How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Intelligent Design

Dahlia Lithwick has written one of the funniest things I've ever read about the debate over "Intelligent Design." Here's a taste.

Let's face it: The problem with science has always been that each new discovery unleashes thousands of new questions and ambiguities. So really, the more we discover new stuff, the stupider we get. Clearly, that isn't working. ID says we shouldn't bother ourselves with resolving scientific inconsistencies or untangling puzzles. We should recognize that what God really wants is for us just to stop learning.

If you think ID belongs in the science classroom, you won't find it so funny. But if you think that ID is nothing more than gussied-up creation myths in a pseudo-science wrapper, I guarantee a guffaw or two.

The Feinstein Standard

Regarding the Senate vote yesterday to confirm John Roberts to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Washington Post reports:

"The pivotal appointment is the next one," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who opposed Roberts. "The comparison obviously is with O'Connor," she said, in contrast to the reliably conservative Rehnquist.

Be careful, senator. This kind of standard may serve Democrats' short-term interests, but, in the long run, it could come back to haunt liberals.

Suppose a Democrat is in the White House 15 to 20 years from now (the very notion may seem remote, but indulge me for just a moment). If Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia were to step down from the court, could conservative senators point to the Feinstein standard and insist that the next nominee should have a judicial or constitutional philosophy comparatively similar to Scalia and Thomas?

Even if there weren't long-term political pitfalls to the Feinstein standard, I have a hard time seeing the intellectual rationale for insisting that a new justice must reflect the views of the justice he or she is replacing.

If Feinstein believes Bush's next high court nominee holds views that would unduly curtail civil rights, the right of privacy, and other individual rights, then she can (and she should) vote against this nominee. But don't claim justification by pointing to Sandra Day O'Connor as an appropriate template for the new nominee.

Perhaps the Pen Truly Is Mightier Than the Sword

The world's biggest asshole is blaming an editorial in a Texas newspaper for why he was indicted by a grand jury yesterday. According to the AP, Tom DeLay blames an editorial published by the Austin American-Statesman for pushing a Texas prosecutor to pursue the criminal indictment against him:

"It was this renewed political pressure in the waning days of his hollow investigation that led this morning's action," DeLay said Wednesday after a grand jury indicted him on a criminal conspiracy charge.

... DeLay said that prosecutor Ronnie Earle had said as recently as two weeks ago that DeLay was not the target or focus of his probe into election spending in the 2002 state legislative campaigns.

"Soon thereafter, Mr. Earle's hometown newspaper ran a biting editorial about his investigation, rhetorically asking what the point had been, after all, if I wasn't to be indicted,'' DeLay said.

... Arnold Garcia, editorial page editor for the American-Statesman, said the newspaper was doing its job in writing the [Sept. 11 editorial]. "We're commenting on an item of public interest,'' Garcia said. "But you should never forget the newspaper didn't indict Mr. DeLay. A grand jury did."

The editorial said Earle and the grand jury may have good reason for indicting just organizations, but "time is running out, and on the face of it, the felony indictments returned last week against the Texas Association of Business and the now nonexistent Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee are disappointing."

The American-Statesman posted the Sept. 11 editorial on its Web site Wednesday, along with a new editorial commenting on the indictment and on Delay's remarks.

"DeLay was not mentioned by name, nor was there an allusion to him," the new editorial states. "It is either DeLay's hubris or his conscience that leads him to think that the editorial targeted him."

Conscience? Nah, can't be. Doctors must have removed that organ from DeLay's body when they took out his appendix.

Two Reasons I'm Proud to Live in Amsterdam

1. This was built with money from city, provincial, and national governments, and the first pile was driven by the Christian Democrat alderman for the arts.
2. When I was in the Dam square the other evening, just near the royal palace and in an area whose heavy pedestrian traffic includes people with plenty of food and drink on board late at night, this was in pristine condition.

More info (English available on some pages of this site).

He Is a Great Quarterback -- Speaking of Zocor ....

It's all about transition. When a pharmaceutical sales rep wants to move his company's drugs, it takes more than just wining and dining physicians at chic, high-priced restaurants. It requires that sales reps find a way to connect virtually any comment a doctor makes to their drugs.

The following 3 scenarios are from course materials used by the drug giant Merck & Co. to train sales representatives from 1999 to 2004. Courtesy of Harper's magazine:

Scenario 1

Physician says: “What a nice restaurant! I hear that the food is wonderful.”

Possible rep response: “You’re right, it is. I’d only arrange the best for you. I’m sure you feel the same way about your patients. When you decide to prescribe an antihypertensive, what characteristics make one product stand out from another?”

Scenario 2

Physician says: “I love coming to this restaurant. It has a great menu.”

Possible rep response: “That’s one of the reasons I chose this place. You can get boiled lobster or a venison steak. Speaking of a great menu, what concerns you about the HMOs you’re dealing with, limiting your choices when choosing a specific drug therapy for a patient?”

Scenario 3

Physician says: “What a great football game yesterday. Did you see how effective Drew Bledsoe was in the fourth quarter? That guy is amazing.”

Possible rep response: “Bledsoe is effective on so many levels. He’s a leader, you feel safe with him carrying the ball, and he’s a proven winner. You know who else that sounds like? Zocor, a market leader with an eight-year safety record, proven to save the lives of your patients. Physician, what concerns do you have about Zocor leading your team in the fight against congenital heart disease?”

I don't think I could give any of these responses without suddenly breaking out in laughter. Which is probably why I'm not a pharmaceutical sales rep.

Unprecedented

This Pennsylvania ruling is incredible on many levels.

In a groundbreaking ruling in support of the rights of gay and lesbian parents, a court in Pennsylvania on Tuesday said the lesbian partner of the biological parent of twins should have primary custody of the children. The decision, by the superior court, upheld a lower court ruling that Patricia Jones would provide a better home than her ex-partner, Ellen Boring, even though Boring is the biological mother of the twins. "We believe that the record supports a finding by clear and convincing evidence that the best interests of the children are served by granting primary physical custody to Jones, for a number of reasons discussed in the trial court's opinion," a unanimous three-judge panel stated in its opinion.
...
Jones and Boring were partners for 14 years. During that time they planned a family, resulting in twins for whom both Jones and Boring served as caregivers. After the couple split up in 2001, the trial court found that Jones had parental rights to the children and awarded joint custody to both mothers, giving primary physical custody to Boring. Later Jones filed for primary physical custody, citing Boring's history of contempt in observing the visitation schedule set by the court and her attempts to unilaterally remove the children from Pennsylvania. The court found "convincing reasons" that being in Jones's custody would be in the best interest of the children and awarded her primary physical custody. That ruling was appealed by Boring, contending that as she was the children's biological mother and former primary custodian, the children could not be removed from her custody without a finding she is unfit, a very high standard. The superior court of Pennsylvania found that argument to be invalid and upheld the lower court's decision to grant custody to Jones.

It is in state and lower level courts that the future of gay and lesbian family law is being decided, on a case-by-case basis. It's always nice to see judges prevent a vindictive parent from using their children to punish the other parent, although in this case it's extra special.

Pat Robertson's Foot Discovered To Be Lodged Permanently in Mouth

There has been a lot of blame going around for Katrina. Some have said it was God's way of preventing Southern Decadence, others have said it was punishment for abortion, has sometihng to do with "intelligent design," while still others have have had a more generic approach and laid the blame at the feet of "sin."

However, you have to hand it to Pat Robertson for thinking completely outside the box and coming up with the most convoluted warning message from God ever. Who is at fault for both Katrina and 9/11? Ellen Degeneres for hosting the Emmys.

"By choosing an avowed lesbian for this national event, these Hollywood elites have clearly invited God's wrath," Robertson said on "The 700 Club" on [9/5/05]. "Is it any surprise that the Almighty chose to strike at Miss Degeneres's hometown?"

Robertson also noted that the last time Degeneres hosted the Emmys, in 2001, the September 11 terrorism attacks took place shortly before the ceremony.“This is the second time in a row that God has invoked a disaster shortly before lesbian Ellen Degeneres hosted the Emmy Awards,” Robertson explained to his approximately one million viewers. “America is waiting for her to apologize for the death and destruction that her sexual deviance has brought onto this great nation.”

Robertson added that other tragedies of the past several years can be linked to Degeneres’ growing national prominence. September, 2003, for example, is both the month that her talk show debuted and when insurgents first gained a foothold in Iraq following the successful March invasion. “Now we know why things took a turn for the worse,” he explained.

OK, while this is a parody, but who can tell anymore? I'm starting to wonder if Pat Robertson's is the man behind the Weekly World News.

What is Denny Smoking?

Hastert wants Dreier to take over DeLay's duties?

First of all, there are only a handful of known gay republicans in congress-- Rep. David Dreier(CA) is one of them-- he lives with this Chief of Staff for pete's sake!

I can practically hear the Family Research Council howling over the appointment of Dreier from more than 10 blocks away.

Update: Dreier's 24-year record on gay rights issues is, as expected, bad. Last year back he received the "Roy Cohn Award."

Update, part deux: I guess someone took Denny's hash pipe away. As mentioned in the comments, Dreier's name was initially floated then rescinded after a big closed door meeting yesterday. Majority Whip Roy Blunt (MO) was tapped instead. Allegedly there was right-wing pressure to reject Dreier for the top post. Hmmmm. Wonder why that would be?

*IF* Dreier was rejected as temporary speaker because he's gay it certainly serves him right considering that he voted against the Employment Non-Discriminiation Act.

Mission Accomplished

Someone other than us referred to DeLay as "The World's Biggest Asshole."

I have never been so proud.

Double-Ended Probe

First DeLay's indictment, now Frist is being formally investigated.

Both leaders of the GOP are getting uncomfortably, publicly probed at the same time.

If only they could make it a triple-- I'd really like to see Rove probed. All we need is the Valerie Plame investigation to open up wide today and the whole news cycle would turn into political porn, providing us all with the political equivalent of a wet dream.

Bush: We're Ready for the Insurgents, But They're Still Gonna Kick Our Ass

... or, mostly, the asses of ordinary Iraqi citizens. ABC News reports on today's Rose Garden statement by President Bush:

President Bush on Wednesday warned there will be an upsurge in violence in Iraq before next month's voting, but said the terrorists will fail. "Our troops are ready for them," he said.

Huh?

If U.S. troops "are ready for" the insurgents, then why will the insurgents be successful in raising the level of violence?

It's one thing to say our troops will respond swiftly when violence happens, but to say we're ready for the insurgents is to mislead the American people. We're no more ready for the insurgents than Michael Brown was ready for Katrina.

World's Biggest Asshole INDICTED

DeLay indicted on conspiracy charges
House majority leader's position in jeopardy.
By Laylan Copelin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, September 28, 2005

A Travis County grand jury today indicted U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay on one count of criminal conspiracy, jeopardizing the Sugar Land Republican's leadership role as the second most powerful Texan in Washington, D.C.

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.

Hey, Tom, maybe this is just God's special way of sending you a very personal message-- "you're fired."

Will the Select Committee Finish Its Job?

In a column on ex-FEMA Director Michael Brown's appearance Tuesday before the House Select Committee on Katrina, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank writes:

Rep. Gene Taylor, one of two Democrats who ignored the boycott, said Brown was in way over his head. "You folks fell on your face. You get an F-minus in my book," he attested. The Mississippian added: "Maybe the president made a very good move when he asked you to leave your job."

I agree. Of course, if Rep. Taylor's assessment is accurate, then one could also say that the president made a very bad move when he originally asked Brown to take the job.

Like Milbank, I thought the members on the committee did "a heck of a job on Brownie yesterday." But the shortcomings in the federal response to Katrina can't all be laid at Brown's feet. The select committee has more to do before its job is truly finished.

Brown said he repeatedly talked with officials at the White House about FEMA's needs as it responded to the Katrina destruction. One of the White House officials named by Brown was the president's chief of staff, Andrew Card. Will members of the select committee have the balls to insist that Card appear before them?

And what about Michael Chertoff, who heads the Homeland Security Department? As Brown testified yesterday, it was Chertoff who took a saw to FEMA's budget. Those funding cuts -- probably approved by some of the very members of Congress who on Tuesday gleefully poked and prodded Brown for answers -- may have undermined FEMA's ability to respond.

Yes, the select committee did "a heck of a job" on Brown, but its job is far from completed.

Pending Indictment for the World's Biggest Asshole?

I'm not holding my breath, however, if DeLay gets indicted and consequently dethroned there's going to be one helluva party at my house!

Conspiracy charge a possibility for DeLay

Travis County grand jury to weigh indicting House leader, lawyers say

By Laylan Copelin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, September 28, 2005

U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's leadership post is on the line today as a Travis County grand jury is expected to consider indicting DeLay on conspiracy charges, several lawyers familiar with the investigation said.

The charges would stem from the DeLay's role in using corporate money in the 2002 elections. State law generally bans corporate money from campaign activities.

"I wouldn't have expected this a year ago," one Austin criminal defense lawyer said. "It's quite a turnaround if it happens."
...
An indictment would not force DeLay to resign as a member of Congress, but the GOP's rules would demand that he resign his post as majority leader.

Now if only Frist gets indicted then we'd have both GOP leaders looking like the sleazebags that we know they are and 2006 could be a "throw the bums out" election...hey, a girl can hope.

Straight Fokkers

Robert de Niro and Ben Stiller managed two pretty successful comedies based in part on juvenile humor stemming from the fact that Stiller's character's surname was Fokker.

Fokker is a Dutch name (the Red Baron flew a Fokker biplane). The Dutch word fokker means "breeder," and the corresponding verb is fokken. Example: Ik fok honden means "I breed dogs."

A few years back, it was hip in some circles to refer to heterosexuals as "breeders."

Put these disparate facts together and you realize that we heteros are just a bunch of straight fokkers.

Anarchy and the UN

Here is the weekly post from the CFD:

As Darfur descends into anarchy, the United Nations appears unable to do any more than express concerns and continue to ask the parties involved to cease their violent attacks.

After rebels attacked and took control of the town of Sheiria last week, the Sudanese army said it was prepared to retake the town, to which the rebels replied that they would "repulse anything from the Sudanese government's army."

The upsurge in violence forced thousands more out of the villages, swelling the ranks of the internally displaced that already numbers nearly 2 million.

As the violence was raging, even the UN's own Special Representative Jan Pronk, a man who tends to see everything in Sudan through rose-colored glasses, was forced to admit that the violence was spiraling out of control. He was joined by the US government, which stated that the "uptick in violence ... is of concern to us" and the UN's genocide advisor, Juan Mendez, who acknowledged that Khartoum had done little to disarm militias or end the "culture of impunity" that exists in Darfur.

Pronk went on to state that the UN must give the Sudanese government and rebels an ultimatum to compel them to reach some sort of peace agreement and even made the startling admission that, thus far, the UN has utterly failed to deal with Darfur

Pronk said that when the Darfur conflict began U.N. humanitarian officials agitated for the Security Council to take up the conflict, which it refused to do.

A "massive force" was needed [in 2003] then to guarantee security but instead several thousand African Union troops and monitors had to carry the burden. And now the council needed to plan for how to keep the peace in case a peace deal was signed.

Pronk was quoted elsewhere as saying

He said the war situation in Sudan was "everybody’s failure" and could have been avoided if the international community had acted quickly.

How could the present day situation have been avoided?

"I think there should have been intervention in 2003," Pronk said, adding that while the occurrence of genocide in the country was debatable, "There was mass slaughter of people. It needed humanitarian intervention."

Of course, the international community did not act quickly, nor are they acting quickly now.

In fact, while Darfur burned, the BBC reported that American and British intelligence officials, along with representatives of the UN, China and 12 African nations were in Khartoum discussing cooperation on counter-terrorism operations in the region.

Hosting the conference is part of a sustained diplomatic push by Sudan to shake off its pariah status ... When the opportunity for this second regional conference on counter-terrorism came up, Sudan competed for the right to host it ... The decision of the CIA to agree to come to Sudan shows the pragmatism of the intelligence community against the continuing political desire of America to punish Sudan for what has happened in Darfur.

Khartoum continues to work to "shake off its pariah status," with Sudanese Ambassador Khidir Haroun Ahmed publishing an op-ed in the Washington Times today claiming that "After two decades of brutal civil war, Sudan is emerging as a reminder that engagement, dialogue and intensive diplomacy can resolve seemingly intractable problems and permit a country to look to the future with optimism."

Meanwhile, the violence and anarchy Khartoum unleashed is now spilling over into neighboring Chad, a country that is already host to an estimated 200,000 refugees from Darfur

A group of unidentified armed men in military uniform crossed into Chad from Sudan early on Monday, killing 36 herders and stealing livestock, the Chadian government said.

The violence, in addition to threatening the people of Darfur, is also threatening the relief work that sustains them, as U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland noted yesterday

"If it (the violence) continues to escalate, we may not be able to sustain our operations for 2.5 million people requiring life-saving assistance," he said, adding: "In Darfur, it (aid distribution) could all end tomorrow. It is as serious as that."

As Eric Reeves never fails to remind us, in December 2004, Egeland warned that 100,000 people could die a month if humanitarian organizations are forced to suspend operations in Darfur.

Despite all of this, Pronk still managed to recently declare that progress was being made on implementing the Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the North and South and on efforts to reach peace in Darfur.

Such a statement is utterly feckless and shameful.

As Gerald Caplan, author of "Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide," wrote last week

But what we are learning from Darfur, which we never remotely imagined, is that even naming a genocide is an utterly inconsequential exercise in hot air ... despite the apparent concern of many western leaders, despite the pressure from elements of civil society, the catastrophe in Darfur is explicitly allowed to continue ... As always, everything takes precedence over the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands of distant, exotic others. It won't be the last time."

After two years, 400,000 deaths, and an estimated 3.5 million now entirely dependent on humanitarian aid, it must be stated that the UN and every one of its member nations have failed the people of Darfur and, in all likelihood, will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Those Tender-Footed Democrats

On his blog, John Moltz speaks for a lot of us with this post on Tuesday about Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and the HCA stock sale controversy:

A Senate Democrat, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said: “This doesn’t help Bill Frist. It just looks bad. We’ll see what happens.”

Writes Moltz:

Another gutsy Democrat speaks out!

(I can understand not wanting to put your foot in your mouth by claiming Frist has an ethics problem before he’s been indicted or something, but WTF do you need anonymity for to say that?! That’s obvious! Oh, these tender-footed Democrats we have!)

More Evidence of Post-Katrina Hype

I posted on this a several days ago -- the revelation that so much of what was reported during the first 36 hours of post-Katrina media coverage was hyped or imagined. Now, the Associated Press has offered yet more proof of the gap between rumor and reality:

On September 1, with desperate Hurricane Katrina evacuees crammed into the convention center, Police Chief Eddie Compass reported: "We have individuals who are getting raped; we have individuals who are getting beaten." Five days later, he told Oprah Winfrey that babies were being raped.

On the same show, Mayor Ray Nagin warned: "They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."

The ugliest reports -- children with slit throats, women dragged off and raped, corpses piling up in the basement -- soon became a searing image of post-Katrina New Orleans.

The stories ... were repeated by public officials. Many news organizations, including The Associated Press, carried the witness accounts and official pronouncements, and in some cases later repeated the claims as fact, without attribution.

But now, a month after the chaos subsided, police are re-examining the reports and finding that many of them have little or no basis in fact.

They have no official reports of rape and no eyewitnesses to sexual assault. The state Department of Health and Hospitals counted 10 dead at the Superdome and four at the convention center. Only two of those are believed to have been murdered.

One of those victims -- found at the Superdome -- appears to have been killed elsewhere before being brought to the stadium ...

Oil Prices and a Trip Down Memory Lane

Five years ago, during the summer of 2000, gas prices spiked upward (although nowhere near the level they've reached today). Back then, Iran-Contra alumnus Oliver North wrote a column in which he took shots at presidential candidate Al Gore, saying that consumers are "getting 'Gored' " at the pump.

North wrote:

Truth be told, the price of gas is high because the Clinton-Gore administration has no influence with the OPEC cartel and because -- and this is important -- they want higher gas prices.

In his monumental tome, "Earth in the Balance," Gore extols the virtues of higher gasoline prices as the way to get rid of the evil internal combustion engine ...

So if those are the two reasons why gas prices rise, then which explains the situation in 2005, Ollie? Does the Bush administration have even less influence over OPEC than Clinton-Gore? Or does the Bush gang want higher gas prices?

In this 2000 presidential debate, Bush assured Americans that oil was "an issue I know a lot about." If so, it didn't make him a success in the oil business. And, if so, Bush's knowledge has not proven all that beneficial for the average American.

Not Your Father's Military

The military has admitted that they have had a secret policy in place to run around "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" during wartime. Too bad it's in direct conflict with the first policy-- people who are out aren't supposed to be able to serve.

National Guard troops and reservists who come out [of the closet] to their superiors are routinely sent to serve in Iraq under a policy designed to prevent soldiers from falsely claiming they are gay to avoid duty, an Army spokesperson said last week. "If a soldier 'tells,' they still have to go to war and the homosexual issue is postponed until they return to the U.S. and the unit is demobilized," said Kim Waldron, a civilian employee at U.S. Army Forces Command at Fort McPherson, Ga. LGBT advocacy groups have long maintained such a policy was in place, but Pentagon officials had denied it.

Don't worry, we'll dishonorably discharge you after you come back from serving your country and fighting in the war. (Well, if you come back.)

So, the theory is that gays can't be in the military because they make other people uncomfortable, they're bad for morale, and so on. Right? This exposes the rank hypocrisy and idiocy of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Gays have and do serve and the military knows it, accepts it, but then treats them like crap afterwards.

Monotheism Has Problems

Rude Pundit responds to an e-mail he received from the Family Research Council that warned Americans that Katrina is clearly God's way of sending us all a telegram that we don't worship Him enough.

But it is worthless to argue with people who think a mystical sky wizard farted giant anus-looking storms to fuck up the Gulf Coast twice. It's worthless to ask why God decided to kick the asses of the poorest people, black and white, while leaving the French Quarter, where all the sex, booze, and feather queen fashion shows reign supreme, relatively unscathed.

It's because the wacky God of fundamentalists is as inconsistent and incomprehensible as a pet ferret that's gotten into your meth stash. God's hatin', he's lovin', he's smitin', he's depositin' great gobs o' god jizz into a teenage virgin. Really, this version of God's got quite the multiple personality syndrome. Man, the ancient cultures had it all over Christians in this god shit: instead of tryin' to come up with one all-encompassing God, they had all those many deities to blame shit on. The Mayans had kick-ass gods, like Ah-Puch, the most vicious god of death; Ixtab, the goddess of suicide; Cizin, the earthquake god; and Ixchel, the moon goddess. So you didn't have to fit disaster and happiness into one god figure. You could blame anyone you wanted. It's so much more convenient. It's so much less mind-blowing. And it doesn't require the faux-cryptic "we cannot know the ways of God." If it's a fuckin' earthquake god, you know what that bastard does.

But let's say, for a moment, that the Christian God is "warning" America, that it's a whole Sodom and Gomorrah deal. Maybe we could say that God's saying that it's time to work on the whole global warming thing. Maybe we could say that launching a big-time God attack on an oil production center says it's time to start buildin' more hybrid cars. Hell, maybe we could say that there's worse sins than tossin' a few coins on a craps table while gettin' fellated by your boyfriend.

Generally speaking, if I want someone to like me more I don't try to convince them by killing a lot of people and destroying their entire lives. You'd think that God would be smart enough to know that hurricanes are probably one of the worst methods possible to make friends and influence people. Anyone who believes this kind of thoughtless nonsense needs to either go to a doctor and get some help and/or promise the rest of us they won't breed.

Underreported Katrina Story?

It's one thing to be abandoned, it's another entirely to be both locked up and abandoned. From my buddy David over at his anti-death penalty blog.

As Hurricane Katrina began pounding New Orleans, the sheriff's department abandoned hundreds of inmates imprisoned in the city’s jail, Human Rights Watch said today.

Inmates in Templeman III, one of several buildings in the Orleans Parish Prison compound, reported that as of Monday, August 29, there were no correctional officers in the building, which held more than 600 inmates. These inmates, including some who were locked in ground-floor cells, were not evacuated until Thursday, September 1, four days after flood waters in the jail had reached chest-level.

“Of all the nightmares during Hurricane Katrina, this must be one of the worst,” said Corinne Carey, researcher from Human Rights Watch. “Prisoners were abandoned in their cells without food or water for days as floodwaters rose toward the ceiling.”
...
“They left us to die there,” Dan Bright, an Orleans Parish Prison inmate told Human Rights Watch at Rapides Parish Prison, where he was sent after the evacuation.

As the water began rising on the first floor, prisoners became anxious and then desperate. Some of the inmates were able to force open their cell doors, helped by inmates held in the common area. All of them, however, remained trapped in the locked facility.

