Fear and race

This was too important to miss:

...New Orleans has filled with tens of thousands of Army, police, and National Guard soldiers. They are doing courageous, necessary work. But that are also operating in a cultural context rife with paranoia. Many of the people they are policing are armed as well--also possessed of a hair-trigger paranoia that might presume every shotgun-like crack, every snapped powerline, every detonated firecracker, is a sniper's shot aimed at them.

And now there is that New Orleans diaspora, poor black men ("fake evacuees"?) wandering around unfamiliar towns.

It is the job of all of us to help ratchet down the paranoia: not to let the rumors spread. So none of these people start firing on each other.

And here's a little bit on why you almost did.

Grassroots AIDS work

An SGACer got a letter published in the Washington Times:

Martin Krause argues that compulsory licensing of inexpensive generic AIDS drugs decreases access to medicines ("Compulsory social responsibility," Commentary, Tuesday).

Using Brazil as an example, he asserts that forcing such firms as the U.S.-based Abbott Laboratories to lower their prices will reduce their subsequent investment in the research and development of new drugs. What the author ignores is that a large portion of pharmaceutical companies' research and development costs, including those of Abbott's AIDS drug, Norvir, are funded by federal taxpayer dollars — not the paltry profits from Latin American AIDS patients.

In 1980, Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, allowing inventors to retain ownership of drugs developed with federal grants. This act provides economic incentives for drug corporations to produce medicines, such as AIDS drugs, that are less profitable but enhance public welfare. These federal grants now finance 70 percent of R&D expenditures.

Should pharmaceutical companies be allowed to overcharge AIDS patients for drugs developed with our taxpayer dollars? Abbott is not waiting for the answer. The company increased Norvir's price by 400 percent in December 2003 and increased overall profits to $3.6 billion by 2004. Meanwhile, 5.5 million AIDS patients in need of immediate treatment await the generic drugs that could save them from an untimely death.

JESSICA LOVAAS
Williamstown, Mass.

Pain in the wallet

Atrios links to some disturbing news:

It's still under most people's radar screen right now," said Carl Neill, an analyst at Risk Management Inc., a natural gas consultant and brokerage firm Chicago. "The public has absolutely no idea how high prices are going to be this year. It's going to be mind-boggling. Price are going to be 50 to 100 percent higher for residential consumers than in previous year.

Glad I don't pay utilities, I guess. But it seems like this is going to feed inflation, and that isn't fun, even for me.

Hatchet job

hack.

It's all about the corruption

The Delay indictment shouldn't be viewed as a partisan move. Media Matters (via Atrios) explains:

"During his long tenure, Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle has prosecuted many more Democratic officials than Republicans. The record does not support allegations that Earle is prone to partisan witch hunts." This assertion supports Earle's own claim about his record; a March 6 article in the El Paso Times reported: "Earle says local prosecution is fundamental and points out that 11 of the 15 politicians he has prosecuted over the years were Democrats."

Delay says Earle is "trying to criminalize politics." If what Delay does is just politics, maybe it should be illegal.

The awesome

CNN's headline got my hopes up - it's only temporary - but Delay has stepped down from his leadership position. I'd heard that the Grand Jury might indict him today, but I didn't really put much stock in that rumor, since these rats have been pretty much able to act with impunity, no matter how obviously corrupt their actions. Guess I was wrong.

Good to see the world is turning around.

Well, maybe Bush really doesn't want to increase unemployment numbers

CBS blog, via atrios:

Michael Brown, who left his job as FEMA boss under heavy criticism of his qualifications and response to the needs of Katrina's victims, will be on Capitol Hill Tuesday: answering questions about what FEMA did and how things could be done better. Brown's still on the FEMA payroll; a spokesman tells CBS News he'll be there for another two weeks so the agency can get gets a "proper download of his experience."

Come on! When someone craps up in a government job that badly, you don't rehire them, you fire them and put them in front of a congressional investigation.

Also - what experience?

Milk outta my nose

The Poor Man strikes again - new Keyboard Kommandos, and a great treatise on the possible relapse of President Bush. My favorite bit:

2. On the other hand, the guy falls down alot. I don’t know what a normal amount of falling down is, an I imagine that some people have lifestyles that involve a higher risk of falling down than mine, and so that needs to be taken into account. That said, he fell off a Segway. That’s like … I don’t know what that’s like, like water flowing uphill or something. I’m not sure how you would go about doing that, falling off a state-of-the-art self-balancing transport, but I think there are instructions inside bottles of cheap Scotch.

More US policy effects on AIDS

The Post has a decentarticle today about the combination of AIDS and TB treatment in South Africa. One bit that caught my eye:

A combination of political pressure and increased production of generic drugs has led to a dramatic decrease in the price of antiretrovirals. But treating AIDS on a mass scale in South Africa, where estimates of HIV infections exceed 5 million, has proven far more complicated than just providing medicine.

There are not nearly enough doctors, nurses or pharmacists to prescribe and distribute the drugs.

In the AIDS advocacy community, we often focus on how US policy affects the fight against the disease abroad (very detrimentally of late, it seems). The issues activists are usually most concerned about revolve around intellectual property and pharmaceuticals, debt cancellation, abstinence-only restrictions on prevention money, and the dollar amount of direct aid. What often gets left out of the picture, because it is not so apparently a US government problem, is the shortage of medical personnel in much of the global south. This too, however, is related to problems in this country and its approach to medicine.

We treat nurses very poorly. Despite offering more pay and benefits than ever before, many americans are still driven from the job by the overwhelming workload expected for what is still inadequate compensation, and a medical culture that does not properly respect nurses relative to doctors. It is a patronizing, elitist social order that harkens back to days of aristocracy and sexism, and needs to be restructured. As critical as nurses are to medical care, it's a wonder that things haven't yet reformed. The result of complacency in the face of such deep-seated problems is that fewer and fewer Americans choose to become nurses.

