Back End Of The Week
Coming out on top for this week's best bumper sticker (a contest I didn't know I was having) is this one:
Seen any great back ends lately? Do tell. And in case you're wondering, I like my steaks "still mooing."
Karen Hughes, Go Home!
Fred Kaplan is puzzled. Karen Hughes as Middle East emissary? Huh? Just like "Brownie," she's doing a helluva job:
Put the shoe on the other foot. Let's say some Muslim leader wanted to improve Americans' image of Islam. It's doubtful that he would send as his emissary a woman in a black chador who had spent no time in the United States, possessed no knowledge of our history or movies or pop music, and spoke no English beyond a heavily accented "Good morning." Yet this would be the clueless counterpart to Karen Hughes, with her lame attempts at bonding ("I'm a working mom") and her tin-eared assurances that President Bush is a man of God (you can almost hear the Muslim women thinking, "Yes, we know, that's why he's relaunched the Crusades")....And now here is Hughes, once again a strong woman with no substantive experience on the subject, who was named to the job last March but put off coming to work so she could spend quality time with her son before he went off to college—a laudable priority for Hughes personally, but this indulgence by the president of the United States casts doubt on how urgently he regards the job's mission.
Back in the days of the Cold War, the U.S. Information Agency ran a vast, independent public-diplomacy program in embassies all over the world—libraries, speakers' bureaus, concert tours by famous jazz musicians, and broadcasts of news and music on the Voice of America. Together, they conveyed an appealing image of a free, even boisterous, America in the face of an implacable, totalitarian Communist foe.
It's hard to say what kinds of programs—which cultural messengers or emblems of freedom—might effectively counter the hatred and suspicions of today's foes. But Karen Hughes would be spending her time more wisely trying to come up with some.
Perhaps the most effective personification of public diplomacy in recent times was Vladimir Posner, a Soviet newsman who in the early 1980s appeared frequently on Ted Koppel's Nightline to defend the invasion of Afghanistan. Posner was sophisticated, dapper, and spoke perfect, idiomatic, accent-free English. It turned out that he had been born and raised in the United States. His father was a Communist who immigrated to Moscow—taking along his family, including his teenage son—after being blacklisted during the McCarthy era. In short, Posner was the perfect man for the job.
So, that's another thing Karen Hughes should be doing—looking for the Muslim equivalent of our own Vladimir Posner.
But even smart public diplomacy can only go so far. When the Afghan invasion turned disastrous, Posner could not save it—or the Soviet Union. (By the way, he managed to rehabilitate himself nicely, emerging as a pro-reform TV game-show host in the Yeltsin era.) Similarly, when the Vietnam War came to dominate nearly everything about the world's perception of America, the USIA's cleverest image-molders could do nothing to stave off the damage.
To the extent that public diplomacy has worked at all, it has done so as a garnish. The main course—a nation's ultimate image—is fashioned not by how it talks but by what it does.
More on Hughes here, in a Guardian story by Sidney Blumenthal.
B.Y.O. Body Armor
Not only were the troops forced to supply their own body armor (beats dying!), Mr. Rumsfield is apparently too busy running around blathering about how wonderfully the war is going to reimburse the soldiers and their families. Here's an excerpt from an AP story by Lolita C. Baldor:
"Your expectation is that when you are sent to war, that our government does everything they can do to protect the lives of our people, and anything less than that is not good enough," said a former Marine who spent nearly $1,000 two weeks ago to buy lower-body armor for his son, a Marine serving in Fallujah.The father asked that he be identified only by his first name - Gordon - because he is afraid of retribution against his son.
"I wouldn't have cared if it cost us $10,000 to protect our son, I would do it," said Gordon. "But I think the U.S. has an obligation to make sure they have this equipment and to reimburse for it. I just don't support Donald Rumsfeld's idea of going to war with what you have, not what you want. You go to war prepared, and you don't go to war until you are prepared."
