the issues and absolutely no time at all trying to live them. Maybe next time they should interview those fifty-something educated women who have actually lived through this all, or even some women who don't have the luxury of deciding on anything but full-time work without any career considerations. Though naturally this would be a lot less fun and interesting to debate.
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Thanks to sb for the link.

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President at a Precipice 



Say that very fast a few times. Then apologize to anyone who happened to be within your saliva range. The title comes from one description of yet another bad poll for George Bush.

The USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll suggests that George is not the likeable president the so-called liberal media likes to tell us. In fact, his disapproval rating is at a new high of 58%, and he is doing poorly even in the category of boldness: for the first time the majority doesn't find him that strong or decisive as a leader.

And

The survey shows signs of friction between the two most pressing concerns on Bush's agenda: the Iraq war and Katrina recovery.

A 54% majority says the best way for the government to pay for hurricane relief is by cutting spending for the war. Just 6% support spending cuts in domestic programs, as Bush has suggested.

Nearly two-thirds of those polled, 63%, say some or all of the U.S. troops in Iraq should be withdrawn. A record-high 59% say it was a mistake to invade.

Those polled also want an independent panel to study what went wrong with the Katrina unrescue efforts, not the kind of Republican panel we are going to have. This by a four-to-one margin. Hmmm.

But Bush doesn't care about focus groups. He told us so.

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Monday, September 19, 2005

The Value of Blogging 



"To blog" is an unfortunate term, like the sound one hears when someone is trying to swear at you with a hot potato in her mouth. It's not elegant, not like "write" or "pen". So well suited for what I try to do.

Some days I like blogging a lot less, though. For example, today the New York Times has decided to start charging a fee for its opinion columns. This means that if I want to choke and vomit over Tierney or Brooks I have to pay for it. That may sound fair to some of you, but then you can't read my masterful dissections of the same vomit. (Hint: You can donate me ten bucks by pressing that little symbol in the right column, below the hurricane one. Of course after you have donated all your other disposable income to the hurricane rescue operations. Don't do this if you are poor!)

This may be the beginning of a trend of charging, and the final outcome is to lock all amateurs and goddesses out of the sources of evidence. I'm sure someone would like to do exactly this.

One reason why I think so is this excellent article. It discusses the purpose of political blogs, the need to triangulate between the blogs, the political machinery and the traditional media, and it tells us how much better the wingnut blogs are doing in all this, largely because they are marching to the commands of the top of their hierarchy and feeding on the soundbites sent down by Hannity and Limbaugh and so on. The lefty-liberal bloggers, sadly, are like cats walking on their own and about as easily herded together. But as the article says we really must learn to do better to have more influence on the public discussion.

Where I differ from Daou Report is explained by the place where I sit. Though I'm a fairly widely-read feminist blogger, I'm but a tiny speck as a political one. Well, not so very tiny but you get my point. I'm not one of the big boys and neither the Democratic establishment nor the traditional media is likely to check out what I say every morning. Nothing much is getting triangulated here, but I hope that something else is happening, perhaps a debate, a discussion about the need to include women's points of views more, a discussion to start finding the political machinery that we need and the access to the traditional media we simply don't have.

That's when I feel like a really ambitious and powerful divine, which isn't often. The reality is much more limited, but still useful: to at least join the conversation, to name things which may not yet have names so that the phenomena they are attached to can be discussed. This is what we all smaller bloggers are doing, and I believe that it is useful or at least fun.

For a feminist blogger this quote from the Daou Report article is also a point of divergence:

After a year of my life spent at the intersection of pre-blog and post-blog political thinking, and with Bush getting the second term he craved, one question has preoccupied me since last November: What is the scope of netroots power? Put differently: How influential are bloggers?

It's a difficult question to answer. First, there's no consensus on metrics. Second, blogs serve many purposes, some of which are more social than political. Third, the use of the Internet in political campaigns cuts across so many areas that it's easy to confuse netroots influence in the communications and messaging realm with other Internet-based political applications such as organizing and fundraising. Fourth, 'influence' is a hazy term. (Bolding by Echidne)

For us feminists the borderline between "social" and "political" is much hazier than it is in the mainstream (malestream?) conversation. Much which really is political avoids the limelight of the big liberal blogs because it appears to be social, and feminist blogs can point this out. This also means that writing about our everyday lives, about what happened in the streets, in the kitchens, in the bedrooms or in the boardrooms can be deeply political and may ultimately convert more people to a certain political view than the discussions about the campaign promises of the next Democratic candidate. It is this wider sense of political that many feminist bloggers employ, and if what they do is not seen as political blogging then we are defining the term too narrowly.

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Sunday, September 18, 2005

The Big Dawg Barks 



I never really liked Bill Clinton but at least he had the necessary skills to run a country. On most days. Now he has opened his mouth and out came some not-so-nice statements about the current administration:

Former President Bill Clinton, asked by President Bush to help raise money for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, offered harsh criticism of the administration's disaster-relief effort on Sunday, saying "you can't have an emergency plan that works if it only affects middle-class people up."
...
"It's like when they issued the evacuation order," he said. "That affects poor people differently. A lot of them in New Orleans didn't have cars. A lot of them who had cars had kinfolk they had to take care of. They didn't have cars, so they couldn't take them out."

"This is a matter of public policy," he said. "And whether it's race-based or not, if you give your tax cuts to the rich and hope everything works out all right, and poverty goes up and it disproportionately affects black and brown people, that's a consequence of the action made. That's what they did in the 80's; that's what they've done in this decade. In the middle, we had a different policy."

This after having cavorted around in the company of Bush The Elder, mind you. Bill always knew how to polish both sides of the apple. In many ways he truly was the best Republican president we have had.

Now I await for all sorts of angry comments from my faithful readers...

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A Little Sunday Sermon 



The United States is a predominantly Christian country. Most people believe in a god and the majority appear to believe in angels, too. The religious right tells us that the politics and the laws of this country should reflect its Christianity, and the natural inference to draw is that these should somehow follow the tenets of this religion.

But things get confusing when we hear (via Bobo's World) that most American Christians don't know their own religion very well:

Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the Gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. This failure to recall the specifics of our Christian heritage may be further evidence of our nation's educational decline, but it probably doesn't matter all that much in spiritual or political terms. Here is a statistic that does matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that "God helps those who help themselves." That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin's wisdom not biblical; it's counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans—most American Christians—are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.

Asking Christians what Christ taught isn't a trick. When we say we are a Christian nation—and, overwhelmingly, we do—it means something. People who go to church absorb lessons there and make real decisions based on those lessons; increasingly, these lessons inform their politics. (One poll found that 11 percent of U.S. churchgoers were urged by their clergy to vote in a particular way in the 2004 election, up from 6 percent in 2000.) When George Bush says that Jesus Christ is his favorite philosopher, he may or may not be sincere, but he is reflecting the sincere beliefs of the vast majority of Americans.

This isn't that astonishing. Most religious people in this world appear not to know the tenets of their own religion or what its leaders might be doing. - I remember listening to a radio interview to do with Aceh during the time when various Islamist policies were attempted there. One of them was the use of shariah law in place of a secular legal code. The ordinary people interviewed in the program were happy to hear about the possible use of shariah; they expressed a strong need to do something about the lawlessness on the streets, the rapists and the muggers. But the religious expert also interviewed stated that the use of shariah would ban playing cards, alcohol and would punish adulterers more harshly. And indeed, these would have been the major changes to the laws already in force in Aceh, with the exception of extra whippings etcetera.

This may not be astonishing, but it is very worrying. It means that the voices of authority within the religious sphere have the power to misinform. There are few built-in safeguards to correct anything that is said from the pulpit or its equivalence in other faiths. Still, the very act of uttering something in this context makes it more weighty, more to be trusted, than the statements the same people might make in their private roles. Or in their political roles.

It is also difficult to debate a religious authority if all that the outsiders can use are the written tenets of the religion, yet these tenets are not widely known or perhaps even followed. This pretty much makes real debate impossible, should it not already be so by the unspoken code that religions must not be criticized.

As the article I quote points out, the Christianity of many Americans is better seen as an identity than actual adherence to Christian teachings. Such an identity is moldable, and the religious right has effectively molded the idea of Christianity into something that requires, among other things, that the faithful always vote Republican. Religion has entered politics, yes, but even more it is the politics that have entered religiosity. What to make out of this all is unclear to my divine eyes.

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Saturday, September 17, 2005

On Toe Rings 



I have bought two in Europe. They cost about four Euros each, and are covered with lovely little "emerald flowers". It takes time to get used to having rings on ones toes but I like to look at my bare feet under the desk and see the glitter in the semi-darkness.

Of such things is the human self-decoration made. Sometimes we just like to play with our bodies and the impact they have on the world. Other times it is the world that tries to tell us how to present or not to present ourselves, and here we step into much darker areas of debate and feminist analysis. But my toe rings are wholly innocent of any attempt by anybody else to influence me and nobody else even sees them. They are just fun.

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On Hating George Bush 



I heard some talking head on the radio this morning discuss the need to get over hating Bush. According to this man the democratic base (or us extreme moonbats, really) is too wound up in the Bush-hating to practise good political moves. We should all look ahead to the next Republican president, House and Senate, and ignore Bush whose reign is already essentially over.

This is a misperception. The base hates what Bush is doing to this country and what the wingnuts are planning to do in the future. The so-called Bush-hating is not some odd psychological tic which makes people scream because of the way Bush pretends to have a Texan twang or because of the way he pretends to be a fireman or a working stiff or because he appears to have no brain whatsoever. True, all these little bits of Bush are annoying, but they are not the reason just naming the guy causes rashes in so many of us. The reasons are in the policies the Bush administration has pursued, is pursuing and will pursue. Getting rid of Bush will not get rid of these policies, and all us Bush-haters (so-called) know this.

Besides, I really hate being lectured to by some talking head whose information may be acquired in inside-the-beltway cocktail parties. I hate being othered in this way, and I hate the fact that there was no response to this man's assertions. Maybe I suffer from the "hates-the-talking-heads" syndrome? Yet another reason to ignore all I write.

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Friday, September 16, 2005

On Animals, Men and Women's Health 



Remember that the last director of the Office of Women's Health, Susan Wood, quit in protest of the decision not to let the morning-after pill be available over the counter? Now her place has been filled. By a man whose experience is on veterinarian science:

Wood's acting replacement is Norris Alderson. Alderson has a bachelor's degree in animal husbandry from the University of Tennessee and graduate degrees from the University of Kentucky. He has worked at the FDA for more than 30 years, more than 20 of which he spent in the agency's Bureau of Veterinary Medicine.

Foot-in-the-mouth disease.
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ADDENDUM on Saturday:
This decision has been changed. Maybe the publicity helped with the change? Nah. Thanks to dancinfool in the comments.

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The America Haters 



The radical right calls me an America-hater almost every day. The idea that anyone criticizing this administration hates America and plots treason is spread all over the net and the traditional media. The intention is to make us critics ashamed and fearful of saying anything. The intention is approving silence, the only love that is acceptable to the most extremists on the right.

But it is we, the noisy and complaining ones, who really love America, love her as she is, a gangly teenager with acne and furious dreams and occasional bad mistakes which she then corrects. Love her beautiful mountains and rivers and prairies and wetlands and deserts and cities and all the people that inhabit these, even the ones who think differently. It is we who love what America was, what she had grown to, her promises and her frailties, her ability to learn from errors, to become better, to promise to try, her genius, her optimism, her determination to follow the arc of justice, ultimately.

Yes, we would complain about her teenage fads, about her shallowness, about the serious problems which she didn't know how to correct: the role of race, the role of poverty and the role of violence in a society. But she tried, however unclearly sometimes, and all the voices, even the conservative ones, participated in this trying and made the country ultimately better, closer to maturity, without any loss in the optimism and sunniness that we all prized.

This is the America that was and still is, at least partly, and this is the America that the current administration and the radical right want to destroy. We love her too much to want to see this young country clad in a burkha, to want to see her bent over to carry the heavy moneybags of a few greedy capitalists. We love her too much to want to see her poisoned by mercury and arsenic in her beautiful oceans and lovely lakes. We want her to learn and to grow, not to be forced to sit in a solitary silence, reading over and over the same "thou-shalt-nots" of the conservative bibles.