Enter immigrants. Enticed by huge pay differentials and bonuses relative to their native country's ability to compensate them, foreign nurses and nursing students travel in large numbers to fill the increasing shortage stateside (this kind of move is often used when American management finds difficulty in continuing to exploit the local labor pool). This leaves shortages in their home countries, which in turn leads to deficient health infrastructure incapable of dealing with AIDS, TB and other epidemics.

It is important to place the blame where it ought to lie - not only with the outdated, oppressive culture of American medicine, but also with our failure to implement a humane and universal health care system. The shortage of nurses in this country ought to be viewed as a national crisis that our government needs to address, not a problem of private business that can be solved by hiring mercenaries at the expense of poor nations. I believe that a public health care system could confer the sense dignity and importance onto nursing that it so deserves. But whatever the solution to our crisis, we need to make it globally sustainable, and not rob our neighbors of medical personnel they so dearly need.

Antiwar march pictures

Pictures are up:



Also, the Post has revised their story to be far more useful:

The masses on the street served up a broad cross section of the United States by age, geography religion and ethnic group. The Raging Grannies, Presbyterians for Peace, Portuguese Against Bush and a group of Quakers were there. The Buddhist Peace Delegation took up most of 14th Street NW with its golden banner that read: "May all beings be safe and free from anger, fear, greed, dilution and all ill being."

Sun foiled Bush's PR tour

Ha.

Protest went well

Just got back from the huge antiwar march around the white house. I ended up going to the Mobilization for Global Justice feeder march from Dupont (which stopped by the World Bank), and got to the main march just as it was getting started. Lots of Fun. CNN has more. (The Post's adaption of the AP article is disappointing - it takes the interesting balance of views out if it.) Pictures up as soon as I can tag them.

Reminder

Well, if you're at all like me, you're not going to the 9:30 Kogan pre-rally. So, for all you socially-conscious, yet socially-active folk out there, meet me at Dupont at 11:30.

Geek break

Interesting piece on the iPod nano. Seems Apple is making some decent cash, even on this impossibly small device. Time to buy some stock?

Extras

Guess I know what I'll be doing Sunday night.

Bus woes

Atrios does a good job picking apart this article from the Chicago Tribune. Seems the absolute incompetence of the Katrina relief effort was not isolated to government leaders, but spread deep into the private contractors hired to evacuate people. Well, not so deep. Turns out the main bus contractor is headed by a big-shot lobbyist. I bet his beltway insider status didn't have any impact on his firm getting the $100 million contract.

All roads lead to Rove

Abramoff claimed ties to Karl Rove. But, my bet is that nothing comes of it. I mean, if he hasn't been fired because of his involvement in the outing of a CIA agent, he probably won't get in trouble for participating in wire fraud or pay-for-play politics.

I wonder who has to be connected to Rove in order for the guy to get seriously investigated - Saddam Hussain? Kim Jong Il? Hitler? Even Satan might not do it.

Changing sentiments

It's interesting to me how events like hurricane katrina, and the tsunami before it, can have such an impact on how people perceive and talk about the world. I mean, it certainly wasn't as if there weren't poor people in the South before Katrina, and it clearly wasn't the case that the racial divisions that have been so visible since were caused by the storm. So why do these topics make regular fodder for TV news shows and newspaper columns only now?

David Broder seems to be answering a similar question:

Those were good words that President Bush spoke last week, when he pledged "bold action" to confront the poverty of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, which he correctly said "has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America."

We have heard similar words from presidents in the past. In 1992, when African Americans rioted in Los Angeles after the acquittal of the white police officers who had beaten Rodney King, the first President Bush decried the violence but said, "After peace is restored . . . we must then turn again to the underlying causes of such tragic events. We must keep on working to create a climate of understanding and tolerance, a climate that refuses to accept racism, bigotry, anti-Semitism and hate of any kind, anytime, anywhere."

But the capacity of us comfortable, affluent white Americans to put aside any lasting concern about those who are isolated by poverty or race from the mainstream of society is almost limitless.

Yeah, it isn't that we've never seen or talked about these problems before - it's just that certain people get pretty uncomfortable about talking about them for long. Maybe they don't want to feel guilty, or maybe it just doesn't affect their lives regularly enough to be of constant concern. Either way, unless something significant changes, I'd bet we're in for another onset of media forgetfulness regarding all the economic and race issues that seem so current now. That likely being the case, we should work now, while we still have media attention and sympathy for these issues, to correct the situation for all those Americans left behind by America. We don't have long.

GW's Day of Action

Seemed to go pretty well. I only caught the last bit, but there were a number of people newly signed up for the list serve, and almost all the call scripts were gone.



As a not of personal pride, the video seemed well received.

Katrina's economic impact

This chart from the Times is pretty amazing.

Saturday

For those planning on marching, a couple places to start:

GW students will be getting going from Kogan Plaza at 9:30 am.

Mobilization for Global Justice folks will be meeting in DuPont Circle around 11:30, and will stop by the IMF/World Bank on the way.

Neither feeder march is permitted, as far as I know.

Why voting by party matters

Seems that there really are partisan differences in voting behavior - who knew?

Kos has some good stuff:

So what does this tell us? That our least "progressive" Senator, Ben Nelson, still voted with progressives 8 percent more of the time than Lincoln Chafee, the best of their lot.

Right-wing agenda revealed

As everyone expected, congressional Republicans are using the need for massive appropriations to mop-up the Katrina catastrophe as an excuse to cut all the things from the budget that they never wanted there in the first place. From the Times:

At the top of a partial list of the potential cuts being circulated on Tuesday were previously suggested ideas like delaying the start of the new Medicare prescription drug coverage for one year to save $31 billion and eliminating $25 billion in projects from the newly enacted transportation measure.