“The water started rising, it was getting to here,” said Earrand Kelly, an inmate from Templeman III, as he pointed at his neck. “We was calling down to the guys in the cells under us, talking to them every couple of minutes. They were crying, they were scared. The one that I was cool with, he was saying ‘I'm scared. I feel like I'm about to drown.' He was crying.”

Some inmates from Templeman III have said they saw bodies floating in the floodwaters as they were evacuated from the prison. A number of inmates told Human Rights Watch that they were not able to get everyone out from their cells.

Not only did the government fail to help get the poor, free people out of the city, but they left prisoners locked up in a flooding prison without food or water? Think this qualifies as cruel and unusual? The government's systematic, comprehensive failure to adequately prepare for a hurricane people have been openly concerned about for decades is astounding.

Ex-FEMA Director Tries to Spin the Agency's Role

The New York Times reports on former FEMA Director Michael Brown's appearance before a congressional panel today:

... Brown told Congress on Tuesday he made ''specific mistakes'' in leading the initial federal government response to Hurricane Katrina. But Brown also blamed state and local officials for government failures.

... He suggested that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had gotten a bum rap because many people incorrectly believe it serves as something of a federal rapid-response force.

Don't worry, Mr. Brown. Recent events have shattered any lingering belief by the public that FEMA plays a "rapid-response" role.

I can't imagine where the media and the American people would have gotten the impression that FEMA played a rapid-response role. Unless, umm ..... maybe it was from this FEMA update, released last September:

FEMA Prepares for Hurricane Frances
FEMA Region 4 Operations Center (ROC) has been activated and will assume management of the Federal response and recovery activities in Florida effective 8:00 a.m. today. The Emergency Response Team National (ERT-N)-RED is on alert ... One Emergency Response Team-Advance (ERT-A) has deployed to Tallahassee ... Three Rapid Needs Assessment Teams have deployed to Orlando ... Ten Mobile Disaster Recovery Centers are staged in Florida for a rapid response.

Or perhaps it was from this FEMA news release in July about Hurricane Dennis:

Disaster Medical Assistance Teams (DMATs) hasten to the scene, providing a rapid-response element to supplement local health care.

Or maybe it was from this FEMA report:

More than ten rapid response teams and two Mitigation Assessment Teams were deployed (in Florida last year) to document observations and recommendations (about hurricane relief efforts).

"... the New York Times Calls It More Hilarious Than a Mushroom Cloud Over Denver"

Well, actually, the N.Y. Times said no such thing about this film, but at least I got your attention. In The New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg writes about a film that opened recently at an auditorium on Manhattan's East Side:

The film, “Last Best Chance,” was a bit unusual .... You might even say it isn’t really a movie at all — it just plays one on TV. Set in the near future, it takes the form of a slick international suspense thriller, the kind that cuts from a rainswept warehouse in a bleak corner of the former Soviet empire to a dimly lit White House Situation Room.

It has no sex scenes, no car chases, and no wisecracking sidekicks, and it is only forty-five minutes long, but it lays out a frighteningly plausible narrative of how terrorists might buy or steal the makings of a nuclear bomb, assemble one, smuggle it halfway around the world, and send it on its way to an American city in an S.U.V.

The closest thing to a star in the cast is Fred Thompson, the lawyer turned actor turned Republican senator from Tennessee turned actor again. Thompson plays the President of the United States, and his character is mature, wise, and serious — the one jarringly unrealistic note in the picture.

“Last Best Chance” was made not by a movie studio but by a singularly unraffish indie producer: Nunn’s Nuclear Threat Initiative .... The blurb on its poster comes not from Ebert & Roeper but from Kean & Hamilton — Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the chairman and vice-chairman of the 9/11 Commission. Its grosses are zero. For the past five months, it has been distributed free on DVD.

Now it has been taken up by HBO, which plans to show it repeatedly, beginning on October 17th.

“Last Best Chance” is entertaining, in a grim sort of way, but entertainment is not its raison d’être. Its purpose is to stimulate public support and political pressure on the Bush Administration and Congress to do something serious about the terrifying danger of nuclear terrorism. And this is a scandal

It is scandalous that at this late date, four years after the attacks on New York and Washington, people like (former Senator Sam) Nunn, (Senator Richard) Lugar, and (financier Warren) Buffett feel it necessary to go to such unorthodox lengths to get the attention of Washington’s responsibles.

“Last Best Chance” is a symptom of an immense failure of national, and especially Presidential, leadership. “As short a time ago as nine years or eight years,” Turner said in his remarks after the screening, “I still thought that nuclear weapons, biological and chemical weapons, was an area that the government took care of.”

One of the attendees at the screening was Graham Allison, the founding dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the director of its Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, who held high Pentagon posts under Reagan and Clinton. Allison’s “Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe,” which has just been published in an expanded paperback edition, is the indispensable text on the subject. “Americans are no safer from a nuclear terrorist attack today than we were on September 10, 2001,” he writes.

... In 1991, thanks to the initiative of Senator Lugar and then-Senator Nunn, the United States launched a program aimed at giving the Russians financial and technical help in “locking down” their bombs and other weapons-adaptable nuclear material subject to theft or diversion.

Fourteen years later, half of Russia’s material is still unsecured, and at the present rate the job won’t be finished until 2022. We don’t have that long. If the President cared to make the effort, it could be finished in four years or less.

Also in urgent need of attention are about a hundred civilian laboratories and reactors in dozens of countries, including the United States — all containing bomb-grade material, some protected by no more than a night watchman and a chain-link fence.

... After the September 11th attacks, Condoleezza Rice said that no one had imagined planes being smashed into buildings. After Hurricane Katrina, President Bush said that no one had imagined the breach of the levees. These statements were untrue, of course, but Rice and Bush probably believed them at the time.

What no one can say, or can have said in good faith for many years, is that no one has imagined nuclear terrorism, and not just onscreen.

Mayor: It Was a "Death Trap" .... FEMA: "Effective"

Are there any lessons that federal emergency planners can learn from the latest hurricane that struck the Gulf coast? Apparently not. On NPR's "Morning Edition," that was essentially the response from a FEMA official who was interviewed about Hurricane Rita.

NPR's Steve Inskeep pointed out that soon before Rita hit the coast, fleeing evacuees from southeastern Texas clogged highways heading north of the Houston area, bringing traffic to a complete standstill. Many motorists ran out of gas as their cars waited in the gridlock. The situation prompted Mayor Bill White of Houston to warn that the chaos on northbound freeways was a potential "death trap" if the hurricane hit land and then veered toward the metro area.

Inskeep asked if the highway bottlenecks would lead FEMA to talk with state officials about rethinking future evacuation procedures. The FEMA spokesman's answer: Basically, that's up to the state and local officials. Inskeep then asked for the FEMA spokesman's assessment of the highway gridlock. From his perspective, said the FEMA spokesman, the evacuation seemed to be "effective."

While Texas' highways north of the Houston area were choked with traffic as Rita approached, what was Gov. Rick Perry saying?

"Be calm. Be strong. Say a prayer for Texas."

That's most reassuring, Governor.

I guess effective emergency planning is something we just have to leave up to supernatural beings.

Things Get Testy in the WH Press Room

Ladies and gentlemen! In this corner, the defending champion of dodge-and-deception, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan. In the other corner, an ABC news reporter.

Excerpts from Friday's White House press briefing:

REPORTER: How is it going to help the people of Texas practically prepare for this storm that the President is going to fly in to take a firsthand look at preparations and show support for first responders? How is that going to practically help them do what they have to do?

McCLELLAN: Well, I think we're going to have as minimal a footprint as possible. We're not going to get in the way of the ongoing preparations that are going on. We go out of our way when we travel to make sure that that doesn't happen. The President wants to go in there and be able to thank all those first responders as they are gearing up for the challenges that will be coming shortly thereafter. That's why we're going there first, for a short amount of time, and then going on to Colorado. And it will also give him a chance to see firsthand some of the preparations that are underway on the ground.

REPORTER: But it sounds like a bit of a photo op, one that he'd prefer over playing the guitar at the airport photo op before Katrina.

McCLELLAN: Well, first of all, let's correct the record on that. There was a reporter from your news organization that was backstage during that event. That was an event to go and thank our troops and talk about the war on terrorism. And it was not an event, as you may have portrayed to some people that are watching this out there by this simple statement. It was --

REPORTER: He didn't pick up the guitar while the hurricane was rolling into Louisiana?

McCLELLAN: -- much more than that. The person that was entertaining our troops there presented a gift to the President. So I think you need to make that clear to everybody who's watching this or to your viewers. And it was one of your colleagues at ABC News who was backstage taking a picture of that.

REPORTER: It was a very good picture and I'm proud of her, but the question I have --

McCLELLAN: Yes, but that picture was taken by someone -- hang on, hang on, Terry -- that picture was taken by some people way out of context. And it was portrayed that the President was simply doing that, and that's not the case, as you and I know.

REPORTER: The point was that he was over there and not --

McCLELLAN: As you and I know, I had announced shortly before that, that we were returning the next morning. As you and I know, we had announced the President -- the day before -- all the briefings he was participating in. The President spoke the day before. He spoke that day about the hurricane. So let's just set the record straight.

REPORTER: Fair enough.

The Hot Zone

Yahoo has teamed up with journalist Kevin Sites, who will "spend the next year covering every major global conflict ... in "The Hot Zone."

The first dispatch come from Somalia, where 12 years ago the infamous "Black Hawk Down" incident occurred. Sites does a good job of explaining an oft-ignored point regarding just what had happened in June of 1993 and the role it played in the fury unleashed on the Army Rangers four months later

So much of what many Americans, including myself, know about Somalia comes from watching news coverage of the aftermath of the Battle of Mogadishu, and the chilling image of Somalis dragging a dead American soldier through the streets.

It was a seminal moment for Americans who collectively shook their heads and wondered how Operation Restore Hope, a joint humanitarian effort to protect United Nations relief supplies from falling into the hands of warlords, degenerated into bloody combat.

Historians say the key moment was when the mission shifted from protecting food supplies to capturing Aidid.

A major misstep in the operation, acknowledged even in the U.N.'s own independent inquiry, was a United States-led attack on what was believed to be a safe house in Mogadishu where members of Aidid's Habr Gedir clan were supposedly meeting to plan more violence against U.S. and U.N. forces.

In reality, elders of the clan, not gunmen, were meeting in the house. According to U.N. officials, the agenda (which was advertised in the local newspaper) was to discuss ways to peacefully resolve the conflict between Aidid and the multinational task force in Somalia, and perhaps even to remove Aidid as leader of the clan.

17-minute combat mission

What eventually took place on July 12, 1993, was a 17-minute combat operation in which U.S. Cobra attack helicopters fired 16 TOW missiles and thousands of 20-millimeter cannon rounds into the compound.

When the operation was over and the smoke had cleared, more than 50 of the clan elders, the oldest and most respected in their community, were dead. Many here agree that was the turning point in unifying Somalians against the U.S. and U.N. efforts here.

It would also lead to the deaths of four journalists, killed by angry Somali mobs when they arrived to cover the incident.

This is only the first installment, but I like what I see so far. Giving a journalist dedicated to covering "hot spots" his or her own forum is undoubtedly a good thing and I plan on reading it regularly.

A Quick Update on Bush's War on Terror

From the Harper's Index of Sept. 14:

Number of killed or captured suspects reported so far by U.S. media to be Al Qaeda’s “number 3” man : 4

Minimum number of people convicted on “terrorism-related charges” since 2001, according to Alberto Gonzales in April : 200

Actual number convicted on charges related to terrorism or national security : 39

Can You Name That Judge?

Here are some clues. This judge:

a) graduated 640th in a West Point class of 800.

b) was nicknamed "Captain America" during his stint in Vietnam.

c) can thank a trial of two male strippers for catapaulting him into the public's eye.

d) moved to Australia in the 1980s and worked for several months as a cowboy at a 42,000-acre ranch.

This final clue may give it away:

e) won election to the supreme court in his state by defeating Harold See, whose chief campaign adviser was Karl Rove.

In this month's Atlantic Monthly, staff writer Joshua Green's follows Roy Moore and "the rock" on a nationwide tour. It's an interesting, surreal article -- an almost superfluous description for an article about the "Ten Commandments" judge.

The Protest Against the Iraq War, Poverty, Israel ....

I was glad to know that roughly 100,000 people felt strongly enough about the Iraq war that they chose to gather near the White House on Saturday to protest. Of course, a number of the speakers delivered messages that were either unrelated or only marginally related to the Iraq war. This is how the Left works, unfortunately.

Organizers are so damned afraid of appearing "insensitive" that an anti-Iraq war platform ends up being diverted or hijacked, for example, to speak of "indigenous peoples," slam the World Bank and attack Israel. This is strange timing for a volley of anti-Israeli messages. Didn't Sharon just complete a pullout from Gaza and forcibly remove Israeli settlers who had been living there?

Even if one feels, as I do, that the Israeli settlers shouldn't have been encouraged to live there in the first place, one at least has to applaud the Sharon government's decision as a positive step forward.

One of the speakers at Saturday's anti-war protest was Mohammed Abed, a University of Wisconsin faculty member. It's rather telling that the best criticism that Abed could level at the Gaza withdrawal was that it "allows Israel to ... creat[e] an illusion of reasonableness and political compromise" and that "the (withdrawal) plan satisfies the international community’s yearning for progress in the 'peace process'; at the very least, it looks like a first step in the right direction."

Just as the U.S. government has long held a pro-Israeli bias, a pro-Palestinian bias is de rigueur among the Left. For the Left, acknowledging the shortcomings of both sides of this conflict would complicate the ability to conduct "die-ins" and write messages that fit on a protest sign. But enough about the Middle East.

The organizers of this protest rally should have had plenty of things to say about the Bush administration and its debacle in Iraq. Yet one of the organizers seemed to be reaching. According to the New York Times:

"It's significant that Bush is out of town," said William Dobbs, an organizer of the march. "It shows that he's turned his back on the peace movement, which represents a majority of the American public right now."

On the contrary, all that Bush's absence from Washington "shows" is that the president was nervous as hell that the his administration might (again) be caught with its pants down when Rita hit the Gulf coast. With his approval ratings in the toilet, Bush wanted to be in locations with appropriate photo-ops when Rita struck. No surprise there.

If it took knowing that Bush was out of town for Dobbs to realize that the president is no fan of the peace movement, then Dobbs is rather slow at putting two and two together.

Put it down, Orrin

Here's a thought, if it's rude to talk or play with your cell phone in a restaurant or in a business meeting isn't it obvious that it's even more inappropriate to play with one during Judiciary Hearings? Sheesh.

Screaming on the Inside

A frightening breakdown of cuts proposed by "Operation Offset," from Salon Premium:

The Republicans would freeze funding for the Peace Corps, the Global AIDS Initiative, U.N. peacekeeping operations and a wide variety of third-world development programs; eliminate the EnergyStar program, eliminate grants to states and local communities for energy conservation, reduce federal subsidies for Amtrak, eliminate funding for new light-rail programs and cancel the president's hydrogen fuel initiative; eliminate state grants for safe and drug-free schools because "studies show that schools are among the safest places in the country and relatively drug free"; and eliminate the teen funding portion of Title X, which provides "free and reduced-price contraceptives, including the IUD, the injection drug Depo-Provera, and the morning-after pill" to poor teenagers.

Along the way, they'd find a way to punish -- or simply eliminate -- some of their enemies, real and imagined. They'd cut funding for the District of Columbia, eliminate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, eliminate subsidized student loans for graduate students, terminate the Legal Services Corporation, eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and kill the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Of course, you can't balance the budget on the backs of PBS viewers, grad students and other outside-the-mainstream liberals alone. So the Republican plan also calls for "rational reforms to Defense and Homeland Security." Does this mean cutting weapons systems at the expense of big defense corporations? Well, no. But it does mean closing schools for the children of soldiers, cutting grants for local responders and offering National Guard members the "option" to purchase a less comprehensive healthcare plan.

It only makes sense. The GOP has a choice between making many tiny cuts of small programs they want to get rid of anyways but have lacked the opporutnity, OR they can choose to eliminate a few HUGE items such as Bush's tax cuts or all that famous pork in the transportation bill. Which do we think they're going to choose?

Wake up Call?

It never ceases to amaze me how well the Bush Administration manages to breathe with its head firmly planted in the sand.

Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, said Thursday that he had been warning the Bush administration in recent days that Iraq was hurtling toward disintegration, a development that he said could drag the region into war.

"There is no dynamic now pulling the nation together," he said in a meeting with reporters at the Saudi Embassy here. "All the dynamics are pulling the country apart." He said he was so concerned that he was carrying this message "to everyone who will listen" in the Bush administration.

Prince Saud's statements, some of the most pessimistic public comments on Iraq by a Middle Eastern leader in recent months, were in stark contrast to the generally upbeat assessments that the White House and the Pentagon have been offering.

But in an appearance at the Pentagon on Thursday, President Bush, while once again expressing long-term optimism, warned that the bloodshed in Iraq was likely to increase in the coming weeks.

"Today, our commanders made it clear," he said after a meeting on Iraq with senior military officers, "as Iraqis prepare to vote on their constitution in October and elect a permanent government in December, we must be prepared for more violence."

American commanders have repeatedly warned that insurgents would try to disrupt the voting, as they did before legislative elections in January.

Mr. Bush said that if the United States left Iraq now, it could turn into a haven for terrorists, as Afghanistan was before the fall of the Taliban.

"To leave Iraq now would be to repeat the costly mistakes of the past that led to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001," he said.

Prince Saud, who is in Washington for meetings with administration officials, blamed several American decisions for the slide toward disintegration, though he did not refer to the Bush administration directly.

Primary among them was designating "every Sunni as a Baathist criminal," he said.

Saudi Arabia styles itself as the capital and protector of Sunni Islam, and the prince's remarks - at times harsh and at other moments careful - were emblematic of the conflicted Saudi-American relationship.

A senior administration official, reacting to Prince Saud's remarks, said, "The United States values and respects his view, and we all share a common concern for the future and stability of Iraq." He declined to be identified, under administration policy.

Prince Saud said he met with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last week and added that American officials generally responded to his warnings by telling him that the United States successfully carried off the Iraqi elections and "they say the same things about the constitution" and the broader situation in Iraq now. On Thursday, in fact, the senior administration official said, "The forward movement of the political process is the best answer."
Prince Saud argued: "But what I am trying do is say that unless something is done to bring Iraqis together, elections alone won't do it. A constitution alone won't do it." Prince Saud is a son of the late King Faisal and has been foreign minister for 30 years.

Someone who knows far more than we do is telling us something incredibly important, is Bush listening?

You Think John Roberts is Bad?

London, Part III

I wonder how much play has been given in American media to the rather serious story involving British troops in Basra, in the relatively calm part of Iraq the Brits have been occupying since the war. If you don't know, the Iraqi president has acknowledged that the police force is riddled with insurgents and insurgent sympathisers, and a couple of British soldiers who had been put into jail were handed over by the jailers to the insurgents. It's really a big story, but I wonder whether the American press will cover it much since it doesn't involve Americans--even though it has serious implications for the American zone and for the American project of supposedly training the Iraqi security forces so that they can take over and we can leave.

I ask because of how high on the agenda the news from the U.S. has been. The Katrina story was the top on the Dutch TV news for days before the hurricane hit. I was watching interviews on Dutch TV with the New Orleans mayor regarding evacuation two days before the hurricane arrived. Naturally, after the horrifying scenes that followed Katrina's landfall, Rita has been the lead story on the Dutch and British news for quite a while already.

When you're an expat, one of the things that brings home to you how important our country is is how much attention everyone else pays to it--especially as compared to how much attention we pay to everyone else. As a program (or should I say programme) I saw here on Tuesday evening regarding anti-Americanism in Britain put it, perhaps what really pisses off Europeans is the fact that Americans, generally speaking, think Europe is irrelevant in today's world.

London, Part II

Near Leicester Square last night, I walked past a stand selling T-shirts. A lot were variations on a theme stemming from what's referred to here as 7/7, namely the bombings on the Tube a couple of months ago. The shirts have the familiar Tube symbol, but where the name of the station should go, there's a message like: "Still not afraid" or "al who?" The idea obviously being that we're going to go on living normally, and you can't make us stop.

Then there was the shirt with a frightening-looking silhouetted figure and the legend: "Kill Bush."

Now, I don't think there's anything inconsistent with taking a stand against the terrorists and also loathing Bush. After all, that's pretty much how I view things. While Bush was busy making sure that Americans in places that foreign terrorists have never heard of would stay afraid, I was staying in lower Manhattan, raising kids there, working across the street from the great mountain of rubble that used to be the WTC, and so on. And I think Bush is--well, if you read this blog, you know what I think.

But that T-shirt was so far out of bounds that I was astonished--and if you've lived in New York and Amsterdam for the past decade, it takes a bit to astonish you. It wasn't funny (not that it was meant to be), it wasn't appropriate, it wasn't...for once, I found myself at a loss for words. And, as an American, I have to say I took it as a bit of a personal afront to see that shirt for sale on a foreign street.

There is a line. And that went way across it.

London, Part I

Hello from London, where I spent all of last week (M-F, I mean) and will be from W-F this week. Tip: if you don't want to feel old, don't go somewhere you used to hang out when you were young. I have some very, very fond memories of the summer of '88, when my then-girlfriend, with whom I'd been going out for only a few months (she's now Mrs. California) and I lived in a small flat with 7 (!) other kids from Ireland, France, England, and the U.S., did secretarial work during the days, researched Mrs. C's senior thesis at the British Library and the Fawcett women's library in East London when we could, and hung around Leicester Square the rest of the time. I strolled over that way last night and had supper in Soho (sadly, it wasn't raining, as it almost always seems to be in London, so there was no point in going to Lee Ho Fook's and getting the beef chow mein). It seemed to me that no two people on the street put together would add up to my age.

When did this happen?

Clinton v. Gore?

This would be very interesting.

AS Senator Hillary Clinton ratchets up her attacks on President Bush, some Democrats think they smell an explanation: the threat of a 2008 Al Gore presidential bid that could come at her from the left on Iraq.
The former vice president is suddenly re-emerging as a vocal and visible Bush-basher — he's slated to star at a Democratic National Committee fund-raiser for big donors in Washington next Tuesday.

"He's keeping a very strong public profile. He was the first major Democrat to oppose the Iraq war. He's keeping in touch around the country and doing a lot of speeches. You don't do all that if your goal is to play celebrity golf," says a Democratic fund-raiser.

A top Dem strategist adds: "Americans love comebacks and Gore could come back as a real human being instead of a wooden guy. He could come back as the new Nixon — somebody who went into the wilderness and found himself."

No wonder Dems are having trouble winning elections, our own strategists are calling Gore the "new Nixon." (pounding head on desk)

How do I feel about Gore running again? As big of a fan as I am of recycling, I do wish we could find some fresh faces. But if we don't I think Gore should run again. I like him about 10 times more than I ever liked Kerry and he already won once. If people wake up and decide they want someone who stands for good, reliable government, Gore might just kick ass. Maybe by the time 2008 comes around people will be looking for a smart, well-informed leader instead of a shallow, nationalistic cowboy. Maybe people will be yearning for a guy who reminds them of the Clinton years who isn't married to Clinton.

My only concern about Gore is this-- one would hope that he and his handlers would have learned something about the GOP Slime Machine so it won't just be a rehash of the same old bullshit from 2000. Yeah, I'm not holding my breath.

You're F'ing Kidding Me

According to the Houston Chronicle's blog there are still old, poor black people who can't evacuate from Houston?!

Hortense Davis is waiting at the Houston Greyhound station for a bus that may not be coming.

The 73-year-old woman called the Red Cross today to find out what she should do about the storm. She said she was told to go to the bus station and tell them she had no money and needs to get out of the city.

"But when I got here, they said they couldn't help me," she said. "So now I'm just sitting here."

Davis is trying to evacuate to Lufkin because she is scared hurricane Rita is going to causing major flooding in Houston.

"I'm stuck here," she said. "I don't have anywhere else to go."

Hundreds of people packed the downtown Greyhound station tonight hoping to get a ticket to safety.

Carolyn Rivera, 62, said she bought a bus ticket to Dallas today, but when she arrived at the station she discovered all the buses were filled. So she called her daughter and the two women plan to drive to Arkansas tonight.

"There are so many people and so few buses," she said.

Rivera said she has been through two hurricanes and numerous tropical storms, but Rita has her worried.

"I think this one is going to be stronger than those others," she said.

Sheesh. It was bad enough when this happened during Katrina, but now? I hope that this story is no longer true and Hortence and anyone else in Rita endangered areas can get out regardless of their age, health and income.

Spring Has Sprung

From Harper's magazine -- deletions are striked-thru and additions are in bold:

From editorial revisions and marginal notations made to government reports on global warming by Philip A. Cooney, then chief of staff for the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality. Cooney’s previous employer had been the American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade and lobbying group of the petroleum industry. Soon after the documents were released by the Government Accountability Project in June, Cooney left the administration to take a public-relations job with ExxonMobil.