We critics don't want our America to rampage across this globe, grabbing money and power and leaving behind destitution and death. It is not good for the world and it is terrible for the young country we still are. We are like the parents who love their children, yet see clearly where their frailties lie, and as good parents we tell how to fix those frailties and how to grow stronger while retaining the essential greatness of the child, the teenager, this glorious country of many songs.
How to be mature.

The radical right wants none of this. It wants a country with no kindness, no shelter, no common squares where people can meet. It wants a country in perpetual war, a country where mercenaries and corporations are cared for, where America is but their feeding ground, the silent congregation in some monsterous church for money.

We critics are needed, because we indeed love this country. Our tough love is needed, because it sees with clear eyes. Our patriotism is needed, because it is untainted with false beliefs and childish assertions of how much greater America is than the rest of this earth. We are needed for the very love that makes us named the haters of America.

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Friday Dog Blogging 




Hank and the Loch Ness Monster


These are quite lovely pictures. I hope they come across the same on the blog. Hank is enjoying the early morning sunrise in one, and in the other one it looks like she has just spotted the Loch Ness Monster in the waters. Though it's the dog on the beach she spotted, and then went to play with the same dog who bumped into her and caused her bad leg. But the Monster story is better.

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Thursday, September 15, 2005

The Bush Speech 



I'm not going to write about it. You can hear the wingnut interpretations all over the so-called liberal media. The wingnuts like George when he has taken his tie off and rolled up his sleeve to look just like one of them, like someone who works with his hands. Oh, were it only true.

But one thing I will say. Watch the money. Keep an eagle's eye on it. Because what this will be is a big feast for all Bush's friends, unless we all watch and count and remember.

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Today's Action Alert 



This comes from the National Women's Law Center, and you can find out what to do about John Roberts by clicking on their action page.

The current progressive/liberal near-consensus on Roberts seems to be that he is as good a candidate as we can expect from Attila the Hun, and that with the exception of abortion (which he will help to outlaw) he is actually quite a charming man. Naturally only some of us can view the question in this "cool and detached" way, but then some of us are lumbered with uteri and so on. Sigh. I haven't slept enough.

This is a summary of Roberts's views on those of use saddled with wombs:

Title IX -- John Roberts has repeatedly argued for a narrow interpretation of Title IX, but his testimony today attempted to hide the ball on his real positions. For example, in a 1982 Supreme Court case (Franklin v. Gwinnett County), he filed a brief arguing that no victim of sexual harassment should be allowed to sue for damages under Title IX. His response to the committee did not acknowledge that his interpretation of the law would have left students without any remedy for sex discrimination. Roberts also denied any responsibility for his "strong agreement" with recommendations to restrict the coverage of Title IX. According to Roberts, he was merely parroting administration positions on this issue – an assertion at odds with the very language of his recommendations.

Gender Discrimination -- John Roberts wrote in a 1980s memo of a "perceived problem" of gender discrimination. When asked about this memo, he responded that gender discrimination is "a particular concern of mine and always has been." But the question is not whether he cares about gender equity. It is whether he will apply the laws of this country to provide effective protection against discrimination. His past record and his testimony provide no reassurance.

Equal Protection -- In another memo, John Roberts wrote that sex discrimination is not subject to "heightened scrutiny" under the Constitution. He told members of the Judiciary Committee that he actually meant "strict scrutiny," a standard that applies to racial discrimination – not gender. It's hard to believe a lawyer of Roberts's caliber would misuse legal terms in this way. And this is no mere semantic dispute -- levels of scrutiny affect how the Supreme Court reviews discriminatory policies and often make the difference between condoning or invalidating discrimination.

Roe v. Wade -- As Deputy Solicitor General, John Roberts asked the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. During the hearings, he has refused to give senators straightforward answers about his views on whether the Constitution protects a woman's right to choose and whether he would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. For example, when he was asked whether the right to choose embodied in Roe v. Wade is sufficiently embedded in our national culture that it should not be eliminated, he flatly declined to answer. When he was asked for his comments on Justice Ginsburg's confirmation testimony that a prohibition on abortion is unconstitutional, he would not respond. And when asked whether the right to privacy applies to the beginning of life and the end of life, John Roberts again refused to answer.


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Roving to New Orleans 



Froomkin:

All you really need to know about the White House's post-Katrina strategy -- and Bush's carefully choreographed address on national television tonight -- is this little tidbit from the ninth paragraph of Elisabeth Bumiller and Richard W. Stevenson 's story in the New York Times this morning:

"Republicans said Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff and Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, was in charge of the reconstruction effort."

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!

My most eloquent post ever.

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How To Lower The Costs Of Doing Business 



The Wall Street Journal reports that the Republicans in Washington, D.C., see the hurricane disaster in Louisiana as an excellent opportunity to spread free market principles into this erstwhile den of failed families and big government and so on. The idea, according to Representative Todd Tiahrt (R., Kan.), is to lower the costs of doing business! This raises the profits of the entrepreneurs, natch.

How much all this helps the people in the area, including the workers these businesses might hire, isn't quite so clear. Or perhaps not just very relevant. After all, Bush's executive order allows the contractors to pay less than prevailing wages in the disaster areas (do I hear the trucks bringing immigrant workers already?). And the following extra steps to lower the costs of doing business are being percolated right now:

Now, Republicans are working on legislation that would limit victims' right to sue, offer vouchers for displaced school children, lift some environment restrictions on new refineries and create tax-advantaged enterprise zones to maximize private-sector participation in recovery and reconstruction. Yesterday, the House overwhelmingly passed a bill that would offer sweeping protection against lawsuits to any person or organization that helps Katrina victims without compensation.

Note the attempt to make the disaster area into one where environmental causes matter not at all (especially upsetting considering the role of wetlands destruction in exacerbating the hurricane's effects and the current high rates of toxic substances in the remaining floodwaters). And note the tax advantages offered to the same firms who already enjoy lower wages and now needn't worry about any polluting costs, either.

This is a big division of the spoils after one of the largest natural disasters to strike this country. You can bet anything that those benefiting will be good ole Republican boys and that they will remember the fat wallets they earned when the next election time rolls around. At least some of this money will return to the Republican party. This is what we are paying taxes for, under a one-party government.

A big division of the spoils, yes, but also a wonderful opportunity for the Republican party to make Louisiana into a wingnut state. If only all those who voted for Democrats (the poor black people) could be kept from returning! If enough money could be poured into the right pockets to guarantee more votes in return! Wouldn't it be paradoxical if the greatest leadership blunder of our George actually resulted in such rewards!

As I read this WSJ article I realized that I should be reborn as an oil company. I would get much more attention from the government. I could even pretty much dictate which laws I want to micromanage, and my wishlist would at least appear for discussion in the Congress:

The National Petrochemical & Refineries Association would like lawmakers to reduce the depreciation period from 10 years to five years in order to stimulate investment. Some refineries are talking about reviving an effort to get liability protection for producing the fuel additive methyl tertiary butyl ether, or MTBE. Both were dropped from the earlier energy bill at the insistence of Democrats.

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Thanks to kg for the link.

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Let Us Make Fun Of 



Democratic Senators, people who believe in democracy, anyone not delighted with John Roberts as the next Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Let us use a column in the New York Times to ridicule the process of presenting a candidate for the Supreme Court to the nation. Let us chuckle at the idea that the candidate can't be made to say anything at all revealing.

Let us stick our fingers in our ears and let us stick our tongue out at the enemy. Let us go "Nannannah!" And let us call this political writing.

If we happen to be named John Tierney.

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Wednesday, September 14, 2005

And Even More Pictures 



Not a writing day, it seems. This is from Daily Kos:





It is worth showing because Grover Norquist really wants to do what he threatened in the statement (contrasted with New Orleans) in the picture, and he should be held accountable for his views.

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Not Photoshopped! 



From Reuters and all over the blogosphere:





Text:
REUTERS/Rick Wilking
U.S. President George W. Bush writes a note to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during a Security Council meeting at the 2005 World Summit and 60th General Assembly of the United Nations in New York September 14, 2005. World leaders are exploring ways to revitalize the United Nations at a summit on Wednesday but their blueprint falls short of Secretary-General Kofi Annan's vision of freedom from want, persecution and war.
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It seems to read: I think I may need a BATHROOM break. Is this possible?

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Wingnuts and Science 



Salon has this photograph for your education:





It goes with an article which asks some questions about the wingnuts and their funny attitudes towards science. To me the wingnuts appear to fall into two groups: those who believe in God and no science, and those who believe in science as God. Both approaches are unscientific. Science is not some hundred-percent-proof alternative for religion or some panacea that solves every question we might have about life, universe and stuff. Science is one way of studying answers to various questions, a laborsome way, a slow way, and a way that doesn't always proceed correctly. But it has the advantage that the steps the explanation takes are laid out for all to see. This is not true of the religious approach, and neither is it true of the approach which says that if something is called science then it must be true and nobody must ask questions about it.

A simpler way of making the same point is to refresh your memories about the meaning of the scientific method:

The scientific method has four steps

1. Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena.

2. Formulation of an hypothesis to explain the phenomena. In physics, the hypothesis often takes the form of a causal mechanism or a mathematical relation.

3. Use of the hypothesis to predict the existence of other phenomena, or to predict quantitatively the results of new observations.

4. Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent experimenters and properly performed experiments.

If the experiments bear out the hypothesis it may come to be regarded as a theory or law of nature (more on the concepts of hypothesis, model, theory and law below). If the experiments do not bear out the hypothesis, it must be rejected or modified. What is key in the description of the scientific method just given is the predictive power (the ability to get more out of the theory than you put in; see Barrow, 1991) of the hypothesis or theory, as tested by experiment. It is often said in science that theories can never be proved, only disproved. There is always the possibility that a new observation or a new experiment will conflict with a long-standing theory.
(Bold mine.)
This is a very simple initial definition. Each of these steps may have additional refinements, and as my added bolding of the word "may" is intended to indicate, alternative theories might actually explain the same evidence. Thus, it is not always the case that a hypothesis which appears to predict well is the only one, or even the best one, to explain a particular phenomenom.

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Go Read Molly Ivins 



She is depressingly good. Link here.

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The Tale of Two States 



Blanco and Barbour, the governors of Louisiana and Mississippi, respectively, are being compared and analyzed in USA Today (via Atrios). Atrios points out this upsetting pair of quotes in the article:

She says that two days after Katrina, desperate for help, she couldn't get through to Bush and didn't get a callback; hours later, she tried again, and they talked.
...
Barbour hasn't had to wait hours to talk to Bush. In fact, Barbour said in an interview with USA TODAY, the president called him three to four times in the wake of Katrina. "I never called him. He always called me," he said.

Which makes me worried that this government might see its responsibility (the one Bush has now freely accepted) as limited to only those who voted Republican.

The article is fascinating in other ways, as well. The whole tone of the story is really a comparison of the stereotypes of a "traditional woman" and a "traditional man" in a leadership role. We are told that Governor Blanco had many children, stayed at home for several years, cares for her people and takes a nurturing approach. She sounds like the mold from which good wingnut women are supposed to spring. Governor Barbour, on the other hand, comes across as tough as rock, ready to grab bullhorns and eager to shake lots of hands, all the time denying that anything at all has gone wrong. The reader is supposed to draw the obvious conclusions about what works.

It's unfortunate that Blanco would then come across as punished for being the "good woman" and that Barbour would appear to win this game without actually having been a very good governor for his state. So confusing. What is a reader to do?

Well, a good idea would be to read sources which offer somewhat less stereotyped and superficial reports; sources, where one doesn't have to dig and wonder about what was really said. If one is careful with this USA Today story it actually tells that Blanco most likely did a fairly good job and that we don't yet know what sort of a job Barbour did. But the story itself ends with predictions of a presidential ticket for Barbour...

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Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Ammunition 



For your next conversation with a wingnut. Wingnuts live in an alternate universe, one in which George Bush is the younger brother of Jesus and in which we progressives are the spawns of Satan himself. The more modern section of Wingnuttia reads Adam Smith and books about social Darwinism instead of the Bible but the ideas are otherwise fairly similar. All wingnuts get their information from Fox, so that what they think happened during the hurricane Katrina may sound very odd to you. Don't despair, Think Progress has created a list of wingnut myths with proper corrections to each myth.