The list also proposed eliminating the Moon-Mars initiative that NASA announced on Monday, for $44 billion in savings; ending support for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, $4 billion; cutting taxpayer payments for the national political conventions and the presidential election campaign fund, $600 million; and charging federal employees for parking, $1.54 billion.

Now, most of that pretty much jives with my understanding of the Republican party. Cut drugs for old people? Sure. Don't go to Mars? Well, Martians probably haven't got much oil, anyway. Kill public broadcasting? Bunch of communists. End public support for elections? Hell, Democrats need it more.

But the cuts reveal the sinister next steps of the party - charging federal employees for parking. What a dastardly plot! I mean, they own the lots, they pretty much have the federal employees by the balls already, and who's gonna complain - everybody hates those damn bureaucrats. I can see it now: government agencies will have to rent office space - from the government. Pure genius!

I can't wait to go to the post office after Congress implements toilet paper fees for postal workers - I'm sure that line will be quick and efficient.

Frist troubles

Via Atrios, the Post:

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a potential presidential candidate in 2008, sold all his stock in his family's hospital corporation about two weeks before it issued a disappointing earnings report and the price fell nearly 15 percent.

Frist held an undisclosed amount of stock in Hospital Corporation of America, based in Nashville, the nation's largest for-profit hospital chain. On June 13, he instructed the trustee managing the assets to sell his HCA shares and those of his wife and children, said Amy Call, a spokeswoman for Frist.

Frist's shares were sold by July 1 and those of his wife and children by July 8, Call said. The trustee decided when to sell the shares, and the Tennessee Republican had no control over the exact time they were sold, she said.

No control. Hahahaha. Right.

Do you think we can keep this scandal alive long enough to keep him from even running?

Filling the Gap

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria is the best mechanism out there to distribute funds to small and large public health programs in the developing world. Sadly, because rich nations like the US (especially the US) have failed to give their fair share of what is needed, the organization is facing a critical shortage in funding, and won't have enough to fulfill pledges it has made in an already reduced next round.



Now is the time to do something about that.

Join the Student Global AIDS Campaign in their National Day of Action:

Take action to ensure that the U.S. government does the right thing and contributes the U.S. fair share to the Global Fund. The U.S. must contribute a total of $840 million, but we are faced with a mere $600 million. Take a minute to call your senators and representatives today!

If you’re from OH, call Senator Dewine: 202.224.2315
If you’re from PA, call Senators Specter: 202.224.4254 and Santorum: 202.224.6324
If you’re from KY, call Senator McConnell: 202.224.2541
If you’re from AZ, call Rep. Kolbe: 202.225.2542

EVERYONE should call Majority leader, Senator Frist: 202.224.3344

Here’s a sample script for making these calls....

“My name is _______ from ________. I’m calling today to encourage Sen./Rep. ________ to strongly support full funding of the Global Fund for AIDS, TB, and Malaria.

The Global Fund is in need of $840 million this year to be able to fund existing and new programs for people living with AIDS around the world. I’m urging the Sen./Rep. to support $600 million for the Global Fund out of conference committee while committing and working towards an additional $240 million in emergency spending as soon as possible. As other countries respond to increased funding for the Global Fund, the U.S. must continue to match their pledges and funding their full share of one-third.

I look forward to the Senator’s/Representative’s leadership on this.”

Grassroots and the Global Fund

The Des Moines Register (via Kaiser) has a Global Fund editorial that reminds me of some talking points I heard somewheres...

My favorite bits:

The United States continues to pour the majority of its aid money into U.S.-led AIDS programs. Those come with strings. The Bush administration has refused to allow organizations to purchase drugs not reviewed by the Food and Drug Administration. The administration wants abstinence promoted, and it recently required groups to pledge opposition to prostitution and sex trafficking. Those may seem like worthy goals, but they fail to recognize the powerlessness of women in many countries.

Such U.S. strings serve only to further political agendas of U.S. politicians, not save lives or spend dollars wisely.

Contributing our share to the Global Fund is a better use of U.S. dollars.

SGAC has been pushing hard on this, and will be doing a lot today. More on that later.

Where's the Pork?

The Poor Man Institute has a wonderful little explication of pork, for everyone out there who can't find it.

War on Porn?

Seems like a great time to start another endless war, given the incredible, total success of our wars on poverty, drugs and terrorism. This guy at the FBI must be a communist:

"I guess this means we've won the war on terror," said one exasperated FBI agent, speaking on the condition of anonymity because poking fun at headquarters is not regarded as career-enhancing. "We must not need any more resources for espionage."

I mean, seriously, who else could question anything this administration does, when everything is going so well right now?

The Post has more about the most recent crusade. (Interesting note - the article has a surprising 230 or so blogs linking to it, which is a lot more than any Katrina article I saw. I guess the internet cares more about porn than the poor.)

How to control the media

Via Atrios, this is scary:

Another Win for 'Friends & Allies'
When John G. Roberts is approved as chief justice of the United States, as expected, he can thank President Bush 's "Friends & Allies" program, which went to work on him immediately after he was nominated. The project, started by the Republican National Committee in the 2004 re-election campaign, is simple and effective: Give opinion makers, media friends, and even cocktail party hosts insider info on the topic of the day. How? Through E-mailed talking points, called D.C. Talkers, and conference calls. For Roberts, it worked this way: A daily conference call to about 80 pundits, GOP-leaning radio and TV hosts, and newsmakers was made around 9 a.m. On the other end were the main Roberts gunslingers like Steve Schmidt at the White House and Ken Mehlman and Brian Jones at the RNC. D.C. Talkers would then be distributed to an even larger list filled with positive info about Roberts and lines of attack on his critics. "The idea," said one of those involved, "is to feed them information and have them invested in us." It has even created addicts, he added. "Now they come to us before going on TV."

