Don't Go to Disney World

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence begins an advertising assault against Florida's "shoot first" law that goes into effect tomorrow.

Money Can't Buy You...

Of course I would find it absolutely hilarious that British Lotto winner, Michael Carroll, revels in irritating his neighbors with his behavior and maintaining his class pretensions, despite his serenditous wealth. The New York Times reports that he is called the "King of the Chavs."

Chav behavior - outrageous spending sprees, drunken brawls, inappropriate public displays of affection, screaming matches with loved ones in bars, destruction of property, late-night stumbling and/or vomiting - provide celebrity magazines here with much of their material. Among British women, Coleen McLoughlin, the girlfriend of the soccer star Wayne Rooney, is seen as a celebrity chav.

Ha! Take That!

Being called vindictive and partisan by Tom DeLay is like being called ugly by a frog. -- Ronnie Earle (John H) (From KOS)

What I Learned in Senegal

"To be a woman in Africa," Dr. Waaldijk said as he stitched her last sutures, "is truly a terrible thing."

The New York Times reports on just one of the hardships that African women endure-- fistulas, that along with polygamy, fgm, poverty, and disease just to start a list. It seems to me that whenever one hears about any part of Africa in the media it is bad news, and having traveled to Senegal this summer I understand why. They say that travel opens one's eyes and changes one's views, perhaps even makes one more compassionate, but I left Senegal something of a social darwinist.

A Matter of Honor

An Army Ian Captain frustrated by the confused standards on treatment of prisoners writes to Senator John McCain:

Despite my efforts, I have been unable to get clear, consistent answers from my leadership about what constitutes lawful and humane treatment of detainees. I am certain that this confusion contributed to a wide range of abuses including death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment. I and troops under my command witnessed some of these abuses in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

This is a tragedy. I can remember, as a cadet at West Point, resolving to ensure that my men would never commit a dishonorable act; that I would protect them from that type of burden. It absolutely breaks my heart that I have failed some of them in this regard.

That is in the past and there is nothing we can do about it now. But, we can learn from our mistakes and ensure that this does not happen again. Take a major step in that direction; eliminate the confusion.

Lest We Not Forget, "The Army does not tolerate detainee abuse."

Bad Apple, Army Pfc. Lynndie England, received three years for her role in the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and despite the claims that there was no official sanction, Human Rights Watch reports new claims of abuse.

According to U.S. Army Captain Ian Fishback who called Human Rights Watch, the army was not holding up its own values.

Central to Fishback's reasoning in pursuing the abuse matter is the "Cadet Honor Code" he studied before graduating from West Point in 2001. It says, "A cadet shall not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do."

In his personal chronology, he wrote, "Bottom line: I am concerned that the Army is deliberately misleading the American people about detainee treatment within our custody."

Everybody Hates Chris

Yahoo has the entire first episode of the new sitcom "Everybody Hates Chris" on its website.

The Problem with Metaphors

In a radio address back in the lazy hazy days of August, a couple of days before Hurricane Katrina seemed to wipe such hopeful pipe dreams away, George bush told the nation:

Like our own nation's founders over two centuries ago, the Iraqis are grappling with difficult issues, such as the role of the federal government.

Soon after Billmon suggested that if one wanted to make that analogy then one might actually wan to look at the differing circumstances, the occupation being just one issue.

The men who met in Philadelpha in the summer of 1787 were the winners of a protracted revolutionary struggle for national independence -- not the leaders of a collection of squabbling ethnic and religious factions, many of whom spent years in exile and then rode back into their native land on the backs of foreign tanks. The framers of the U.S. constitution expelled an occupying army. The founders of the New Iraq are guarded by one.

And now Retired Marine General Joseph Hoar turns the metaphor on its head:

And the answer was that Ho Chi Minh won as long as he didn’t lose, and these guys are in the same category. They are on an entirely different track than we are. This is the George Washington plan: don’t get decisively engaged, hang in there, sooner or later events are going to change and the foreign invaders are going to lose. (Think Progess)

Beware, the Dolphins Are Coming

Reading a Guardian article about a group of trained attack dolphins who had been liberated from their pens by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina gave me one of those twilight zone moments.

It may be the oddest tale to emerge from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Armed dolphins, trained by the US military to shoot terrorists and pinpoint spies underwater, may be missing in the Gulf of Mexico.

No maybe about it as far as I am concerned.

CNN Asks the Essential Question

Operation Yellow Elephant has found supporters in unsuspected places.

