barbara on bush

Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D) Oakland issued an excellent response to Bush's speech last night, calling it a nice gesture, but less than inspiring. To paraphrase a cliche, it seems as if even an optimist were to argue that Bush was actually going to come through on his promises (with "no new taxes" no less), it seems that he's dealing with the symptoms while ignoring the underlying disease:

I am glad that the President has indicated that he will commit significant federal resources to rebuilding the Gulf Coast.

However, if the President means to make good on his commitment to 'take responsibility' for his administration's failures in responding to Katrina, then he must demonstrate an equal commitment to tackling the systematic problems of
poverty and institutional racism that contributed to the magnitude of this tragedy.

The problem with the administration's response was not simply the failure to react to the hurricane in a coherent or competent manner. It was the tragic, longstanding failure to acknowledge the massive structural crisis that poverty and inequality pose for our nation and the stubborn refusal to conceive of any constructive role for our government in addressing it.

Americans have shown enormous generosity and courage in responding to this tragedy, and we are committed to rebuilding America as one country. Katrina revealed how different our fates can be, depending on our means and the color of our skins. This moment should galvanize us the way 9/11 did, and we should be recommitting ourselves to making America a united country, where everyone has a genuine chance of achieving the American dream.

Unfortunately, the President has given no indication that he committed to doing the work to create such a united America, and without a commitment to address systematic problems of poverty and inequality, I fear that all the federally funded reconstruction will be built on a rotten foundation.

novakula's backula

This is the newest tripe being solicited by the Prince of Dark
ness*/**:

McCain has been bomb

arded all sum

mer with attacks on him for opposing repeal. In mid-July, Birmingham, Ala., lawyer Harold Apolinsky, a longtime crusader against the estate tax, sent 23,600 letters to contributors who gave at least $2,000 to 15 senators opposed to repeal. McCain contributors were told: "Sen. McCain has shockingly failed to act on an issue of extreme importance to you." Contending that McCain's refusal to support estate tax repeal "may benefit and please the special interests, who've funneled millions of dollars into his many political campaigns," it asked backers to "contact" McCain and lobby him for his vote.

Any commentary that I would wish to offer has already been done perfectly by the New Republic, in an editorial in which the author notes that:

I realize the term "Orwellian" is overused in the context of Republican hackery. But the way this Apolinsky character invokes the phrase "special interest" is so completely the opposite of what the phrase actually means that I'm not sure how else to describe it. I had to read the graf several times to make sure I hadn't missed something.

* You may notice that I do not create hot links to many conservative web sites or specific articles. The articles that I link to always do, but, frankly, I do not like to encourage that particular web traffic. Sorry if that's not so fair and balanced.

** I'm sorry. I know it's petty, but I can think of few who I love to hate more than Robert Novak.

some good news

According to the AP, Katrina has caused fewer deaths than expected.

NEW ORLEANS - Alarming predictions of as many as 10,000 dead in New Orleans may have been greatly exaggerated, with authorities saying Friday that the first street-by-street sweep of the swamped city revealed far fewer corpses than feared.

we need the juice

Although it may seem like it, I promise that this is not a joke:

Buffeted by criticism over the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, President Bush said Tuesday he will oversee an investigation into what went wrong and why _ in part to be sure the country could withstand morestorms or attack.

Bush also announced he is sending Vice President Dick Cheney to the Gulf Coast region on Thursday to help determine whether the government is doing all that it can.

who else, but an utter buffoon?

So, my workload is such that I was going to take another few days off. However, I ran into this incredible tidbit and felt the need to post.

In addition to praising the lord for the death of Chief Justice Reinquist, Pat Robertson is apparently thanking his lucky stars for the destruction wrought by Katrina.

A recent Media Matters note puts it thusly:

On the September 1 edition of The 700 Club, Robertson argued that "out of this tragedy, the focus of America is going to be on these [hurricane] victims," and "inflamed rhetoric" from senators during Roberts's confirmation hearings "is just not going to play well now." Robertson also commented that, following the hurricane, if senators "[go] on a vendetta against Roberts" by sharply questioning or criticizing him, "it's just going to hurt them."