This seems like a particularly clever media strategy - too bad it only works for those already having gobs and gobs of power to attract the media-types who love this sort of insider information. Small advocacy groups can still learn from this model, I think - we have to find a way to convince reporters that we're doing them a favor by giving them access.

Good news, if it lasts

From the Post:

China announced Monday that negotiators from six nations have reached agreement under which North Korea pledged to dismantle its nuclear arms program in return for recognition and aid from the United States and its Asian allies.

Now, that "if it lasts" part is probably pretty unlikely.

Nice contradiction

President Bush explains that he will spend hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding the Gulf Coast without raising any new revenues. Republican leader Tom DeLay declines any spending cuts because "there is no fat left to cut in the federal budget."

Found here.

Pay attention to Iraq, please

As Atrios suggests, real looting:

Most of the money was supposedly spent buying arms from Poland and Pakistan. The contracts were peculiar in four ways. According to Mr Allawi, they were awarded without bidding, and were signed with a Baghdad-based company, and not directly with the foreign supplier. The money was paid up front, and, surprisingly for Iraq, it was paid at great speed out of the ministry's account with the Central Bank. Military equipment purchased in Poland included 28-year-old Soviet-made helicopters. The manufacturers said they should have been scrapped after 25 years of service. Armoured cars purchased by Iraq turned out to be so poorly made that even a bullet from an elderly AK-47 machine-gun could penetrate their armour. A shipment of the latest MP5 American machine-guns, at a cost of $3,500 (£1,900) each, consisted in reality of Egyptian copies worth only $200 a gun. Other armoured cars leaked so much oil that they had to be abandoned. A deal was struck to buy 7.62mm machine-gun bullets for 16 cents each, although they should have cost between 4 and 6 cents.

Big media and truth

This is a bit old, but worth a read. I was admittedly quite impressed with the news coverage after Katrina - reporters seemed genuinely interested in making a difference. I think that if there's any hope of turning the tide of ignorance and apathy in our country, we've got to find a way to keep that up. From the editorial:

For the first 120 hours after Hurricane Katrina, TV journalists were let off their leashes by their mogul owners, the result of a rare conjoining of flawless timing (summer’s biggest vacation week) and foulest tragedy (America’s worst natural disaster). All of a sudden, broadcasters narrated disturbing images of the poor, the minority, the aged, the sick and the dead, and discussed complex issues like poverty, race, class, infirmity and ecology that never make it on the air in this swift-boat/anti-gay-marriage/Michael Jackson media-sideshow era. So began a perfect storm of controversy.

...

Of course, no one could have anticipated that, to their immense credit, TV’s prettiest-boy anchors (CNN’s Anderson Cooper and FNC’s Shep Smith and NBC’s Brian Williams) would be boldly and tearfully relating horror whenever and wherever they found it, no matter if the fault lay with Mother Nature or President Dubya. But the real test of pathos vs. profit is still before us: whether the TV newscasters will spend the fresh reservoir of trust earned with the public to not only rattle Bush’s cage but also battle their own bosses. If not, it won’t be long before TV truth telling will be muzzled permanently.

Word games

Ignore for a moment the context of this bit from the Times:

But the likelihood that pornography will be increasingly accessible by phone has children's advocacy groups mobilizing. This month, the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families, a nonprofit group that seeks to promote "biblical morality," met with leaders of the wireless industry to voice concern that phones could provide minors with all-too-easy access to inappropriate material.

Children's advocacy groups? Hardly. These are clearly morality advocacy groups. That, first and foremost, is what they're about, so why name them as anything else? Now, groups that work for more available daycare, or for better enforcement of child abuse laws, those are children's advocacy groups. And while it may be good to keep porn from kids, I'd bet these folks are actually concerned about anyone getting to see any naughty bits.

(Aside: why anyone would want to get porn on their phone is another question entirely. After all, as any Avenue Q fan knows, the internet is for porn. And that's the problem, really - the internet is the perfect vehicle for porn because it's so grassroots and relatively private that anyone can find anything they want. If these groups want to limit kids' access to porn, they should probably do anything they can to promote alternate porn distribution schemes, like these phones.)

SGAC

Gaa! this takes up too much time! I'm busy administrating instead of doing anything that actually matters directly. I guess fundraising 80s dance parties will have to wait for another day.

About damn time

Post:

President Bush, summoning the American spirit and "a faith in God no storm can take away," vowed from the heart of the Hurricane Katrina disaster zone Thursday night to rebuild this devastated city and the rest of the Gulf Coast with "one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen."

Please, lets quit with the "New Orleanians were dumb" talking point now, shall we?

Roberts: dedicated to principles of the court?

Roberts, to Joe Biden:

"You make the point that, 'We stand for election and we wouldn't be elected if we didn't tell people what we stand for.' Judges don't stand for election. I'm not standing for election. And it is contrary to the role of judges in our society to say that, 'This judge should go on the bench because these are his or her positions and those are the positions they're going to apply.' Judges go on the bench and they apply and decide cases according to the judicial process, not on the basis of promises made earlier to get elected or promises made earlier to get confirmed. That's inconsistent with the independence and integrity of the Supreme Court."

I've been generally displeased with Bush nominees to almost every position, because I get the distinct impression that all are ideologues bent on exacting some right-wing agenda. I think we may have a different animal here with Roberts, a real idealist. He's been said to be among the elite of court insiders, serving as a lawyer on firms that argue before the court, and as a government solicitor, and as a clerk. I think it may be possible that is first allegiance is in fact to the court, rather than the party. If this is the case (which is not certain), he may be less dangerous than his individual views indicate. Only time will tell, though.