Not that you can just offer the corrections and see the air cleared. The same myth will be thrown back at you repeatedly. But at least you can feel calmer knowing that evidence doesn't back the weird stuff you hear, over and over again.

And you will certainly be told that us lefties blame Bush for the hurricane itself. That is one of the myths which is most intriguing: how on earth did they decide that it is us who think Bush is strong enough to steer hurricanes? It's always been the Wingnuttia that believes this.

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Bush Takes Responsibility 



About federal blunders in the Katrina unrescue effort. The problem with this responsibility-taking is that I have no idea what he might mean. Is he going to resign? Offer compensation? Do public penance? Can we now blame him more openly?

I doubt it. Here are some possible definitions of responsibility that Bush might have used:

Definitions of responsibility on the Web:

* duty: the social force that binds you to your obligations and the courses of action demanded by that force; "we must instill a sense of duty in our children"; "every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty"- John D.Rockefeller Jr
* province: the proper sphere or extent of your activities; "it was his province to take care of himself"
* a form of trustworthiness; the trait of being answerable to someone for something or being responsible for one's conduct; "he holds a position of great responsibility"
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

* In moral philosophy, the word responsibility has at least two related meanings: * The obligation to answer for actions. Often this means answering to some specified authority.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility

* Unless otherwise specified, the vendor shall be responsible for all items covered by this purchase order until delivered at the designated delivery point and the vendor shall bear all risks as to items rejected or requiring correction after notice of such rejection or correction is given.
207.104.50.39/supportserv/terms.htm

* A yacht owner/skipper is solely responsible for deciding whether or not to start or to continue to race.
mooloolaba.cyca.com.au/editorial.asp

* *. The moral and forward-looking sense of responsibility is the sense in which one is responsible for achieving (or maintaining) a good result in some matter. The idea is that one is entrusted with achieving or maintaining this outcome, and expected to both have relevant knowledge and skills, and to make a conscientious effort. However, despite one's best efforts, the result may not be achieved. For example, patients of responsible physicians may die, and the work of a responsible engineer may result in an accident because the accident was not foreseeable, it was not possible to compensate for the factors
www.unmc.edu/ethics/words.html

* To be entrusted with or assigned a duty or charge. In many instances responsibility is assumed, appropriate with one's duties. Responsibility is distinct from accountability. A supervisor can assign responsibility but cannot give away his or her accountability: the manager is ultimately responsible.
www.ucsc.edu/matman/bppwg/glossary.htm

* Condition, quality, fact, or instance of being responsible; obligation, accountability, dependability, etc.
www.ifdn.com/teacher/glossary.htm

* a virtue, is a charge, trust, or duty, for which one is responsible. To be responsible means to be correspondent or answerable, accountable to another for something, liable to be called to account, morally accountable for your actions, capable of rational conduct. The Vow of Responsibility: "I am now become responsible for all my own earth life. The spot I occupy now I have made for myself. The work I do now is as a servant of God. All that comes to me is my very own, either Light or Dark, it has been Created by me for myself by
miriams-well.org/Glossary/

* Neither the company nor anyone on its behalf shall be liable for any death, loss, injury, accident, damage to personal property (including baggage) or delay, illness strike, machinery failure, acts of God, improper documentation or any other causes beyond its control.
www.selwynsnow.com.au/bookings/terms.html

* Behavior for which a
www.rolemodeling.com/glossary.htm

* Especially "personal responsibility". Catch-cry of the powerful self-righteous Right who conveniently forget that a lot of other people were responsible for them gaining positions of power. Catherine Kingfisher (Waikato Uni) says the targets - like poor single mothers - are portrayed "as out of control, hedonistic, irresponsible, and dependent." Catherine argues that the personal responsibility dogma "mirrors discourses of colonization, in which the colonized Other is constructed as "savage" -- wild and ungoverned -- and in need of reformation. Poor single mothers, like indigenous populations, thus constitute an internal savage, and welfare reform may accordingly be analyzed in terms of colonizing/reformative
www.embassy.org.nz/encycl/r2encyc.htm

* 1. The obligation to carry forward an assigned task to a successful conclusion. With responsibility goes authority to direct and take the necessary action to ensure success. 2. The obligation for the proper custody, care, and safekeeping of property or funds entrusted to the possession or supervision of an individual. See also accountability. (JP 1-02).
www.shelflife.hq.dla.mil/Policy_4140_27/06Definitions.htm

* Manager Contract Management and Project Accounting (CMPA)
www.careaustralia.org.au/show_vacancy_terms.asp

* Five types of responsibilities under "Extended Producer Responsibility" are denoted in the inventory:
www.ec.gc.ca/epr/en/glossary.cfm

* An obligation to perform assigned activities.
www.crfonline.org/orc/glossary/r.html

* Youth accepts and takes personal responsibility.
www.sesa.org/assets/short.html

* Being obliged to answer, as for one's actions, to an authority that may impose a penalty for failure.
www.isoeasy.org/std_cmpn/glossary.htm

* refers to a person attempting to meet the expectations others have of them.
wps.prenhall.com/wps/media/objects/213/218150/glossary.html

* Cloud Tours, Inc. of 31-09 Newtown Ave, Long Island City, NY acts solely in its capacity as marketing agent on behalf of its suppliers such as air carriers, ground operator, cruise lines and hotels identified on documents supplied in connection with purchase of the tours described herein or other travel services.
www.cloudtours.com/terms_cond.htm

* Definition:
www.webofint.info/glossary.html

* The notion of describing problem space entities in terms of responsibilities is one of the core characteristics of OO development. The notion that publicly an entity is only responsible for knowing or doing something introduces a level of conceptual indirection that is important to OO encapsulation, implementation hiding, and DbC. It allows the "client" collaborating with an object to be protected from knowing anything about the details of how the "service" object actually fulfills its contract. (See category on what OO is all about.)
pathfinderpeople.blogs.com/hslahman/glossary_of_oomda_terms/

* literally 'response-ability', the ability to choose and act upon appropriate responses according to context, as an expression of personal power; link-theme between spiritual dimension and physical dimension
www.soul-dynamics.com/glossary

* a contract or obligation of a class. What an object knows or does. An object may fulfill responsibilities using its own methods/data or the services of a collaborator.
www.sci.csuhayward.edu/~billard/case/node11.html

* Being responsible; being accountable; having a duty.
www.emerys.com.au/glossary.htm


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John Roberts 






While dodging questions on the woman's right to choose.

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Monday, September 12, 2005

The Roberts Hearings 



John Roberts reminds me of the Sleeping Beauty. There he lies, asleep, pristine, surrounded by rose bushes, waiting for the kiss from George Bush that would make him spring alive. But this is as far as the fairy tale goes, as I'm not quite sure what Roberts-awake would look like.

He hasn't been asleep, of course. He has been suave, polished, pleasant, intelligent and most destructive of the right to privacy, civil rights and the Commerce Clause (which matters for the federal government to be able to interfere in the aftermath of a hurricane, for example). In fact, he's so pleasant and nice that most beltway insiders find his appointment very natural. He is one of them. But the real Roberts is hidden somewhere deep inside the Sleeping Beauty, and I want that real Roberts to wake up and speak. Because we will have him around for something like three generations.

So what would Chief Justice Roberts do about Grizwold vs. The State of Connecticut, the famous forty-year-old case which decided that married couples can use contraception if they wish? If we don't have a right to privacy, according to Roberts, what else will fall by the wayside? Our right not to use contraception, say?

I don't know what Roberts plans to do, and it seems it's very bad manners to try to make him tell us:

But Republicans urged Roberts to be cautious in what he tells the committee about how he would rule on certain issues.

"Some have said that nominees who do not spill their guts about whatever a senator wants to know are hiding something from the American people," said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. "Some compare a nominee's refusal to violate his judicial oath or abandon judicial ethics to taking the Fifth Amendment. These might be catchy sound bites, but they are patently false."

"Don't take the bait," Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told Roberts in the hearings. "Don't go down that road. Do exactly the same thing every nominee, Republican and Democrat alike, has done. Decline to answer any question that you feel would compromise your ability to do your job. The vast majority of the Senate, I am convinced, will not punish you for doing so."

The vast majority of the Senate are Republicans, so naturally they wouldn't punish their pal John. I might, though.

And what do we get instead of answers to questions about judicial philosophy? We get an analog to baseball:

"I come before this committee with no agenda, no platform," said Roberts in his brief opening remarks. "I will approach every case with an open mind."

And using a baseball metaphor, he compared his judicial role to that of an umpire, saying, "My job is to call balls and strikes, not pitch or bat."

Right. But what are the rules of the game you are umpiring, John? Are they the same rules the players believe in?

Wake up or go back to sleep.

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On Poverty 



Jonathan Alter writes about the poverty question in the aftermath of Katrina. I don't agree with everything he says but his article is a good beginning for those who wish to learn more about the roots of the problem. When I have more time I will write something long and boring on the topic here. But the preview is that the solutions ain't easy though not as hard as the wingnuts pretend.

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Michael Brown Has Resigned from FEMA 



It seems that Brown is no longer the head of FEMA. This is the western equivalence of seppuku, I guess.

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The Royal Visit to New Orleans 



Was there a foghorn this time? I haven't watched the visit, because I firmly and angrily believe that he should not have gone there to cause disruption in the real rescue effort. The only reason for this visit is in the abysmal approval numbers of our George. He's playing the only game this government finds worthy (other than war games): the illusion game.

Part of the illusion game is to shroud everything into words which carry nothing but sound:

A reporter asked Bush about criticism that a racial component was behind the government's slow response to the people left without help after Katrina hit.

"The storm didn't discriminate, and neither will the recovery effort," Bush said. "When those Coast Guard choppers -- many of whom were first on the scene -- were pulling people off roofs, they didn't check the color of a person's skin, they wanted to save lives.

"I can assure people ... that this recovery is going to be comprehensive. The rescue efforts were comprehensive, and the recovery will be comprehensive."

Bush also rejected suggestions that the nation's military was stretched too thin with the Iraq war to deal with the hurricane devastation.

"We've got plenty of troops to do both," the president said.

"It is preposterous to claim that the engagement in Iraq meant there weren't enough troops here, just pure and simple."

So criticism is "preposterous", things are "comprehensive" and "pure and simple". No evidence to support the Iraq argument's preposterousness, no attempt to answer what those who charge racism really refer to. No substance, just a lot of fluff, like happy little Republican clouds floating about in the sky of emptiness. See, I can do the same!

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Sunday, September 11, 2005

A Headline I Saw 



It stated:
Specter will not question Roberts over abortion.

Well, no. He is unlikely to need one anytime soon.

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9/11/2005 




Flying


I embroidered this after 9/11/2001. I have posted it before but this is the context in which it was made. What it means isn't that clear to me. It seems to have the two sides all mixed together. But I know that I wanted release for the souls trapped in the horror of it all when I was working on this.

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Why Have A Government? 



David Brooks, the wingnut windbag of the New York Times, has returned to his usual liberal-bashing after a couple of fairly thoughtful columns. The most recent one isn't thoughtful: it regards the failure of the Katrina rescue efforts as proof that governments fail. The logical conclusion then is to have as little government as possible. In the (sadly) unforgettable words of Grover Norquist (who is crazy) the government should be shrunk so small that it can be drowned in a bathtub.

Let us take these wingnuts at face value. Let's ask the question:"What would happen in the absence of a government?" The answer is chaos, and then a new government would be created. Because governments are necessary for human cooperation and human cooperation is necessary for survival. It's as simple as that.

In a little more detail, common activity is necessary to get certain types of jobs done. Suppose, for example, that you wish to build levees to protect a low-lying city from hurricanes. Once the levees are built they will protect everyone inside them. It's not efficient for each individual to build his or her own levees. But doing the building together means that one must also solve the question of funding the work. Sometimes the work is done together by the whole community, but mostly someone is employed to do the actual work while others just pay for it.

Now assume that I decide to settle in this city and I see the levees already built. There is then no real (selfish) reason for me to pay anything towards the levees. After all, they will protect me even if I pay nothing! But this same logic applies to everyone else: why would anybody pay for the levees if others can be persuaded to build them free? The outcome would be either no levees at all or the creation of a system where people are forced to pay for the levees. These forced payments are called taxes.