Many scientific observations point to the conclusion indicate that the Earth is may be undergoing a period of relatively rapid change.

Humans have become agents of environmental change, at least on timescales of decades to centuries, even as the quality of living standards for billions of people has improved monumentally in the past century and a half.

These models are useful for performing if-then scenario experiments that make it possible to begin to explore the potential implications of different technological and institutional conditions for future emissions, and climate, and sustained and expanded wealth and living standards.

Longer growing seasons are likely to be reflected in changes in plant life cycles and associated insects and disease, and possibly in the migratory patterns of associated wildlife. [Balance? How about more food and forest products for humanity? Lower prices for consumers of food and forest products throughout the U.S. economy and world.]

Briefings, forums, workshops, and other forms of engagement between researchers and stakeholders increase the likelihood that research will contribute to improved decision-making. At the same time, we should always be vigilant in ensuring the independence of research and resist its being influenced or biased by the policy agendas of decision-makers.

You Sure Made Your Point, Sen. Leahy

Judge John G. Roberts today won the support of the Senate Judiciary Committee in his quest to win confirmation as the next chief justice to the U.S. Supreme Court. In reporting the 13-5 vote in favor of Roberts, the New York Times writes:

The Democrats who backed Judge Roberts were generally more restrained. Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking minority member on the panel, said that despite his vote in favor of the nominee he was very disappointed in him for not being more forthcoming and with the White House for not consulting more with the Senate.

I won't bother to tackle the question of how forthcoming Roberts was or how much the White House consulted with senators. But assuming Leahy's complaints are valid, what lesson does his vote teach future nominees and the White House?

The lesson for nominees: don't provide forthcoming answers and you'll get a favorable vote anyway -- hell, you'll even win the vote of senators like Leahy who bitch about you not being sufficiently forthcoming.

For the White House, the lesson is similar: don't bother consulting with the Senate or providing senators with full access to a nominee's governmental or legal work. Despite the whining, enough Dems will roll over in the end.

Joining the Parade...a Day Late

Apparently yesterday was proclaimed the unofficial "Lurker Day" and we missed it. It's the day that bloggers are supposed to encourage people who read but never comment to say something, anything.

So this is an invitation to say hullo, tell us where you're from, share your favorite dirty limerick, tell all of us to STFU, ask a question, or whatever else you feel like writing...just do so in the comments of this post.

Burka Sold Separately

Move over Barbie. There's a new doll on the scene -- a young woman with
equally anorexic proportions, but the similarities end there:

In the last year or so, Barbie dolls have all but disappeared from the shelves of many toy stores in the Middle East. In their place, there is Fulla, a dark-eyed doll with, as her creator puts it, "Muslim values."

Fulla roughly shares Barbie's size and proportions, but steps out of her shiny pink box wearing a black abaya and matching head scarf. She is named after a type of jasmine that grows in the Levant ... she has quickly become a best seller all over the region.

Young girls here are obsessed with Fulla, and conservative parents who would not dream of buying Barbies for their daughters seem happy to pay for a modest doll who has her own tiny prayer rug, in pink felt. Children who want to dress like their dolls can buy a matching, girl-size prayer rug and cotton scarf set, all in pink.

Fulla is not the first doll to wear the hijab, a traditional Islamic head covering worn outside the house so a woman's hair cannot be seen by men outside her family. Mattel markets a group of collectors' dolls that include a Moroccan Barbie and a doll called Leila, intended to represent a Muslim slave girl in an Ottoman court.

Something tells me that Mattel executives might be a little nervous at getting this publicity for a doll that represents "a Muslim slave girl" -- not terribly PC in this post-Taliban era.

Fawaz Abidin, the Fulla brand manager for NewBoy, said that was because NewBoy understood the Arab market in a way that its competitors had not.

"This isn't just about putting the hijab on a Barbie doll," Mr. Abidin said. "You have to create a character that parents and children will want to relate to. Our advertising is full of positive messages about Fulla's character. She's honest, loving, and caring, and she respects her father and mother."

Honest, loving and caring? Those traits don't get you ahead in today's world. What foolish dollmakers.

In Damascus, a Fulla doll sells for about $16, in a country where average per capita income hovers around $100 per month.

Jack Kemp Isn't Reading From the Same Script

Jack Kemp, the former Republican congressman and the party's 1996 vice-presidential nominee, was quoted in today's Washington Post in a post-Katrina story:

"There really has not been a strong Republican message to either the poor or the African American community at large."

But, Jack, how can you say such a thing? As Laura Bush explained to us all, until Katrina it "really was not possible" for the administration to discuss poverty-related issues.

It's A Good Thing the Police Are Illiterate

There has been a lot of discussion of this New York Times article on the supposed trend of women at elite colleges wanting to forgo their careers for the sake of raising children (Zoe discussed it here and here.)

The main criticism is that the article doesn't provide any actual data to back up the claim, instead relying on anecdotal evidence.

The same can probably be said for this other New York Times article on gay men congregating in suburban parking lots for a quick hook-up. But at least in this case, the NYT was kind enough to list specific places where such activity occurs

Long Island spots include Two Mile Hollow Beach in East Hampton, the Field 6 parking lot at Jones Beach, a rest stop near Exit 52 on the Long Island Expressway and the park-and-ride lot on Route 110 in Melville. Each has its own culture and often its own set of protocols, ranging from parking position to the flashing of headlights or blinkers as mating calls.

So if you are ever in one of these neighborhoods, now you know where to go for a quick fix on the way home from work.

Thanks, NYT!

Maybe next they will do a follow-up piece on just what exactly the "protocols" are in each of the spots, so that all the newbies who are going to start showing up don't embarrass themselves.

Now if only I can get the Washington Post to do a piece on exactly where in DC I can score some top-quality weed or stolen stereo equipment, I'll be all set.

The Descent into Anarchy

The weekly post from the CDF:

One week ago, experts and observers warned that Darfur risked "sliding into a perpetual state of lawlessness." At a time when Khartoum and the Darfur rebels were preparing to meet in an attempt to move the essentially non-existent peace process forward, IRIN was reporting

Banditry and continuous attacks by armed groups on humanitarian workers, Arab nomads and villages in Darfur have increased significantly over the past weeks and threaten to destabilise the fragile ceasefire in the volatile western Sudanese region.

The "fragile ceasefire" has never really existed and fears of "perpetual" lawlessness are misplaced considering that Darfur has been essentially lawless for more than two years.

Last week, the World Food Program reported that "security levels deteriorated in Darfur during the reporting week." This week, the WFP reported that "despite precautionary security measures, attacks on commercial and humanitarian vehicles continue in Darfur."

And as the UN was expressing its concern "about the recurrent attacks carried out by armed men and gangs in Darfur states, which target civilians and commercial vehicles hired by relief organizations," Norwegian Church Aid was reporting that "relief convoy has been raided at gunpoint by bandits in Darfur for the second time in a short period. The security situation in Darfur shows signs of deterioration"

A growing problem is also that aid convoys are now being ambushed with increasing regularity by bandits on horses and camels. Norwegian Church Aid vehicles have been raided at gunpoint twice in a matter of weeks ... The field teams who travel most often through the western and southern parts of Darfur regularly encounter en route, and are often chased by, heavily armed men riding on horses and camels. Since the aid operation began just over a year ago, security has presented a great challenge for the agencies. Yet whereas assault, exchanges of fire and attacks on villages were previously politically motivated, much of the violence seems now to be criminal in nature.

And the violence continues.

Just yesterday, it was reported that 40 were killed in fighting after an attack on the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement/Army by "armed nomadic tribesmen" [aka "the Janjaweed"]. This was followed by another report that 80 government soldiers had been killed by the SLM when they captured the town of Sheiria in a surprise attack in retaliation for earlier government attacks on rebel-held territory.

The attack on Sheiria put at risk some 33,000 civilians who rely on humanitarian assistance after staff from three NGO's were withdrawn due to the fighting. And for good measure, the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) "reported that the security situation in the Kalma camp housing displaced persons has further deteriorated with a large number of security incidents, including some 60 reported attacks on women over the last week alone."

All of this took place while the sixth round of peace talks were being held in Nigeria.

It has now been more than a year since the United States declared the situation in Darfur a "genocide" - and the security situation on the ground is now even arguably worse. While government-orchestrated attacks on civilians have diminished, mainly because "there are not many villages left to burn down and destroy," the rampant insecurity in all likelihood still qualifies as part of Khartoum's genocidal campaign to "deliberately [inflict] on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part."

The genocide is not ending and the situation is not improving. The people of Darfur have, for all intents and purposes, been abandoned.

Able What?

I can't imagine why they don't want anyone talking about this anymore.

The Department of Defense forbade a military intelligence officer to testify Wednesday about a secret military unit that the officer says identified four Sept. 11 hijackers as terrorists more than a year before the attacks, according to the man's attorney.

In testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, attorney Mark Zaid, who represents Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, said the Pentagon also refused to permit testimony there by a defense contractor that he also represents.

The Judiciary Committee was hearing testimony about the work of a classified unit code named "Able Danger."

Zaid, appearing on behalf of Shaffer and contractor John Smith that Able Danger, using data mining techniques, identified four of the terrorists who struck on Sept. 11, 2001 -- including mastermind Mohamed Atta.

"At least one chart, and possibly more, featured a photograph of Mohamed Atta," Zaid said.

Maj. Paul Swiergosz, a Defense Department spokesman, said Wednesday that open testimony would not be appropriate.

"We have expressed our security concerns and believe it is simply not possible to discuss Able Danger in any great detail in any public forum," he said.

Swiergosz said no individuals were singled out not to testify.

"There's nothing more to say than that," Swiergosz said. "It's not possible to discuss the Able Danger program because there are security concerns."

Yes, yes, there are security concerns-- concerns over the security of your jobs, perhaps?

Wait, what am I talking about, nobody gets fired in the Bush Administration no matter their extraordinary level of imcompetence. It must be something else.

Move Over Cindy...

you may have a lot more company.

In military communities across the United States, a debate over the Iraq war is being waged by reluctant, neophyte activists. Their microphones chirp and squeak, or don't pick up their quiet voices at all. Their signs are too small. They forget the banners.

"This is my community. I don't want to offend people here. But my husband is a soldier; he can't say anything. So it's my duty as a citizen to speak up," Kara Hollingsworth, a D.C. native and Army wife at Fort Bragg whose husband served two tours in Iraq, said as she took a seat on a panel of antiwar activists last week.
...
Military families, stoic and tight-lipped during most of the nation's wars, have become a powerful voice on both sides of the bitter argument over U.S. involvement in Iraq. And their growing prominence will add a poignant note to Saturday's antiwar march and rally near the White House.

Organizers of the protest, who anticipate a crowd of about 100,000, estimate that thousands of military families and veterans will join in the demonstration. Three busloads of military families have been touring the country since Aug. 31 and will converge on Washington today to promote Saturday's rally.
...
[Cindy] Sheehan also galvanized Phil and Linda Waste, who were riding one of the "Bring Them Home Now" buses through the hills of North Carolina last week. Their three sons, grandson and granddaughter are all in the military and have served a total of 58 months in Iraq, and the Wastes have white-knuckled their way through each of those tours of duty.

They sat in their Hinesville, Ga., living room for months, cursing at the television reports from Iraq.

"Then we saw Cindy in Texas," said Linda Waste, holding tight to the table's edge on the bumping bus. Her husband picked up her thought: "And then we heard people call her unpatriotic. And that was it."
...
When Chito [the ex-navy bus driver] parked the "Bring Them Home Now" bus in the center of Fayetteville the next day, cars whizzing by it honked and drivers barked at the slogans all over the windows and sides.

A woman in a silver Mercedes leaned out and shouted, "Go home!" A man in a red muscle car gave members of the group an obscene gesture. A soldier in a beat-up Olds Cutlass gave them a peace sign.

Cindy Sheehan's lasting legacy may not be her Crawford protest, it appears she has helped other military families who oppose the war to find their voices and one another. Awesome.

Laura Bush: Poverty and Housing Discussion "Really Was Not Possible Before"

The Associated Press interviewed First Lady Laura Bush on Tuesday and wrote this article afterward. Notice the not so subtle excuse that Mrs. Bush offers for why poverty-related issues were not on the administration's radar screen in pre-Katrina days:

[Laura Bush] said she also hopes for a broader national discussion of poverty and race.

"I think it's really important for us to talk about it in a different way," said Mrs. Bush, who over three decades ago taught elementary students at an inner-city school in Houston and was a school librarian in a poor Austin neighborhood.

The next three words are my favorite.

Without offering specifics, she urged policymakers to tackle not only improving education so that poor and minority children have a leg up in life, but increasing the amount of affordable housing stock and the jobs available to those who most need them. She pressed for job training programs ....

"Because of the devastation on the coast, there will be a neighborhood and a housing discussion that'll be possible that really was not possible before," she said.

This is a subtle yet ridiculous notion that the First Lady is trying to advance. It wasn't possible for the Bush administration to have a serious conversation about poor neighborhoods and the challenges their residents have faced?

Katrina's destruction certainly raises the sense of urgency around housing and poverty issues, but the White House could easily have broached these issues years ago if the Bush gang had really given a damn about it.

I'm sure it's merely a coincidence that this administration discovered the poverty issue after its feeble response to a hurricane made it look uncaring and drove its poll numbers downward. When George W. Bush talks like John Maynard Keynes and when Laura Bush starts sounding like a 21st century Jane Addams, you know this administration is running scared.

Bush's Next High Court Nominee

Slate.com's Emily Bazelon invites readers to guess who the next Supreme Court nominee will be:

Making one perfect Supreme Court pick is hard enough. Making a second one may be impossible, as the Bush administration is learning. John Roberts' cakewalk through the Senate has changed the calculus. The Democrats swear they won't be slow on the trigger for the next nominee. Republican women are anxious. The far right is determined to gain rather than lose ground on the court. And that's just the beginning.

Bazelon reviews the possible choices here.

What Didn't Get Reported From the Sex Survey

Last week a new survey by the Centers for Disease Control on sexual behavior in America got lots of attention in print, but Slate.com's William Saletan writes that there was one part of the survey that was virtually ignored:

If you live in Bergen County, N.J., congratulations. You get the only newspaper in the world that mentioned heterosexual anal sex, albeit briefly, in its write-up of the survey. Two other papers buried it in lines of statistics below their articles; the rest completely ignored it. Evidently anal sex is too icky to mention in print. But not too icky to have been tried by 35 percent of young women and 40 to 44 percent of young men—or to have killed some of them.

Not that there's anything wrong with it, as Jerry Seinfeld might say. But if your moral standard for judging sex acts is the risk of disease, anal is worse than oral.

... I understand why we fixate on the oral sex numbers. Even liberals can digest sexual revolutions only one taboo at a time. We think oral sex is the new frontier. We think talking about it in print and sex education classes makes us hip and candid. It doesn't.

The entire article is here.

Yet Another "Apology" That Isn't One

The Washington Nationals pro baseball team announced yesterday that it suspended a volunteer chaplain and, according to The Post, "distributed an apology" from one of its players, Ryan Church, for controversial remarks he had made a few days earlier. Church was quoted in a front-page Post article suggesting that Jews are headed for eternal damnation.

But what the newspaper called an apology was nothing of the kind. No, this was yet another case of what I call the non-apology apology. Call me a sentimentalist, but apologies used to mean someone was admitting that he or she had spoken or acted inappropriately. These days, the apology has evolved into a one-sentence, take-the-heat-off message.

Here is The Post describing Church's apology:

In a written statement yesterday distributed by the team, Church said: "Those who know me on a personal level understand that I am not the type of person who would call into question the religious beliefs of others. I sincerely regret if the quote attributed to me in Sunday's Washington Post article offended anyone."

Just for future reference, the first tip-off that someone is not truly apologizing is when he/she uses the word "if" within the so-called apology statement. Using "if" means that Church is only conceding that he might have offended someone.

Even more pathetic is the fact that Church dares to claim that anyone who knows him knows that he is "not the type of person who would call into question the religious beliefs of others." Well, apparently, your friends and teammates don't know you that well because that's exactly what you did. According to The Post:

An article in Sunday's paper about Baseball Chapel quoted Church as saying that he had turned to (chaplain Jon) Moeller for advice about his former girlfriend, who was Jewish. "I said, like, Jewish people, they don't believe in Jesus. Does that mean they're doomed? Jon nodded, like, that's what it meant. My ex-girlfriend! I was like, man, if they only knew. Other religions don't know any better. It's up to us to spread the word," Church said.

Is Church going to pretend that this statement doesn't "call into question the religious beliefs of others"?

Hillary-induced Paranoia

Apparently Hollywood has come up with a tv show to indoctrinate the masses so we would be more willing to accept the crazy notion of a female president, namely Hillary Clinton. From my favorite blathering idiot over at The Corner:

HAVE YOU NOTICED [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

that the billboards for the Geena Davis as President show never show Geena? They just inform you that a woman will be president soon. It's all part of the Hillary campaign, I tell you. Her Hollywood friends coming through for her.

Best left-wing conspiracy theory ever. I'm surprised "K-Lo" doesn't send a letter to the FEC demanding that the whole show be considered an unreported in-kind political contribution.

Photo ID Rule Shouldn't Derail Reforms

A commission co-chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Sec. of State James Baker has outlined several key recommendations for improving the conduct of elections in future years. As the Associated Press reports:

The commission recommended improved voter registration lists, requiring a verifiable paper trail for electronic voting machines and rotating regional primaries, while warning that "Americans are losing confidence in elections."

"Some foreign countries have gone far beyond us in making sure that voting procedures and registration of voters is at a high level of true democracy," said Carter, who has monitored elections around the world.

The commission also recommends that top election officials in the states should be nonpartisan and chosen by super-majorities of the legislature so as to ensure their actions won't be influenced by partisan instincts.

But the commission's recommendations may not get very far. Why? Liberal congressmen and their allies are seeing red over one of the proposals.

Critics suggested that having to acquire the ID cards in order to vote could be an obstacle for minorities, the poor and older Americans and might intimidate some people.

"We believe such a requirement would constitute nothing less than a 21st century poll tax," said a letter from Reps. John Conyers, D-Mich., and John Lewis, D-Ga. Poll taxes were once used in some states to prevent black citizens from voting.

Comparing that to a poll tax is ridiculous.

Allowing states to require a photo ID is a small and reasonable compromise to getting a few things that Republican legislators have traditionally resisted -- in particular, the verifiable paper trail to help guard against electronic-voting fraud.

You can't board a commercial airplane, pick up event tickets at "will call," cash a check at a bank, or check into many hotels without displaying a photo ID. Is it so unreasonable to ask people to bring one with them when they vote?

The ID requirement is not without some basis. A lengthy investigation in the city of Milwaukee found that in last November's election, the number of votes cast there exceeded the number of registered voters by more than 4,600. More than 100 people voted twice, used fraudulent names or false addresses, or voted in the name of a dead person.

Besides, simply refusing to support this at the national level doesn't make it go away. As Carter pointed out, 24 states already require photo ID and 12 other states are considering such a mandate. At least the national proposal embraced by the Carter-Baker commission would require states to provide the ID cards for free and to publicize how these cards can be obtained -- conditions that don't apply in most state laws that now require photo IDs.

Additionally, the commission's proposal is not Draconian. It would still allow voters without ID to cast provisional ballots.

If progressives really want to improve access and integrity in the electoral process, allowing a photo ID provision is a very small, reasonable price to pay.

Defining Feminism Down, part 2

(Note: this is part 2 of a series. I didn't want a single post that went on for eons so I split it up into two parts. Part 1 is addressing the anti-feminist twist on the story, the second is on issues I do have with dramatic conclusions the article is making based on a very small sample.)

To recap, today's New York Times article on young ivy league women talking about how they don't want full-time, high-power careers because they want to be full-time mothers. As I wrote earlier, I think this is an affirmation of modern feminism coming full circle, women's intellect and career choices being valued differently than they have before-- career and motherhood are seen as equally valid, fulfilling choices. However, as often with the New York Times and stories like these, it's not about what is said is what isn't said.

First, all of the young women seem to assume, without question, they will be able to afford to stay home. If they talk at all about having a career before children, they say they'll stop working, a few mention that they may work part-time. There is a fairly blatant class issue at work here. Not all women have that choice. It's safe to say they all assume they're going to marry ivy league men who will be able to support them and their children.

Second, none of the women interviewed were married, they had not found a man who would be willing and able to do this. I'm not saying they won't be able to, but building a plan based on marrying and having babies without a partner in the picture seems risky, if not a little stupid. I have a 26-year old sister who is now going back to school because she had that "plan," but all of her friends are now married and having babies and she still hasn't found the right guy. She never planned on having a career until she realized recently that relying on some imaginary man to take care of her wasn't such a great "plan" after all. These women do seem to be setting themselves up to be disappointed, but then again, they're young and idealistic.

Third, this survey was devoted entirely to women in the early 20s who are still in college-- how many of them have any real clue about what they will end up doing? I'm not suggesting that they'll change their minds or anything but they haven't even existed in the workworld yet, at this stage they're merely projecting what they hope their futures will look like. It all strikes me as more than a little bit naive.

There is one scenario that I would say is a rejection of feminism-- but it doesn't appear anywhere in the article. None of these women are talking about going to school to "find a man," they all seem to value their own intellect and think that having a degree is a worthwhile pursuit of its own. While it's possible they're focusing on motherhood too early and limiting their choices in the meantime, but they do see motherhood as a choice, not an obligation, and the kind of mother they want to be is also a choice. This is a very modern way of looking at the future.

Regardless, I find it a very postmodern feminist thang that these young women do view motherhood as a valid, rewarding "career" in of itself, it means they place equal value on "women's work" in a way that hasn't always been valued. This is a major cultural shift that has been in the making for the past 30-50 years. I say more power to them.

In Search of an Explanation

One final point on the new Gallup Poll and Bush's record low rating on the "honest and trustworthy" question.

I'm glad that more and more Americans have come to recognize that their president is not an honest man, but I'm at a loss to figure out precisely what factor caused Bush's numbers to fall in this area.

Has the president told a great big whopper lately? Not really. Bush almost certainly lied when he assumed the persona of LBJ and used his Sept. 15 speech to wax on about poverty. But, all in all, Bush hasn't been any more truth-challenged lately than he has throughout his presidency.

The infamous Downing Street Memo came to light in early May, but, over the next few months, Bush's honesty rating declined only slightly.

My guess is that rising gas prices, continuing unrest in Iraq and those distressing images from the Gulf Coast have as more to do with Bush's fall in the "honesty" area -- not any specific fib that he told or that came to life in recent days.

As with so many polls of public attitudes, I think there is a lot of air in these poll numbers -- that's to say, they could change significantly over the next 2-3 weeks if, for example, gas prices receded and we captured Osama bin Laden. Even though such developments would say nothing about Bush's "honesty," you can bet his numbers on that specific rating would also rise. (This is the kind of phenomenon that understandably prompts Eugene's "I hate polls" reaction.)

For the moment at least, the public seems to think Bush isn't an honest president. But I would find this development much more encouraging if I thought it was based on something relevant, rather than the fact that a gallon of unleaded gas is costing them $2.93 at the pump.

Bush: No Longer a "Palpably Honest Man"

The new Gallup Poll shows President Bush's ratings have reached a new low. There is now an 18% gap between those who approve of him (40%) and those who disapprove (58%). But most telling from this newest poll is where Bush stands on a key assessment of character: honesty.

Half of those surveyed told Gallup that the words "honest and trustworthy" did not apply to Bush -- easily his worst rating on the honesty question.

This is a dramatic change from past years. Even when the issues appeared to work against Bush during his first term, the Calvinist public's desire to have a "moral" president seemed to give Bush just enough cover -- motivating his religious conservative base and appeasing just enough moderate voters.

When Bush first ran for the presidency, his supporters spoke vaguely of diminished "trust" in the White House, leaving unsaid those other two L-words: "lie" and "Lewinsky." They praised Bush as an honest, upright gentleman. Some of this praise almost sounded satirical. For example, in the heat of the 2000 election, Peggy Noonan wrote:

... Mr. Gore tells a lot of lies ... (and) he lies a lot even for a politician. But I think it has also been established that Mr. Bush not only does not lie but is probably incapable of lying. He is, transparently and simply, not a liar but a plainspoken teller of the truth as he is able to see it. This is a wonderful thing in anyone .... A palpably honest man running for office in the Clinton era!

When you feel moved to describe any candidate for president (either a "D" or an "R") as "probably incapable of lying," it's time to stop drinking the Kool-aid. Perhaps the disclaimer in Noonan's words is "as he is able to see it." Alas, much like Reagan, Bush's delusions and intellectual deficits are a potential defense.