Things for the next court to deal with

My bet is that this will be both (a) a bloody political fight, and (b) a great fundraising tool for Republicans. But seriously, isn't this clear enough?

U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton ruled that the pledge's reference to one nation "under God" violates school children's right to be "free from a coercive requirement to affirm God."

SCOTUS dodged the bullet last time with a question of standing; that won't be an issue this time.

We've got a live one

Not sure how much this really means, but whoa:

Roberts finally showed some leg on stare decisis . Roe "is settled as a precedent of the court," he said, "entitled to respect under principles of stare decisis ."

That's a lot more than I expected to hear from Roberts. Is he for real, or does he just know what to say to please his doubters? We'll probably find out.

Plans

I think I'll head to grad school sooner rather than later, and go for my PhD in Political Science or some related field. From there, probably bounce around at a bunch of institutions until I land a full professorship somewhere, and then grow into an old curmudgeon, eventually becoming that geezer that everyone wants to take a class from because he's such a curious fossil.

Remember

I think I posted this earlier, but it's important and I've been asked to look at it again, so here.

Reading

I've been working my way through mountains of stuff, and I came across the idea of connectionism. Fascinating. Really giving my brain a workout tonight.

Roberts hearings

Watching at the Post homepage, when I get a couple free minutes.

Race

From the Post:

"The storm didn't discriminate and neither will the recovery effort," Bush said

The thing that bothers me most about the Katrina situation in regards to race is that (a) it doesn't seem that any effort was made to evacuate the masses of poor people in New Orleans and (b) because of structural problems in our society, the majority of those poor people not evacuated were black.

I don't know whether the people were ignored because they were black or because they were poor, or just because our government is run by a bunch of rich people too ignorant to realize that a lot of people don't have cars. What I do know is that if efforts are not made in the reconstruction to rebuild our society as a more equitable one, that failure will most certainly be racist, because it will compound our racist structural problems.

Bush may not hate black people, but I think Kanye West may be proven right - neither has Bush shown any proof that he cares about them.

Grrr

Safari has been eating my posts today. Guess I should take that as a reminder that I should be working.

Things I wish I could watch

I think everybody who can should pay as much attention as is possible to the confirmation hearings for Roberts. I've heard many different opinions about his potential impact on the court, good and bad, so I'm very curious to see how the Senate will treat him. One thing that seems likely is a smooth confirmation, but hey, what do I know?

Adams Morgan Day

After this and reading, no time for blogging.

Rebuilding NOLA

Via BoingBoing, Kathryn Cramer asks an interesting question:

The question is this: How much of New Orleans does FEMA plan to restore, and how much does it plan to simply replace. And if the houses are replaced with something else, are they to be replaced for their original owners? Or will the land be taken by eminent domain and redistributed?

With the recent Supreme Court ruling on the matter, I won't be surprised if it's eminent domain all the way. Oh, except where rich white people live. Those houses will be rebuilt and then some.

Toilet paper

Well, the Bill of Rights doesn't seem to be worth much recently, does it? I mean, what part of "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial" isn't clear? "All" is pretty determinate.

It'll be interesting to see what the Supreme Court does with this. Bush is all into "strict constructionists," whatever that means, so in theory Roberts might be against reading additional rights into the constitution, like, oh, say, the right of the government to do whatever the hell it wants during wartime.

Finally

Brown Replaced. About damn time.

I hope that one silver lining on the massive cloud that was Katrina will be that we'll see less political appointees to administrative agencies in the future. Maybe it's too much to hope for, but I'd like for politicians to realize that, while it may be helpful when running to promise your buddies cushy spots in your government, it isn't terribly politically expedient when they fail totally at what they were never qualified to do.

One more reason why Al Gore is pretty cool

He financed two airlifts for Katrina victims, CNN says.

Most critically, Gore worked to cut through government red tape, personally calling Gov. Phil Bredesen to get Tennessee's support and U.S. Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta to secure landing rights in New Orleans.

I can think of a lot of people of means that I haven't heard much from. Time to step up.

Cojones

BoingBoing has a good round-up on the media's new set.

Some example we are

Even as late as this year, I've heard references to Reagan's "shining city on a hill" aspiration for US hegemony. Somerwhere, though, it turned into more of a stinking city in a lake. The UN has taken notice in its Human Development Report.

To give you an idea:

Key US health indicators are far below those that might be anticipated on the basis of national wealth. Infant mortality trends are especially troublesome. Since 2000 a half century of sustained decline in infant death rates first slowed and then reversed. The infant mortality rate is now higher for the United States than for many other industrial countries. Malaysia—a country with an average income one-quarter that of the United States—has achieved the same infant mortality rate as the United States...

More than in any other major industrial country the cost of treatment is a major barrier to access in the United States. Over 40% of the uninsured do not have a regular place to receive medical treatment when they are sick, and more than a third say that they or someone in their family went without needed medical care, including recommended treatments or prescription drugs, in the last year because of cost.

Katrina Timeline

Think Progress has given us another great resource.

George Bush don't like black people

I think we've got our political anthem for the decade. Go listen.

Anyone who's surprised that the most poignant music of our generation is hip-hop needs to get themselves a copy of Eminem's Mosh and some of the Coup.

Spin cycle

The unrelenting spin machine that is our Vice President has finally made a tour of the Katrina disaster area. A Washington Post reporter does a good job catching his traditional looseness with facts:

As Cheney was speaking to reporters, a passerby shouted obscenities at him. Cheney dismissed it, saying it was the first negative reaction he had heard on his trip.

Earlier, as Cheney walked along a debris-strewn Gulfport street, resident Lynn Lofton called his visit "a media opportunity that is a complete waste of time and taxpayer money," adding, "They should have been here last week."