Under the law passed by Congress last October, the Defense Department had until Feb. 25 to develop regulations for the reimbursement, which is limited to $1,100 per item. Pentagon officials opposed the reimbursement idea, calling it "an unmanageable precedent that will saddle the DOD with an open-ended financial burden."
In a letter to Dodd in late April, David Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel, said his office was developing regulations to implement the reimbursement, and would be done in about 60 days.
Soldiers and their families have reported buying everything from higher-quality protective gear to armor for their Humvees, medical supplies and even global positioning devices.
"The bottom line is that Donald Rumsfeld and the Defense Department are failing soldiers again," said Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Operation Truth, an advocacy group for Iraq veterans.
How odd that Bush found it within himself to hop a plane to "save" Terry Schiavo, but he hasn't been able to get motivated to stop clearing brush and start clearing some checks for the troops. Of course, it would have been nice if the government had provided the body armor to begin with. "Support our troops!" (With what, lip service? That'll dodge you a bullet or two.)
Why Does The Left Hate George Bush So Much?
Well, here's a list from Daysbreak:
For 1,900+ dead American soldiers. 15,000+ American soldiers wounded. Countless numbers of innocent Iraqi civilians dead. ("We don't do body counts.") For what? For nothing.For doing squat since 9/11 to make us safer here at home.
For the policies that have led to the tripling of global terrorist attacks around the world.
For seizing on the fear that surged across this country post-9/11 to push your unjustified, unnecessary war on Iraq. Mushroom clouds anyone?
For "fixing the facts around the policy."
For flat-out lying about WMDs. And soooo many other things.
For joking about those missing WMDs while soldiers were still dying. Yep, that was hilarious.
For attempting to conduct a 'war on the cheap'.
For not putting enough troops on the ground in the first place.
For not properly equipping our troops before sending them to war.
For failing completely to plan for or understand the post-invasion chaos and insurgency. Rumsfeld's explanation? "Stuff happens."
For not firing Donald Rumsfeld.
For losing track of $1 billion in Iraq earlier this week, added to the $8.8 billion you lost earlier. And hey, how about the $300 billion already spent on this endeavor? We can pretty much consider that 'lost' too, can't we? $300 billion... that's like an entire hurricane.
For approving the interrogation practices that led to torture at Abu Ghraib.
For the August 6, 2001 PDB which stated "Bin Laden determined to strike in the U.S."
For being too busy 'clearing brush' to pay attention to that memo.
For clearing brush. Period.
For 'My Pet Goat'.
For continuing to cover-up 9/11 failures.
By the way, where is Osama?
For that bullshit bullhorn moment.
For squandering the good will the world showered upon us after 9/11.
For turning so many goddam corners in Iraq that we're now running in circles with no way out.
For sending America's children to be blowed up when you yourself spent the Vietnam era swilling beer in Alabama.
For the Swift Boat attacks.
For Karl fucking Rove.
For rushing back to DC from your ranch to 'rescue' Terri Schiavo.
For fiddling at your ranch while not rescuing the entire city of New Orleans.
For having the audacity to link anything, including Hurricane Katrina, to the War (Struggle?) on Terror in order to justify your policies.
For continuing to reward loyalty over competency, moving forward with your policy of cronyism (and nepotism!) even in the face of the Michael 'Heckuvajob' Brownie debacle
For continuing to allow the crooks and thieves who permeate your party to run wild.
For having Lynyrd Skynyrd on your iPod.
For completely ignoring the environment.
For saying "the jury is still out" on Global Warming.
For saying "the jury is still out" on Evolution.
For thinking Jesus Christ was a philosopher. And a Republican.
For being the only president ever to cut taxes during wartime. And for cutting them in such a way that the richest 1% benefit the most.
For continuing to insist on making those tax cuts permanent, even in the face of a $200 billion+ reconstruction effort in New Orleans.
For proposing cuts to benefits for military families to pay for that reconstruction instead.
For repeatedly treating disaster as an opportunity.
For an all-time high trade deficit nearing $700 billion.