Gallup has asked its "honesty" question for a number of years. Here is the trend in this question during Bush's presidency:

Bush "is honest and trustworthy" -- does it apply or not?

February 9-11, 2001 ......... Applies 64% Doesn't apply 29% No opinion 7%

April 29-May 1, 2002 ....... Applies 77% Doesn't apply 20% No opinion 3%

June 27-29, 2003 ............. Applies 65% Doesn't apply 33% No opinion 2%

February 16-17, 2004 ....... Applies 55% Doesn't apply 42% No opinion 3%

Sept. 16-18, 2005 ............. Applies 47% Doesn't apply 50% No opinion 3%

Defining Feminism Down, part I

There's a New York Times article that is sure to trigger some anti-feminist victory dances in conservative circles. The article is on a small survey of young women at elite colleges-- Harvard, Yale-- and what they envision for their futures. It's supposed to be a big surprise that some of them are planning for motherhood with either a part-time career on the side or no career at all. Of course neo-conservatives such as Vox Day think this is evidence of a rejection of feminist principles but, unsurprisingly, he only sees things in the context of whether or not they validate his extraodrinarily sexist views. (In the past he has said women shouldn't have the right to vote, it's too costly and has no discernable positive value to society. Seriously.)

However, in a way, I can't entirely blame Vox for coming to the conclusion that this study is some kind of evidence of an anti-feminist culture shift among young, educated women. The female author thoughtlessly weaves that angle into the story, she opines that the notion of young women attending Harvard and Yale who are planning for motherhood in leiu of big careers is something that would "shock" most feminists. As usual, the issue of women, work and family is set up in an antogonistic way, even by a New York Times writer who likely considers herself a feminist. I'm just so bloody sick of it.

I don't know how many times we have to have this same tired argument. For the last time, women choosing motherhood is not a repudiation of feminism. Even feminists can't seem to see the forest for the trees. There is this constant presumption about what feminism is and frankly, it's often wrong. Feminism is supposed to be about both women and men having choices beyond their traditional gender roles.

Debatably, the biggest contribution feminism has made to our modern society is so intrinsic to this whole debate that people don't even get it. Feminism is supposed to be about giving women choices-- in theory, today's women have the choice to work, to stay home, to do a mix of both or do neither. The notion that there are young women who are very high-achievers who feel that staying home with a child is as valuable as having a career is a very good thing. I think it is a sign that modern feminism has come full circle.

I know I am especially frustrated by all of this nonsense because I view this whole issue as an outsider, so it's much more clear to me how much bullshit it all is. My wife and I aren't strained by who will stay home to take care of our future kids, both of us are willing, it will largely depend on who is the bigger breadwinner at the time. (At this point that is somewhat unclear because we're both in the process of going back to school.) Ideally, we'll have two kids and will be able to take turns staying home. Neither of us see it as a betrayal of feminist principles to stay home with kids, quite the contrary. I think like a lot of women it comes down to choices limited by finances. For instance, if we were independently wealthy we probably both would both stay home with the children in addition to doing lots of volunteer and activist work-- we both believe strongly in contributing positively to community and society.

However, I do have some issues with some of the things these young women said in the article, although not on the basis of whether or not they're feminist. But that's for another post...

Treating Its Readers Like a Herd of Cattle

On Monday, the Washington Post published a Q & A column from an interview conducted by Lally Weymouth with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Post editorialized that Ahmadinejad “said little during [this] lengthy interview … to dispel the impression that he is a hard-liner who intends to take his country in a different direction.”

I guess The Post believes that one is a _______ until he/she dispels the newspaper’s “impression.” It’s so kind of The Post to tell its readers what conclusion they should reach from an interview before they begin reading the interview in question.

Ahmadinejad may well be a hard-liner or at least someone with deplorable views on several fronts. But, after reading this interview, I must confess that there isn’t much (other than perhaps the last response) that sounds remotely hard-line. This is the first series of questions:

Q: The Bush administration has actually called Iran part of the "axis of evil." … The U.S. would like to see some changes in Iran.
We would like to see some changes occur in America.
Q: What changes?
For example, the approach and the kind of language that the American government use in their relations with other countries.

To an objective observer, Bush is the one who comes off sounding hard-line from those excerpts.

And does this exchange make Ahmadinejad sound like a radical?

Q: Many fear if U.S. troops withdraw (from Iraq), the result will be a civil war.
It can be done either by replacing those troops with U.N. troops, international troops or there can be a specific time frame for the withdrawal. I think the American government and the American Army should take upon itself many more responsibilities for the security in Iraq. The explosions and terrorist acts create a distinct feeling of insecurity among the people.

The premier of Iran welcomes a UN or other multinational force right next door? Not what you’d expect from an anti-Western hard-liner.

And what about this exchange:

Q: Iran put under house arrest two very prominent al Qaeda members. What is their status?
Al Qaeda is for sure an enemy of Iran. They killed 11 Iranian diplomats. We have always wished to uproot and destroy them. These are the most dangerous enemies for us ...

Ahmadinejad calls al Qaeda “an enemy of Iran.” If anything, that’s reassuring, not scary.

Okay, so let’s get to the thorniest U.S.-Iran issue:

Q: How do you dispel the impression that is prevalent in the U.S. that Iran is making a nuclear weapon?
Our religion prohibits us from having nuclear arms. Our religious leader has prohibited it from the point of view of religious law. It's a closed road.

It's quite possible that Ahmadinejad is lying. He wouldn’t be the first world leader to be guilty of that. But there’s nothing in this answer per se — contrary to The Post’s prejudicial statement — that is hard-line.

When Weymouth asks Ahmadinejad if he was one of the 1979 Iran hostage-takers, he says he was not, explaining that “the root causes” of this hostage crisis were “in the behavior of the American government since 1953 …”

How many readers understand to what the Iranian premier is referring? Sadly, probably only a handful. The year 1953 wasn’t simply the year that the Shah came to power in Iran, but it was the year that a military coup — led by the British and aided by the U.S. government — ousted a democratically elected government and opened the door for the Shah’s rise to power.

Oh, wait .... but that couldn't have happened. We're America, the great shining star of freedom that only seeks to encourage democracy abroad. How could I have forgotten?

Bush's "Comeback"? Only in Your Dreams

A quick post-script on Fox News talking head Bill O'Reilly. These are the "talking points" that O'Reilly issued just recently:

The Comeback of President Bush
The comeback of President Bush: that is the subject of this evening's "Talking Points Memo".
Mostly positive reviews for the president's speech [Thursday] .... Mr. Bush delivered big money promises, hope, and some contrition. I thought the speech was well written.

O'Reilly neglects to mention, however, that Bush addressed the nation from New Orleans' Jackson Square on Sept. 15. Right on the heels of his speech, Gallup surveyed the public (Sept. 16-18) to learn the president's approval rating. And Gallup's numbers show no sign of O'Reilly's much ballyhooed "comeback."

In fact, they reveal that the gap (-18%) between Bush's approval and disapproval ratings is the worst of his presidency.

Bush's Confidence Game...

is over and so is his agenda is according to the right-wing rag the American Spectator.

DEAD AGENDA

Publicly, the White House will tell you that it intends to push ahead with two of its big legislative issues throughout the fall: making permanent the first term tax cuts and Social Security reform.

Even privately, with the political and policy debacle that the White House created with its Clintonian response to Hurricane Katrina, policy and political types at 1600 Pennsylvania insist what's left of an agenda is still viable.

But at this stage of the game, barring some imaginative political moves that bear some resemblance to the Bush Administration circa 2002, Republicans on Capitol Hill and even some longtime Bush team members in various Cabinet level departments say this Administration is done for.

"You run down the list of things we thought we could accomplish and you have to wonder what we thought we were thinking," says a Bush Administration member who joined on in 2001. "You get the impression that we're more than listless. We're sunk."

Too pessimistic? Maybe not. Rumors are flying through various departments of longtime senior Bush loyalists looking to jump, but with few opportunities in the private sector to make the jump look like anything more than desperation. Almost daily, complaints from Cabinet level Departments come in to the White House about lack of communication coordination on even basic policy matters.

I hope that the Dems are getting this loud and clear-- 2006 is theirs to lose.

Clinton-Bashing Is Never Out of Style

Conservative whiner Bill O'Reilly offers this ridiculous teaser for his Fox News channel show airing tonight:

Tonight "The O'Reilly Factor" is on...
Former President Bill Clinton is lashing out at the Bush administration over Hurricane Katrina. Is it right for him to be speaking out now against the current administration? Plus, why is he taking aim at President George W. Bush's administration while raising money for the hurricane's victims with the president's father, George H.W. Bush?

Leave it to O'Reilly to spin Clinton's criticism as somehow incompatible with the desire to raise funds for post-Katrina relief.

I guess this shouldn't be so surprising. In O'Reilly's world, people who would dare to criticize President Bush are also the kind of people who want to see families go without food or housing.

It just doesn't seem possible to O'Reilly that someone can believe that the initial emergency response sucked and still want to help victims. In fact, one of the reasons someone might want to go the extra mile to help out is precisely because the initial government efforts were so pathetic.

Actually, I'm a little disappointed by O'Reilly's teaser. I expected something with more "red meat." A more crowd-pleasing teaser for his conservative viewers might have been:

Tonight "The O'Reilly Factor" is on...
Former President Bill Clinton is lashing out at the Bush administration over Hurricane Katrina. Is it right for him to be speaking? Who says he has First Amendment rights like the rest of us? Plus, why is he helping to raise money for relief efforts when it's so obvious that he and Hillary orchestrated this hurricane in the first place?

Fluffy Fluffy Fleeting Thoughts

I don't care about award shows and I never watch them. I offer this as proof of why they're completely meaningless -- Frances Conroy as Ruth Fisher in "Six Feet Under" got passed over for an Emmy by some woman from "Desperate Housewives," a show I couldn't bring myself to watch for more than 10 minutes at a time. More proof of why award shows suck? A sitcom that is the very definition of predictable, formulaic, unoriginal banality continues to gets the most awards-- "Everybody Doesn't Love Raymond." The only thing nice I can say about that show is that it's over.

By the way, is it me and I was just really drunk last night or was "The Simpons" actually somewhat funny? (Yeah, yeah, I actually still watch it, mostly out of habit.)

Cindy Sheehan Finds New Ways to Annoy

When Cindy Sheehan first arrived on the scene, I welcomed her efforts to draw greater attention to the debacle in Iraq -- a war we didn't need to start and a war whose major enduring consequence could be to give Iran a Shiite fundamentalist ally right next door.

Like most people, I felt for Sheehan, and I was sad to know that she'd lost a son over there. But, as far as this blogger's concerned, she is acting more and more strangely every day. Recently, Sheehan traveled to Louisiana to observe Katrina damage. Yet even on this issue (where the administration is quite vulnerable), Sheehan manages to look almost as silly and uninformed as the president she's lambasting.

In this post Friday on Arianna Huffington's blog, Sheehan writes:

... I guess one can never really fully prepare for such devastation and tragedy. After living in a country your entire life it is so difficult to see such callous indifference on an immense scale.

... I wonder why the government made [Louisianans] leave at great expense and uproot families who have been living in their communities for generations.

Yes, there was a mandatory evacuation order issued, but this was issued long after most families voluntarily evacuated New Orleans and the adjoining parishes.

Another sign of Sheehan's "speak first, think later" approach:

One thing that truly troubled me about my visit to Louisiana was the level of the military presence there .... what I saw was a city that is occupied. I saw soldiers walking around in patrols of 7 with their weapons slung on their backs. I wanted to ask one of them what it would take for one of them to shoot me.

... George Bush needs to stop talking, admit the mistakes of his all around failed administration, pull our troops out of occupied New Orleans and Iraq, and excuse his [sic] self from power.

These troops are assigned the tough task of maintaining order, and here's Sheehan just aching to toy with them, treating their assignment with condescension.

The mayor of New Orleans welcomed the presence of troops. Other than the Michigan Militia, Sheehan is just about the only one who could find fault with temporary troop deployments in New Orleans and other hurricane-ravaged areas.

Cindy Sheehan is not a effective anti-Bush spokesperson, and, when it comes to offering her observations of post-Katrina relief efforts, she has no more credibility than Michael Brown does. She needs to go get a life.

Adding (False) Drama to the Trauma

In today's New York Times, David Carr writes:

Disaster has a way of bringing out the best and the worst instincts in the news media. It is a grand thing that during the most terrible days of Hurricane Katrina, many reporters found their gag reflex and stopped swallowing pat excuses from public officials. But the media's willingness to report thinly attributed rumors may also have contributed to a kind of cultural wreckage that will not clean up easily.

... anyone with any knowledge of the events in New Orleans knows that terrible things with non-natural causes occurred: there were assaults ... (and) many other crimes that probably went unreported.

But many instances in the lurid libretto of widespread murder, carjacking, rape, and assaults that filled the airwaves and newspapers have yet to be established or proved, as far as anyone can determine. And many of the urban legends that sprang up -- the systematic rape of children, the slitting of a 7-year-old's throat -- so far seem to be just that.

The fact that some of these rumors were repeated by overwhelmed local officials does not completely get the news media off the hook. A survey of news reports in the LexisNexis database shows that on Sept. 1, the news media's narrative of the hurricane shifted.

The Fox News anchor, John Gibson, helped set the scene: "All kinds of reports of looting, fires and violence. Thugs shooting at rescue crews. Thousands of police and National Guard troops are on the scene trying to get the situation under control. Thousands more on the way. So heads up, looters."

A reporter, David Lee Miller, responded: "Hi, John. As you so rightly point out, there are so many murders taking place. There are rapes, other violent crimes taking place in New Orleans." After the interview, Mr. Gibson did acknowledge that "we have yet to confirm a lot of that."

... Although I was not in New Orleans, I was at the World Trade Center towers site the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001. People had seen unimaginable things, but a small percentage, many still covered in ash, told me tales that were worse than what actually happened. Mothers throwing babies out of the towers, men getting in fights on the ledges, human heads getting blown out of the buildings, all of which took place so high up in the air that it was hard to distinguish the falling humans from the falling wreckage.

... Howard Witt, the Southwest bureau chief of The Chicago Tribune, wrote early on that much of what he had been told, even by public officials, did not check out. And he found himself inundated by rumors.

"The Web and talk radio fueled these rumors in the days following the storm, and the evacuees themselves contributed to the misinformation because they were so scared," he said .... Even now, the real, actual events in New Orleans in the past three weeks surpass the imagination. Who needs urban myths when the reality was so brutal?

Peace Treaty over Gays in the Military?

Yet another poll shows that the ban on gays in the military is indeed passe-- even among young Republicans.

According to the poll, 24.2% of respondents said that the policy makes them embarrassed by the military, while 17.5% said that the policy makes them proud. Fifty-six percent said the policy has no impact on their feelings about the military.

Conservatives were heavily overrepresented in the pool of respondents because the sample was designed to match the characteristics of a cohort of new military recruits. Among respondents to the survey, 53.1% were Republicans, 29.8% were independent/other, and 17% were Democrats; 81.6% were male, and 18.4% were female; and all were between the ages of 18 and 24. These characteristics closely match the profile of a cohort of new military recruits.
...
During the past two years, at least six national polls administered by five different polling organizations have asked members of the public whether gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve openly in the military. All polls found that between 58% and 79% of the public believe that gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve openly. For example, Fox News found in August 2003 that 64% of the public, including 55% of Republicans, believe that gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve openly.

I'm pretty surprised that among a sample of 18-24 year olds, of which 81% are male and 53% are Republican, that only 17.5% srongly support the ban and everyone else either doesn't care or opposes it. Bizarre.

L'Italia anche?

Is Italy next?

Romano Prodi, the center-left leader expected to challenge Premier Silvio Berlusconi in general elections next year, said he favored giving legal status to unmarried couples. Prodi stopped short of proposing legalization of same-sex marriages, such as is the case in Spain, but said he was looking to a 1999 French law that gives unmarried couples, including gay and lesbian couples, extensive legal rights if they register their unions with the state.

At this point it doesn't seem likely to happen but it would be very interesting if it did. If same-sex unions were legalized would the Vatican spontaneously combust? relocate? (There are a number of red states that are in no danger of allowing same sex unions/marriage for at least a few decades, if not longer.)

Ultimately, how powerful would the Vatican appear to the world if it couldn't even keep same-sex unions/marriage out of Italy?

Zinging Bush

The wife and I have been talking lately about getting rid of The Evil, Evil Cable now that the reason we got it in the first place-- HBO's Six Feet Under-- is gone. But then Bil Maher's "Real Time" comes back from hiatus and now I'm not so sure. Maher recently called for Bush to be "recalled" and here are all the reasons why.

Mr. President, this job can't be fun for you anymore. There's no more money to spend. You used up all of that. You can't start another war because you also used up the army. And now, darn the luck, the rest of your term has become the Bush family nightmare: helping poor people.

Yeah, listen to your mom. The cupboard's bare, the credit card's maxed out, and no one is speaking to you: mission accomplished! Now it's time to do what you've always done best: lose interest and walk away. Like you did with your military service. And the oil company. And the baseball team. It's time. Time to move on and try the next fantasy job. How about cowboy or spaceman?!

Now, I know what you're saying. You're saying that there's so many other things that you, as president, could involve yourself in… Please don't. I know, I know, there's a lot left to do. There's a war with Venezuela, and eliminating the sales tax on yachts. Turning the space program over to the church. And Social Security to Fannie Mae. Giving embryos the vote. But, sir, none of that is going to happen now. Why? Because you govern like Billy Joel drives. You've performed so poorly I'm surprised you haven't given yourself a medal. You're a catastrophe that walks like a man.

Herbert Hoover was a shitty president, but even he never conceded an entire metropolis to rising water and snakes.

On your watch, we've lost almost all of our allies, the surplus, four airliners, two Trade Centers, a piece of the Pentagon and the City of New Orleans… Maybe you're just not lucky!

I'm not saying you don't love this country. I'm just wondering how much worse it could be if you were on the other side. So, yes, God does speak to you, and what he's saying is, “Take a hint.”

Pathetic

I haven't posted in a while because I was in London all last week. I might not post much for another while because I'm going back there tomorrow, and I might be in Turin next week.

But a short tidbit from my trip: I spent a lot of my small amount of free time in bookstores--Amsterdam has plenty of English books, of course, but coming from here, a London bookstore appears still seems like an oasis. So I get to the counter to pay for my haul of books, and I see a display of the current issue of Private Eye. I wince with embarrassment upon seeing the cover.

I don't know how many Americans realize what a laughingstock our president is to the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, on Page A14 of the Newspaper ...

An editorial in today's Detroit Free Press:

Maybe they were miffed about being bumped from the headlines and news shows for a few weeks by Hurricane Katrina.

Whatever their twisted motivation, terrorists have renewed their horrible work on several fronts in Iraq this week .... The body count is staggering.

On Wednesday, 160 people were killed and nearly 600 wounded in a dozen coordinated bombings over a nine-hour span in Baghdad. Another 17 people were executed in a village north of the capital. There were a half-dozen attacks on U.S. forces that left 10 soldiers wounded as Iraq went through its second-bloodiest day since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled the country's dictatorship in March 2003.

... For Americans, focused for the past few weeks on the domestic disaster Katrina, the explosion of violence is a grim reminder of the unsettled and dangerous situation facing U.S. troops in Iraq. American military spokesman Maj. Gen. Richard Lynch said the trouble was actually "predictable" with the referendum approaching on the constitution.

"Remember," he said, "democracy equals failure for the insurgency."

... The success of the latest attacks ... further undermines the international credibility of the new Iraqi government, which has yet even to gain much acceptance in the Arab world. Not a single Arab nation has opened an embassy in Iraq since the U.S.-backed government was installed.

The Iraqis say the old-line Arab regimes are afraid of democracy. Perhaps they are just plain afraid.

Am I the only one who finds it hard to take seriously Lynch's claim that "democracy equals failure" for the insurgents?

After all, wasn't there an Iraqi election in late January -- an election that, if pulled off successfully, was supposed to deal a crushing blow to the insurgency?

Fake Power

Just in case people didn't realize it, last night's flood of pretty lights in Jackson Square that served as a etheral backdrop during Bush's speech were only temporary. About an hour after Bush left town, so did all the electricity. Why spend all the time and money to power up the whole square like a Christmas tree only to take it away after the president leaves? Why leave all the people who are still there in the dark?

I suppose this is what the world looks like through Karl Rove's eyes-- nothing is real, everything and anything is merely a political prop.

Pope Benedict's Gay Purge in America Begins

From today's Boston Globe:

An effort by the Vatican to look for evidence of homosexuality in Catholic seminaries is alarming gay rights advocates but is pleasing conservatives, who are hoping that Pope Benedict XVI will soon issue a ban on gay men as future priests.

The planned search for homosexuality is part of a Vatican review prompted by the clergy sexual abuse crisis of 229 American seminaries, theology schools, and other institutions that train priests. It is set to begin this month.

The chairman of the Boston College theology department, the Rev. Kenneth Himes, sharply criticized the review yesterday, saying that if the bishops really want to understand what caused the sexual abuse crisis, they should investigate their own offices.

''What really created the sexual abuse crisis was not poor formation [of priests] in the seminaries, but poor personnel management in the chanceries," Himes said. ''Now we are having an investigation of the seminaries, but I wonder when the Vatican and the American bishops will investigate their own chanceries."

Not a chance.

... ''You're trying to assess whether this institution is successfully forming men to live a celibate life, so you have to ask the question [whether] it is or is not doing that," said Monsignor Francis J. Maniscalco, spokesman for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. ''You want to make sure that sexual activity, or tolerance of that activity, is not present in the seminary."

Yes, the Vatican remains under the delusion that a seminarian who happens to be gay will definitely seek out sex with minors. I met and befriended a gay priest many years ago in Washington, D.C., and I can assure the pontiff that this individual had absolutely no interest in minors and was quite content to pursue periodic soirees with adult men (and with all the fervor, I might add, that one would expect of a Jesuit).

Having said all of this, the Catholic Church is entitled to have its rules, whether or not I or anyone else agrees with them. No person (gay or otherwise) has a legal right to serve as a priest. So, in this sense at least, they can conduct such a purge if they wish.

However, if the Vatican's purge proves highly successful in rooting out gay seminarians, this may be a case of: be careful what you wish for. Expelling even a relatively small number of men from seminaries will certainly exacerbate the church's severe shortage of priests.

How bleak is this shortage? In a recent report on the outlook for job opportunities in various fields, the U.S. Department of Labor noted:

The shortage of Roman Catholic priests is expected to continue, resulting in a very favorable outlook.

Do Conservatives Care About Darfur?

Feddie linked to this very long but quite good article in First Things on Darfur and the evangelical community's response over on the CFD.

For people who read this blog, that is probably not particularly interesting, so I'll just highlight the one part that reminds us that the certain right wing preachers are shameless hypocrites

Another influence is the recrudescence of the culture war. Gay marriage and the related issue of judicial appointments exploded onto the agenda, diverting attention from Darfur. Indeed, one prominent born-again leader admitted to me that “the timing” was not convenient for a full press on the international front. A related factor pertains to pietistic habits of the evangelical mind, as identified by Mark Noll, that result in an episodic and reactive public engagement. Certain prominent evangelical figures, such as Gary Bauer and James Dobson, who put their formidable networks in service of the cause in southern Sudan, are now largely silent on Darfur.

I Kissed a Girl

A new major study reveals some very interesting statistics on sexuality, especially homosexuality, in the United States.

About 4 percent of men and women described themselves as homosexual or bisexual, but in a finding that surprised the researchers, 14 percent of the women aged 18 to 29 reported at least one homosexual experience, more than twice the proportion for young men.

Among adults ages 15 to 44, almost 3 percent of men and 4 percent of women reported having a sexual experience with a member of the same sex within the past year, and over their lifetimes, 6 percent of men and 11 percent of women had such experiences. About 1 percent of men and 3 percent of women had had both male and female sexual partners in the previous 12 months.

Nearly 6 percent of all men ages 15 to 44 reported having oral sex with another man at some time in their lives, and nearly 4 percent reported having anal sex with another man.

The data comes from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth, a survey of 12,571 men and women ages 15 to 44.
...
When asked, "Have you ever had any sexual experience of any kind with any female?" 14 percent of the 18- to 29-year-old women said yes, compared with slightly under 10 percent of the 30- to 44-year-olds.

It would be naive to conclude that this means that women are inherently more bisexual than men. I think this shift hinges a lot on the weakened stigma of women kissing women which, in my view, has more to do with men than with women. It strikes me as evidence of the widespread fetishization of girl-on-girl action. It's hard to know what these experiences mean to the women who had them, if they are referring to half-drunk kisses with men cheering them on in a bar at 2 am on a Friday night or if they represent private, audience-free sexual exploration.