Sounds like a negative reaction to me. But then, Cheney has always been bad at recognizing the difference between the first time he's experienced something and every subsequent time. Remember the VP debate, when he said it was the first time he'd met John Edwards? Well, that turned out to be very wrong. Maybe we'll just have to face the fact that Cheney's not so much the senior sales associate in the Brains department. Or maybe seniority is his problem.

And I like the suggestion of Ms. Lofton - I imagine it would have been hard, even for Cheney, to deny a negative reaction if he'd visited the Superdome last week.

Reflection

I don't think it's set in yet, really, that we've lost a major American city. I think this New York Times piece does some justice in explaining the gravity of what's happened there in a physical sense. But I think the possibility is that, in the longer term, we may have to come to grips with a larger psychological fallout, that of the realization of our national mortality.

I remember a car accident in which three students from my high school were killed. It shook things up for a while, and everyone was talking about our realization that we were susceptible to death as much as anyone else. I think we'll come to that sort of conclusion as a nation, and one more broad than September 11. Four years ago, we felt threatened by others who wished to attack us. Now, I think, we'll have to come to terms with being threatened by the negligence of those who lead us. Unlike the terrorist attacks, there is no enemy to blame for the total destruction of New Orleans but nature and ourselves.

SGAC Advocacy

Call the White House TODAY Wednesday, September 7

Demand That the U.S. Keep Our Promises to the Millennium Development Goals

Make a difference in 5 minutes!

Call (202) 456-1111 before 5 pm ET

What to say (use your own words if possible):

· I oppose the changes proposed by UN Ambassador John Bolton to the Millennium Development Goals draft document.

· The president must keep the promises he made to America and the world on numerous occasions, including the 2005 G-8 Summit and the 2002 Monterrey Summit, to support the Millennium Development Goals.

· The Millennium Development Goals were carefully worked out by international development experts as an achievable blueprint for enormous progress against poverty, hunger, disease, and illiteracy.

· I fully support using my tax dollars to alleviate extreme poverty.

Note: more than one person can speak on a White House call. After you have finished speaking, you can say, “And I have someone else here with me who has something to say.” Every voice counts… even if they just voice agreement to your previous comments! You can also send your message by fax: (202) 466-2461 or e-mail president@whitehouse.gov.

Forward this message to as many people as you can. The more calls, faxes and e-mails, the more likely the president will act!

Additional background

The 2005 World Summit, also known as the Millennium +5 Summit, will be held at the United Nations in New York September 14–16, 2005. Attending will be 175 heads of state and heads of government, including President Bush. The purpose of the 2005 World Summit is to determine what the world needs to do to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, which were established at the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000.

President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice have repeatedly reaffirmed U.S. commitments to the Millennium Development Goals, including at the G-8 Summit in June in Gleneagles, Scotland. However, within the past month, the Bush administration, led by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, has proposed hundreds of changes to the Millennium Development Goals draft document that has taken years of feasibility study and negotiation to assemble. These changes would essentially gut the Millennium Development Goals and leave a watered-down version that would lack the timetables, commitments and strategies to reach the historic goals that were promised to be achieved by 2015.

For more information, please contact Kolleen Bouchane at (202) 783-7100 x107 or Stacy Carkonen at (206) 715-4986. Or visit these pages:

Scrapping Millennium Development Goals Lowers the Bar for Humanity’s Progress

Economist Jeffrey Sachs Discusses Administration Efforts to Retreat from the MDGs

United Nations Millennium Development Goals

2005 World Summit (14-16 September 2005)

Geek Break

Crazy things going down at Apple:

Jobs calls the iPod nano "an entirely new ground-up design, that also has 1000 songs in your pocket." The white device features a color display and can support photos, uses a grey click wheel to navigate, and is 80 percent smaller in volume than the original iPod -- thinner than a number two pencil, said Jobs. The iPod nano weighs 1.5 ounces or 42 grams.

Pawns

Via Kos, our President has no shame:

Firefighters say they want to brave the heat, the debris-littered roads, the poisonous cottonmouth snakes and fire ants and travel into pockets of Louisiana where many people have yet to receive emergency aid.
But as specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew's first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.

Iraq games, again

This remind you of anything?

The U.S. agency leading Hurricane Katrina rescue efforts said Tuesday that it does not want the news media to photograph the dead as they are recovered.

From experience, I know that the difference between someone feeling bad about something and actually getting involved often depends on the strength of media (small m) that informs about that thing. I personally feel that while the written word has an immense capacity to convey and build deep understanding, it isn't good for the sort of visceral response that gets people immediately involved in something. For that, nothing beats visual media.

Without photos, perhaps the administration will save itself some embarrassment, but it will also lessen the general resolve of our nation to do something in response to the horror of the Katrina aftermath. We cannot afford for that to happen.

Some good news

Well, at least there's some bright spot in all this darkness. The California legislature has taken the bold step of redefining marriage as between two persons, opening the door for recognition of same-sex unions. Only one question now - what will Schwarzenegger do?

Found it!

This must be the administration's source on the whole bullet-dodging business:

Chattanooga Times Free Press
Area mostly dodges Katrina’s bullet
Abstract: Strong winds from the rem nants of Hurricane Katrina con tinued to rip through parts of Southeast Tennessee on Tues day, toppling trees that knocked out power and blocked sec ondary roads, officials said. "We’ve got trees ...
Date: 08/31/2005

That's from the only headline reference I could find on Lexis Nexis to the dodging of bullets from August 29-31. It's a day late and a state away, but hey, there was some resemblance to what Gen. Myers and Michael Chertoff claim to have seen. Guess they're not liars or idiots after all. My bad!