Where, when you so desperately need them, are all the youthful neo-cons who thought Mr. Bush's war of choice was so historically peachy-keen? (CNN)

Norman Mailer Sounds Off On Iraq

Even two years later his critique still resonates. The thing about Mailer is that he doesn't pull any punches. His langauge is brutal hisare scathing. He asks, "why did we go to war?" And answers, in terms not like those used to justify the zeal with which young European men joined ht efighting in the First World War:

And there were other factors for using our military skills, minor but significant these reasons return us to the ongoing malaise of the white American male. He had been taking a daily drubbing over the last thirty years. For better or worse, th women's movement has had its breakthrough successes and the old, easy white mal ego has withered in the glare. Even the consolation of rooting for his team on TV ha been skewed. For many, there was now measurably less reward in watching sport than there used to be, a clear and declarable loss. The great white stars of yesteryear were for the most part gone, gone in football, in basketball, in boxing, and half gone in baseball. Black genius now prevailed in all these sports (and the Hispanics were coming up fast; even the Asians were beginning to make their mark). We white men were now left with half of tennis (at least its male half), and might also point to ice hockey, skiing, soccer, golf (with the notable exception of the Tiger), as well as lacrosse, track, swimming, and the World Wrestling Federation—remnants of a once great and glorious white athletic centrality.

The Video Revolution

For someone who quite clearly remembers the earliest videos on MTV , the home grown remix, provides objects of intense fascination. First the remade song, now the remade vide. Here are two post-Katrina examples, one for Green Day's Wake Me Up When September Ends, and the other for the Legendary KO's George Bush Doesn't Like Black People.

Phil Donohue v. Bill O'Reilly

In the pre-Oprah days Donohue was the talk show host guy. I have no idea what he has been doing since his show ended, but he has resurfaced as an articulate voice of the left. Donohue hols his own and cuts through O'Reilly's Bluster to get some strong points and some digs of his own.

Americablog gives a nose-on description:

You gotta love how well Donohue handles himself. Calling O'Reilly "Billy." Woosh. It's almost not worth commenting on. O'Reilly pretty much concedes the war was a big mistake, has become a big mess, but then says it's "noble" for our boys to stay over there to ensure that Iraqis have a chance at freedom.

Video at Crooks and Liars

Here We Go Again

The Houston Chronicle has a Hurricane Rita blog with stories from the ground.

Disaster Tourism

I admit that since Katrina I have been meaning to get my disaster kit togther, a sort of bourgeois dread mediated by shopping at Costco...

"Because let's be honest. Disaster preparedness is mostly for the middle and upper classes. It is for the informed and the educated, the credit carded and the disposable incomed, the newspaper subscribers and registered voters and people who keep a spare pair of Timberland boots in the trunk of the Range Rover, just in case." (SFGate)

The Music of New Orleans

At Aurgasm.

I Remember Bobby Sands (1954-1981)

Bobby Sands died on May 1, 1981, in a British prison after a 65-day-long hunger strike to protest the conditions under which Irish political prisoners were held. Nine other IRA prisoners died before the hunger strike ended on October 3, 1981. Just a few weeks earlier the imprisoned Sands had been elected MP in a special election. Bobby Sands became a symbol of the IRA and his death gained media attention through out the world. His funeral drew a hundred thousand mourners.

Sands kept a secret diary for the first 17 days of his hunger strike, he had to hide the paper and the pen in his body cavities.

In his last entry he wrote:

I was thinking today about the hunger-strike. People say a lot about the body, but don't trust it. I consider that there is a kind of fight indeed. Firstly the body doesn't accept the lack of food, and it suffers from the temptation of food, and from other aspects which gnaw at it perpetually.

The body fights back sure enough, but at the end of the day everything returns to the primary consideration, that is, the mind. The mind is the most important.

But then where does this proper mentality stem from? Perhaps from one's desire for freedom. It isn't certain that that's where it comes from.

If they aren't able to destroy the desire for freedom, they won't break you. They won't break me because the desire for freedom, and the freedom of the Irish people, is in my heart. The day will dawn when all the people of Ireland will have the desire for freedom to show.

It is then we'll see the rising of the moon.

I was eleven years old when Bobby Sands died. I knew nothing about the IRA, their concerns, their demands or their tactics, but his protest, his steadfastness in the face of death, and his death itself burned into my memory. I was left with a lifelong sympathy for the IRA.

When I read that a large percentage Guantanamo Prisoners have begun a hunger strike, I remember Bobby Sands.

Is FEMA secretly running the war in Iraq?