It is the power to tax that distinguishes formal governments from the kind of cooperation I described above. A market solution doesn't allow the power to tax, and can be shown to always produce fewer levees (or military troops) than the optimal level would indicate.

In econo-babble, some goods and services are said to be public in nature. In their purest form public goods and services have these two characeristics: 1) the amount I consume of the service or good does not reduce the amount you can consume, and 2) it is prohibitively expensive to exclude anybody from consuming the product. The usual examples of such pure public goods are lighthouses: the amount of guidance they provide to one ship doesn't reduce the amount they offer other ships and there is no inexpensive way of excluding ships from using the service. At the other extreme, a sandwich is an example of a purely private good. If I eat it you can't, and I can keep you away from my sandwich fairly easily.

Many goods and services have characteristics that are both public and private, but the closer a service comes to the public endpoint the less efficient a market solution will prove to be. Wingnuts who want the government small enough to drown in a bathtub will also drown large chunks of modern civilization, national security and disaster preparedness.

None of this means that governments are necessarily efficient, but then neither are the markets. The wingnut way of always suspecting the government of evil and always giving the markets free pass is stupid, but so would its opposite be. Markets and governments are nothing more than institutions which humans have created, and which to use and in which proportions is an empirical question about what works.

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Saturday, September 10, 2005

Don't Worry 



We are in good hands. Thank the Lord that the disaster relief and reconstruction work will go largely to Bush's good friends! Who needs open bidding! If the good Lord had wanted us to have open bidding he wouldn't have sent us George and his friends.

I read this and my teeth grind each other to white dust:

Companies with ties to the Bush White House and the former head of FEMA are clinching some of the administration's first disaster relief and reconstruction contracts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

At least two major corporate clients of lobbyist Joe Allbaugh, President George W. Bush's former campaign manager and a former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have already been tapped to start recovery work along the battered Gulf Coast.

One is Shaw Group Inc. and the other is Halliburton Co. subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root. Vice President Dick Cheney is a former head of Halliburton.

Bechtel National Inc., a unit of San Francisco-based Bechtel Corp., has also been selected by FEMA to provide short-term housing for people displaced by the hurricane. Bush named Bechtel's CEO to his Export Council and put the former CEO of Bechtel Energy in charge of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.

Experts say it has been common practice in both Republican and Democratic administrations for policy makers to take lobbying jobs once they leave office, and many of the same companies seeking contracts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina have already received billions of dollars for work in Iraq.

Halliburton alone has earned more than $9 billion. Pentagon audits released by Democrats in June showed $1.03 billion in "questioned" costs and $422 million in "unsupported" costs for Halliburton's work in Iraq.

Just the firms I would have picked up for further payments from the American taxpayers, especially now that Bush has abolished the rule that required federal contractors to pay prevailing wages. And just the reminder we all needed that nothing this administration does is ultimately about anything else than how to grab the most cash.

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Saturday Waffling 



(For more of my political posts, check out American Street (in the links on the right) today)

I've been so focused on the hurricane unrescue efforts that I haven't had time to write rubbish at all, and I really miss it. Rubbish writing, I mean. Reading it may not be so fun, but writing it is a blast. But disasters make this very hard to do. Still, if I quit now I might never get back in the saddle.

It is a lovely autumn morning here, the sun seeping down between the dark green leaves in rays of pale gold, and it is once again possible to smell the earth and not just its flowers and leaves. I have an autumn switch which seems to have turned on, and suddenly I'm a ball of energy, cleaning and planning and just enjoying the feeling of ripening all around me. I go out and buy the fruit and the vegetables just for their colors and shapes and the kitchen looks glorious. Earthmotherly. This is as close as I ever get to being earthmotherly.

The snakes aren't especially affected by autumn but the dogs are. They get all edgy and even more eager to run, and then they change from spring shedding to fall shedding. Slightly different type of hair can now be found in the corners of the Snakepit Inc.. This morning Hank jumped into the stream and got stuck quite deep in the mud. I had to pull her out (with a slurp sound), and then we were both smelly and brown. Don't give me any wise-cracks here! It wasn't fun to walk back past the popular local soccer game, but luckily Henrietta was as clean and noble-looking as usual, to show that the smelly browniness didn't extend to all of the household.

I'm thinking of painting all the walls brown. This would save on cleaning time. What could I use to cover the pungent smell of boggy water in the mud?

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Bipartisanship 



New definition (erase the old ones): Anything proposed by wingnuts and supported by Joseph Lieberman.

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Friday, September 09, 2005

And Then The Dogs? 



It seems that stray pet dogs in New Orleans are now being shot.

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A Little Economics Lesson in Wingnuttia 



Courtesy of John Stossel. Excuse me for the long quote but it is needed:

Politicians and the media are furious about price increases in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. They want gas stations and water sellers punished.

If you want to score points cracking down on mean, greedy profiteers, pushing anti-"gouging" rules is a very good thing.

But if you're one of the people the law "protects" from "price gouging," you won't fare as well.

Consider this scenario: You are thirsty -- worried that your baby is going to become dehydrated. You find a store that's open, and the storeowner thinks it's immoral to take advantage of your distress, so he won't charge you a dime more than he charged last week. But you can't buy water from him. It's sold out.

You continue on your quest, and finally find that dreaded monster, the price gouger. He offers a bottle of water that cost $1 last week at an "outrageous" price -- say $20. You pay it to survive the disaster.

You resent the price gouger. But if he hadn't demanded $20, he'd have been out of water. It was the price gouger's "exploitation" that saved your child.

It saved her because people look out for their own interests. Before you got to the water seller, other people did. At $1 a bottle, they stocked up. At $20 a bottle, they bought more cautiously. By charging $20, the price gouger makes sure his water goes to those who really need it.

The people the softheaded politicians think are cruelest are doing the most to help. Assuming the demand for bottled water was going to go up, they bought a lot of it, planning to resell it at a steep profit. If they hadn't done that, that water would not have been available for the people who need it the most.

According to "Professor" Stossel, the black market profiteers in Europe during the WWII did a real favor. They saved all the red meat, cream and eggs and guaranteed that it went to the neediest.

The mistake Stossel makes is not distinguishing the need for water (dehydration and thirst) from the ability to pay for water (wealth). He assumes that everybody has the twenty dollars in their pack pockets, and that those who won't pay the necessary twenty are the ones who are less thirsty, rather than being the ones who are poorer.

Stossel is correct that hoarding can be a problem during disasters. But he advocates more hoarding (by the sellers) as a solution. This is a cruel and unethical solution, making some very rich and causing lack of water elsewhere. What is usually done during disasters of this kind is some kind of rationing. The rationing guarantees that as many people get the water as possible and makes hoarding less likely.

But rationing means intervening with the holy markets, Stossel might grumble. Indeed. There are many reasons for interfering with markets and the economic consequences of disasters are good ones. Those who worship the markets (rather than see them as one tool among many in our economic toolkit) think that markets would function well even if the market distribution would leave all but the wealthiest dead of thirst. Which it would in the case of disasters like Katrina if water became extremely scarce. So remember this when you interpret Stossel's argument that "price gougers save lives".

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Today's Bumper Sticker 



I saw my first Rapture-sticker today! I'm so excited. It said:"There is no speed limit during rapture". The van with this sticker was parked in the driveway of a very nice suburban house. First dibs on the house!

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Friday Dog Blogging 




Henrietta


And lots of mess in the background.

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Define "Enemy Combatant" 



A federal appeals court has ruled that the U.S. government had the authority to order the detention of Jose Padilla, an American citizen, based on him qualifying as an enemy combatant, despite the fact that he has not been accused of any crime.

What this means depends crucially on how the courts define an enemy combatant. What is required for one to be viewed as such? Writing a blog critical of the current administration? I hope not.

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Quasi-Firing 



Michael Brown has been quasi-fired from his FEMA job:

Michael Brown, the embattled head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was removed today from a direct role in running the relief and recovery efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Michael Chertoff, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, announced.

Brown, whose agency has been criticized for imposing bureaucratic obstacles to relief efforts even before the winds and rain died down, was being sent back to Washington from Louisiana, where he had been the top on-scene commander of the federal operation.

Why wasn't he kicked out on his arse? Because Bush never makes mistakes in his hiring decisions? Because Brown got him lotsa votes in Florida? Because of what, exactly?

We are all expected to make sacrifices because of Katrina. We are supposed to give to charities, conserve gas, and the workers don't have to get paid prevailing wages in the hurricane-affected areas, not to even mention the much more horrific sacrifices some have made already. But Bush's cronies get a cushy office job as a punishment for being totally incompetent.

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And Yet More Incompetency 



The Time magazine has done some research on Michael Brown's resume. The FEMA director appears to have padded his achievements a tiny bit. For example:

Under the heading of "Professional Associations and Memberships" on FindLaw, Brown states that from 1983 to the present he has been director of the Oklahoma Christian Home, a nursing home in Edmond. But an administrator with the Home, told TIME that Brown is "not a person that anyone here is familiar with." She says there was a board of directors until a couple of years ago, but she couldn't find anyone who recalled him being on it. According to FEMA's Andrews, Brown said "he's never claimed to be the director of the home. He was on the board of directors, or governors of the nursing home." However, a veteran employee at the center since 1981 says Brown "was never director here, was never on the board of directors, was never executive director. He was never here in any capacity. I never heard his name mentioned here."

And this is the man George Bush appointed to take care of our country, while Joe Lieberman cheered him on.

Then there is this New York Times editorial, sputtering with anger:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced this week that it didn't want the news media taking photographs of the dead in New Orleans. A FEMA spokeswoman talked unconvincingly about the dignity of the dead. But the bizarre demand, a creepy echo of the ban on news media coverage of the coffins returning from Iraq, is simply the latest spasm of a gutted federal agency.

Too little, too late.
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Link to the Time article via Daily Kos.

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And Still More Unrescue 



This made me really angry, not that everything else hasn't already. But this is so petty, so greedy, so horribly unempathetic:

President Bush issued an executive order Thursday allowing federal contractors rebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to pay below the prevailing wage.

In a notice to Congress, Bush said the hurricane had caused "a national emergency" that permits him to take such action under the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act in ravaged areas of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi.

Bush's action came as the federal government moved to provide billions of dollars in aid, and drew rebukes from two of organized labor's biggest friends in Congress, Rep. George Miller of California and Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, both Democrats.

"The administration is using the devastation of Hurricane Katrina to cut the wages of people desperately trying to rebuild their lives and their communities," Miller said.

It's the contractors who will benefit if they can find people desperate enough to work for very little money. And what did Bush sign to curtail the contractors' profits from the hurricane? As far as I know, nothing at all.

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Thursday, September 08, 2005

The Ones Who Said No 



To the proposed federal aid package intended for the victims of Katrina:

Rep. Joe Barton - TX

Jeff Flake - AZ

Virginia Foxx - NC

Scott Garrett - NJ

John Hostettler - IN

Steve King - IA

Butch Otter - ID

Ron Paul - TX

James Sensenbrenner - WI

Tom Tancredo - CO

Lynn Westmoreland - GA


All are Republicans.

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The Day's Philosophical Question 



Would it be better if the cockroaches took over from humans?


I'm not sure. If I was a cockroach I'd know what their sense of humor is. I like humor, and I fear that I wouldn't get the cockroach jokes. They'd be all about silly humans suddenly bursting out of the woodwork, all saying that it wasn't their fault. Whatever the "it" might be. I also am too large to find lovers among the cockroaches unless they agree to collaborate.

On the other hand, it wouldn't be that difficult to overperform the humans. Not that difficult, at all. But then there are the beautiful works of human art and the acts of kindness and the sudden lightning strokes of understanding and feeling...the universe. Can cockroaches do that?

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Otterside 



This is the blog of a physician who is in Louisiana trying to help with the rescue.
A snippet:

Two NOPD dogs drank from flood water--dead within hours. Cops have chemical burns on exposed skin.


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From Daily Kos 





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An Eyewitness Account 



This one is interesting as it records the experiences of paramedics who were stranded in New Orleans while attending a conference. Because of their backgrounds, the writers have a very clear-sighted grasp of the rescue efforts they witnessed and the many blunders they observed.