Dodging bullets

AMERICAblog says what I wanted to after watching this on CSPAN-2:

GEN MYERS: The headline, of course, in most of the country's papers on Tuesday were "New Orleans dodged a bullet," or words to that effect. At that time, when those words were in our minds, we started working issues before we were asked. And on Tuesday, at the direction of the secretary and the deputy secretary, we went to each of the services. I called each of the chiefs of the services, one by one, and said we don't know what we're going to be asked for yet. The levees and the flood walls had just broken. And we know some of what's going to be asked, because we'd already had some requests for assistance, but there's probably going to be more.

Where'd he get that idea? Probably not from reading any papers, even if that is where the head of our military gets his news (which would be damned crazy). No, he probably heard it from his pal Michael Chertoff:

"I remember on Tuesday morning picking up newspapers and I saw headlines, 'New Orleans Dodged The Bullet."

Quick rule of thumb in Washington - if one person says some inane thing, that's OK, most of these guys are crazy anyway. But if two people repeat an outright fabrication, that means someone's probably distributed it as a talking point. Who makes these talking points up? Why would they ever think they could get anything so blatantly false as this past a reporter? Oh, yeah.

Some suggestions

Don't fire Max Mayfield, National Hurricane Center Director:

"We were briefing them way before landfall," Mayfield said. "It's not like this was a surprise. ... I keep looking back to see if there was anything else we could have done, and I just don't know what it would be," he said.

Do fire Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff:

Chertoff said Saturday that government officials had not expected the damaging combination of a powerful hurricane and levee breaches that flooded New Orleans.

Aw, snap!

Rumsfeld tries Iraq trick on reporter, gets shut down:

SEC. RUMSFELD: ...And the numbers, as you know, people have watched what's going on on the ground. They are not in the remote areas, because CNN isn't in the remote areas. But the -- in --

Reporter: We are Sir. We’re in many of the remote areas. We're not everywhere, but we have over a hundred reporters --

SEC. RUMSFELD: Right...

This isn't Iraq, and reporters actually know what's happening better than you do. Try not to tell them what's going on - it just makes you look stupid.

No more excuses, please

The Post today:

While Chertoff said the levee breach that flooded New Orleans "exceeded the foresight of planners," Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, said Brown and other top federal officials were briefed as much as 32 hours in advance of landfall that Hurricane Katrina's storm surge was likely to overtop levees and cause catastrophic flooding.

"They knew that this one was different," Mayfield said yesterday. "I don't think Mike Brown or anyone else in FEMA could have any reason to have any problem with our calls. . . . They were told. . . . We said the levees could be topped."

Remember what President Bush said:

I don't think anybody anticipated the breech of the levees.

Were they just not paying attention? Was no one passing information along? Either these guys are liars, or our government has massive communication problems. Either would be pretty bad in any situation; Katrina turned the administration's failures into a catastrophe.

By the way...

If you're unhappy about the way things are going, don't just donate - call your congressperson. The Louisiana delegation can't do this alone.

Peeks at our broken system

From CNN, via Atrios:

I am stunned by an interview I conducted with New Orleans Detective Lawrence Dupree. He told me they were trying to rescue people with a helicopter and the people were so poor they were afraid it would cost too much to get a ride and they had no money for a "ticket." Dupree was shaken telling us the story. He just couldn't believe these people were afraid they'd be charged for a rescue.

We charge people for everything in this country. I'm not surprised that anyone would have the impression they'd have to pay for someone to save their life - that's exactly how we treat many people with AIDS and other life-threatening illnesses. And usually, rescue helicopters do cost a boatload of money.

If things seem really fucked-up now, it's because they have been for a very long time.

Medical needs

Atrios has a rather large document posted, purportedly the Senate Democrats' plan for aid to the hurricane-devistated area. I think that the Medicaid provisions will be the most critical - the people affected do and will need a considerable amount of medical care, and few will be in any position to pay for quite some time.

Who needs to be fired?

One of the things that deeply bothered me after September 11th was that seemingly no one was fired for neglegence in preventing the attack. Dozens of things went very wrong, with communications, tracking the planes, the intelligence operations that could have predicted the nature of the attack, etc. I think we can't make that mistake again. People responsible for this Katrina debacle need to go. As Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard said:

"Whoever's at the top of this totem pole, that totem pole needs to be chain-sawed off, and we've got to start with some new leadership. It's not just Katrina that's caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now."

Over-the-counter EC?

Kaiser reports that the American Academy of Pediatrics has released a statement in support of nonprescription sales of emergency contraception, complete with guidelines for doctors to talk to patients about EC. The ball, I suppose, is now in the FDA's court.

Mounting threats after Katrina

BoingBoing quotes a very in-depth analysis of the various disease, mental health and political crises afoot. The scope of what we'll have to deal with in the Mississippi Delta area is immense. One bit to keep in mind:

In every disaster we have been engaged in we have witnessed a similar sense by the victims of disasters that they were being singled out, and ignored by their government, because of their ethnicity, religion or race. The onus is on government to prove them wrong.

Why everyone is mad this time

Memo to President Bush: You can't escape blame for one catastrophic event by declaring the nation was unprepared and then expect to get away with doing that again in your second term. When everything you've done for the last four years has been ostensibly to make the "homeland" secure, it looks pretty bad when that security evaporates. The Post says this:

If Hurricane Katrina represented a real-life rehearsal of sorts, the response suggested to many that the nation is not ready to handle a terrorist attack of similar dimensions.

As you said before, "You can't get fooled again."

Reaction to breakdown

It actually surprises me how mad everyone on TV and in the newspapers are. I'm not surprised by anger over Katrina, of course, because (as should be pretty bloody apparent by now to anyone reading this blog) I'm mad too. But the kind of seething rage I've seen from reporters and leaders alike shocks me because these people are so often detached in the face of tragedy. I don't remember any journalist yelling at a politician over Iraq war casualties.