Billmon on point again:

You may recall that in early August six Marine snipers were ambushed and wiped out in Anbar province, near the insurgent-infested city of Haditha. It was a humiliating blow -- Marine snipers are supposed to hunt, not be hunted -- although it was quickly overshadowed by an even bigger humiliation when 14 Marines riding in an antiquated amphibious vehicle (in the middle of the desert!) were blown up in the same neighborhood.

But the destruction of those Marine sniper teams may have been even more ominous than it appeared at the time. Military analyst William Lind, who has excellent sources inside the Corps, says he's been told that the snipers were attacked and killed by the Iraqi unit they were attached to.

Lind also says he's not been able to confirm that report. But if it's true -- or if other Marines even think its true -- the implications for Iraqification are stark. How do you "stand up" an Army when you can't risk turning your back on the troops once they stand up? As Lind says:

When did irony leave the building?

Now there's a new conservative comic book, with felons as heroes! You just can't make this stuff up.

"LIBERALITY FOR ALL #1 It is 2021, tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of 9/11 It is up to an underground group of bio-mechanically enhanced conservatives led by Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North to thwart Ambassador Usama Bin Laden's plans to nuke New York City...And wake the world from an Orwellian nightmare of United Nations dominated ultra-liberalism. "

It's all about asking the right questions...

Please stop fetishising integration. Equality is what we really need (The Guardian)

Where race is concerned there are, it seems, some words that just don't go together. No matter how many young drunken white men beat each other up over the weekend, there is no such thing as white-on-white crime. No matter how many non-white people flee inner-city neighbourhoods for better schools and services, there is no such thing as "black flight". And no matter how bitter their ethnic divides, white people never engage in "tribal conflict".

Prince Harry: Leading from the Front

"I hope I would not drag my sorry arse through Sandhurst . . . I would not have joined if they had said I could not be in the front line. The last thing I would want to do is for my soldiers to be sent away to Iraq and have me held back at home twiddling my thumbs, thinking what about David, what about Derek or whatever."

Perhaps he could send a note to Jenna and Barbara.

It's All About the Coffee

When Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice isn't buying shoes, she talks with Bill O'Reilly about Iraq. See the video at Crooks and Liars.

Kanye West, The Remix

Click here to listen to the track.

"The cockroaches come out at night"

Just a quote from Dean Nugent, of the Louisiana State Coroner's Department, speaking about the residents of a predominantly black and poor neighborhood in Louisiana, that he was visiting for the first tiem as part of the governmental efforts to recover dead bodies in New Orleans.

Signs Turned to Wonders

"Fuck Bush They Fucking Left Us Here Them Bitches Flooded Us . . . Them Bitches Killed Our People."

The LA Weekly reports that the slogan above was scrawled on the walls of a Houston shelter where displaced New Orleans residents currently reside. It reveals the anger and the disappointment that those folks feel, but it reveals a darker edge that the article also illuminates, a sense that it was not just neglect but deliberate malice and action that flooded New Orleans. Such conspiracy stories make sense in communities that have suffered official neglect for generation.

It seemed to many of the poorer and darker folks whose lives and homes were destroyed ithe wakeke of the storm that the authorities didn't step in until it was too late to help them, and when they arrived it was with rifles drawn to protect the rubble rather than to aid the needy. The National Guard filed in accompanied by the Blackhawk mercenaries-- the new Team America.

"It had become Bush's Baghdad on the Bayou, except that there were no insurgents to speak of."

Ouch! The Rude Pundit on Barbara Bush

Katrina Proves Liberals Were Right All Along

"She's a vicious old kooz, so calmly, mesmerizingly mean that daisies curl their petals for safety and male dogs cower in the corner for fear of losing their balls whenever she walks the streets."

A Headline to Remember

How Bush Blew It
Newsweek, Sept. 19, 2005 issue

Embarrassed!

The parallels bewteen Katrina and Iraq continue:

If anything I`m kind of embarrassed,' said an officer. 'We`re supposed to be telling the Iraqis how to act and this is what`s happening at home?'

And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short

When the social contract fails:

But nothing, in the plethora of grim tales of disaster, compares with a terrible incident recounted to me as the week drew to a close. There was a 380-pound man stranded on the seventh floor of a New Orleans hospital. Unable to get him down five flights of stairs to the second-floor exit, through which other patients were being evacuated onto rescue boats to escape the rising floodwater, a female manager took a shocking decision. She ordered that he be given euthanasia.

A bearded, middle-aged doctor, who is still wearing his green hospital garb, tells me the sad story as he and his colleagues sit at the muddy, squalid refugee-receiving post on New Orleans' I10 Highway. He does not want to give me his name and will not identify the patient out of respect.