For the 7 percent decrease in real value of minimum wage over the past four years.
For the 11 percent increase in poverty over the past four years.
For four straight years in which median household incomes have not increased.
For the 6 million more uninsured Americans created in the last four years.
For hiding the true cost of your Medicare prescription drug bill until it was already passed.
For ramming through a transportation bill filled with a record amount of pork to support such "special projects" as Alaskan Don Young's "bridges to nowhere".
For pushing through an energy bill which includes billions in tax breaks for your oily friends as gas prices continue to soar.
For treating your failed war as though it were a charity, asking Americans for donations to support it. Talk about last throes.
For ignoring real crises while claiming a "crisis" in Social Security when there isn't one.
For being a divider, not a uniter.
For fueling discrimination and hatred of homosexuals by pushing the frivolous idea of a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in order to polarize the electorate so you could win re-election.
For "Mission Accomplished"
For "Bring 'em on"
For "Last Throes"
For "We'll be greeted as liberators"
For "Smoke 'em out"
For "Watch me hit this drive"
For generally being an asshole.
Is there really so much there to argue with?
Free Parking For Ugly Cars!
Well, actually, it's free parking for hybrid cars, but you have to plaster your car with big ugly stickers (photo of Mitchell Rose holding them here). First, here's the news on free parking for hybrids in the City Of Los Angeles:
Free Parking for Zero Emission Vehicles (ZEVs), Super Ultra Low Emission Vehicles (SULEVs) and certain Hybrid Vehicles - Pilot ProgramIf you own a Zero Emission Vehicle or Super Ultra Low Emission Vehicle as defined by the California Air Resources Board, you may purchase a California Clean Air Vehicle Decal from the California Department of Motor Vehicles. Once you have purchased and affixed the decal to your vehicle per DMV instructions, you can park without depositing coins at on- and off-street metered parking spaces throughout the City of Los Angeles (however, you remain subject to the posted time limit restrictions and other higher order parking restrictions like Tow Away and Street Cleaning.)
On October 1, 2004, participation in this free metered parking program was extended to four hybrid vehicle models: the Honda Insight, Honda Civic Hybrid, Toyota Prius, and the Ford Escape Hybrid. The eight-month pilot program for hybrid vehicles is due to expire at midnight on June 30, 2006.
And here's the note I wrote to LA DOT:
Isn't there some alternative to using those big ugly stickers? My vehicle is a Honda Insight. I get 66mpg hwy, but to get such good mileage, they had to make my car tiny (only 1900 lbs). The sticker will cover and ugly up my whole car. I would have paid for a special license plate or anything to not be ugly like that. Will I get a ticket if I don't cover my whole car with stickers? It's about the size of a bathtub, for goodness sake!
Awaiting word. As is my little car.
Oh, did I mention that I have to get gas every two months?
First, Make It The Best Newspaper In LA
Terrific Bruce Feirstein piece on why nobody's reading the LA Times. Via LA Observed, the LA Media source everybody turns to to find out what they missed in the LA Times -- and more.
High Rent Bag Ladies
Those would be Julia Roberts and Cameron Diaz, says Valentino:
"Today you see Julia Roberts and Cameron Diaz running around looking unkempt in jogging trousers, they look like bag ladies, like homeless people. In the past you never saw that," Valentino was quoted as saying by weekly paper Die Zeit."In the past, actresses had to commit in their contracts to appear in public like stars when they left their homes," added the Italian, who dresses actress
Gwyneth Paltrow and is often seen with her at red-carpet events like the Venice film festival.Valentino made his name in the 1960s and designed the wedding dress worn by Jacqueline Kennedy for her marriage to Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis.
Ladies, you make more in a couple of months than a lot of us make in a lifetime. It's not just a job. You're movie stars. Maybe throw on a dress (one that doesn't look like you nicked it off a real homeless person) and some lipstick from time to time? If that's not too much for you.
American Car Companies Discover Hybrids!