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Just For (Sarcastic) Laughs 



Some time ago Rick (the Dick) Santorum said this about the people of New Orleans:

Some prominent Republicans made remarks that fed Democrats' accusations. Asked about the disaster last weekend on Pittsburgh's ABC affiliate WTAE-TV, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) suggested a law-and-order approach to evacuations. "There may be a need to look at tougher penalties on those who decide to ride it out and understand that there are consequences to not leaving," he said. He later said he was not referring to the one-fifth of people in the disaster area who reportedly did not own automobiles.

I'm so happy that Santorum defined carefully the groups that should be treated harshly if they don't leave. Like this one, perhaps:

"The green expanse of Audubon Park, in the city's Uptown area, has doubled in recent days as a heliport for the city's rich -- and a terminus for the small armies of private security guards who have been dispatched to keep the homes there safe and habitable. Mr. O'Dwyer has cellphone service and ice cubes to cool off his highballs in the evening. By yesterday, the city water service even sprang to life, making the daily trips to his neighbor's pool unnecessary. A pair of oil-company engineers, dispatched by his son-in-law, delivered four cases of water, a box of delicacies including herring with mustard sauce and 15 gallons of generator gasoline."

Mr. O'Dwyer has stubbornly refused to leave, you see.

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Getting to the Bottom of It 



Aren't you glad to hear that there will be an inquiry into the unrescue effort after Katrina? So good to find out exactly who caused several unnecessary deaths and much suffering. There is just one little snag:

House and Senate GOP leaders announced the "Hurricane Katrina Joint Review Committee," which will include only members of Congress, with Republicans outnumbering Democrats by a yet-to-be-determined ratio. The commission, which will have subpoena powers, will investigate the actions of local, state and federal governments before and after the storm that devastated New Orleans and other portions of the Gulf Coast.

No independents. Given what the recent polls have shown us Republicans appear to believe (without evidence) that Bush did a great job after Katrina. So prepare for the same findings.

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More Poll Results 



Rasmussen Reports have one out. It says that 45% of the respondents thought the federal government had done a poor job responding to hurricane Katrina. Still,28% think that this job was done excellently or well. So the wingnuts are nearly 30% of all Americans...(assuming the sample is representative, of course).

But this is most interesting:

Even among Republicans, there are significant doubts about the federal response to Katrina. Just 47% of those in President Bush's party say the federal response has been good or excellent. Fifty-one percent say fair or poor.

My faith in humanity is a little restored. For a while there I thought that I had somehow landed in a parallel reality where the heads of people are mostly hollow and there just to have something to hang the eyes and the mouth on.

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Unrescue Effort Continues, Relentlessly 



Louise Slaughter's office sent me this in an e-mail:

Washington, DC - Tonight, after five weeks vacation, in the wake of what is quickly becoming the worst natural disaster in American history, the Republican Leadership in the House of Representatives made the decision to limit floor consideration of the Federal response to Hurricane Katrina to just forty minutes.



Rep. Louise M. Slaughter (D-NY), Ranking Member of the House Rules Committee, led Democratic opposition to a Rules Committee vote this evening that makes the $52 Billion Supplemental Appropriation bill, a Suspension Rule that will prevent any amendments from being offered and allow for a grand total of 40 minutes of consideration. The bill, which enjoys broad bipartisan support, is expected to pass on the House floor tomorrow.



Republicans on a party line voted to deny Rep. Slaughter's amendment that would have allowed for a modest 2 hours of discussion and opened up the measure to be amended.



Democrats on the Rules Committee and in attendance at the hearing passionately implored the Republicans to allow amendments, which would enable consideration of critical and urgent measures, such as which areas and to which agencies relief dollars were most needed and how to restructure FEMA so that it would be more effective. Members also noted that no one had yet to even see a copy of the legislation.

Note the bit about "no-one having seen a copy of the legislation". So we don't actually know what it contains! Isn't modern politics marvelous in this one-party country.

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Wednesday, September 07, 2005

More Incompetency Or Unrescue Efforts 



In late August the White House had this to say about the hurricane Katrina:

The President today declared an emergency exists in the State of Louisiana and ordered Federal aid to supplement state and local response efforts in the parishes located in the path of Hurricane Katrina beginning on August 26, 2005, and continuing.

The President's action authorizes the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population, and to provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures, authorized under Title V of the Stafford Act, to save lives, protect property and public health and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe in the parishes of Allen, Avoyelles, Beauregard, Bienville, Bossier, Caddo, Caldwell, Claiborne, Catahoula, Concordia, De Soto, East Baton Rouge, East Carroll, East Feliciana, Evangeline, Franklin, Grant, Jackson, LaSalle, Lincoln, Livingston, Madison, Morehouse, Natchitoches, Pointe Coupee, Ouachita, Rapides, Red River, Richland, Sabine, St. Helena, St. Landry, Tensas, Union, Vernon, Webster, West Carroll, West Feliciana, and Winn.

Good, huh? Except that the list of parishes doesn't include the ones that were really hit by Katrina, the coastal ones, you know. If you don't believe me look for Jefferson Parish in that list or check out this map of Louisiana:



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Props for the White House report to easy rider on Eschaton threads.
---
Added: It seems that this is not necessarily incompetency. There is a separate statement for the omitted parishes a few days later. But it is still odd that the safer parishes are covered in the first notice. Thanks for dave in Rubber Hose's comments for the link.



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A Gallup On Public Opinions About The Unrescue Operation 



It tells us that 42% of the respondents think Bush has done a "terrible" or a "bad" job, while 35% think that his response was "good" or "great". Some of the latter group would have voted Nero the Best Emperor Ever.

And 63% of the respondents think that nobody should be fired for this fiasco. These are much nicer people than yours truly. I'd love to see practically everybody fired, starting with Georgie Porgie. But then I'm a vicious goddess and I also follow the news. Most Americans are kindly people and are fairly oblivious about currrent events.

It could also be that the respondents don't want to assign blame when the country is still suffering greatly. Sadly, this is likely to lead to more suffering in the future. The time for some new brooms is right now.

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In California 



a bill that would allow same-sex marriage has passed in the California Assembly. But the battle is not over with this victory:

Opponents of gay marriage aim to place a measure on next year's ballot that would amend the state Constitution to include a ban.

The opposition of same-sex marriage has a bunch of arguments which fall, one after the other, like a house of cards, when they are responded to. This makes no difference at all. It just leads to a new round of presenting the same arguments which then again can be refuted. This makes me believe that the real reason so many oppose same-sex marriage is one of those hidden subconscious things. Nothing can be said that would affect the underlying premise of those scared of all change, even when the change has no direct impact on their own lives.

But the California decision must be included in the category of good news. It is the beginning (not counting Masssachusetts's legal decision to the same effect) of many similar decisions, albeit probably only after some decades have passed.

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The Real Katrina Timeline 



Courtesy of Think Progress. This is good to read, because the wingnut spin consists of an altered timeline; one in which the local and state authorities do nothing and valiant George finally steps in. The real timeline begins like this:

GOV. KATHLEEN BLANCO DECLARES STATE OF EMERGENCY IN LOUISIANA: [Office of the Governor]

GULF COAST STATES REQUEST TROOP ASSISTANCE FROM PENTAGON: At a 9/1 press conference, Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, commander, Joint Task Force Katrina, said that the Gulf States began the process of requesting additional forces on Friday, 8/26. [DOD]
Saturday, August 27

Read the whole timeline at the link. It's well worth your time.

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Understanding FEMA 



This Salon article is quite thought-provoking in explaining how FEMA was destroyed:

Indeed, the White House's new response to the political disaster prompted by Katrina -- one in which officials are attempting to blame authorities in Louisiana, rather than in Washington, for the slow aid -- underscores the Bush philosophy. According to Haddow, instead of working with local officials to try to minimize the impacts of an impending storm, the White House has decided its best strategy is to keep its distance from people on the ground. That way if anything goes wrong, the White House can "attack, attack, attack."

We began to see some of these attacks over the weekend. Sunday's Washington Post cited an anonymous Bush administration official who explained that one reason that the federal government didn't intervene more quickly in Louisiana was because Kathleen Blanco, the state's Democratic governor, failed to declare a state of emergency there, a necessary step for federal help to flow. An article in Newsweek repeats the same claim.

But there's a problem with the White House's excuse: It's patently false. As Josh Marshall points out, Blanco declared a state of emergency on Aug. 26 -- a day before Bush declared a federal emergency in Louisiana. (You can see Blanco's official declaration in PDF format here; the Washington Post has corrected its article.) On Aug. 28 -- the day before Katrina made landfall -- Blanco followed her declaration with an official letter (PDF) to Bush that requested all manner of emergency supplies her state would need for the aftermath.

Haddow says that these requests should have been enough -- more than enough -- to prompt a full-scale federal response. Under the Clinton administration's FEMA, with Witt as the head, a storm of Katrina's magnitude would have prompted federal and state officials to actually meet in order to coordinate their response. "You were all working together to anticipate needs," Haddow says. "You're all sitting in the same room when the things happened -- the Midwest flood, the Northridge quake, the Oklahoma City bombing and all the disasters we responded to. We were in the same room together and nobody had to point fingers."


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Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Some More Unrescue News 



You might be glad to learn that contractors interested in post-disaster jobs don't have to worry about open bidding:

The vast majority of emergency contracts are being awarded outside of the centralized posting system that is normally required. Indeed, on its home page, FedBizOpps states, "Due to the immediacy of emergency opportunities, it is unlikely that opportunities dealing with the hurricanes will be advertised through the FedBizOpps system."

Understandable, perhaps. But which firms will be informed about these opportunities? And what prices will be set? Who monitors this? Anyone?

Then there is the internal FEMA memo which according to Josh Marshall shows that:

Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, sought the approval from Homeland Security Secretary Mike Chertoff roughly five hours after Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29. Brown said that among duties of these employees was to "convey a positive image" about the government's response for victims. Before then, FEMA had positioned smaller rescue and communications teams across the Gulf Coast. But officials acknowledged Tuesday the first department-wide appeal for help came only as the storm raged."

Michael Brown isn't the only FEMA director without any relevant work experience. It turns out that his number three is equally inexperienced:

Before joining FEMA in 2001, Brown, a protege of longtime Bush aide Joseph Allbaugh, was commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association and had virtually no experience in disaster management.

An official biography of Brown's top aide, acting deputy director Patrick Rhode, doesn't list any disaster relief experience.

The department's No. 3 official, acting deputy chief of staff Brooks Altshuler, also does not have emergency management experience, according to FEMA spokeswoman Natalie Rule.

Scott Morris, who had been the agency's third in command until May, also lacked a background in disaster preparedness, according to his official FEMA biography.


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Business Boom After Katrina 



Yes, my title is sick, but I feel sick. The one business that will be doing well is the mortuary business:

A co-owner of Shelbyville-based Gowen-Smith Chapel has been deployed to Gulfport, Miss., to help with recovery since Hurricane Katrina, and his business partner here has described the grim task there.

"DMort is telling us to expect up to 40,000 bodies," Dan Buckner said, quoting officials with the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, a volunteer arm of Homeland Security.

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From Aladdinslamp on Eschaton threads.

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Some Good News 



From Talk Left:

In the chaos that was Causeway Boulevard, this group of refugees stood out: a 6-year-old boy walking down the road, holding a 5-month-old, surrounded by five toddlers who followed him around as if he were their leader.

They were holding hands. Three of the children were about 2 years old, and one was wearing only diapers. A 3-year-old girl, who wore colorful barrettes on the ends of her braids, had her 14-month-old brother in tow. The 6-year-old spoke for all of them, and he told rescuers his name was Deamonte Love.

Maybe he could be the next head of FEMA?
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Props to w00t on the Eschaton threads.

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The Deep Question of the Day 



Why does Michael Brown, the ex-commissioner of the International Arabian Horses Association, still have the job of running FEMA?
------
Added:

The White House is rejecting calls to fire the nation's top disaster chief in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
Critics are questioning whether Michael Brown is qualified to head up the Federal Emergency Management Agency -- which is being blamed for a slow federal response to the storm.
...
White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan says "enormous progress" has been made since the storm hit eight days ago.



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The Blame Game Begins 



Kos has the e-mail that has been circulating this morning, with the wingnut plan set out clearly. The blame is going to be put on bureaucracy (which somehow miraculously has nothing to do with Bush), the local and state authorities in Louisiana (because they are Democrats), on political correctness (???) and the socialist (!!!) government of New Orleans. The heroes are going to be FEMA and our fearless leader. Sorry, I have no brown vomit bags.