Regardless, it does expose a pretty dramatic cultural change in attitudes about same-sex attraction and should bode well for the future of same-sex marriage and the eventual increased acceptance of gay couples and their families. It may also help resolve the 'how many gay people are there' population question-- statistically speaking 4% of America's total population of 295,734,134 is 11.8 million. For the sake of comparison, in the United States there are 38.7 million people(pdf) of African descent, approximately 13.3%, and there are 37.4 million people of Hispanic descent, 12.8%. There are approximately 5.3 million Jews in the United States, less than 2% of the total population, and reportedly .06% of the overall population is Muslim. The number of Americans who are non-religious/atheist/agonistic is 15%, which is over 44 million.

The bottom line is that 11 million gay people Americans is nothing to sneeze at, that's roughly equal to the population of New York City and Los Angeles combined or half the population of the state of Texas or a third of the population of California. It would also be like everyone in the following states turning gay all at once-- Montana, Nebraska, Iowa, Idaho, Kansas, Wyoming and Utah. (I've been studying for the math section of the GRE lately, can you tell?)

I hope that this is all enough to keep the anti-gay bigots up at night, perhaps make them consider heading for a country with a less tolerant future. As of now it appears pretty certain America will be much more queer and queer-friendly than it is now.

One Cool Thing About Being President That You Never Think About

Check out this Brad Plumer post.

Once Again, Halliburton Is There When Duty Calls

This is from page 2 of The Onion (Sept. 15-21 issue) so it's supposed to be an excuse for a quick laugh. But it's a sign of the times that this story strikes me as only slightly implausible:

On Tuesday, Halliburton received a $110 million no-bid government contract to pry the gold fillings from the mouths of deceased disaster victims in the New Orleans-Gulf Coast area.

"We are proud to serve the government in this time of crisis by recovering valuable resources from the wreckage of this deadly storm," said David J. Lesar, Halliburton's president ...

Hinky Headline of the Day

Mice Infected With Bubonic Plague Missing

Nothing to worry about, supposedly, it's just a few plague-infected rats are missing from a lab in Newark, New Jersey that conducts bioterrorism research for the federal government.

Kidding aside, the bubonic plague is still around. But that's not the scary kind.

Health officials say 10 to 20 people in the United States contract [bubonic] plague each year, usually through infected fleas or rodents. It can be treated with antibiotics, but about one in seven U.S. cases is fatal. Bubonic plague is not contagious, but left untreated it can transform into pneumonic plague, which can be spread from person to person.

The incident came as federal authorities investigate possible corruption in the school's finances. The FBI is reviewing political donations and millions of dollars in no-bid contracts awarded to politically connected firms.

Apparently the Public Health Research Institute is plagued by more than a few plague rats.

Hmmm ..... Which City Would That Be?

I just received an e-mail from the Human Rights Campaign, noting that anti-gay protesters last week gathered outside HRC's Washington, D.C. offices with signs and chants declaring that Hurricane Katrina was God's rage against "a city of 'sinners and sodomites.' " But since so many cities on or near the Gulf coast were heavily damaged by Katrina, it's not clear from the e-mail message to which city the protesters were referring?

Of course, cities such as Gulfport, Miss. and New Orleans were hard hit. But, as these photos reveal, Bay St. Louis, Miss. was also pounded by the hurricane. Perhaps the protesters were talking about Pascagoula, Miss., where many lives and homes were lost.

Yes, I know, I know -- the protesters had a very specific city in mind. Yet, if one considers the proportional damage that cities in the region suffered, one could argue that God's wrath was directed at Waveland, Miss., a city that MSNBC reports was "nearly wiped off the map." Katrina, the network reported, "seemed to take a particular vengeance out on Waveland, Mississippi."

So I guess Waveland must have been a virtual cesspool of sin and sodomy.

Channeling Lewis Black

By way of Raw Story, last night Bill O'Reilly interviewed Secretary of State Condi "ShoeGal" Rice. Here are two great minds that go great together.

O'Reilly: "The truth of the matter is our correspondents at Fox News can't go out for a cup of coffee in Baghdad."

Rice: "Bill, that’s tough. It's tough. But what — would they wanted to have gone out for a cup of coffee when Saddam Hussein was in power?"

Wait a minute. Why would there be any journalists roaming the Baghdad streets in seach of a Starbucks if Saddam was still in power and we hadn't invaded Iraq? There wouldn't be any news to cover, would there?

It must be really "tough" to deal with how dangerous things are in a country that isn't your own, a country you could pick up and leave at any f*cking moment because you're just there to do your job and cover a war that your own country f*cking started. It must be additionally hard making more money in a week than most Iraqis make in a year. Those poor, poor FauxNews yellow journalists, my heart really goes out to them, you know?

Nobody Expects the Inquisition

I wonder how they're going to do this exactly?

Investigators appointed by the Vatican have been instructed to review each of the 229 Roman Catholic seminaries in the United States for "evidence of homosexuality" and for faculty members who dissent from church teaching, according to a document prepared to guide the process.

By conducting a priest-by-priest, seminary-by-seminary homo witchhunt, that's how.

A 12-page document with instructions for the review is now being distributed to seminarians and faculty members. It asks whether the doctrine on the priesthood presented by the seminary is "solidly based on the church's Magisterium," or teaching, and whether teachers and seminarians "accept this teaching." Among the other questions are these:

¶"Is there a clear process for removing from the seminary faculty members who dissent from the authoritative teaching of the church or whose conduct does not provide good example to future priests?"

¶"Is the seminary free from the influences of New Age and eclectic spirituality?"

¶"Do the seminarians or faculty members have concerns about the moral life of those living in the institution? (This question must be answered)."

¶"Is there evidence of homosexuality in the seminary? (This question must be answered)."

The questionnaire also asks whether faculty members "watch out for signs of particular friendships."

I also read that each faculty member has been instructed to ask all of their students "homosaywhat?" Any student that answers "what" is to be reported to the Vatican as a homosexual and defrocked immediately. The Pope has also declared that there will be no more public kissing of his ring.

Seriously, isn't the Catholic Church already worried about a decline in numbers of men joining the priesthood? I'm sure an investigation like this will do wonders for their recruiting.

I suppose it is easier to blame a big, ol' gay scapegoat instead of focusing on the actual problem of sex abuse/rape/molestation of adolescent boys by priests whose repeated offenses were hidden by the church, eh? They may as well unfurl a giant banner across the piazza in the middle of Vatican square that says "We STILL Don't Get It!" (Ancora non lo otteniamo!)

Hey, at least this time they're turning their inquisition on their own. Oddly enough, any rejected gay priests that do get trapped in the homodragnet can move to Spain and get married.

Pledge Politics

I've been thinking a bit about the latest Pledge of Allegiance ruling.

I feel very strongly about this issue because of my personal experiences and beliefs, it's a symbolic issue that is pretty close to my heart and helped transform me into a political animal when I was in 6th grade. (Yet another reason to dislike the battle over the pledge.) It is a fact that in many places in America to criticize state-sanctioned religious speech earns people the label anti-God, anti-Christian and anti-American, or worse. This is an adult battle over the place of religion in the public square being played out with non-Christian kids as the political fodder. Many Christians don't see it that way, they believe is it their children who are being persecuted by the removal of "under God" from the Pledge. But who do they think pays the higher price for being different in this country? Their Christian kid or the kid who either sits down or goes out in the hallway during the Pledge of Allegiance?

Frankly, kids don't care about the pledge. It doesn't really mean much to them, they generally don't understand the words-- well, except for the "under God" part. That's one of the only parts that aren't garbled by young mouths. Kids do get the message that we are supposed to be a nation "under God." Speaking from personal experience that is not a subtle message to the kids who are from an irreligous household and don't say the pledge.

Conservatives like to argue that the Pledge isn't compulsory, that no one is forced to say it. What do people think happens to the little Muslim/Jewish/Jehovah's Witness/agnostic/atheist kid who opts out of the Pledge? Sorry, but the opt-out clause is pretty much bull as stupid kids and even stupider adults think that you're anti-god and anti-America if you refuse to say the Pledge. It's not a benign option. We know this about America yet we pretend that opting-out doesn't have negative consequences for the kid who every morning opts-out of saying "under God" with all of his/her classmates. It does. It takes little to no imagination to realize it.

The Pledge, as it stands now, is both a pledge to God and Country. Everyone standing up in a room to say the Pledge in unison *is* a cohersive environment if you're a kid. Why does anyone want to volunatrily put kids in this awkward, uncomfortable position so they can be picked on and ridiculed for being different?

However, despite everything I have just written, I do concede that it's a lame, tired issue. It's one of those pure political ammunition issues that never get debated in a constructive way. It's lose-lose. It's pretty low on my list of priorities and I do wish it would fade away.

Sweet

A joint session of the Massachusetts Legislature voted 157-39 on Wednesday to defeat a proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage while calling for legalizing civil unions.

Gay activists and their supporters called today’s development a stunning victory and a clear signal that a majority of legislators — and most likely a majority of state residents — support gay marriage.

“We now have a solid and growing pro-marriage majority in the legislature,” said Marty Rouse, campaign director for Mass Equality, a state wide gay rights group.

This is a much sweeter victory than anticipated as earlier reports showed a much tighter vote. The struggle over same-sex marriage in Massachusetts is pretty much final. Damn. This feels pretty damn good.

Lately my wife and I have been thinking and talking a lot about place. It's highly likely that within the next year we'll be moving to my familial city of Pittsburgh, PA to go to go back to school, buy a house, and raise a family. If it weren't so important to us to have a lot extended family nearby (cough, family values, cough) we'd probably move to Massachusetts or Canada. My parents, grandmother, aunt, uncle and cousins live in Pittsburgh as do my wife's aunt and uncle and their children. However, if it weren't for the fact that Pennsylvania has second-parent adoption we couldn't even consider moving to to the state. Frankly, right now the importance of family ties has come into sharper focus as we are currently waiting to hear how much longer my wife's mother has to live. As much as conservatives like to think that they are "pro-family" it's apparent they have a very shallow appreciation for what the word truly means.

I think a lot of people believe that to gay people gay marriage is all about the symbolism-- surely that is part of it-- but it's really about our basic rights to be defined and protected as a family. These laws strongly impact and influence the lives of gay people, our choices about where we live and work, our sense of freedom (or lack thereof) within our own country. I can only hope that other people will gain a sense of what this really means as time goes on. Outside of Massachusetts we're all still outlaws. One can only hope this won't be true for too much longer.

Congratulations Massachusetts. Job well done.

A Meaningless Pledge

Below is the weekly post from the CFD:

Some are hailing the inclusion of language regarding a "responsibility to protect" in the draft declaration on UN reform to be discussed during the three-day summit being held in New York.

The "Responsibility to Protect" is, according to the seminal report on the topic

[T]he idea that sovereign states have a responsibility to protect their own citizens from avoidable catastrophe, but that when they are unwilling or unable to do so, that responsibility must be borne by the broader community of states.

The report, and the idea, were generated by the international community's ignominious failure to intervene in situations such as the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The thinking was that it was necessary to shift the debate away from a "right to intervene," which carries serious implications for the cherished idea of national sovereignty, and toward a "responsibility to protect" those people in danger.

After much debate, compromise and rewriting, the final text included in the draft declaration came out looking like this

The international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapter VI and VIII of the Charter, to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context, we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the UN Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case by case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. We stress the need for the General Assembly to continue consideration of the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity and its implications, bearing in mind the principles of the Charter of the United Nations and international law. We also intend to commit ourselves, as necessary and appropriate, to help states build capacity to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and to assist those which are under stress before crises and conflicts break out.

Nowhere has the Security Council or the UN member states actually pledged to do anything. This section carries no legal obligations; rather, it merely reiterates that the UN has a responsibility "to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity," which something they already an obligation to prevent under the Genocide Convention.

Note also that it doesn't say that the UN has a "responsibility to protect" but rather a responsibility ... to help protect" those at risk. That is a big difference.

As such, it is a little difficult to share Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin's excitement

But a Canadian-inspired initiative highlighting the world's responsibility to protect threatened people and prevent genocides is a clear move forward, Martin said.

The doctrine "essentially says that if Rwanda occurred today that the United Nations would act," he said, referring to the genocide that took an estimated 800,000 lives in the African country in the mid-1990s.

Considering that there is "another Rwanda" currently taking place in Darfur, why are we to expect that suddenly the UN is going to take seriously its "responsibility to protect"? Has the UN failed to act thus far solely because it lacked this one resolution? The UN has resisted acting on Darfur for two years and there is absolutely no reason to believe that this recognition of a theoretical "responsibility to protect" will have any impact on the legal or political concerns that have thus far prevented action.

If the UN and its members truly believed in the "responsibility to protect," they would be protecting the people of Darfur, not writing resolutions vaguely promising to act when Darfur-like situations arise in the future.

Not So Fast, Senator Cornyn

During yesterday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearings with Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, Senator John Cornyn (R-Tex.) began a question by voicing his concern about court decisions that aren't in sync with public opinion.

Citing words from the Declaration of Independence, Cornyn said that the laws and decisions that come from all three branches of government should be "based on the consent of the governed." Of course, the Texas Republican left out a few pertinent points:

* The Declaration of Independence is a document that was written to outline the reasons why the colonies were officially "dissolv[ing] the political bands which have connected them with" Britain. It was not a document intended to explain how the new nation's government would function. And it was written at a time when there was no Supreme Court. Someone should remind Cornyn that the document that outlines the structure of our government is called the Constitution.

* Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote those words ("the consent of the governed") was no fan of unbridled majority rule. In his first inaugural address, Jefferson asked Americans to "bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate (these rights) would be oppression." And James Madison also warned of the potential dangers of relying on "pure democracy." The final word belongs to Douglas Gwyn, an author and Quaker theologian: "Truth is not determined by majority vote."

Our "Lake Wobegon" Government

Based on what the world's biggest asshole says, we should all start singing "Oh Happy Day." Surely, you've heard the great news .... haven't you? As the Washington Times reports:

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said yesterday that Republicans have done so well in cutting spending that he declared an "ongoing victory," and said there is simply no fat left to cut in the federal budget.

Mr. DeLay was defending Republicans' choice to borrow money and add to this year's expected $331 billion deficit to pay for Hurricane Katrina relief. Some Republicans have said Congress should make cuts in other areas, but Mr. DeLay said that doesn't seem possible.

... Asked if that meant the government was running at peak efficiency, Mr. DeLay said, "Yes, after 11 years of Republican majority we've pared it down pretty good."

... "This is hardly a well-oiled machine," said Rep. Jeff Flake, Arizona Republican. "There's a lot of fat to trim. ... I wonder if we've been serving in the same Congress."

American Conservative Union Chairman David A. Keene said federal spending already was "spiraling out of control" before Katrina, and conservatives are "increasingly losing faith in the president and the Republican leadership in Congress."

"... and, in other news, there are no more people living in poverty. But, first, with a quick check of the weather, let's go to meteorologist Bill Shaw ..."

Unredacted & Damning

In August 2004 the Bush Administration stopped the 9/11 Commission from releasing a report on the failures in the aviation industry and the government to prevent 9/11. Now we know why.

American aviation officials were warned as early as 1998 that Al Qaeda could "seek to hijack a commercial jet and slam it into a U.S. landmark," according to previously secret portions of a report prepared last year by the Sept. 11 commission. The officials also realized months before the Sept. 11 attacks that two of the three airports used in the hijackings had suffered repeated security lapses.

Federal Aviation Administration officials were also warned in 2001 in a report prepared for the agency that airport screeners' ability to detect possible weapons had "declined significantly" in recent years, but little was done to remedy the problem, the Sept. 11 commission found.

The White House and many members of the commission, which has completed its official work, have been battling for more than a year over the release of the commission's report on aviation failures, which was completed in August 2004.

A heavily redacted version was released by the Bush administration in January, but commission members complained that the deleted material contained information critical to the public's understanding of what went wrong on Sept. 11. In response, the administration prepared a new public version of the report, which was posted Tuesday on the National Archives Web site.

I'm sure the timing of the release of this report has nothing to do with the fact that the news media is currently distracted by the Roberts hearings, Katrina coverage, etc. I'm also sure the fact that they waited to release it until September 13th, 2005 just a few days past the 9/11 anniversary news cycle is just a mere coincidence. (deep sigh)

Sloppy Practices, Poor Excuses from The Post

In a recent "Media Notes" columns, the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz wrote:

The Washington Post, like many news organizations, says it is trying to crack down on the use of anonymous sources. But the paper allowed a "senior administration official" to spin the story of the slow response to Katrina -- with a claim that turned out to be false.

On Sept. 4, the paper cited the "senior Bush official" as saying that as of the day before, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco "still had not declared a state of emergency." As The Post noted in a correction, Blanco, a Democrat, had declared a state of emergency on Aug. 26.

... Post National Editor Michael Abramowitz calls the incident "a bad mistake" that happened right on deadline. "We all feel bad about that," he says. "We should not have printed the information as background information, and it should have been checked. We fell down on the desk."

On the desk? Try the floor.

But, okay, at least Abramowitz seems to be taking responsibility for this major lapse in journalistic standards.

However, Kurtz then proceeds to quote the article's co-author, Spencer Hu. Hu sounds anything but contrite, and he betrays a certain naivete:

Spencer Hsu, the article's co-author, says he "tried to make clear that the source came from the administration, and that he was blaming the locals, which I believe our story made clear and broke ground in explaining by uncovering the National Guard dispute."

Should the paper identify the source who provided bad information? "We don't blow sources, period, especially if we don't have reason to believe the source in this case actually lied deliberately," Hsu says.

One cannot say with certainty whether the senior Bush official was lying. But Hsu wants us to accept the notion that The Post has no "reason to believe" that the senior Bush official "lied deliberately"? Please.

The very fact that the Bush official requested anonymity provides some reason to believe he or she had bad intentions. After all, whether or not Gov. Blanco had declared a state of emergency by a certain date is a matter of public record -- it's not a he-said, she-said dispute. It can be independently verified (and should have been, but perhaps Hsu didn't want to be late for the baseball game or the theater that evening).

Hsu wants us to conclude that the Bush White House (or this one "senior" official) simply made a clumsy mistake with the facts. What's Hsu putting in his coffee every morning?

I don't know what's more disturbing -- a) the fact that Kurtz's quotes make Hsu appear so chilled-out over this breach of journalistic integrity, or b) the fact that about news and events is partially dependent on someone as naive as Hsu.

After all, the Company Has Done Such a Sterling Job in Iraq and Afghanistan ....

Earlier this week, a Wall Street Journal article reported:

The reconstruction of New Orleans hasn't yet begun, but smart investors already are putting their money on companies that might profit by helping the city rebuild.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, investors have scooper up shares of companies including ... Halliburton Co., which provides energy and construction services ...

Although the article referred to investors choosing companies "that might profit by helping the city rebuild," the lessons of Halliburton's work in the Middle East suggest that the company seems to profit whether or not it does a good job of actually "helping."

Thank You for Being Myopic Strategists

Today Massachusetts lawmakers are to vote on a state constitutional amendment that would replace gay marriage with civil unions. It passed narrowly last year, 105-92, and needs to be passed a second time by the legislature to get on the Massachusetts ballot in 2006. While gay marriage supporters are obviously lobbying against it, quixotically, so are some anti-gay conservatives.

Why? Essentially, while it is a clear vote against gay marriage and would put the question before voters in an off-year election when the issue is still lukewarm, they don't want civil unions either. So instead they are pushing for a third, far less popular option that bans both marriage and unions.

What seems pretty clear to me is that they are risking diluting the vote for something that has a slim chance of passing in favor of something that won't pass the legislature or be approved by the people. They have given people a free dodge-the-conservative-shitlist card, now they can vote against the "no marriage/yes unions amendment" and vote for the "nothing amendment" while the votes opposing either amendment will outnumber votes in favor. They even risk making the rejection of the "no marriage/yes unions" appear to be even stronger than it actually is among legislators. They are defeating their own cause with their stubborn, extremist myopia.

However, pro-gay marriage activists in other states could learn a lesson from these conservatives. Their all-or-nothing strategy reminds me of same-sex marriage supporters who won't ever consider settling for civil unions in the short term in states that are strongly Democratic but people are still turned of by the term "gay marriage." Instead of going for the smaller, incremental victory they are holding out for the unattainable one. I worry that the groups who push for "full marriage rights only" only help constitutional bans get enacted which pushes away any chances of any familial rights for gay couples in the near future.

Neither side seems to understand the importance of disarming your opponent and fighting smart. Sometimes you fight for what you can get when you know you can't get what you want. Something is better than nothing and sometimes pragmatism should trump idealism. Ignoring the fact that politics is a game of strategy is the first step to losing the game. You don't win anything by losing everything.

At least today it looks like gay marriage in Massachusetts is here to stay-- thanks to the myopia of some Massachusetts conservatives.

Need A New Reason to Find Santorum Annoying?

Senator Rick "Two Terms Only, Please" Santorum (R-Penn.) has long been a critic of the National Weather Service. So when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf coast, Santorum was eager to take a swipe at the agency, complaining that he didn't believe that NWS had given "sufficient warning" in its initial reports about Katrina.

That's interesting because Santorum's GOP colleague, Sen. Jim DeMint -- who happens to chair the Disaster Prediction and Prevention Subcommittee, offered words of praise for the NWS. DeMint said that after reviewing the NWS's actions, he was "convinced that this was one of the most accurate hurricane predictions we have ever seen."

Indeed, Monday's Wall Street Journal notes that if there was any blame to be assigned for a lack of warning, it is the media -- not weather officials -- who deserve it. The Journal reports that in addition to tracking Katrina's approach, the NWS also was on top of the potential for flooding caused by compromised levees:

The New Orleans office of the National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning at 8:14 a.m. Monday (Aug. 29), saying "a levee breech occurred along the industrial canal at Tennessee Street, 3 to 8 feet of water is expected due to the breech." The media largely ignored [the warning].

So what's Santorum's beef with the NWS? This Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article offers some critical clues:

Sen. Rick Santorum, who has sponsored legislation to limit the information that the National Weather Service can provide to the public, told radio reporters this week that Congress should investigate whether the federal agency's initial warnings on the severity of Hurricane Katrina were adequate.

... [Democrats] have contended that his legislation is intended to benefit private weather companies, at least one of which has contributed to his campaign.

Not that we needed additional reasons to hope that Pennsylvania voters reject Santorum's re-election bid next year.

By the way, this is the Democrat with the best shot of defeating Santorum next November.

March of the Morons

After watching the documentary "March of the Penguins" last month the last furthest thing from my mind was anything like this.

To Andrew Coffin, writing in the widely circulated Christian publication World Magazine, that is a winning argument for the theory that life is too complex to have arisen through random selection.

"That any one of these eggs survives is a remarkable feat - and, some might suppose, a strong case for intelligent design," he wrote. "It's sad that acknowledgment of a creator is absent in the examination of such strange and wonderful animals. But it's also a gap easily filled by family discussion after the film."

Hold on a minute, this film affirms that there is an "intelligent" designer? If anything this film is evidence that even if one were to concede, for argument's sake, that there is a sentient "creator" that he/she is far from intelligent. Do these people actually believe that someone intelligent created these fat, clumsy, flightless, defenseless birds who must walk 70 miles back and forth in the coldest place on earth for their basic surivival, meanwhile the food that they need so desperately to keep them and their species alive is RIGHT BELOW THEM. Intelligent designer? No. Cruel designer? Yes.

Then there are other Christians who think the films is an affimration of marriage/monogamy.

"March of the Penguins," the conservative film critic and radio host Michael Medved said in an interview, is "the motion picture this summer that most passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing."
...
Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, told the young conservatives' gathering last month: "You have to check out 'March of the Penguins.' It is an amazing movie. And I have to say, penguins are the really ideal example of monogamy. These things - the dedication of these birds is just amazing."
...
Richard A. Blake, co-director of the film studies program at Boston College and the author of "The Lutheran Milieu of the Films of Ingmar Bergman" said that like many films, "March of the Penguins" was open to a religious interpretation.

"You get a sense of these animals - following their natural instincts - are really exercising virtue that for humans would be quite admirable," he said. "I could see it as a statement on monogamy or condemnation of gay marriage or whatever the current agenda is."

Sure they're the ideal of monogamy if monogamy means staying together just long enough to have sex and try to have a baby. If the baby doesn't hatch, they go their seperate ways. If they do successfully rear a baby they only stay together for the sake of the baby. After the baby is grown they both abandon it along with all the other defenseless babies and next very season they try to find each other again, but if they don't they'll mate with someone else. At best this is an example of serial monogamy, or on-again-off-again monogamy, but I'm sure if any humans actually lived like emperor penguins conservatives would consider them anything but monogamy affirming. For pete's sake, they're not even married! As for the anti-gay marrige comment, the existence of same-sex penguin couples that mate for life are well publicized. More evidence that these conservatives are using very selective reasoning to support their childish notions of an omnipotent sky-daddy is that the beginning of the film opens with the narrator describing how the penguins have been living like this for millions of years. MILLIONS. Not to mention that the Bible says nothing about penguins.