So, let me get this straight, tens of thousands of Americans are missing and most likely dead, but at least the road to the Supreme Court looks easier for Bush's most recent nominee? The lord does indeed work in mysterious ways.

kanye west, gw, racism, and poverty

You may notice that in my recent posts I have been somewhat critical of official responses to Katrina.

At the same time, I can not say that I am in agreement with those statements made by rapper Kanye West this weekend. However, having watched the telecast, I can tell you that he is no Pat Robertson; his unscripted words were spoken with the anguished heart of one who has just witnessed unspeakable tragedy and has not necessarily fully processed his emotional response.

Regardless, there is most definitely a racial tinge to this horrible event. In a recent post, Tom Tomorrow collects evidence of a widespread understanding of this inevitable fact.

Personally, I believe that class played a larger role than race in determining the relative efficiency or inefficiency of the official responses. In the end though, this just reinforces the fundamental question of why so many African Americans fall into the category of those living below the poverty line.

Finally, over at the Newshous w/Jim Lehrer on Friday, Tom Oliphant and Clarence Page replaced Mark Shields in the weekly Shields-Brooks match-up. Predictably, the conversation was primarily focused on the aftermath of Katrina. Both David Brooks (my sometimes-favorite conservative on television) and Tom Oliphant brought up very important points about some of the thusfar unrecognized consequences of Katrina.

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

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

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

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

TOM OLIPHANT: And we're still feeling it. I mean there are at least three more shocks yet to come on top of everything that has happened to this hour. One, sadly, is going to be the body count which we haven't had.

JIM LEHRER: I just dread that moment. Don't you dread that bulletin, when it's going to come on the wires?

TOM OLIPHANT: Right. And then apologize for including this in the same thought but the next one is going to come when the bill is added up -- not just to clean this up but to repair and rebuild the right way.

JIM LEHRER: And find new lives for all these people who are not going to come back.

TOM OLIPHANT: And then the third shock will be the impact -- this is a regional disaster with immense national implications right away because of the impact on energy and on the economy. So everything that we've tried to absorb -- to absorb to this moment is about to be greatly exceeded by what we have yet to absorb.

more scttwh

Thanks to scttwh, the Washington Post was fed misinformation that the Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (coincidentally "D") had never declared a state of emergency in LA.

Luckily, the Post ran a correction. However, Joshua Michah Marshall of Talking Points Memo gets his analysis right when he describes the deeper implications of this characteristic and problematic issue with the media's willingness to swallow and regurgitate the statements of "administration sources":

[F]or all the truly foolish chattering about anonymous sources and blind quotes a few months ago, this is a terrific example of the worst sort of anonymous sourcing. This claim by the administration official was obviously meant to place blame on Gov. Blanco. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that. Maybe she deserved blame. Reporters frequently have to rely on interested parties to bring key information to their attention.

But in this case, this is a straightforward factual assertion. What you do in such a case is find out whether it's true or not. If it is, you don't need to source it to your tipster. You run it as a fact. What you don't do is take an interested party's say-so on an easily verifiable claim and run it as a blind quote.

truth and fiction

I don't know if you saw NOW or not this week, but the episode was a deja vu doozy.

In a 2002 interview, Walter Maestri, the Emergency Manager for Jefferson Parish, one of the biggest metropolitan areas of New Orleans, told NOW what a powerful hurricane might do to New Orleans. "It's ... got a wall of water in front of it some 30, 40 feet high. As it approaches the levees that surround the city, it tops those levees.... The bowl now completely fills. And we've now got the entire community underwater ... some 20, 30 feet underwater. Everything is lost."

Apparently, both Bush and those irresponsible Marxist newswriters at the New York Times missed this episode also because they're both peddling the ridiculous and patently false line that they "don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

From a posting at Media Matters:

In fact, dozens of news organizations had reported on the possibility of a breach well in advance of the hurricane, and even the Times' lead editorial in the same day's newspaper flatly stated that "[d]isaster planners were well aware that New Orleans could be flooded by the combined effects of a hurricane and broken levees."