Kos also points out that all right-wing talk shows had the script this morning. Shows some mighty hierarchical authority. Too bad it wasn't rolled out to fight Katrina.

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Disrespectful to the President? 



I just received this in an e-mail. It argues that the Fox network turned down a political ad as disrespectful to the president:

Today, Brian Ellner, a former School Board President and candidate for Manhattan Borough President, responded to Fox network's decision to ban his campaign commercial.

Although Fox refuses to submit a formal defense of its censorship, network representatives have informed the Ellner campaign that the ad was rejected because Fox views it as disrespectful to the president. All other networks have accepted the ad.

"Fox claims that this ad is disrespectful to the President. What is truly disrespectful to Manhattan voters is to deny them the chance to hear a serious message from a candidate for public office," Ellner said. "This is censorship and it's un-American."

The commercial can be viewed at www.BrianEllner.com. Manhattan voters will still have the opportunity to see it on other networks as well as many cable channels. Ellner's media buy of nearly $300,000 is by far the largest in the race for Borough President.

The ad received national praise when it was released last week as the first political television spot in America in which a gay candidate appears with his or her partner. In the 48 hours following its release, the Ellner campaign received a flood of contributions from across the nation.

Ellner, a former President of the District 2 School Board in Manhattan, has dedicated his career as an attorney to standing up for equal rights and civil rights. As Borough President, he will be Manhattan's most forceful advocate for progressive values like affordable housing, neighborhood preservation and real education reform. He will also fight for marriage equality, stem cell research and to protect a woman's fundamental right to choose.

The Heretik has a picture which certainly would qualify as disrespectful:





To Marie Antoinette at least.

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The Bright Side of Life After A Hurricane 



From New York Times:

HOUSTON, Sept. 5 - Perhaps no city in the United States is in a better spot than Houston to turn Katrina's tragedy into opportunity. And businesses here are already scrambling to profit in the hurricane's aftermath.

Oil services companies based here are racing to carry out repairs to damaged offshore platforms in the Gulf of Mexico; the promise of plenty of work to do sent shares in two large companies, Halliburton and Baker Hughes, soaring to 52-week highs last week. The Port of Houston is preparing for an increase in traffic as shippers divert cargoes away from the damaged ports of Pascagoula, Miss., and New Orleans.

Owners of office space here are witnessing a surge in leasing as New Orleans companies, including that city's oldest bank, scramble to set up new headquarters in Houston, helping to shore up its sagging property market. With brio that might make an ambulance-chaser proud, one company, National Realty Investments, is offering special financing deals "for hurricane survivors only," with no down payments and discounted closing costs.

All this, of course, is capitalism at work, moving quickly to get resources to where they are needed most. And those who move fastest are likely to do best.

Meanwhile, even small businesses and cheap hotels are benefiting from the population surge, which could total up to 250,000 people. Some hardware stores have sold out their entire supply of gasoline cans and generators to people preparing for an eventual return to the devastated region.

"It feels like the only things left in south Louisiana are snakes and alligators," said John E. Olson, co-manager of Houston Energy Partners, a hedge fund that operates out of a skyscraper downtown. "Houston is positioned for a boom."

Long known for its commercial fervor, Houston is the largest city in the South and has a metropolitan population of more than four million. It has one of the nation's busiest ports and remains unrivaled as a center for the American energy industry.

Halliburton, for instance, moved its headquarters to Houston from Dallas in 2003, joining dozens of companies based here that provide services for oil and natural gas producers.

Halliburton differs from many oil services companies in that it also does significant business with the federal government. The company, which has contracts in Iraq, has a contract with the Navy that has already kept it busy after Hurricane Katrina. The company's KBR unit was doing repairs and cleanup at three naval facilities in Mississippi last week.

Halliburton was also planning to go to New Orleans to start repairs at other naval facilities as soon as it was considered safe to do so, Cathy Mann, a spokeswoman, said.

(Bolds mine.)

Those Halliburton boys must have been born covered in Teflon. Nothing sticks to them. Doesn't matter how they have performed in Iraq, for example. The sun always shines on them. So does the federal government.

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Monday, September 05, 2005

Olbermann 



His latest blog entry is well worth reading, though you may not want to do so if your anger quotient has been exceeded.

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The Culture of Affluence 



Via Eschaton, I learned about this little interview with Barbara Bush, the mother of our fearless leader:

In a segment at the top of the show on the surge of evacuees to the Texas city, Barbara Bush said: "Almost everyone I've talked to says we're going to move to Houston."

Then she added: "What I'm hearing is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.

"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this (she chuckles slightly)--this is working very well for them."

The silver-foot-in-the-mouth disease appears to be herited.

I don't usually blog about the family members of politicians, because they are private individuals, not politicians, and it seems wrong to me to expose them to the harsh limelight of my viper tongue (what an idiom!). But I'm going to make an exception this time. Barbara Bush is such a good example of the consequences of "the culture of affluence", that dire disease that makes its members phlegmatic, smug and self-satisfied, despite the fact that they know nothing about how the rest of humanity lives.

Perhaps for her everything about life is money. Else how to interpret her assumption that individuals who have been forcibly separated from their family, their friends and the place they called home should be happy because now they are somewhere like a football arena? After all, their houses could never have been that big! And food is just being carried to their cots!

It is funny, for someone who suffers from the "culture of affluence" syndrome. Too bad that we can't help Barbara. We don't have the resources for that.

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Roberts Nominated for Chief Justice 



That was quick, quicker than Bush's response to the hurricane. Let us be thankful for small mercies.

Why so quick? Could it be because:

Getting a new chief justice of Bush's choosing in place quickly also avoids the scenario of having liberal Justice John Paul Stevens making the decisions about whom to assign cases to and making other decisions that could influence court deliberations. As the court's senior justice, Stevens would take over Rehnquist's administrative duties until a new chief is confirmed.

Maybe.

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And Even More on the Unrescue Effort 



From Washington Monthly:

NORTHCOM AND KATRINA....Last time I checked, naval officers aren't in the habit of criticizing their commander in chief no matter how many punches they have to absorb in the process. It appears, however, that Lt. Commander Sean Kelly, a Pentagon spokesman for Northern Command, didn't get the memo. Asked why Northcom hadn't reponded to Hurricane Katrina more quickly, he accidentally told the truth:

Northcom started planning before the storm even hit....We had the USS Bataan sailing almost behind the hurricane so once the hurricane made landfall, its search and rescue helicopters could be available almost immediately So, we had things ready.

The only caveat is: we have to wait until the president authorizes us to do so. The laws of the United States say that the military can't just act in this fashion; we have to wait for the president to give us permission.

For your information.

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On Race And Disasters 



New Orleans is a predominantly black city and most of the poor who stayed behind are black. So are most of the armed looters we see on television. This has opened a crack for the old (but always present though suppressed) discussion on race. The wingnuts are getting more and more courageous in offering the explanation that it's the race of the sufferers that is the problem, not their poverty or the ineptitude of the rescue effort:

Many conservative thinkers espouse a race-neutral analysis. Racism doesn't cause poverty, they say, poverty is the result of a pattern of dependency that has set in among poor blacks.

In New Orleans, "you are dealing with the permanently poor -- people who don't have jobs, are not used to getting up and organizing themselves and getting things done and for whom sitting and waiting is a way of life," says Linda Chavez, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity and a former head of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

"This is a natural disaster that is exacerbated by the problems of the underclass. The chief cause of poverty today among blacks is no longer racism. It is the breakdown of the traditional family."

John McWhorter, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, cautions against the use of the "nasty, circular, unprovable" argument of race because "this is a matter of the incompetence of the American infrastructure. It's not a matter of somebody in Washington deciding we don't need to rush [to New Orleans] because they're all poor jungle bunnies anyway."

Indeed, there are poor people who just sit and wait. There are even rich people who just sit and wait, for their trust funds to mature, say. And there is a lot of crime among the poor, although there is crime among the rich, too, though then it is named "white collar crime" and punished less often and less heavily. Lack of education goes with lack of money, and lack of education makes it a lot harder to make informed decisions about anything.

A long time ago I read our favorite crackpot, Charles Murray, pontificate on the topic of poverty. He argued that anyone who is poor could at least keep his or her family clean and reading Shakespeare. This is one of the Victorian arguments about poverty, the idea that the poor could otherwise be like us, the wealthy, if they only tried. That they don't try shows that they are not like us and probably deserve to be poor.

Murray's argument is a naive one as anyone who has ever been without food for a while knows. Lack of food tends to do things to the body and the mind which cause fatigue, and fatigue causes frayed nerves and bad decisions. And more fatigue. Anyone who has worked two jobs at the same time knows that keeping the house clean isn't going to happen, that reading Shakespeare is not very likely. Energy is limited in its total amount, and the more of it we need for mere survival the less of it remains for all the little niceties of life that Murray so values.

So New Orleans isn't about how blacks are somehow intrinsically different from whites or how the poor somehow are causing their own poverty and violence. But New Orleans definitely is about race, about our inability to provide adequate education and opportunities for all children, about our segregated neighborhoods, about lack of will which feeds back to racial perceptions.

I happen to believe that there is something like "a culture of poverty", just as there is something like a "culture of unearned wealth". Neither is wholly pretty, but both have their purposes: to help a person survive in the environment in which he or she is stranded. But these cultures are not some independent thing sprouting from the genetic memories of their participants; they are a consequence of the societal arrangements and they can be influenced. In France, it is the Muslims who have "a culture of poverty" because it is the Muslims who are the underclass, the recent immigrants, the ones who stand out in their difference. In other countries these cultures are sometimes attached to people of the same race and religion as the rest of the society, but they are set apart by the poverty of the group itself. In short, "a culture of poverty" is not an explanation for what we see. For that we need to dig deeper.

But it isn't necessary to dig very deep to find the "culture of racism" (my term) that permeates so much of the discussion of the conservative right. It is nowadays expressed in careful terms, with nary a whiff of actual racist terms, but it is still offered as an excuse, an explanation that will allow the majority to continue ignoring the plight of the minorities. Because anything that is intractable or caused by something in the minorities cannot be affected by the rest of us. Which allows us to keep our money and our gated communities and so on. And our neat and clean consciences.

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Time Running Out 



So reports CNN:

Time is running out for thousands of people awaiting rescue six days after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, rescuers say.

Officials say they do not have the manpower, the resources or enough time to save everyone.

"My guys are coming back and telling me, 'Sir, I went into a house, and there are three elderly people in their beds, and they're gasping, and they're dying,' " Coast Guard Capt. Bruce Jones said.

"And we got calls today, 'We need you ... to go to a place in St. Bernard Parish. It's a hospice, ... and there are 10 dead and there are 10 dying.' But those people were probably alive yesterday or the day before."

Though pilots, rescue crew members and maintenance workers are red-eyed and exhausted, they're refusing to rest, CNN's Karl Penhaul reported.

For every person plucked from the flood, there are hundreds still waiting, rescuers say. (Watch a report on rescue efforts -- 3:10)

"There's simply not enough resources," Jones said.

"It's an awful feeling to know you've not got everybody in time," rescue swimmer Chris Monville said. "You're trying to get everybody out. But in these temperatures the weak and the sick expire first, and it tears at your heart."

Monville said he has rescued 126 people in a single day.

This is terrible if true. What about employing volunteers who have the necessary skills? What about asking foreign nations for their teams trained in similar rescues? Are we really this short of personnel that we are going to let people die? Where are all the skilled rescue teams?

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The Real Rescue Effort 



This will cover how to rescue George Bush's skin. The plan seems to be as follows:

1. Rewind the machines so as to make Bush look like he cares. Send him back to Louisiana on Monday, even if that stops all real rescue efforts for the duration.

2. Blame Louisiana governor Blanco for the ineptitude. She's a Democrat and a woman, so this is an excellent strategy. Find out later if she had any blame to share, actually.

3. Don't talk about the past. Talk about what is happening right now: "Look! All those military people are going into New Orleans! Isn't that wonderful!"

Or in slightly different words:

Mr. Bush is to return to Louisiana and Mississippi on Monday; his first visit, on Friday, left some Republicans cringing, in part because the president had little contact with residents left homeless.