Where have they been keeping William Clay Ford all these years? Locked in a supply closet in the executive washroom at Ford? Here’s an editorial from the IHT. They plan to increase the production of hybrids ten-fold by 2010? I’m sorry, is that the Ford Insight I’ve been parking behind my neighbors’ Ford Prius?
William Clay Ford Jr., the chairman and chief executive of Ford and great-grandson of its founder, has announced that the company intends to increase the production of hybrid cars ten-fold by 2010, to a quarter of a million annually. That's good news, especially with gasoline prices going berserk and the globe getting ever warmer.Increase production ten-fold? From what, two?
For those who may not have heard of hybrid cars yet, these are vehicles powered by a combination of gasoline and electric engines, with sophisticated computers that seamlessly meld the two, making for sizeable fuel savings. In a word, Prius. That's the brilliant Toyota hybrid sedan that has stunned the car world with its popularity since it went on sale in Japan in 1997, and in the United States in 2000. The Prius looks to clear 100,000 sales in the United States this year, and Toyota hopes that by 2010, a quarter of all the cars it sells in America, or about 600,000 cars, will be hybrids. So this was hardly a Model T moment at Ford; it was more like playing catch-up to the Japanese, again.
Still, it is good that the car industry, and especially the American one, is taking a serious look at making cars that burn less fossil fuel. Initial efforts in the 1990s focused on all-electric cars. That proved a costly failure; the cars had a relatively short range and required long hours of recharging.
Enter the hybrids. Honda was first to bring one to the U.S. market, in 1999, with its little two-door Insight, whose EPA ratings of 61 miles pergallon in the city and 70 on the highway were a sensation. Toyota followed in 2000 with the Prius, Honda brought in a Civic hybrid, and the race was on. If the Insight and Prius had a sci-fi look to them, today's hybrid models already include stock luxury sedans and sport utility vehicles.
My Honda Insight looks like something out of Tom Swift. It did, when it came out, in the late 1990s, and it still does today, and that's just how I like it. Yooohooo, Ford...Chrysler...G.M.?
Stupid And Temporary
Did you just get an unwanted call from Smart and Final? I just did -- even though I'm on the "Do Not Call List," and even though I never gave Smart and Final my home phone number. It couldn't have come from using their dumb savings card, I don't think -- since I always make those grocery store memberships out to Mrs. S. Claus, North Pole...unless...they're somehow able to access the data behind my credit card.
I don't like getting phone calls at home. If I'm not too busy writing, I should be too busy writing to talk on the phone. If you're my friend, I'd prefer to see you in person. Otherwise, I'll take my communication via email.
Anyway, this call was from somebody named Tim Snee at Smart and Final. He's apparently an executive there, and his voice was on a recording calling and interrupting my deadline day to tell me that their restocking problems are over or almost over. Well, Mr. Snee, your Amy Alkon problems have just begun.
Did Tim Snee call you at home? Well, perhaps you'd like to return the favor. Here's his home address and phone number, which I got off Zabasearch.com:
TIMOTHY M SNEE
294 POMONA AVE
LONG BEACH, CA (562) 433-0047
Unfortunately, when I called, only his wife was home, as he's probably still at work, annoying the crap out of his customers. She didn't like hearing from me, not one bit. How unfortunate. Perhaps she should have married somebody other than Mr. Snee.
If calling his home number doesn't make you feel any better, you might want to email him as well -- tim.snee@smartandfinal.com -- and tell him exactly how you feel about getting annoyance calls at home.
If that still doesn't make you feel any better, via Mickey Kaus, here's the handy dandy California Attorney General complaint form.
You Can't Even Say "Butt" In A Whole Lot Of Daily Newspapers
My column runs, not just in alt weeklies (my main market) but in dailies that want younger readers, and are willing to field a few little old lady complaints instead of automatically firing me (Ithaca Journal and the St. Cloud Times both gave my column the ax a while back for "Sex isn't special. Monkeys do it, and not because somebody gave them flowers or expensive jewelry").