At least George Will shows signs of intelligent thinking, "If an Intelligent Designer designed nature," the columnist George F. Will asked recently, "why did it decide to make breeding so tedious for those penguins?"

You said it, George. There are so many expamples on non-intelligent design in nature that only a truly delusional, un(der)educated person can wholly reject the theory of evolution and believe that the earth is "new" and created by an intellgent, sentient being.

Snark Snuggling

By way of the lovely long-lost Helena Montana...

This was so funny that I had to share. Embrace the snark!

Wonkette's Tips to Make John Roberts's Confirmation More Interesting:

• Figure out which senators aren't wearing make-up.
• Go through box of crayons trying to approximate the exact shade of Roberts' dreamy blue eyes.
• Turn off sound, do voice over giving senators funny voices or accents.
• Turn off sound, start "Dark Side of the Moon." Freaky, huh?
• Miniputt!
• Put ten glasses of water on your coffee table, one containing poison: close your eyes and re-arrange them. Every time Specter says, "let him finish," drink one.
• Translate the hearings for your cat ("And then the senator asked 'meow meow meeeow meow meoooow.'").
• Count your yawns per hour; now, can you double that the next hour?
• Assfuck -- while you still can.
• Prank call the committee members' offices, asking "Is your democracy running?"
• Watch them with a gerbil in your trousers.

Hell Just Froze Over

Bush just said something both honest and true.

"Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government," Bush said at a joint White House news conference with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. "To the extent the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility."

I hate to be cynical, I want to congratulate the president for owning up to his responsibility, but I can't help but wonder if this new tactic of taking responsibility has been either focused grouped or if it was an off-the-cuff moment that won't be repeated.

(crickets chirping)

Another Rodney King Moment?

When I read this the first thing that popped into my head was "Rodney King."

Twenty-two percent of all those polled say a "major reason" the response was slow was that it was not a priority because the people affected were mostly African-American. However, 47 percent of non-whites believe race was a major reason, while only 13 percent of whites believe it. And 29 percent of all those polled and 53 percent of non-whites say a major reason was that the people affected were mostly poor. (Only 20 percent of whites feel that way.)

Yet another significant cultural moment that highlights just how differently blacks and whites in America perceive the relationship between race, class and power. It supports my belief that most whites neither "see" or "get" it mostly due to limited exposure to people who aren't just like themselves.

Watching all the post-Katrina hurricane coverage has been like watching people who I actually know suffer tremendous, unimaginable loss. I don't have nearly the distance that most white Americans do from the lives of black Americans. For the past seven years I have always been a "multiple minority" in mostly black, poor-to-middle class DC neighborhoods-- I'm a white, Jewish lesbian. I don't think any of this earns me anything special, I certainly don't wear it as a badge of enlightenment or anything, but I do think I have a different perspective from the vast majority of other white people; I'm hyper aware of what it's like to stand out as an "other" in a day-to-day way. I know what it's like to feel like I'm trespassing in places where I, technically, don't belong. Frankly, there is no place I could go where I would only be surrounded by people who, at least superficially, are just like me.

Today, like many, I'm thinking about both 9/11 and the aftermath of Katrina. Both are tragedies, of different stripes, but they reveal some of the fundamental differences in understanding of how "others" live. It puts a spotlight on America's complicated intersection of race and class that is deeply rooted in a sometimes inspiring, mostly ugly, history. Let's hope that we are able to turn this into a uniting momement instead of the ususual "blame game"-- blaming those in poverty for being poor and having few resources and pretending that they became that way in a vacuum, that it is entirely their fault.

I think of most people as products of their ancestral history and that our lives either represent a chapter similar to the one before or a divergence. None of us can escape who we are by denying where come from without paying a very high price. I can only hope that America stops trying to distance itself from its recent history of institutional discrimination and can begin to recognize that the past isn't buried nearly as deeply as we'd like it to be.

Speaking of Having No Sense of Decency

Last night I saw a trailer for a horror movie, "Venom," and couldn't believe they were still releasing it next week. It just seems like a really, really bad time to release a zombie movie about teenagers using voodoo to reanimate corpses in a swampy Louisiana Bayou. Dontcha think? What the hell is Miramax thinking?!?

DeLay to Evacuee Children: "Is This Kind of Fun?"

From the Houston Chronicle's blog:

U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's visit to Reliant Park this morning offered him a glimpse of what it's like to be living in shelter.

While on the tour with top administration officials from Washington, including U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao and U.S. Treasury Secretary John W. Snow, DeLay stopped to chat with three young boys resting on cots.

The congressman likened their stay to being at camp and asked, "Now tell me the truth boys, is this kind of fun?"

They nodded yes, but looked perplexed.

For good reason.

God Flunks Clean-Up Duty

According to today's print version of the Wall Street Journal (registration req'd), Rep. Richard Baker (R-La.) was overheard making the following statements to lobbyists: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."

Baker later explained, reports the Journal, that he "didn't intend flippancy" but has "long wanted to improve low-income housing" in the city.

If Katrina was God's way of cleaning up public housing, he needs to work on his precision. Someone needs to tell the Dieu-dude that his hurricane also "cleaned up" hundreds of private homes throughout Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

Bye, Bye Brownie

Considering he was fired from his last job as the director of the Pretty, Pretty Horses Association do you think Michael Brown got to ride out on the horse he rode in on?

(ba dum dum, crash)

Seriously, though, why do they call it "relieved " when the man was clearly fired? Then again, he probably is feeling pretty relieved right now.

Proof that Humans Can Regrow Spinal Cells

Where was this attitude from January 2001 to January 2005?

But seriously, folks: in the predictable but very worrisome category is the poll indicating that two-thirds of black respondents believe the response to Katrina would have been more substantial if most of the victims had been white. This is one of those areas where the perception really does matter. It would be awful if it were true that the response was lessened by the race of the victims (I'm neither agreeing nor disagreeing with that premise); but even if it were not true, the fact that so many blacks believe it's true would be a problem.

And am I the only one who finds C.P.'s response--in the reporter's paraphrase, "so many African-Americans were left unprotected because they were poor, rather than because they were black"--less than completely reassuring?

How the Bush Administration Celebrates Freedom

Sunday's 9/11 absurdly-named "America Supports You Freedom Walk" is quite possibly the most restricted, least free government-sponsored event I've ever heard of in my entire 29 years, 361 days.

Organizers of the Pentagon's 9/11 memorial Freedom Walk on Sunday are taking extraordinary measures to control participation in the march and concert, with the route fenced off and lined with police and the event closed to anyone who does not register online by 4:30 p.m. today.

The march, sponsored by the Department of Defense, will wend its way from the Pentagon to the Mall along a route that has not been specified but will be lined with four-foot-high snow fencing to keep it closed and "sterile," said Allison Barber, deputy assistant secretary of defense.

The U.S. Park Police will have its entire Washington force of several hundred on duty and along the route, on foot, horseback and motorcycles and monitoring from above by helicopter. Officers are prepared to arrest anyone who joins the march or concert without a credential and refuses to leave, said Park Police Chief Dwight E. Pettiford.
...
Pettiford said officers would patrol to keep interlopers out because the Pentagon restricted the event in its permit application. "That is what their permit called for, so we have those fences to keep the public out." [ed. Maybe they should just define all "interlopers" as "looters" and shoot them on sight?]

Once the National Park Service approves the permit, it is normal for police to do what they can to adhere to the organizers' requests. "It's a permitted event. That means [organizers] are allowed to say who is in and who's out," said Sgt. Scott Fear, a Park Police spokesman. He declined to say how many officers were in the Park Police, which had a Washington detail of about 400 two years ago.

What's unusual for an event on the Mall is the combination of fences, required preregistration and the threat of arrest.
...
One restricted group [another?] will be the media, whose members will not be allowed to walk along the march route. Reporters and cameras are restricted to three enclosed areas along the route but are not permitted to walk alongside participants walking from the Pentagon, across the Memorial Bridge to the Mall.

Yeah! Freedom! Wahoo! With armed police escorts ready to arrest anyone who steps out of line at a government-sponsored, taxpayer-supported march with heavily restricted media access! Thank you America, thank you for being so free!

Seriously, who do they think they're fucking kidding with this shit? This is a totally mockery of freedom, it's practically a big ol' double-middle-finger "fuck you!" to the Bill of Rights. As it's been said before, this kind of pro-government propaganda really does seem soviet-inspired.

Update: Not only are they giving away "free" t-shirts that people will be required to wear, Atrios says they're giving machers their own military DOG TAGS. I am so going tomorrow to get my t-shirt and dog tags to remind myself of this totally Orwellian day.

Norquist Knows "Exactly What the Residents of the Gulf Region Need at This Time ..."

While most of us were still trying to grasp the destruction and chaos that had swept New Orleans and the adjacent areas in the wake of Katrina, Grover Norquist was busy writing this memorandum. In it, Norquist urges members of the U.S. Senate not to delay passage of a bill repealing the inheritance tax.

Why? Norquist insists that repeal of the inheritance tax would spur economic growth, and that, he writes, "is exactly what the residents of the Gulf Region need at this time to start the rebuilding process for their neighborhoods..."

Really? It's nice of Norquist to speak to the Senate on behalf of people he's never even met. Yep, I'm sure he's an expert on the needs of New Orleans' 9th Ward.

Well, the New York Times has a different take on repealing the inheritance tax:

Hurricane Katrina may have cost very wealthy people a lot of money. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it may have cost their heirs a lot of money.

The cost came not from the direct effects of the disaster. It came because the hurricane's impact on the poor people who remained in New Orleans made it politically unattractive for the Senate to vote on repealing the estate tax this week.

Such a vote is still possible later in the Congressional session, however, and if it does not pass, there is some speculation that a compromise to cut estate tax rates by two-thirds might be approved.

The estate tax affects a surprisingly small number of people. In 2003, the most recent year with numbers available, just 1.25 percent of all deaths resulted in taxable estates, with most of them paying relatively little. But 505 estates, each worth more than $20 million, paid $5.2 billion ...

Repeal will have no impact at all on the vast majority of people, but you wouldn't know that if you lived in a state with a wavering senator. There, advertising campaigns claim that small-business owners and family farms suffer from the estate tax. In fact, there are provisions in the law to ease the effect on both groups and an estate has to be large to face any tax at all.

Conference for and by the Greatest Demagogues

I just received this e-mail.

Countering the War on Faith Conference

You're Invited!

Dear Zoe,

Are you

Disgusted by Hollywood's attacks on Judeo-Christian ethics?

Outraged by media slander of Christians?

Incensed by judicial assaults on Americans' right to publicly acknowledge God?

Sick and Tired of seeing our children indoctrinated in the homosexual lifestyle?

Learn how and why the left is relentlessly attacking people of faith - and how to stop it!

Confirmed Speakers Includde [sic]:
Sen. Sam Brownback
Phylis Schlafly
Gary Bauer
Alan Keyes
Sen. Rick Santorum
Sen. John Cornyn
Congressman Tom DeLay
Judge Roy Moore
Rabbi Daniel Lapin
Hon. Zel Miller

For people who are so disgusted by homosexuals, it's amusing to me that they have a picture of men kissing as part of their e-mail banner. However, I'd like to know more about the latest homosexual indoctrination techniques, so I think I might have to go. Especially since it's here in DC at the Omni Shoreham (just north of DC's gay Dupont Circle) and it is most of my very favorite right-wing demagogues-- WBA! Ricky! Roy! Alan! Jerry! Gary! Zel! Phyllis! Sam! Only Pat "High Priest of Demagoguery" Robertson would make the list complete.

The problem is that it's $149, although married couples get in for $259. Anyone want to be my beard/husband October 17-18? We could find out what those badges look like and make our own. Or maybe we can get in free as "press"? (We'd probably just have to make up a right-wing newsblog, say we're friends of Jeff Gannon.) In my experience conferences like these have very light security, if any. If you smile, look the part and dress the part, they're happy to have you there. Any other takers?

Hmmm. I think there is still an active Lesbian Avengers group around, perfect place for an old fashioned "Kiss-in" or some other similar mischief. Might have to drop them an e-mail.

Where Are Your Katrina Donations Going?

In recent days, commentators on major broadcast and cable TV networks seem to have begun steering Katrina donors toward one of two charities -- the American Red Cross (good) and the Salvation Army (not so good -- their employment policies discriminate against gay people).

But only a few days after Katrina hit the Gulf coast states, a number of charities were getting "face time" on the TV screen. For example, CNN's "Larry King Show" was promoting a variety of charities, some of which were quite undeserving of this free exposure.

It seems unlikely that CNN vetted its initial list of charities with experts who analyze the actual work of charitable or philanthropic organizations. "Operation Blessing," the charity arm of Pat Robertson's televangelistic empire, was among the charities whose names were posted periodically on the TV screen. Another was Feed the Children (FTC), an Oklahoma City-based charitable ministry. According to CharityWatch.org, FTC is

an [American Institute for Philanthropy] F-rated charity that spends only 18% of its cash budget on program services and spends 60% on direct mail and television and radio ads .... (FTC) has repeatedly declined to fulfill AIP’s request to disclose what it is actually distributing to which specific charities. Finally, in February of this year [FTC] did disclose to us in a letter the basic categories and amounts of $796 million worth of goods distributed. This letter did not cite the time frame in which the distribution occurred and omitted any information on which charities received the goods ...

... When are audited financial statements unaudited? When the accompanying audit report is fake. The fiscal 1999 and 1998 financial statements of Feed the Children (FTC), formerly Larry Jones International Ministries, Inc., distributed to AIP and state regulators contain the forged signature of Arthur Andersen .... According to FTC, its former Chief Financial Director Monty Rainwater confessed that he forged Arthur Andersen’s name on FTC’s ’98 and ’99 financial statements.

But here's my favorite disclosure from CharityWatch.org's analysis:

Nearly none of the $47.5 million in cash raised in fiscal 1998 was spent on food. FTC told AIP that this is true but that “there is a lot more to Feed the Children than feeding children.”

This led me to wonder how an honest thank-you letter from FTC might begin. Perhaps ....

Dear Friend,

I am writing to thank you for your recent contribution of $100. Thanks to donations like yours, we have been able to purchase new drapes and carpet for Feed the Children's headquarters and a nice leather chair for my office. These improvements serve to remind us all that Feed the Children is about a whole lot more than just feeding children ....

Before they remove this from their website...

I thought I'd post it here. From whitehouse.gov.

Statement on Federal Emergency Assistance for Louisiana

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.

Specifically, FEMA is authorized to identify, mobilize, and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency. Debris removal and emergency protective measures, including direct Federal assistance, will be provided at 75 percent Federal funding.

Representing FEMA, Michael D. Brown, Under Secretary for Emergency Preparedness and Response, Department of Homeland Security, named William Lokey as the Federal Coordinating Officer for Federal recovery operations in the affected area.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: FEMA (202) 646-4600.

It couldn't be more plain. At least in theory, the federal government declared itself available and responsible starting Friday, August the 26th. Therefore all of the Republicans who are trying to blame the local government for not doing enough, for not reaching out to the federal government, are totally full of it. This charade needs to stop. Now.

Another Disaster for Which Relief Is Needed

If you were a British citizen who had been completely unaware of Hurricane Katrina and had simply turned on the Sky News channel, except for the words "breaking news," the caption on the TV screen's "crawl bar" would have made perfect sense:

I Hate Polls...

but it does appear that Katrina, at least temporarily, has hurt Bush as well.

Almost two-thirds, 65 percent, say the country is headed in the wrong direction — up from 59 percent last month. President Bush's job approval was at 39 percent, the lowest point since AP-Ipsos began measuring public approval of Bush in December 2003.

Post-Katrina Censorship: It's a Matter of Style

Buried on page C8 in yesterday's Washington Post "Style" section -- six pages after a story headlined "Shopper: Aprons Too Hot for the Kitchen" -- was this news article:

When U.S. officials asked the news media not to take pictures of those killed by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, they were censoring a key part of the disaster story, free-speech watchdogs said yesterday.

The move by the Federal Emergency Management Agency is in line with the Bush administration's ban on images of flag-draped U.S. military coffins returning from the Iraq war, media monitors charged in separate telephone interviews.

"It's impossible for me to imagine how you report a story whose subject is death without allowing the public to see images of the subject of the story," said Larry Siems of the PEN American Center, an authors' group that defends free expression.

... "This is about managing images and not public taste or human dignity," (Tom) Rosenstiel (of Columbia University's journalism school) said. He said FEMA's refusal to take journalists along on recovery missions meant that media workers would go on their own .... "By and large, American television is the most sanitized television in the world," he said. "They are less likely to show bodies, they are less likely to show graphic images of the dead than any television in the world."

There is also a question of what the American PEN Center's Siems called "international equity," noting that American news outlets cover stories around the world showing the effects of natural disasters and wars in graphic detail.

"How is the world going to look at us if we go into their part of the world and we broadcast these images and we do not allow ourselves to look at such images when they're right in our own midst?" Siems said.

Siems has a good point. However, over the past nine months, if you blinked while watching American TV, you probably missed the video images of human death and misery from Darfur.

Why? Our TV news executives would rather tell us about the "runaway bride." And, apparently, the Post would rather inform us that there's a sexy little apron out there that can make us (or our significant others) forget about whether dinner has been burned.

I Wish I Could Say I'm Surprised ....

.... by this news, but I'm not. According to this morning's Washington Post:

Five of eight top Federal Emergency Management Agency officials came to their posts with virtually no experience in handling disasters and now lead an agency whose ranks of seasoned crisis managers have thinned dramatically since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

FEMA's top three leaders -- Director Michael D. Brown, Chief of Staff Patrick J. Rhode and Deputy Chief of Staff Brooks D. Altshuler -- arrived with ties to President Bush's 2000 campaign or to the White House advance operation, according to the agency. Two other senior operational jobs are filled by a former Republican lieutenant governor of Nebraska and a U.S. Chamber of Commerce official who was once a political operative.

If you're pissed off about this, you should be. But you should also realize that this isn't just a Dubya issue.

Clinton, Bush I, Reagan and numerous presidents before them treated ambassadorships, top positions at FEMA and other agencies, and other government posts as theirs to parcel out to wealthy campaign hacks and contributors. Little or no thought was given to the notion that these positions required individuals with specific qualifications.

FEMA: Help Is Just a Toll-Free Call Away*

(* - But try rubbing a rabbit's foot and waving a four-leaf clover as you dial.)

I won't even suggest that I've felt the tragedy of Katrina in any direct sense. The closest I've come to it is watching and listening to the experiences of a co-worker of mine who grew up in New Orleans. Her parents were living there when the hurricane approached the shore.

Yesterday afternoon, through the wall of my office, I could hear my co-worker patiently trying to talk her parents through the task of filling out an insurance claim form. A half-hour later, I watched her grow frustrated trying to get through on FEMA's toll-free number. For hours, the agency's toll-free line was busy.

Then, I thought she was going to snap after she heard a FEMA official at an official briefing (via C-Span, I believe) try to reassure the public that all people needed to do was to dial FEMA's toll-free number. Yes, this was the same number on which she had been unable to get an answer for several hours.

Even if that toll-free number weren't constantly busy, the Bush administration official seems to have overlooked the fact that most cell towers are either down or overwhelmed by capacity. And it isn't just a cell phone problem. Even yesterday, many people trying to use land lines to reach friends or family in the affected states only heard phone company recordings.

Oh, yeah, one last thing. That official also encouraged evacuees and their families to apply for help by going online and visiting FEMA's website.

What's that? You didn't carry your Dell notebook computer with you as you rushed to your car to evacuate? Jeez, what were you people thinking?

One of the 11 Who Voted "No" on Katrina Aid Bill

Earlier today, 11 House Republicans voted against the $51 billion aid package to help the people and areas victimized by Hurricane Katrina. They include the aptly named Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and the libertarian-minded Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.).

Whatever one may think about a congressman who would oppose such a bill, at least one of the 11 "no" voters -- Rep. Paul -- is quite consistent. He opposes virtually every appropriation or aid bill that ever comes to the House floor. But the same cannot be said about U.S. Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.).

On his website, Sensenbrenner's biography informs us that the congressman "has been at the forefront of efforts to eliminate wasteful government spending and protect the interests of American taxpayers." In Sensenbrenner's view, a bill aiding the victims of Katrina is apparently "wasteful." But, apparently, disaster relief bills are not created equal.

Only last spring, heavy rains caused millions of dollars in crop damage in 12 Wisconsin counties. Two of these counties (Jefferson and Ozaukee) happen to be in Sensenbrenner's congressional district. In this news release from last June, Rep. Sensenbrenner joined other lawmakers from his state in urging the federal government to provide disaster-relief funds for the affected farmers. Said Sensenbrenner:

"When nature strikes with such force, there is little we can do to stop or control her impact. But we can help the families who lost their homes and the farmers who lost their crops by lending them a helping hand. I hope (FEMA) Under Secretary (Michael) Brown will quickly approve the Governor's request for assistance so families in Wisconsin can go about getting their lives back in order."

How interesting. If you make only a few minor word substitutions in Sensenbrenner's quote, you'd have an equally eloquent rationale for supporting the $51 billion Katrina relief package that the congressman opposed:

"When nature strikes with such force, there is little we can do to stop or control her impact. But we can help the families who lost their homes and the [people] who lost their [jobs] by lending them a helping hand. I hope (FEMA) Under Secretary (Michael) Brown will quickly approve [this] request for assistance so families in [Louisiana, Mississippi and other states] can go about getting their lives back in order."

Now, if this leads you to wonder if Sensenbrenner is just a hypocritical pig, please don't jump to conclusions. The congressman must be an honorable man -- I mean, look at the swell friends he has ....


















Grover Norquist and Sensenbrenner shake hands.

Explain this To Me, Please

Quixotically, new indictments have been handed down for two of DeLay's Texas political organizations, but not any actual people.

The Texas Association of Business and Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee have been indicted on charges of illegally using corporate money to help Republicans win control of the Texas Legislature in 2002.

The indictments, released publicly this morning, include 128 counts against the business group and two against the political action committee, which was created by U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land.

The Travis County grand jury that issued the indictments, however, took no action against the Texas Association of Business' president, Bill Hammond, or any other officials with the group today.

A rare meeting among Hammond, his lawyer Roy Minton and Travis County prosecutors Wednesday might have made a difference.

If convicted, the state's largest business group faces the threat of fines — up to $20,000 for each count. But the indictments also complicate the group's defense against civil lawsuits filed by losing Democratic candidates. Damages in those suits could be double the $1.7 million that the association spent on 4 million mailers to voters in 2002.

The four indictments against the business group — two of which were issued last month and then sealed — break down the counts by different actions the group took. They include:

n 14 counts of prohibited political contributions by a corporation (TAB) for paying Hammond and staffer Jack Campbell to do political work.

•28 additional counts of prohibited political contributions by a corporation for launching ad campaigns, among other things.

•83 additional counts of prohibited political contributions by a corporations for paying for political ads, among other things.

•Three counts of prohibited political expenditures by a corporation for spending money in connection with 23 legislative campaigns.

All the counts are third-degree felonies.

TRMPAC, in the lone indictment against it, is is charged with two counts of illegally accepting corporate donations, including $100,000 from the Washington, D.C.-based Alliance for Quality Nursing Home Care.

Am I missing something? How can a PAC or an org be indicted? Or can we expect that actual people will be named responsible at a later time? If not, that's truly lame. PACs don't break the law, people do.

Ask and Ye Shall...Something, Something

Tom DeLay, the World's Biggest Asshole, seems to know exactly who to blame in the "blame game."

"It's the local officials trying to handle the problem. When they can't handle the problem, they go to the state, and the state does what they can to, and if they need assistance from FEMA and the federal government they ask for it and it's delivered," DeLay said.

He added that Alabama and Mississippi did a much better job of responding quickly than Louisiana. Alabama and Mississippi have Republican governors.

Is this really the best spin you can do? According to you the federal government didn't know that Louisiana needed help? That Louisiana's officials didn't ask the federal government for help? Maybe they just didn't ask nicely enough-- did they forget to say please with a cherry and sprinkles on top?

I suppose the fact that the governor of Louisiana declared a "State of Emergency" on the Friday before Katrina hit land doesn't matter, nor does it matter that Bush himself declared Louisiana to be in a "State of Emergency" on Saturday before Katrina hit. I think I understand why you cancelled the House hearings and are happy to see them delayed-- you're hoping the nation's disgust level will dissapate along with the putrid flood waters.

Washington in the Nutshell

Why do I dislike Washington DC?

1) Because jobs such as this exist,

2) Because the people hiring for this job have no qualms about describing it in this manner [bold in original]

THIS IS NOT AN ENTRY-LEVEL POSITION. Please apply only if you have at least 5 years of Executive Assistance experience supporting a senior partner, Member of Congress or other top-level executive, and you consider yourself to be a "career EA."