Republicans said the administration's effort to stanch the damage had been helped by the fact that convoys of troops and supplies had begun to arrive by the time the administration officials turned up. All of those developments were covered closely on television.

In many ways, the unfolding public relations campaign reflects the style Mr. Rove has brought to the political campaigns he has run for Mr. Bush. For example, administration officials who went on television on Sunday were instructed to avoid getting drawn into exchanges about the problems of the past week, and to turn the discussion to what the government is doing now.

"We will have time to go back and do an after-action report, but the time right now is to look at what the enormous tasks ahead are," Michael Chertoff, the secretary of Homeland Security, said on "Meet the Press" on NBC.

One Republican with knowledge of the effort said that Mr. Rove had told administration officials not to respond to Democratic attacks on Mr. Bush's handling of the hurricane in the belief that the president was in a weak moment and that the administration should not appear to be seen now as being blatantly political. As with others in the party, this Republican would discuss the deliberations only on condition of anonymity because of keen White House sensitivity about how the administration and its strategy would be perceived.

In a reflection of what has long been a hallmark of Mr. Rove's tough political style, the administration is also working to shift the blame away from the White House and toward officials of New Orleans and Louisiana who, as it happens, are Democrats.


This rescue will be run very competently. You will see. But it shouldn't work, because the hurricane of incompetence is still totally uncontained in Washington, D.C..

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Sunday, September 04, 2005

Passing the Buck 



It has started. The White House is blaming the state and local authorities for the mess. The Washington Post reports this:

Behind the scenes, a power struggle emerged, as federal officials tried to wrest authority from Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state's emergency operations center said Saturday.

The administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request. "Quite frankly, if they'd been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals," said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly.

A senior administration official said that Bush has clear legal authority to federalize National Guard units to quell civil disturbances under the Insurrection Act and will continue to try to unify the chains of command that are split among the president, the Louisiana governor and the New Orleans mayor.

Louisiana did not reach out to a multi-state mutual aid compact for assistance until Wednesday, three state and federal officials said. As of Saturday, Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency, the senior Bush official said.

"The federal government stands ready to work with state and local officials to secure New Orleans and the state of Louisiana," White House spokesman Dan Bartlett said. "The president will not let any form of bureaucracy get in the way of protecting the citizens of Louisiana."

Then, at the top of this article the Post has added a little correction which states this:

Correction to This Article
A Sept. 4 article on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina incorrectly said that Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) had not declared a state of emergency. She declared an emergency on Aug. 26.

She also accepted help from other states last Monday:

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson offered Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco help from his state's National Guard on Sunday, the day before Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana. Blanco accepted, but paperwork needed to get the troops en route didn't come from Washington until late Thursday.

And she asked for federal help before the hurricane hit.

I don't know how Blanco's performance should be evaluated, but this whole thing is clearly an attempt to make her the scapegoat of all that has gone wrong, including the mistakes of the FEMA. This is just wrong, even if it is sweet to the ears of the wingnuts who dislike women in power and root for them to fail. In this particular case there are plenty of good ole boys failing.
----
Thanks to bg in the comments for the WaPo link.

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Frivolosities 



We need those, too. I just went out and had a sundae which I created myself. Here's the recipe: one scoop of chocolate ice-cream, one slurp of chocolate sauce, as many M&Ms as fit into the bowl. Eat with a spoon or your tongue.

It was good.

My Labrador retriever no longer dances on three legs. All the four are functional now and tomorrow she will be allowed off-leash for the first time in ten days. She has most likely gained a pound or two as I didn't have the heart to cut back her food as much as her exercize has been cut, but as she's hell on wheels, usually, she will probably lose them tomorrow in the chase for her George Bush chewtoy or the many tennis balls she finds in the park. About once a month I re-seed the park with twenty or so tennis balls, and then Hank goes back to collecting them. Doesn't cost anything, either, as they were never my tennis balls to begin with.

And one day, soon, I will even clean the house. Right now I only clean those bits that keep staring at me with blameful eyes, but once some peace returns to the blogosphere I will be out there with a blowtorch and a pressure washer and the Snakepit Inc. will shine again. Who am I kidding here? But it sounds good.

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Deaths On A Bridge In New Orleans 



From the Associated Press, apparently the New Orleans police shot at eight people carrying guns on the Danziger bridge, killing five or six of them.

There is a rumor that these people were contractors, but I have so far been unable to verify or falsify the rumor.

Update: It seems that the people shot at were not contractors, but those who had shot at the contractors:

As authorities struggled to keep order, police shot and killed at least five people Sunday after gunmen opened fire on a group of contractors traveling across a bridge on their way to make repairs, Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley said.

Fourteen contractors were traveling across the Danziger Bridge under police escort when they came under fire, said John Hall, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers. None of the contractors was killed, Hall said.

The bridge spans a canal connecting Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River.
No other details, including whether any of the gunmen were killed, were immediately available.



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Body Count 



Will we get one? And when will we get it? Will it be done objectively?

This administration has made me into the goddess of the paranoid, and I am now fearing that we will never know how many died because of Katrina and the ineptitude that followed and preceded her monsterous passing through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

But we have to demand an objective count. It is important to know what the price has been.

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News About The Unrescue Effort 



Today's Meet the Press was full of them. Here is the president of Jefferson parish:

MR. BROUSSARD: Sir, they were told like me, every single day, "The cavalry's coming," on a federal level, "The cavalry's coming, the cavalry's coming, the cavalry's coming." I have just begun to hear the hoofs of the cavalry. The cavalry's still not here yet, but I've begun to hear the hoofs, and we're almost a week out.

Let me give you just three quick examples. We had Wal-Mart deliver three trucks of water, trailer trucks of water. FEMA turned them back. They said we didn't need them. This was a week ago. FEMA--we had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a Coast Guard vessel docked in my parish. The Coast Guard said, "Come get the fuel right away." When we got there with our trucks, they got a word. "FEMA says don't give you the fuel." Yesterday--yesterday--FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in, he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards on our line and says, "No one is getting near these lines." Sheriff Harry Lee said that if America--American government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn't be in this crisis.

But I want to thank Governor Blanco for all she's done and all her leadership. She sent in the National Guard. I just repaired a breach on my side of the 17th Street canal that the secretary didn't foresee, a 300-foot breach. I just completed it yesterday with convoys of National Guard and local parish workers and levee board people. It took us two and a half days working 24/7. I just closed it.

MR. RUSSERT: All right.

MR. BROUSSARD: I'm telling you most importantly I want to thank my public employees...

MR. RUSSERT: All right.

MR. BROUSSARD: ...that have worked 24/7. They're burned out, the doctors, the nurses. And I want to give you one last story and I'll shut up and let you tell me whatever you want to tell me. The guy who runs this building I'm in, emergency management, he's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, "Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?" And he said, "Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to get you. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday." And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night.

MR. RUSSERT: Mr. President...

MR. BROUSSARD: Nobody's coming to get us. Nobody's coming to get us. The secretary has promised. Everybody's promised. They've had press conferences. I'm sick of the press conferences. For God sakes, shut up and send us somebody.

Britain is offering us help for the victims of Katrina. And we? What are we doing? Here's the answer:

British families trapped in New Orleans last night claimed that US authorities had refused to evacuate them as Hurricane Katrina approached the city.

Although assistance was offered to US residents, British nationals were told they would have to fend for themselves. According to those who remain stranded in the stricken city, police had visited hotels and guest houses on the eve of the hurricane offering to evacuate Americans, but not Britons.

And then there is the story of the eighteen-year old who took a bus in New Orleans and filled it with evacuees. He then drove the bus to Texas and thus saved about a hundred people. What is he getting for his efforts? Supposedly he is in prison, waiting a court visit:

Eighteen-year-old Jabbor Gibson jumped aboard the bus as it sat abandoned on a street in New Orleans and took control.

"I just took the bus and drove all the way here...seven hours straight,' Gibson admitted. "I hadn't ever drove a bus."

The teen packed it full of complete strangers and drove to Houston. He beat thousands of evacuees slated to arrive there.

"It's better than being in New Orleans," said fellow passenger Albert McClaud, "we want to be somewhere where we're safe."

During a long and impatient delay, children popped their heads out of bus windows and mothers clutched their babies.

One 8-day-old infant spent the first days of his life surrounded by chaos. He's one of the many who are homeless and hungry.

Authorities eventually allowed the renegade passengers inside the dome.

But the 18-year-old who ensured their safety could find himself in a world of trouble for stealing the school bus.

"I dont care if I get blamed for it ," Gibson said, "as long as I saved my people."

Well, it seems like you will be blamed for it, Jabbor.

Everything points out to an effort to keep order and to keep property safe. Human lives (and animal lives) are worthless, troubling, something that shouldn't be mentioned at all. A bus is more important than one hundred, mostly black and poor lives. But a bus doesn't have a soul, can't suffer, doesn't feel pain. It's worth some money, though, and these people appear to be worth nothing.

What has been missing from the powers-that-be in FEMA and the federal government in general is empathy. I see not one speck of it anywhere.

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Chief Justice Rehnquist Died 



According to Los Angeles Times:

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist died Saturday evening at his home in suburban Virginia, said Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg.

A statement from the spokeswoman said he was surrounded by his three children when he died in Arlington.

"The Chief Justice battled thyroid cancer since being diagnosed last October and continued to perform his dues on the court until a precipitous decline in his health the last couple of days," she said.

Rehnquist was appointed to the Supreme Court as an associate justice in 1971 by President Nixon and took his seat on Jan. 7, 1982. He was elevated to chief justice by President Reagan in 1986.

His death ends a remarkable 33-year Supreme Court career during which Rehnquist oversaw the court's conservative shift, presided over an impeachment trial and helped decide a presidential election.

The death President Bush his second court opening within pour months and sets up what's expected to be an even more bruising Senate confirmation battle than that of John Roberts.

I don't know what to say. This will be a most interesting fall season, I guess. Possibly also the beginning of the imperial era of the United States. Nothing good will come out of this, that is certain. The Vichy Democrats are not going to be of any help, either.

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Saturday, September 03, 2005

Asleep 



(This post is safe to skip unless you enjoy rants, for rant I shall.)

Sri Lanka is offering aid to the survivors of hurricane Katrina. At least twenty other countries are offering aid to these survivors, including Cuba and Venezuela. Other American states have been offering aid, pleading, begging, praying to be allowed to offer aid. Nearly three hundred million dollars have been sent to the American Red Cross by ordinary people of all types.

Nobody knows how many have drowned in the filthy waters of Katrina's wake, how many have died of thirst, of hunger, of the absence of someone who knows how to help. Nobody knows how many have died of gunshot wounds, how many have been raped, how many have just been too tired to stand on tiptoe in their hot attics, in water up to their necks, hoping for aid.

Nobody knows who gave the orders that keeps aid agencies outside New Orleans, though we know that the reason for these orders is in Order itself: the god of rigidity, ranking and property. Let's not spread food and water around freely; people might not leave and others might come back. Chaos. That keeping order will result in neatly ordered tiers of corpses seems like a small price to pay.

Let's not let anyone out of the city on their own, either. That way lies chaos. Decide on a few collecting points and have people gather there for the purpose of being picked up by buses. But where are the collecting points, does anyone know? Do those know who are standing in the heat without water or food? Does the woman with untreated diabetes know? Or the old man in his attic? Or the family with all those crying children? At least there are collecting points, neatly marked in the planning files. So there is Order.

I'm a stupid goddess. The god of Order knows that help must be under control, under one capable director. Otherwise chaos results. It is good to ban aid from entering the ravaged city, good to ban pedestrians from leaving, good to ban other states or countries from helping, because we need one leader, one pyramid of operations, one voice telling us what to do.

And do we hear this voice? What is it telling the suffering people of New Orleans and Louisiana? Is it whispering? Why can't I hear anything? Something?

Wait a minute! I do hear something! Excuses and accusations, lots of spin. Masterful spin! Yes, someone is in charge who knows how to spin. What a relief. If only those pictures from the city would leave my retinas, if those voices of survivors, reporters and doctors in the stinking wrecks of hospitals would be silenced, if I could somehow stop finding more and more evidence of callous, uncaring, unthinking, unplanning greed and cowardice, then I could sleep.