This is different. Politics are in high swing, but for a change, people are snapping. On NewsHour, David Brooks basically said our society has broken down:

I think it is a huge reaction we are about to see. I mean, first of all, they violated the social fabric, which is in the moments of crisis you take care of the poor first. That didn't happen; it's like leaving wounded on the battlefield.

... This is -- first of all it is a national humiliation to see bodies floating in a river for five days in a major American city. But second, you have to remember, this was really a de-legitimization of institutions.

Our institutions completely failed us and it is not as if it is the first in the past three years -- this follows Abu Ghraib, the failure of planning in Iraq, the intelligence failures, the corporate scandals, the media scandals.

We have had over the past four or five years a whole series of scandals that soured the public mood. You've seen a rise in feeling the country is headed in the wrong direction.

And I think this is the biggest one and the bursting one, and I must say personally it is the one that really says hey, it feels like the 70s now where you really have a loss of faith in institutions. Let's get out of this mess. And I really think this is so important as a cultural moment, like the blackouts of 1977, just people are sick of it.

REHNQUIST DEAD

The Chief is gone.

Aerial Pictures

Via WWLTV, NOAA pictures of the area affected by hurricane Katrina.

More anticipation

From Wired:

Virtually everything that has happened in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina struck was predicted by experts and in computer models, so emergency management specialists wonder why authorities were so unprepared.

"The scenario of a major hurricane hitting New Orleans was well anticipated, predicted and drilled around," said Clare Rubin, an emergency management consultant who also teaches at the Institute for Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management at George Washington University.

Just for a refresher, President Bush:

I don't think anybody anticipated the breech of the levees.

No, not anybody, Mr. President. Everybody.

Is this mission 'accomplished' too?

President Bush today:



Yes, those Coast Guard helicopters look nice behind the president. Too bad people are dying because rescue operations are moving too slowly. Good thing rescue operations don't involve helicopters. Oh, wait...

... If I come off as mad and less than grateful for the president's trip, it's probably because I am. I really don't think that this is what Mayor Nagin meant by "get off your ass."

What country does this sound like?

Congress was rushing through a $10.5 billion aid package, the Pentagon promised to send in 1,400 National Guardsmen a day to stop the looting and President Bush planned to visit the region Friday.

I think comparisons of the failures of our government on Hurricane Katrina to their failures in Iraq are particularly relevant.

Inequality and Katrina

I only really started watching television coverage of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath yesterday. The most striking thing about the video I saw was the one big similarity of the displaced survivors at the Superdome and convention center- almost all were black. Now, I'm not sure that this represents any conscious effort to not evacuate certain people based on their race. Rather, I think that this is a story of poverty. That poverty, though, may be strongly tied to race.

Louisiana is not a rich state. Only one third of people in the state live in census tracts with less than 12 percent poverty, a portion that is larger than only three other states and the District of Columbia. And not counting DC, Louisiana has the highest portion of its population living in tracts with over 40 percent poverty rates. I don't know if politicians intentionally ignored these people when they were considering whether to provide resources for everyone to evacuate, but failing to provide transportation to people who could not otherwise flee is just as bad.

From the Washington Post, consider what some people had to decide:

"I only got a five-passenger car," he said.

"Chevy Cavalier," said his wife.

"And," Thomas continued, "I stood there, thinking. I said, 'Okay, it's 50-50 if the water will get through.' "

Within hours the water rose, and it kept rising.

"But then I said, 'If we do take the car, some of us would be sitting on one another's laps.' And the state troopers were talking about making arrests."

Poor people didn't have means to evacuate. It's that simple. And I don't care if it was racism or classism that defined the lack of resources allocated to these people, or even whether the discrimination was intentional. It was real, and someone ought to be held accountable for this mess.

Anticipation

President Bush Thursday morning:

I don't think anybody anticipated the breech of the levees.

Krugman:

Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack on New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane strike on New Orleans. "The New Orleans hurricane scenario," The Houston Chronicle wrote in December 2001, "may be the deadliest of all." It described a potential catastrophe very much like the one now happening.

Oil Rigs

I think it's safe to say that the world is about to end. Well, not really. But life as we know it has had some pretty serious hiccups lately, and I don't think we've begun to realize the worst of our long term problems. Among them is the fact that dozens of oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico are missing. Yes, missing.

I used to say, as gas prices were rising steadily, that I'm glad I don't own a car. Now I kinda wish nobody else did, because the impact of $6 gas on my grocery bill is going to be pretty sharp.

Indignation

Anderson Cooper: Senator, I’m sorry… for the last four days, I have been seeing dead bodies here in the streets of Mississippi and to listen to politicians thanking each other and complimenting each other — I have to tell you, there are people here who are very upset and angry, and when they hear politicians thanking one another, it just, you know, it cuts them the wrong way right now, because there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman has been laying in the street for 48 hours, and there is not enough facilities to get her up. Do you understand that anger?

Read. Watch.

New media

You know what I said before about Flickr being one of the changing ways we get our media? Well, it seems that Yahoo was on board with that.

Chaos

WWL Channel 4 out of New Orleans has an AP article that details the descent into madness in New Orleans.

I think the pace of the evacuation is shameful. People have been waiting at the Superdome for four days. From all accounts, food and other supplies there are woefully insufficient. This pair of quotes seems negligent:

FEMA director Michael Brown said the agency just learned about the situation at the convention center Thursday and quickly scrambled to provide food, water and medical care and remove the corpses.

Speaking on CNN's "Larry King Live," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the evacuation of New Orleans should be completed by the end of the weekend.

End of the Weekend? This seems insanely slow. Why wasn't the evacuation a priority before the hurricane?

Damn(ing) Numbers!

Think Progress gives us the best argument against the GOP's taxation strategy and funding priorities I've ever seen.