We are looking for a “traditional” executive assistant to report to our Founder/President–the type of assistant who understands how to support one executive and has a “mission mentality” to make sure he always looks good.

A Real Girly Man

Not surprisingly, Schwarzenegger has announced he's going to veto the civil marriage bill that was recently passed by the California legislature. But what is a little peculiar is the justification his office gives for his veto.

In a statement, Schwarzenegger's press secretary, Margita Thompson, said the governor opposes the legislation, passed Tuesday night by the California Assembly and last week by the state Senate, because he thinks the matter should be decided by California's courts or its voters.

Geez, it's a little hard to win this game if everyone keeps moving the goalposts. He wants it settled by "activist judges"? I thought "judicial activists" were a bad thing? And didn't the people of California elect those people in office who passed the bill? Isn't that how a representative government you know, like, works?

Yes, yes, I know by referring to the voters she's likely talking the 5-year old Prop 22 where a "family values" man who had a gay brother and gay son pushed for an anti-gay ballot measure, the Knight Initiative. The initiatve was intended to prevent California from recognizing same-sex marriages performed in other states. (At the time there weren't any.) However, like many controversial ballot measures, the grassroots campaign that were used to convince people it was necessary was largely based on lies, fears and propaganda. (For instance, telling people that if the Knight Iniative isn't passed that churches that don't perform same-sex weddings would be penalized and fined by the state.) Ballot measures are not a rational (or fair) way to resolve a controversial issue such as marriage, especially taking into account that Prop 22 was passed in an off-season vote by about 20% of eligible California voters. It's not hard to imagine how different our country would be if every controversial civil rights matter were resolved by state ballot iniatives. (Yeah! Mob Rule rules!)

My question for Arnold is this-- isn't vetoing a bill that was passed by the elected representatives of the people thwarting the actual will of the people? Does it matter to you that those elected people represent a lot more people than the voters who voted for Prop 22 over 5 years ago? Or is Arnold just a girly man with sagging popularity who is afraid to take a stand on a tough issue?

Tough Job

I just heard that my brother-in-law is heading to the Alabama coast to help manage debris removal for his employer, the Army Corp of Engineers. He just got "called up" to do it last night and left early this morning for a 30-day assignment, with 12 hour workdays, no days off and a lot of hard labor. I worry a little about what he's going to see so close up and how hard it might be for him, especially considering that Alabama is his home state.

We've all seen so much of the raw footage of all the heartbreaking devastation-- but I can't imagine what it would be like if it is your job to clean it all up. If I get any messages from the field, I'll be sure to post them here.

The Sporting Event of 2005

Without a doubt, the greatest sporting event of the year thus far, and almost surely for the full year, is the Ashes series. The finale begins tomorrow at the Kennington Oval. I, like countless others around the globe, will be following the over-by-over updates via Internet while pretending to work, and that's when I can't get away with simply listening to the radio broadcast on the BBC's website outright. And I've tried to schedule my flight to London on Sunday (Sept. 11; I'm not superstitious, though) to minimize the chance that I'll be in the air during a crucial moment. If the Test goes the distance, I'm sure people at the facility where I'll be in hearings all day Monday will be shuttling in and out with updates.

Have no idea what I'm talking about? You don't know what you're missing.

A Clever Way to Think About It...

America is suffering from Battered Wife's Syndrome.

Dear America,

As a friend of the family I can’t sit back and watch you do this to yourself without saying something. Consider this a long distance intervention.

Your man is no good. He treats you like crap, lies to you, abuses you, bullies you, exploits you, takes your money. As a friend I want to tell you that you deserve better. You deserve a person that treats you with respect, cares about your welfare, and your children’s welfare, but that’s not George and it never will be.

Do you tell yourself that he’ll stop, or that it won’t get worse? He won’t ever stop, every insult, injury and death he has caused are a line that once crossed will never be uncrossed. Forget the dream. You will never have the American dream with George. You have to forget about what might have been, what George might have been, and realise that at the end of the day you are what you do, and look at George’s track record.

Notice how he’s alienated all your friends? Who can blame them, they can’t understand why you stay with him when he treats you like shit and embarrasses you in front of everybody. The more his public behaviour overshadows yours, the more doubt creeps over them, they wonder if they knew you as well as they thought they did. You seem to have changed - if you condone his behaviour- and your silence can create the impression that you do.
...
YOU CAN DO BETTER! You are an amazing country, beautiful, interesting, funny, positively glamorous, you wouldn’t stay single for five minutes, you know that suitors would be competing for your affections and any one of them would be ten times better than George.
...
It all comes down to you, America. I know no-one likes other people passing comment on their relationships but this is an extreme situation. You are in very real danger, he is hurting you everyday and he is hurting us, your friends as well. But only you can make it stop. We are all rooting for you, although we don’t get to talk to you very often anymore, because he cuts us off from you. We are on your side, we will all be over the moon the day you finally kick him out. You know he really should be thrown in jail for the things he has done to you. Him and all of his gangster friends.

Please, please, do it America, you know I am right. If not for yourself then do it for your brothers and sisters and children. Do it before he kills any more of your family or anyone else’s. We are all really worried for your welfare.

Your friend,

Gail

Also, if you haven't seen it already, here is a handy Katrina-related timeline that should help counter some of the spin being spun about how things unfolded, who made what request when and what Bush was doing at the time.

Kudos to the Washington Times

It's a rare event when even the GOP-blinders worn by the Washington Times editorial board stop working.

FEMA fails its core mission

Granted they're not fans of "big government" and probably would like to see the agency abolished entirely, but they come pretty close to admitting outright that the Bush Administration screwed up which is still a little like seeing a leprechaun riding a unicorn outside your office window.

Darfur in the Dark

Below is the weekly post from the CFD:

Two weeks ago, the "Be a Witness" campaign reported that it couldn't even pay TV networks to cover the genocide in Darfur

American Progress created a television advertisement for BeAWitness.org, our netroots campaign that calls out the television news media for their deplorable coverage of the genocide in Darfur. Over the last few days, three Washington DC television affiliates, NBC-4, CBS-9, and ABC-7, informed us that they refuse to air the ad.

Since the major networks seem to have their hands full covering stories like Natalee Holloway and the Runaway Bride, the ad does what the media won’t — puts the spotlight on Darfur, and suggests that genocide warrants increased coverage.

ABC News broadcast just 18 minutes of Darfur coverage in its nightly newscasts in all of 2004 — “and that turns out to be a credit to Peter Jennings,” as Nicholas Kristof pointed out. NBC News featured 5 minutes, and CBS only had three, “about a minute of coverage for every 100,000 deaths.” Now they won’t allow us to pay for 30 seconds to urge better coverage of the genocide.

While this is obviously inexcusable, it is at least somewhat understandable that TV networks would be reluctant to run ads criticizing their own failings.

What is odd is that the networks' collective refusal to run this ad generated almost no print media coverage. And judging by the print media's own lack of coverage of Darfur, it is easy to see why.

A search of US newspapers for the number of stories that mentioned the word "Darfur" at least 2 times over the last 19 months shows how coverage of the genocide increased during 2004, only to all but disappear in 2005 (we looked for stories that mention Darfur at least twice in order try to eliminate pieces that mentioned it only in passing)

January 2004: 8

February 2004: 20

March 2004: 29

April 2004: 72

May 2004: 186

June 2004: 327

July 2004: 713

August 2004: 891

September 2004: 659

October 2004: 369

November 2004: 517

December 2004: 269

January 2005: 397

February 2005: 271

March 2005: 240

April 2005: 275

May 2005: 199

June 2005: 227

July 2005: 260

August 2005: 115

The most staggering thing about these numbers is that they reveal that there has been a nearly eight-fold decrease in the number of stories about Darfur between last August and this August.

The other amazing thing is that, on August 1st of this year, former Sudanese rebel leader John Garang died in a helicopter crash. Garang, who only three weeks earlier had been sworn in as vice president under the terms of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended two decades of civil war between North and South Sudan, was seen by many as a man who might be able to bring peace to Darfur. Yet, despite his death and the implications it holds for the future of Darfur, coverage of Darfur plummeted.

Nearly one year after the United States called the situation in Darfur "genocide" and the United Nations found overwhelming evidence of "serious violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, including crimes against humanity or war crimes" in Darfur, the genocide is receiving less print coverage than it did before many had even heard the word "Darfur."

We cannot "be a witness" to the genocide in Darfur if the media continues to keep us in the dark.

Suddenly, a GOP Gov. Wants an Activist Judge

As a follow-up to Zoe's post on yesterday's vote by the California Assembly to approve same-sex marriage rights, I offer these observations.

Ever since the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled that the state must provide equal marriage rights to same-sex couples, we've heard numerous Republican officials blast "activist judges." These issues should be left to state legislatures, we were told.

But how times change. In April of this year, the Connecticut Legislature passed a same-sex, civil unions bill (which the governor signed into law). Suddenly, the Religious Right's ire was aimed at legislatures. Last week, as the same-sex marriage bill awaited debate in the California Assembly, an article appeared in the Los Angeles Times that included this interesting paragraph:

... the (same-sex marriage) measure faces a tougher fight in the Assembly, which defeated the proposal in June. Signaling a likely veto even if it does pass, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's spokeswoman said she preferred to let California's judges sort out the legality of gay marriage, which is currently the topic of a case on appeal.

Lest anyone think I'm being too partisan, I will properly point out that Connecticut's same-sex, civil unions bill was signed into law by a GOP governor. And several Republican governors have signed bills banning various forms of anti-gay discrimination.

So it's safe to say that the party's not congenitally opposed to equality for gay people. The problem is the willingness of most party leaders to kowtow to the bigots who make up the Religious Right. As the bill heads to Gov. Schwarzenegger's desk to be signed or vetoed, the Washington Post writes:

As a former Hollywood star, [Schwarzenegger] hails from a social milieu where gay men and women occupy key positions, and he has spoken glowingly about his friendships with people of all sexual orientations.

Yes, and, as they say, "some of my best friends are black people." I don't give a rat's ass if the Terminator happens to have a friend who's a lesbian. In one sense, I have more respect for a preacher from a rural community who tells me he has never met someone who is gay and that he believes that all gay people are immoral and that he won't befriend them for that reason.

Due to his life experiences, Schwarzenegger should know better. But knowing better isn't enough. What good is knowledge if it isn't used as a basis for one's decisions?

Stop hiding behind the courts, Governor, and sign the damn bill.

Do We Finally Get It?

When I wrote earlier today about how stunned people here are at the sheer incompetence of the American government, I thought I remembered writing something very similar last year, in the run-up to the election. Actually, I wrote more than a few posts on the subject of the administration's incompetence, mostly with this theme: assuming you agreed with Bush's ideology and his sense of mission, wouldn't you still be unhappy that he's been too inept actually to accomplish the mission? I found at least one Bush-supporting publication that reluctantly came to that conclusion.

What I wrote on another occasion shortly before the election still seems to me to have been correct (if I do say so myself); not surprising, considering that it's very much in line with what I wrote only this morning:

But move down from grand policy to the nitty gritty. This administration has shown a remarkable inability simply to execute competently the policies that it has decided to pursue. I was against the Iraq war from the outset, but I didn't imagine it was going to be run by Inspector Clouseau....

Dubya has so exalted faith over knowledge, loyalty over competence, and ideology over everything that our government's comical ineptitude has become an embarrassment. Europeans can understand disagreements over ideas and policy, but a lot of folks I run into over here can't fathom why Americans--even conservative Americans--would vote to retain someone who has demonstrated so thoroughly his unfitness for the job. Our government is a joke that everyone in the world is in on. Except us.

Considering Dubya's plunging poll numbers and the already eroding ratings he's getting for his handling [sic] of the Katrina crisis, perhaps we're finally getting the joke. We're like the kid who sits silent and befuddled while everyone else laughs at the punch line, and then, after the laughter has subsided, suddenly bursts out: "Oh, one to hold the lightbulb and two to turn the ladder! Ha, ha, etc., etc." So we're a bit dorky; at least we're figuring it out eventually.

Meanwhile, Tom Tomorrow draws out the Bush regime's spin on Katrina to its logical conclusion given the regime's aversion to facts, logic, and reality.

Major Marriage Milestone

I know there is so much going on right now this is pretty insignificant to most people, but yesterday California was the first state legislature to approve of changing the state's definition of marriage to a man and a woman to "two persons," sans judicial branch involvement. Last week the state Senate approved of the measure, yesterday the state House did. Now it goes onto the governor, who has signaled that he'll veto.

Regardless, if there is still any truth to the old saying "As California goes, so goes the nation," it's a good sign for the people who are fighting for family equality under the law.

Katrina and the "R" Word

On the heels of Eugene's recent post on the media's use of the term "refugee" to describe Hurricane Katrina evacuees comes this article from today's Washington Post:

Tyrone McKnight sleeps in a shelter. His meals come from the kindness of strangers. It's safe to call him homeless, because his house is under water. What he doesn't want you to call him, or the thousands of other New Orleans residents plucked from floodwater, is this word: refugees.

"The image I have in my mind is people in a Third World country, the babies in Africa that have all the flies and are starving to death," he says, while sitting outside Baton Rouge's convention center, where 5,000 displaced residents are being housed. "That's not me. I'm a law-abiding citizen who's working every day and paying taxes."

Which label to use when describing evacuees might seem trivial when thousands may be dead, thousands are missing, and a major city and its environs have been ravaged.

But at shelters in Louisiana and Texas, workers and volunteers have heard loud and clear from those living there that the government, the media and everyone else should call them something other than refugees.

"We ain't refugees. I'm a citizen," insists Annette Ellis, also sheltered at the convention center with her two children.

... The Washington Post stopped using the term over the weekend, unless it is in a direct quotation, says Phil Bennett, the managing editor. "We're constantly examining all sorts of labels that may or may not be accurate, like 'terrorist' or 'extremist.' This seemed to be an inaccurate label that did not fit the definition. There was also some discussion that this could be used in a pejorative sense, and we're sensitive to those concerns."

... Brian Throckmorton, copy desk chief at the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky, says his paper has stopped using the word in headlines and display type "to avoid provoking those who object to it, but our policy is that it is not a tarnished word and we're allowing it in body copy .... I do not agree with those who see it as an insult. In fact, I think they are insulting the world's asylum seekers by implying that it's shameful to be lumped under the word 'refugee' ... there's no shame in being poor and Third World anyway."

Talk to people long enough and it's clear that the refugee issue is mixed up with issues of race and class, as well as perceptions about New Orleans as an unruly place to live.

It Couldn't Happen Here

Many Dutch are flabbergasted by the utter incompetence of the American government in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I've read or seen on TV more than one commentator or "man in the street" say that it couldn't happen here. Not the disaster--no imagination is needed to envision scores of Dutchmen killed or rendered homeless by collapsing levees and terrible floods, since it has happened here in living memory. But the idea that so many people would be left without any help from the government for so long after the storm is just astonishing, and that's the thing that "couldn't happen here."

This is just another illustration of the general bewilderment of many Dutchmen over the inexplicable things Americans and our government do, which I touched on in a recent post about the popular book Americans Aren't Nuts (by the way: thanks to Dutch commenter John for helping out with a translation problem in that post).

But the Dutch shouldn't be too hasty. Everywhere you look, Dutch society or the Dutch government emulates the sort of appalling behavior previously seen via satellite from America.

I offer two examples from current news, one of a type of government misconduct that happens all too often in the States and is now causing a major scandal here, and the other of the latest attempt by the creator of Big Brother to prove that good taste and common sense no longer exist.

By the way, one of the main suspects in the Natalee Holloway case has returned to the Netherlands to go back to school. I thought you'd like to know.

Free Publicity

I always had a good deal of fun with the Manhattan Borough President race when I lived on that blessed island. It was like being on another planet where politicians strove to be more-liberal-than-thou in their quest for an office that was, so far as I could tell, meaningless (except as a platform from which to run for mayor).

What could be more fun? How about when worlds collide: Fox meets a Democratic candidate for borough president.

I suppose part of me is outraged about this, deep down. But mostly I congratulate Fox for boosting Ellner's candidacy. The key paragraph in the Times article is buried near the bottom:

Mr. Ellner...is not considered a favorite to win the borough president's race and his advertisement was devised in part to jar voters into paying attention to his candidacy in a field of nine Democrats....Fox's refusal to run the ad is likely to help Mr. Ellner's aims.

The average Manahattan Democratic voter, knowing nothing else about Ellner, will assume he must be good if Fox is out to get him. And I bet more than a few people are checking out the "controversial" ad on Ellner's website and paying more attention than they would if they were TiVo'ing past it on TV.

An Appropriate Question for Dems to Ask

In the aftermath of Katrina, Democrats will likely talk about race and poverty in terms of how both made it easier for federal and state officials to take a nap when their help was needed most. But Democrats also should find a way to connect this concern to something bigger, something that white America is more likely to care about -- their own security.

Remember those "security moms" that political commentators kept talking about in the months before last year's presidential election? They weren't thrilled with Republican economic or social policies, but they reportedly felt safer by staying the course and re-electing Bush and his fellow GOPers.

Democrats should challenge this notion head-on, and the perceived debacle of Hurricane Katrina strengthens their odds of doing so with some success. After all, both a hurricane and a terrorist attack have something in common -- each one requires a speedy response to get food, medicine or rescue equipment quickly to those in need.

Or, to frame this in question form: If the Bush administration couldn't respond adequately to a hurricane-induced flood whose potential destruction had been foreseen by top experts long ago, what makes us think the administration can adequately respond to a terrorist strike that may come without warning?

Condescension Masked as Compassion

John Nichols of The Nation writes of former First Lady Barbara Bush's recent visit to the Astrodome in Houston, where thousands of hurricane evacuees are staying:

Commenting on the facilities that have been set up for the evacuees -- cots crammed side-by-side in a huge stadium where the lights never go out and the sound of sobbing children never completely ceases -- former First Lady Barbara Bush concluded that the poor people of New Orleans had lucked out.

"Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them," Mrs. Bush told American Public Media's "Marketplace" program, before returning to her multi-million dollar Houston home.

On the tape of the interview, Mrs. Bush chuckles audibly as she observes just how great things are going for families that are separated from loved ones, people who have been forced to abandon their homes and the only community where they have ever lived, and parents who are explaining to children that their pets, their toys and in some cases their friends may be lost forever.

Judging from Mrs. Bush's words, you'd have thought she had been observing grasshoppers in a jar.

Dershowitz Declines to Join the Praise Parade

In this post from yesterday, Arnold let silence speak volumes in assessing William Rehnquist's legacy. An equally welcome review of Rehnquist comes from this Alan Dershowitz column. Unwilling to join the chorus of praise that political etiquette seems to encourage in these instances, Dershowitz writes:

My mother always told me that when a person dies, one should not say anything bad about him. My mother was wrong. History requires truth, not puffery or silence, especially about powerful governmental figures. And obituaries are a first draft of history.

So here’s the truth about Chief Justice Rehnquist .... [he] set back liberty, equality, and human rights perhaps more than any American judge of this generation. His rise to power speaks volumes about the current state of American values.

Let’s begin at the beginning .... Stanford (Rehnquist's alma mater) is a great law school with a diverse student body, but in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it discriminated against Jews and other minorities, both in the admission of students and in the selection of faculty.

Justice Stephen Breyer recalled an earlier period of Stanford’s history: “When my father was at Stanford, he could not join any of the social organizations because he was Jewish, and those organizations, at that time, did not accept Jews.”

Rehnquist not only benefited in his class ranking from this discrimination; he was also part of that bigotry. When he was nominated to be an associate justice in 1971, I learned from several sources who had known him as a student that he had outraged Jewish classmates by goose-stepping and heil-Hitlering with brown-shirted friends in front of a dormitory that housed the school’s few Jewish students. He also was infamous for telling racist and anti-Semitic jokes.

As a law clerk, Rehnquist wrote a memorandum for Justice Jackson while the court was considering several school desegregation cases, including Brown v. Board of Education. Rehnquist’s memo ... dended the separate-but-equal doctrine embodied in the 1896 Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson. Rehnquist concluded the Plessy “was right and should be reaffirmed.”

When questioned about the memos by the Senate Judiciary Committee in both 1971 and 1986, Rehnquist blamed his defense of segregation on the dead Justice, stating – under oath – that his memo was meant to reflect the views of Justice Jackson. But Justice Jackson voted in Brown, along with a unanimous Court, to strike down school segregation.

According to historian Mark Tushnet, Justice Jackson’s longtime legal secretary called Rehnquist’s Senate testimony an attempt to “smear[] the reputation of a great justice.” Rehnquist later admitted to defending Plessy in arguments with fellow law clerks. He did not acknowledge that he committed perjury in front of the Judiciary Committee to get his job.

The rest of Dershowitz's column is right here.

W.S. Journal: Katrina Creates "Opportunity"

It has never come as a surprise when the editorial writers of the Wall Street Journal attack teacher unions or public schools. But it doesn't get much more cynical than this morning's column by WSJ editorial writer Brendan Miniter.

Most sane human beings would consider the forced closure of New Orleans public schools as one of many unfortunate impacts of Hurricane Katrina's destruction. But in an outrageous column headlined "A Silver Lining?" Miniter wants Americans to consider this to be good news. He writes:

As devastating as Hurricane Katrina has been, it now presents New Orleans officials with an opportunity. The city's 60,000 public school students have been trapped in a failing system for decades. There is no reason why the public education bureaucracy and other obstacles to real reform should now follow them as they move temporarily to Texas and elsewhere.

... Public schools are another area of government failure in New Orleans .... the city has some of the worst-performing schools in the state .... As in most districts around the nation, the obstacle to real reform in New Orleans has largely come from teachers unions. One measure of union strength has been the city's inability to fire teachers even as schools continue to fail.

New Orleans's kids now have a better shot at getting a decent education. Many students displaced by the floods are likely to be absorbed into local schools from Texas to Tennessee and beyond, most will likely be a fair bit better than the New Orleans public schools. Other students could also find themselves in makeshift schools, such as outside Houston's Astrodome, or taught by teachers who lack proper certification but are willing to step into the breach.

WSJ suggests that anyone is sufficiently qualified to teach if he or she is merely "willing" to do so. But if this is the key standard, then it seems to work against the WSJ's assertion that lots of supposedly bad teachers in New Orleans deserve to be fired. Bad teachers, like good teachers, are certainly "willing" to the extent that they keep showing up at school and keep collecting a paycheck. Willingness to teach isn't what separates good teaching from bad teaching.

In the column, Miniter notes that the finances of New Orleans public schools have been in "disarray," and he adds that "as of Aug. 1 about 200 (New Orleans) teachers had yet to be told which school to report to or even which grades they were to teach." Given this unstable environment, does it surprise anyone that the best teachers would tend to opt for jobs in wealthier, suburban school districts?

Say what you will about the teachers who teach in New Orleans, but there don't appear to be thousands of people lining up to replace them. Many of them have been doing their very best to help kids learn in schools with leaking roofs and outdated textbooks, and they're doing it in a city with an astounding poverty rate of 24%.

Granted, New Orleans' public schools are falling far short of what their students deserve. But what statistical basis does Miniter have to presume that New Orleans children "now have a better shot at getting a decent education" in schools based in the neighboring states "from Texas to Tennessee ..."?

Louisiana's southern neighbors have a reputation that should hardly make the Bayou State envious. Urban and rural school districts in Arkansas and Mississippi face at least as many challenges as those in Louisiana. Neither is Texas an educational Shangrila. Last September, a Texas judge ruled that the state's school funding formula was inadequate and, therefore, unconstitutional.

The only "silver lining" in Katrina would have been if the hurricane had veered northward -- instead of into the Gulf -- and swept away the editorial offices of this curmudgeonly newspaper.

The Religious Right Assigns Blame

I guess it was just a matter of time before someone would trot out a Falwellian explanation for the death and destruction of Hurricane Katrina. The Religious Right website "Repent America" issued this press release:

Just days before "Southern Decadence", an annual homosexual celebration attracting tens of thousands of people to the French Quarters section of New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina destroys the city.

"Southern Decadence" has a history of filling the French Quarters section of the city with drunken homosexuals engaging in sex acts in the public streets and bars. .... The past three mayors of New Orleans, including Sidney Barthelomew, Marc H. Morial, and C. Ray Nagin, issued official proclamations welcoming visitors to "Southern Decadence".

... Hurricane Katrina has put an end to the annual celebration of sin.

... "Although the loss of lives is deeply saddening, this act of God destroyed a wicked city," stated Repent America director Michael Marcavage.

So there you have it. As with the 9/11 tragedy, an angry God was out to punish gay people.