Sleep in my clean bed, in my safe room, far away from those who can't sleep or don't have beds. Sleep like an innocent, like a corpse, like the members of this administration. Sleep like the city of New Orleans will, for months, if not for years. Sleep.


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The Unrescue Effort 



A harsh title, but it is deserved for those who have kept the aid agencies out of New Orleans, and for those who caused this delay:

Several states ready and willing to send National Guard troops to the rescue in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans didn't get the go-ahead until days after the storm struck - a delay nearly certain to be investigated by Congress.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson offered Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco help from his state's National Guard on Sunday, the day before Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana. Blanco accepted, but paperwork needed to get the troops en route didn't come from Washington until late Thursday

And for those who didn't activate the CRAF provision earlier:

In addition to Guard help, the federal government could have activated, but did not, a major air support plan under a pre-existing contract with airlines. The program, called Civilian Reserve Air Fleet, lets the government quickly put private cargo and passenger planes into service.

The CRAF provision has been activated twice, once for the Persian Gulf War and again for the Iraq war.

The actual rescue is getting better, finally, and I am very happy to read about that. Now, how many days did it take? Let me think, the storm struck on Monday...

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Why Is Red Cross Not in New Orleans? 



This is their answer. Read and weep:


Hurricane Katrina: Why is the Red Cross not in New Orleans?

* Acess to New Orleans is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities and while we are in constant contact with them, we simply cannot enter New Orleans against their orders.

* The state Homeland Security Department had requested--and continues to request--that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.

* The Red Cross has been meeting the needs of thousands of New Orleans residents in some 90 shelters throughout the state of Louisiana and elsewhere since before landfall. All told, the Red Cross is today operating 149 shelters for almost 93,000 residents.

* The Red Cross shares the nation's anguish over the worsening situation inside the city. We will continue to work under the direction of the military, state and local authorities and to focus all our efforts on our lifesaving mission of feeding and sheltering.

* The Red Cross does not conduct search and rescue operations. We are an organization of civilian volunteers and cannot get relief aid into any location until the local authorities say it is safe and provide us with security and access.

* The original plan was to evacuate all the residents of New Orleans to safe places outside the city. With the hurricane bearing down, the city government decided to open a shelter of last resort in the Superdome downtown. We applaud this decision and believe it saved a significant number of lives.

* As the remaining people are evacuated from New Orleans, the most appropriate role for the Red Cross is to provide a safe place for people to stay and to see that their emergency needs are met. We are fully staffed and equipped to handle these individuals once they are evacuated.

Nice and logical. Too bad that the dead and the dying are inside New Orleans, and that most of us have been giving our money to an organization that has been frozen out.

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Friday, September 02, 2005

Read This 



CNN has an article which compares what officials say about the aftermath of Katrina to what journalists and other eyewitnesses actually on the site say. The disconnect is enormous. Granted, eyewitnesses can fail to see the totality of a disaster, but in this case the sum of all the eyewitness accounts does not make the totality of "things-under-control" that we fear from officials.

Physicians in hospitals are desperate for help, for example. Any disaster-control plan worth its salt would start with hospitals and other places where the truly helpless will be found.

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From Representative Louise Slaughter 

This is what her office sent me:

Washington, DC - Rep. Louise M. Slaughter (D-NY), Ranking Member of the House Committee on Rules, issues the following statement in response to the lack of accountability and poor response in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.



"Our thoughts and prayers go out to all those affected by the devastating destruction of Hurricane Katrina. I hope everyone will take a moment to lend their support to the recovery effort by making a donation to the American Red Cross.



Our brothers and sisters in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama need our help right now and it is incumbent upon each of us, as Americans, to reach out to them.



But make no mistake, the shock and grief we feel right now is giving way to anger. The Federal Government's woefully inadequate response to this disaster has been stunning.



We found out this week that we have no real, effective emergency preparedness in America. And it borders on criminal that our government could allow people to go without food and water for five days after a disaster of this magnitude, right here on American soil.



The lack of an adequate, swift response to this emergency should not be covered up with political grand standing and slaps on the back. This failure must not be swept under the rug.



Today, Congress will pass a $10.5 billion dollar emergency supplemental appropriation for Hurricane Katrina relief, which I will support. But this is simply not enough.



Over the last four years, the Bush Administration repeatedly cut funding which would have upgraded and improved the levees that protected New Orleans.



The American people must demand accountability for the lack of prevention and slow response to this disaster and Congress must work to ensure that these events are not ever repeated."
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Friday Dog Blogging 




Hank and her karate dog


This may be frivolous, but I need it today.

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Airlifts 



Why are they not happening in adequate numbers in New Orleans? I understand that snipers are shooting at the planes but is that the only reason? Don't we have enough planes to remove the patients and the staff from hospitals in the area? If there is an inadequate number of military planes, what about requisitioning private airline planes? As far as I can see this was done in 2003 for Iraq purposes.

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Today's Irony 



September is the National Preparedness Month:

National Preparedness Month is a nationwide coordinated effort held each September to encourage Americans to take simple steps to prepare for emergencies in their homes, businesses and schools. National Preparedness Month 2005 is being co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the American Red Cross.
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You Always Learn Something! 



Attytood gives us this little lesson, via Eschaton:

We heard this on CNN (on satellite radio) last night while we were driving home and almost ran off the road. It was an exchange between anchor Aaron Brown and Jamie McIntyre, CNN's senior Pentagon correspondent, about the military seeking to explain it's slow response to Katrina:

MCINTYRE: And as to your question about political, I talked to a lot of people at the Pentagon today who were very frustrated about the fact that the perception was being created that the military didn't move fast enough. And they did it somewhat as political. They thought that part of the motivation was the critics of the administration to make the president look bad.

And they seemed to question the motives of some of our reporters who were out there and hearing these stories from the victims about why they had so much sympathy for the victims, and not as much sympathy for the challenges that the government met in meeting this challenge.

And I have to say thinking about that, it doesn't really seem all that unusual that you would tend to understand the plight of the victims a little more than the bureaucrats in Washington.

Jesus wept on hearing that one. I kicked the garage door in, again. When you show me the bureaucrat who has not had food or water for five days, who is living in a congested sports arena or on the street, among feces and corpses, who is watching infants and the elderly die and hearing gunshots in the distance, then I will have as much understanding for the bureaucrats as I have for the plight of the victims.

This has been the most fucking demonstration of incompetency I have ever observed in my life. What are the qualifications of the Bush appointed head of FEMA? Is it true that he used to be an estate lawyer?

Do you feel that the government can cope with a major terrorist attack after watching the events of the last five days unfold? Gah.
----
Added: This must be the best demonstration of what is wrong with the new media fashion of deciding that neutrality from the media requires giving each viewpoint equal weight, as in the idea that "Opinions on the Shape of the Earth Vary", as if there are no objective criteria to decide on anything. I thought that relativism was something extreme lefties are accused of? It doesn't take a long discussion to decide that job stresses of the bureaucrats are not equal causes for concern with people quite possibly dying from the effects of hurricane, lawlessness and government ineptitude.

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Katrina 5 



Things are still bad:




Lt. Gen. Steven Blum of the National Guard said 7,000 National Guardsmen arriving in Louisiana on Friday would be dedicated to restoring order in New Orleans. He said half of them had just returned from assignments overseas and are ``highly proficient in the use of lethal force.'' He pledged to ``put down'' the violence ``in a quick and efficient manner.''

``But they are coming here to save Louisiana citizens. The only thing we are attacking is the effects of this hurricane,'' he said. Blum said that a huge airlift of supplies was landing Friday and that it signaled ``the cavalry is and will continue to arrive.''

As he left the White House for his visit to the devastated area, Bush said 600 newly arrived military police officers would be sent to the convention center to secure the site so that food and medicine could get there.

City officials have accused the government - namely the Federal Emergency Management Agency - of being slow to recognize the magnitude of the tragedy and slow to send help.

``Get off your asses and let's do something,'' Mayor Ray Nagin told WWL-AM Thursday night in a rambling interview in which he cursed, yelled and ultimately burst into tears. At one point he said: ``Excuse my French - everybody in America - but I am pissed.''

Across the city, law and order broke down. Police officers turned in their badges. Rescuers, law officers and helicopter were shot at by storm victims. Fistfights and fires broke out Thursday at the hot and stinking Superdome as thousands of people waited in misery to board buses for the Houston Astrodome. Corpses lay out in the open in wheelchairs and in bedsheets. The looting continued.


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Nagin's Interview 



The mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, gave a real radio interview. If you haven't listened to it yet, you can do so here.

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Thursday, September 01, 2005

Katrina 4 


A man covers the body of a man who died Thursday outside the Convention Center in New Orleans



And this is what people saw:

"There are multiple people dying at the convention center," Lawrence said. "There was an old woman, dead in a wheelchair with a blanket draped over her, pushed up against a wall. Horrible, horrible conditions.

"We saw a man who went into a seizure, literally dying right in front of us."

In a statement Thursday, Nagin said that "the convention center is unsanitary and unsafe and we are running out of supplies for (15,000 to 20,000) people."

He said the city would allow people to march up the Crescent City Connection to the Westbank Expressway in an effort to find help.

People were "being forced to live like animals," Lawrence said, surrounded by piles of trash and feces.

He said thousands of people were just laying in the ground outside the building -- many old, or sick, or caring for infants and small children.


And this is what people saw:

Doctors said there is lots of water in Charity Hospital's hallways. There's poor electricity and poor resources.

They are trying to move their patients down to Tulane's hospital.

The doctors were frightened for their lives. There was no police presence except for the private armed guards. There was no U.S. military presence. They were very concerned about this.

This is shocking as a doctor. As a human being, it's unbelievable.

Right now, I'm sitting at this airstrip in Baton Rouge waiting for a helicopter that is coming to evacuate infants. But they are indefinitely delayed because they think it is too dangerous to go in there and land a helicopter and bring these infants to Houston.

I've been in Iraq and Sri Lanka. It is remarkable that this is happening at hospitals here where patients are trying to be evacuated.

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For where to donate, check Katrina 3.

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Weaseling 



This morning, about 7:05 am Eastern time, George Bush was interviewed by Diane Sawyers on ABC's Good Morning America. This is what he said:

"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

Mm. Here is a quote from an article originally published on June 8, 2004 in the Times-Picayune:

For the first time in 37 years, federal budget cuts have all but stopped major work on the New Orleans area's east bank hurricane levees, a complex network of concrete walls, metal gates and giant earthen berms that won't be finished for at least another decade.

"I guess people look around and think there's a complete system in place, that we're just out here trying to put icing on the cake," said Mervin Morehiser, who manages the "Lake Pontchartrain and vicinity" levee project for the Army Corps of Engineers. "And we aren't saying that the sky is falling, but people should know that this is a work in progress, and there's more important work yet to do before there is a complete system in place."

...

"I can't tell you exactly what that could mean this hurricane season if we get a major storm," Naomi said. "It would depend on the path and speed of the storm, the angle that it hits us.

"But I can tell you that we would be better off if the levees were raised, . . . and I think it's important and only fair that those people who live behind the levee know the status of these projects."

...

The Bush administration's proposed fiscal 2005 budget includes only $3.9 million for the east bank hurricane project. Congress likely will increase that amount, although last year it bumped up the administration's $3 million proposal only to $5.5 million.

"I needed $11 million this year, and I got $5.5 million," Naomi said. "I need $22.5 million next year to do everything that needs doing, and the first $4.5 million of that will go to pay four contractors who couldn't get paid this year."


And here is an excerpt from May of this year:

In the event of a slow-moving Category 4 or Category 5 hurricane (with winds up to or exceeding 155 miles per hour), it's possible that only those crow's nests would remain above the water level. Such a storm, plowing over the lake, could generate a 20-foot surge that would easily overwhelm the levees of New Orleans, which only protect against a hybrid Category 2 or Category 3 storm (with winds up to about 110 miles per hour and a storm surge up to 12 feet). Soon the geographical "bowl" of the Crescent City would fill up with the waters of the lake, leaving those unable to evacuate with little option but to cluster on rooftops -- terrain they would have to share with hungry rats, fire ants, nutria, snakes, and perhaps alligators. The water itself would become a festering stew of sewage, gasoline, refinery chemicals, and debris.

I guess it all depends on what one means by "nobody" and "breach" and so on.

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Read This 



The New York Times is finally finding its courage.

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