But he wants people to know what happened in there. His lower jaw quivers as he recalls the events of Wednesday night.

"We had minutes to get out, and I asked, 'What are we going to do about this guy, because he's a big man. It was going to be tough getting him down those stairs - the elevators weren't working. That woman turned to me and said straight out, 'We're going to help him to heaven'. It makes me want to break down, how that man's life was taken away."

My Two Cents

Just reading about all that has gone on in the past week has been exhausting, I cannot imagine the horror of living through it and surviving. We know that there was lawlessness, but it seems to me that most of the folks in New Orleans just wanted to get out alive, and a few people are not an excuse for blaming the victim or callousness.

While I don't doubt that the lacksidaisical and incompetent way that this crisis was handled by the Federal Government had to do with the value placed on the lives of those who are black poor (and who give neither money nor votes to the Republican party), the response of the Nation, from the governors and states who opened their borders, their coffers and their resources to those displaced, to those individuals who have been donating money and crying out against the indifference of the Cheney administration, show that the United States has come a long way, and that regardless of separations of race, region or class we can see one another in each other and that our government's actions withstanding we do care.

We have to keep up the pressure on those in power and we have to drown out the neo-cons, and racists and apologists for Federal Government incompetence. It was the shame of that outrage that forced the Bush puppet show into action and got something started. But we must not forget New Orleans and never let them forget New Orleans either.

An open letter to the President (from the New Orleans Times Picayune):

We’re angry, Mr. President, and we’ll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That’s to the government’s shame.

Give Us Your Poor, Your Tired, Your Hungry...

Why they didn't all just leave when the evacuation order came down? Poverty limits options, especially in the worst of times. The Washington Post reports:

Living Paycheck to Paycheck Makes Leaving Impossible

"These people look at us and wonder why we stayed behind," said Carmita Stephens. "Well, would they leave their grandparents and children behind? Look around and say, 'See you later'?" She gave a roll of the eyes behind the raised voice.

We have been abandoned by our own country.

Jefferson Parish President, Aaron Broussard, speaks out on Meet the Press:

"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."

Let the Games Begin

With the impending Roberts confirmation and the destruction on New Orleans, the Cheney Administration gets another chance to show what it's made of.

Chief Justice Rehnquist Dies at His Home

Survival

'It reminds me of Baghdad in the worst of times' (The Guardian)

A man walked past the bodies dragging a pallet loaded with big bottles of ginger ale, some plates and a frying pan. To the rest of America watching the tragedy unfold on their televisions, he was one of the looters, denounced by President Bush.

But to the people inside the convention centre, he was one of a band of heroes keeping them alive. "The people who were going into the stores would give us water and food, said Edna Harris, Henry Carr's aunt. "There would be ladies with babies and they had no milk, and these guys would break in and bring them milk."

Leadership, Again

Putting aside a long history of differences, Fidel offered a ship load of 1100 medical doctors to help out in New Orleans.

Whose Reality Is It?

FEMA Director Brown seems to have flown in from another planet. CNN reports:

The big disconnect on New Orleans
The official version; then there's the in-the-trenches version

Follow the Money

Sooner or later with the Cheney Administration, all roads lead to Halliburton. And by the way where is Dick?

Leadership

Ray Nagin, Mayor of New Orleans has been on the front lines of the storm. He speaks plainly and clearly. Transcript at CNN.

Finally, Let's talk about the Elephant

The New York Times and The Washington Post point our what should have been obvious from the beginning.

From Margins of Society to Center of the Tragedy

If Sept. 11 showed the power of a nation united in response to a devastating attack, Hurricane Katrina reveals the fault lines of a region and a nation, rent by profound social divisions."


'To Me, It Just Seems Like Black People Are Marked'

In the South, the issue of race -- black, white -- always seems as ready to come rolling off the tongue as a summer whistle. A black Guard unit, passing them by. Something Carter won't soon forget.

The Face of the Enemy

The End of the World as We Know It?

Just one disater and it all begins to come apart at the seams. Now we have the "Iraqification" of New Orleans. One can only be frightened and horrified to read:

"They have M-16s and they're locked and loaded," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said of 300 National Guard troops who landed in New Orleans fresh from duty in Iraq. "These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so, and I expect they will."

Compassion

Billmon provides a list of Charitable Organizations.

Intelligent Design?

Since it seems that anything can pass for science these days we need to ask:
But Is There Intelligent Spaghetti Out There?