But before all of you sinful heterosexuals get too smug, you should know that the good, God-fearin' people at "Repent America" also attribute God's Katrina hissy-fit to heterosexual sin. According to the group's press release:

New Orleans was also known for its Mardi Gras parties where thousands of drunken men would revel in the streets to exchange plastic jewelry for drunken women to expose their breasts and to engage in other sex acts.

I too am appalled. Plastic jewelry? How offensive. The release continues:

[Mardi gras] sparked the creation of the "Girls Gone Wild" video series. Furthermore, Louisiana had a total of ten abortion clinics with half of them operating in New Orleans, where countless numbers of children were murdered at the hands of abortionists.

Additionally, New Orleans has always been known as one of the "Murder Capitals of the World" with a rate ten times the national average.

Ironically, the city's high murder rate was cited in this Salon article as a reason why many city residents did not evacuate. According to Laurie Garrett, whom Salon describes as both a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and an expert on epidemiology:

New Orleans has had one of the highest murder rates in the nation for decades and a notoriously corrupt police force. In our experience dealing with catastrophes and epidemics overseas, there is a direct correlation between the historic relationship between government and its people, and the willingness of the populace to believe in and correctly respond to government instructions.

So, if "Renew America" is correct, Katrina was God's way of punishing the wicked people of New Orleans. But did God consider that New Orleans' wicked ways might cause many good people to perish because they did not trust those sinful city officials who instructed them to evacuate?

There I go, asking questions again.

Chertoff on the Hot Seat

Tip O'Neill was right. All politics is local. Until last Tuesday, the major issue that newspapers, TV and a waiter in a coffee shop had placed on my radar screen was Canada's struggle to resume its beef exports to the U.S. Uh, care to guess where I was?

By last Wednesday, however, Canadian newspapers and television were making the Hurricane Katrina misery their lead story.

Just for the record, I'm suspicious of the motives of anyone who feels there is sufficient knowledge to start assigning blame for Katrina's aftermath to this person or that person. The Senate hearings that Majority Leader Bill Frist has promised to convene around Katrina undoubtedly will be designed much more for show than for any genuine analysis of what happened and why.

But it's certainly appropriate for reporters and others in the media to start digging and ask some tough questions. For example, NBC's Tim Russert had good reason to put Homeland Security Sec. Michael Chertoff on the hot seat. These excerpts are from Sunday's edition of "Meet the Press":

RUSSERT: People were stunned by a comment the president of the United States made on Wednesday, Mr. Secretary. He said, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." How could the president be so wrong, be so misinformed?

As is so typically the case with public or political figures, Chertoff didn't specifically respond to the question. Oh, to be sure, he gave an answer -- it just didn't address the issue of where Bush got the notion that nobody "anticipated" that one or more of the levees in the New Orleans area could fail.

Chertoff concluded his reply by offering this excuse for the delay in getting relief to those in need:

CHERTOFF: ... And one last point I'd make is this, Tim. We had actually prestaged a tremendous number of supplies, meals, shelter, water. We had prestaged, even before the hurricane, dozens of Coast Guard helicopters, which were obviously nearby but not in the area. So the difficulty wasn't lack of supplies. The difficulty was that when the levee broke, it was very, very hard to get the supplies to the people. I-10 was submerged. There was only one significant road going all the way the way around. Much of the city was flooded ...

Yes, it was. But anyone who knows anything about the Gulf Coast region of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama knows that Interstate 10 lies along marshland and other areas that cannot absorb floodwaters. In other words, any serious hurricane-induced flood or levee breech would easily render portions of I-10 unusable.

Federal emergency planners must have known this, which is why Chertoff's excuse (lots of supplies -- no way to deliver them) doesn't deserve our sympathy. Any relief effort must include plans on how to actually deliver supplies to the injured and afflicted. Chertoff's explanation is as lame as the one offered by the employee at the rental car counter in an old "Seinfeld" episode.

To his credit, Russert didn't let Chertoff off the hook.

RUSSERT: Mr. Secretary, you say "prestaged." People were sent to the Convention Center. There was no water, no food, no beds, no authorities there. There was no planning.

CHERTOFF: My understanding is, and again this is something that's going to go back -- we're going to go back over after the fact is -- the plan that the New Orleans officials and the state officials put together called for the Superdome to be the refuge of last resort ....

RUSSERT: Well, Mr. Secretary, you said -- hold on. Mr. Secretary, there was no food or water at the Superdome, either. And I want to stay on this because...

CHERTOFF: Well, my understanding -- well ...

Something tells me that Michael Chertoff will not greet future guests at his D.C.-area home with the line, "Hey, I videotaped my appearance on 'Meet the Press' ... wanna watch it?"

The actions (or inactions) of state and local officials deserve ample scrutiny, but Chertoff was deservedly raked over the coals on Sunday.

They Are Not Refugees

I don't have all that much to say to say about Hurricane Katrina. After all, what is there to say, really?

But I guess I won't let that stop me from complaining about the media's lazy use of the word "refugees" to describe those who have been displaced by this catastrophe.

"States Struggling With Katrina Refugees"

"Texas to move Katrina refugees to other states"

"Texas groans under burden of Katrina refugees"

"Rapes, killings hit Katrina refugees in New Orleans"

"Five Days After Katrina, Refugees Waiting"

The people who have been forced from the homes - and states - are not technically "refugees" unless they end up in Mexico or some foreign country. Until then, they are "internally displaced." The UNHCR explains

When a fleeing civilian crosses an international frontier, he or she becomes a refugee and as such receives international protection and help. If a person in similar circumstances is displaced within his or her home country and becomes internally displaced person then assistance and protection is much more problematic.

This is not really a big deal, I guess, but it seems ridiculous that the media is either unable or unwilling to make this basic distinction.

Perhaps the victims of Katrina should have crossed over into Mexico. At least then they would have had an internationally recognized right to protection and assistance - two things they were sorely lacking for most of the week.

The Best Years of Nino Scalia's Life

I haven't read any of the coverage of Chief Justice Rehnquist's death. In particular, I haven't read any analyses of the Court's future and how Bush's appointment will affect it. But I can be almost sure that some of the pundits are saying that this vacancy doesn't matter too much because Rehnquist was already one of the most reliable conservative votes on the Court, so the most Bush can do by replacing him with a conservative is to maintain the status quo.

I think that the point being missed is for how long the status quo can be maintained. Rehnquist was part of the five-person "federalist" bloc on the Court (the same five who formed the Bush v. Gore majority). Although he did have his occasional lapses, such as the recent Tennessee v. Lane decision, he was indeed one of the Court's most reliable "federalists." O'Connor, though generally part of this bloc on states'-rights issues, was less reliable, so replacing her with an apparent true believer in "federalism" (Roberts) does solidify the bloc. It leaves Kennedy as the only somewhat questionable member, but that's mostly on cases involving social issues; he's reasonably reliable on the states'-rights stuff.

But apart from replacing O'Connor with a more ideologically sound justice, look at the "federalist" bloc Bush ends up with (I'm assuming a Roberts clone as the Rehnquist replacement, just for the sake of simplicity):

Scalia (69 years old)
Kennedy (69 years old)
Thomas (57 years old)
Roberts (50 years old)
Roberts II (50 years old)

Consider the tendency over the centuries for justices to serve until they are literally incapable of staying on the Court any longer (was it Brennan who responded to a question about retirement by saying he'd leave the Court feet first?). Consider also that as healthy 69-year-old white men with access to first-rate medical care, Scalia and Kennedy have a life expentancy of around 12 or 13 more years. I don't know about Kennedy, but I think Scalia will want to hang on as long as possible.

I wouldn't have said that a year ago. Scalia hasn't made much of a secret of the fact that he does not consider many, if any, of his colleagues to be his intellectual peer. But now that the colleague for whom he showed the greatest contempt--O'Connor--is gone, and he's got potentially three younger originalist/federalist [sic] justices who have been strongly influenced by his ideas, Scalia may well emerge as the leading figure in a bloc of justices that can reshape the Constitution over the next decade or so. Many of Scalia's frustrations (a lot of which can be laid at O'Connor's doorstep) can finally be eliminated. Indeed, depending on who Bush names as Chief, the Court of the next decade may thought of as the Scalia Court, not the Chief Justice X Court.

This is a much different situation than would have obtained had Kerry (or Gore) replaced O'Connor and the Chief. A lot depends on what happens with the other four seats, and with Scalia's and Kennedy's when the time comes. Without knowing who the presidents will be, who will control the Senate, what the other political considerations may be at the time, having a core of three solid "federalists" for the next quarter-century or more makes the probability pretty good that at any given moment in that period, the Court will be basically (or completely) conservative.

And if Bush gets to replace the 85-year-old John Paul Stevens with a 40-something true believer, I'm resigned to spending the rest of my legal career under a federal regime that resembles the 1920s: no deference to Congress, lots of progressive legislation getting the axe from the Court, growing popular unhappiness at the situation.

If You Can't Say Anything Nice About Someone, Don't Say Anything at All

This is my post about Chief Justice Rehnquist's body of work.









The end.

America Supports You Freedom Walk

I just received an e-mail from the awkwardly named "America Supports You Freedom Walk" reminding me of the upcoming 9/11 event in Washington, DC.

Thank you for registering for the first ever America Supports You Freedom Walk. To avoid long lines on the morning of the walk, we are encouraging all walkers to pick-up their walk credentials at one of the designated pre-distribution centers prior to September 11, 2005. Please bring your printed confirmation ticket to verify your registration.

Hmmm. Apparently I do need "walk credentials" to go on the government-sponsored, taxpayer-supported 9/11 march/Clint Black concert. At least they could have implied that I don't need "credentials," but instead they could have tried to woo me to pick up my "free" t-shirt! I wonder if I have to wear the t-shirt to walk? Is that how they're going to decide who is allowed to be there?

Who does Bush hold accountable?

Courtesy of Liquid List, a rather astute observation.

Whoa whoa whoa, just a second here. Is George W. Bush, President of the United States and head of the federal government, blaming the federal government for its slow response to the anarchy in New Orleans?

This must be the first time Bush has blamed himself for anything since he took office.

Nice catch.

We Hate to Disappoint a Good Friend

My co-religionists seem to have let down a staunch supporter of Israel. Apparently, the plan for all of us to gather in one place and be cast into the lake of fire has hit a snag.

Clueless Condi

There has been a lot of attention paid to Bush's whereabouts and activities in the immediate aftermath of Katrina. But he wasn't the only high-ranking federal government official whose sense of duty during a domestic humanitarian crisis seemed a little, um, off. Thanks to the people of New York for helping Condi Rice get a clue.

Like President Bush, the Secretary of State has been on vacation during the Hurricane Katrina crisis, with Rice enjoying her downtime in New York Wednesday and yesterday. The cabinet member's responsibilities are usually international, but her timing contributed to the "fiddling while Rome burns" impression given by her boss during the disaster, which may have claimed thousands of lives.

On Wednesday night, Secretary Rice was booed by some audience members at "Spamalot!," the Monty Python musical at the Shubert, when the lights went up after the performance.

Yesterday, Rice went shopping at Ferragamo on Fifth Ave. According to the Web site www.Gawker.com, the 50-year-old bought "several thousand dollars' worth of shoes" at the pricey leather-goods boutique.

A fellow shopper shouted, "How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!" - presumably referring to Louisiana and Mississippi.

The woman expressing her First Amendment rights was promptly removed from the store. A Ferragamo store manager confirmed to us that Rice did shop there yesterday, but refused to answer questions about whether the protester was removed, and whether by his own security or the Secret Service.

No one knows if she cut her vacation short but only after some bad press did Condi return to DC.

Thanks, Condi. Not only did you make yourself look like an insensitive clod but you aren't exactly helping the image of women in high public office-- shoe shopping in NYC while tens of thousands Americans are suffering, starving, drowning and dying?!?

I hope all those pairs of $400 shoes were worth it. (I checked, that is the average price for Ferragamo shoes.)

Update: At least Condi had the sense to get back to work yesterday; Vice President Cheney is still(??) on vacation in Wyoming.

Caught Offguard

I've been so preoccupied with other news that I didn't even know this vote was coming.

Calif. Senate Passes Gay Marriage Bill
Move Is the First by a State Legislative Body Without a Court Order

By Joe Dignan and Amy Argetsinger
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, September 2, 2005; Page A02

SACRAMENTO, Sept. 1 -- The California Senate voted Thursday to allow gay couples to wed, becoming the first legislative body in the nation to approve same-sex marriage without a court order.

The bill would recast the state's legal definition of marriage as a union between two people rather than one between a man and a woman.

Yet it faces an uncertain future: The California Assembly narrowly rejected similar legislation in June, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) has given mixed or ambiguous responses on whether he would support or veto such a bill.

Still, its passage, on a vote of 21 to 15, was hailed by advocates as a breakthrough for gay rights.

"It will totally take away the argument that it is just 'activist judges' who are finding for marriage nondiscrimination," said Geoff Kors, the head of Equality California. "It's the people's representatives in the largest state in the nation doing this."

Wow. I guess the new anti-marriage equality buzzword will be "activist legislators"?

Underlying Issues

From a writer over at Kos on what is truly disturbing about the aftermath of Katrina.

This was a disaster the country had been preparing for. This was one of the disasters most predicted, most feared, most planned for. There was two days of advance warning, as the massive, category 5 hurricane shifted purposefully towards New Orleans. This was no terrorist attack -- this time, there was warning. This time, there was knowledge.
...
The apparent and most likely explanations for the failure, known long before the fact, are almost shattering when reread today, while the ongoing catastrophe unfolds around us.

We have witnessed two disasters this week. The first was an act of nature. The second was not. The second disaster, still ongoing, is unforgivable.

That's the only word that comes to mind, a word I keep repeating to myself. These deaths, these men, these women, these infants dying now in these hours didn't have to happen. They did not have to die waiting for convoys to gather outside their city or for reservists to stand alongside their shattered police forces. They did not have to wait in darkness and fear for help to arrive, only to struggle for days without that help ever coming.

This is not politics. This is not partisanship.

This is unforgivable.

I can't think of a time in the past several years where whenever visiting New Orleans came up in conversation people would always add something about going before it's gone, before it's underwater. I know I've said it a mere 10 days ago when I was talking with a friend about doing the AIDS marathon that (was) scheduled for New Orleans in February 2006. She said she'd never been there and hoped to get there before it's gone.

(deep sad sigh)

Watching tv news coverage has been pretty extraordinary. As mentioned elsewhere, even Tucker Carlson seems perplexed about where the aid is and why it's taking the government so long to help people. All of these reporters who have been down there for 4 or 5 days, all of them repeatedly saying that they don't know where FEMA/National Guard is, they just can't figure out what is taking so long as everything descends into chaos.

I suppose this is what happens when you elect leaders who are ideologically committed to the idea that government isn't good for much of anything. Maybe things would have been better if FEMA and the National Guard had been privatized and outsourced.

Who Ya Gonna Call?

When it comes to living below sea level, keeping levees in good repair, and generally coping with having more than a useful amount of water around, nobody can beat the Dutch. So it's pleasing to learn from my newly discovered Americophilic Dutch blogger that not only has the Dutch Red Cross set up a special account to receive donations for relief from Hurricane Katrina, but a Dutch dike inspection team is on standby.

If anyone makes a wisecrack about "dike inspection teams," I'll...probably laugh.

Americans Aren't Nuts

A catchy title for a sure-to-be controversial book: Amerikanen zijn niet gek, which I would translate as Americans Aren't Nuts. But that title, if clever, is also a bit telling. The book is by Charles Groenhuijsen, who has been for the past 13 years the Washington correspondent for Dutch public television. He genuinely loves the U.S., to the point where he was about to give up the chance to become the news anchor because they wouldn't let him anchor the program from Washington (though he eventually caved and took the job anyway). And he's a conservative with plenty of good things to say about Dubya. The fact that his defense of the U.S. is called Americans Aren't Nuts tells you a bit about how Dutch folks view us right now.

If it's possible, I don't mean that in a bad way. It's not that they hate us. Far from it; Dutch people in general have great affection for the United States. But a lot of them have been scratching their heads lately because they can't figure out what's going on these days: why did we re-elect Bush? why are (were) we so gung-ho about invading Iraq? etc? This bafflement may explain why Groenhuijsen's book has climbed up the Dutch bestseller lists.

This post in a conservative Dutchman's English-language blog gives you a flavor of Groenhuijsen's response to Dutch questions about the U.S., and the trackback links and comments are illuminating as well. The publisher's blurb for the book (Dutch) is perhaps most enlightening (very unreliable translation, as always):

The Dutch can get themselves terribly wound up about Americans. Concerning their political leaders, there is astonishment (Reagan), admiration (Clinton), and annoyance (Bush). Americans are loud and superficial. We have no doubt about these distinct opinions of our biggest ally. Still, we gladly copy America. We watch their movies, read their books, listen to their music, eat fast food, go around in jeans, and are gradually becoming--just like them--much too fat. But what do we really know about Americans? How do they raise their children? What do they think about crime, sex, and drugs? How hard do they work? How rich or poor is America really?

Americans think foremost of themselves, goes the cliché. But ask yourself why there are so many cemeteries all over the world that are full of American soldiers. And why is there nowhere as much charity as there is in the U.S.? Are Americans a bit crazy after all? Or are there other explanations for their foolishness and contradictions?

Groenhuijsen's apologium for America has been greeted with a predictable amount of skepticism or downright opposition. This blogger, for instance, says we shouldn't generalize, but he does find at least some Americans of questionable mental stability. He quotes at length (in English) a news story about a "Christian" group's opposition to a Pride Day march, introducing the passage with, "Some [Americans] have come up with a new use for no-longer-needed yellow stars," and concluding, "If you ask me, they are a bit nuts, some Americans."

Another blogger takes a more sympathetic view of the book.

Groenhuijsen sketches the Netherlands and the U.S. as follows: America is a tough society with good manners, and the Netherlands is a caring society with bad manners.* I think that's the most apt comparison that can be made between the two countries.

This blogger goes on to note that, according to Groenhuijsen, if the U.S. had the same population density as the Netherlands, there would be 4 billion Americans. Maybe that explains some of the differences in how we've arranged our respective societies.

*I'm having trouble translating manieren, which I've rendered "style of behavior." I have no confidence that I've captured the correct connotation. My dictionary translates manier (singular) as manner, style, way, or manners. Update: Thanks to commenter John. I've adopted his suggestion and revised the translation accordingly.

Ann's Overdue Comeuppance

Every year the Ronald Reagan-worshipping conservative youth organization, Young America's Foundation, puts out a "Top 10 Conservative Colleges List." Most of the schools are small, secretarian places like Christendom College, Patrick Henry College ("Homeschooler U."), or Jerry Falwell's own Liberty University. You'd think any school on that list would be an ideal audience for someone like Ann Coulter to visit, right? Think again. Harding University in Arkansas invited Ann to come and speak at their school in a lecture series that has previously hosted mild-mannered folks like Zell Miller. But when word got around that Ann was coming instead of rolling out the red carpet she was disinvited due to objections from alumni-- who had posted their displeasure on their blogs. What was their chief complaint? You might be surprised.

Mike Cope, a minister at Highland Church of Christ in Abilene, Tex., complained that Coulter lives in a “black/white ‘I’m-right-and-you’re-an-idiot’ world. If you don’t agree with her then you’re a bleeding heart liberal who doesn’t deserve to live here.” The problem, he said, was not that Coulter is conservative, but that her views are un-Christian. [emphasis mine]
...
In inviting Coulter to the campus, wrote [Greg] Kendall-Ball, whose father and sisters are also Harding alums, the university had “failed to uphold the Christ-like spirit that Harding seeks to embody.” It troubled him, he said, that “someone advocating violence, forced conversions, physical intimidation and who has routinely expressed anti- or non-Christian views is welcomed and given one of the more prestigious speaking engagements on the school’s calendar.”

I am happy to give credit where credit is due. It is wonderful to know there are some conservative Christians who recognize that Ann Coulter doesn't seem to understand anything about Jesus's basic teachings. Kudos to them.

Politically Incorrect Sports Organizations

I wrote a while back about how much I like rubgy, despite the classist roots that still influence the sport today. I'm also a dyed-in-the-wool Red Sox fan, which isn't quite as bad as in the days when Abbie Hoffman noted how many lefties (including himself) supported an organization owned by that old racist Tom Yawkey. And don't get me started on the retrograde N.F.L., or on the homophobia that pervades most men's team sports (and the fear among administrators of women's sports that the "girls" will "act like" the lesbians that some of them are). The International Olympic Committee is simply unspeakable, and has been since the modern Games were instituted more than a century ago.

Then there's sumo, which I grew to love when I lived in Japan, to the extent that I subscribed to a sumo magazine for several years after I had returned to the U.S.

I think sports is a guilty pleasure for a liberal. Not athletic activity--there's no problem with liberals' playing sports. But spending money and a bit of your heart on professional teams and leagues that are slightly to the left of Attila the Hun is a bit uncomfortable.

Everybody Has to Cross the River

A friend sent me this little test of reasoning that I thought was kind cool.

It is supposedly an IQ test given to job applicants in Japan. The following rules apply

Only 2 persons on the raft at a time

The father can not stay with any of the daughters without their mother's presence

The mother can not stay with any of the sons without their father's presence

The thief (striped shirt) can not stay with any family member if the
Policeman is not there

Only the Father, the Mother and the Policeman know how to operate the raft

To move the people double click on them. To move the raft double click on the pole on the opposite side of the river.

It is tough, but I promise that it can be done (I am going to post the solution in the comments - but no cheating!)

Click on link then click on blue circle to start.

Anti-Cat's Piss Legislation

I thought the most important piss in Belgium was Manekin Pis, but a consumer group is showing that Belgians have the right priorities.

Creation of a new anti-left meme?

FoxNews has hit a new low-- it is using the activities of the Rev. Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps to bash people who oppose the anti-war movement. From Sean Hannity on August 30th.

HANNITY: Let me read to you from Indianapolis. Headline: "Funeral for fallen Hoosier soldier brought some unwanted guests." ...So anyway, the story in Indianapolis goes like this, quote: "Emotions ran high for an Army soldier's funeral in Martinsville on Sunday. Sgt. Jeremy Doyle's sacrifice brought many out to honor him, but also sparked a standoff on a city street. People arriving to say goodbye to a hometown hero met an altogether different scene in Martinsville, as demonstrators dragging American flags on the ground and holding signs opposing U.S. troops. 'The thing that got us here is that Sergeant Doyle died for us to give us our freedom, and then you have people like this come. It's absurd,' one funeral attendee told News 8 in Indianapolis. Tensions grew before demonstrations [sic: demonstrators] finally left their location right across the street from Army Sgt. Jeremy Doyle's funeral service. According to the group's website, it sees America's -- Americans' deaths in Iraq as a kind of punishment for social misdeeds. Martinsville residents said that the protesters picked the wrong time in the wrong town to express their views. Which rightfully -- so they have their freedom of expression. Nobody's going to take that away from them, but there is a time and a place for this kind of thing, and it's certainly not here today."
...
The protesters were headquartered in Kansas. They traveled across the country to demonstrate against a soldier." And you know something? I guess this is just another example of how the anti-war left supports our brave troops. 'Cause isn't that what they always say? They're disrupting the funeral, tormenting a grieving family. Can you believe I even have to bring this story to the airwaves? And creating an incredible spectacle in the middle of an occasion to honor a guy who died serving his country? But of course, they're supporting our troops. They're not supporting them; they're targeting our troops!

I read the whole article and it does not use Fred Phelp's name. It's actually disturbingly thin on anything about the group, it's obvious that the reporter didn't even talk to them, they just read their website-- www.godhatesfags.com-- which not-so-subtly calls for all homosexuals to be put to death. However, anyone who knows anything about Fred Phelps could easily pick up the relatively obvious clues that this is who the story is about. First of all, Phelps has already been in the headlines for protesting soldier's funerals all over the country with signs like "Thank God for 9/11." The story in question mentions that he's from Kansas, that he thinks America is being "punished for social misdeeds," and that he travels across the country protesting funerals. Hmmm. Sound like anyone (in)famous we know? Phelps has only been doing this and nothing else for over 8 years, ever since he and his family protested Matthew Shepherd's funeral.

If Hannity knows who Fred Phelps is and had a clue the story was about Phelps, he needs to be called out on this. If not, he's not well informed enough about American politics to adequately perform his job. Regardless, Hannity should issue a correction and say that he mischaracterized who was protesting a soldier's funeral-- someone who is most certainly not part of the left. The bottom line is that someone, somewhere, at FoxNews is responsible for helping to spread a lie that anti-war folks are angrily protesting soldier's funerals.

On the other hand, maybe Phelps and his merry band of family lawyers will hear about this and sue Hannity for defamation of character. Tee-hee.

(By the way, I went over to godhatesfags.com and just so you don't have to-- the newest message over at Phelp's site is "Thank God for Katrina." Nice. Let's hope that during the next hurricane Phelps decides to go protest *in* its eye.)