I'm always shocked by the stuff dailies are squeamish about (all the while professing to be desperate, just desperate to draw younger readers). What they really want, more than anything, are docile readers. This week, because I made a joke about middle-aged ladies paying doctors to inject their butts into their faces, my editor had me include a substitution for dailies: "thighs" in this case -- although I wrote a little note with it, "only if you must" (use a substitution). No wonder nobody under 72 wants to read the newspaper. You're not even allowed to write the way real people talk.
Neither, in many cases, are you allowed to write about what real people are actually doing. Now, I'll first offer a caveat: self-reported sex statistics are not the most reliable form of data, to say the least. But William Saletan has a very interesting piece up on Slate about how many dailies (one!) mentioned that teens are not just having oral sex, but taking it up the ass. And here's Saletan chastising the prudie editors for holding back on the back door:
"For males, the proportion who have had anal sex with a female increases from 4.6 percent at age 15 to 34 percent at ages 22–24; for females, the proportion who have had anal sex with a male increases from 2.4 percent at age 15 to 32 percent at age 22–24." One in three women admits to having had anal sex by age 24. By ages 25 to 44, the percentages rise to 40 for men and 35 for women. And that's not counting the 3.7 percent of men aged 15 to 44 who've had anal sex with other men.The last time major national surveys asked about this practice, in the early 1990s, only 20 percent of men aged 20 to 39 said they'd had anal sex with a woman in the preceding 10 years. Only 26 percent of men aged 18 to 59 said they'd ever done so. In the first survey, the 10-year limit excluded half the sexual career of half the sample, but that isn't enough to explain a doubling in the percentage saying yes. In the second survey, according to the current report, the inclusion of men aged 46 to 59 might have diluted the sample with "cohorts that were less likely to have had anal sex." But that's the point: Newer cohorts are more likely to have tried it.
Why does this matter? Because anal sex is far more dangerous than oral sex. According to data released earlier this year by the Centers for Disease Control, the probability of HIV acquisition by the receptive partner in unprotected oral sex with an HIV carrier is one per 10,000 acts. In vaginal sex, it's 10 per 10,000 acts. In anal sex, it's 50 per 10,000 acts. Do the math. Oral sex is 10 times safer than vaginal sex. Anal sex is five times more dangerous than vaginal sex and 50 times more dangerous than oral sex. Presumably, oral sex is far more frequent than anal sex. But are you confident it's 50 times more frequent?
A CDC fact sheet explains the risks of anal sex. First, "the lining of the rectum is thin and may allow the [HIV] virus to enter the body." Second, "condoms are more likely to break during anal sex than during vaginal sex." These risks don't just apply to HIV. According to the new survey report, the risk of transmission of other sexually transmitted diseases is likewise "higher for anal than for oral sex," and the risk "from oral sex is also believed to be lower than for vaginal intercourse."
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.
PS Speaking of what can and can't be read in daily papers, the Dallas Morning News just killed their features section, and they're starting little new daily features sections. They dumped my column (along with a number of others) when they killed the old section, but they might be compelled to bring it back if there's enough reader outcry. If you read my column in Dallas, and you'll miss me, please write to viewpoints@dallasnews.com and let them know, or call their hotline at 214-977-7225. While I appreciate people who'd want to write who don't read me in Dallas, it's important to keep the letters honest, so please - only if you read me there and will miss me. Otherwise it will backfire and they'll never bring me back!
Still Under Construction
If you notice that the text is a little tiny and links and things disappear from the left side and go to the top or bottom...we're working on it.
PERMALINKS will be corrected Monday evening. Right now they work, you'll just have to scroll down to the item. (The stuff normally on the side of the page is coming out on top.)
This Week In Role Models
I just loved this article in the Observer knocking all the holier-than-thous for firing Kate Moss. (Hello? Like none of the designers or anybody in the fashion industry is nose deep in coke – or more.) Here’s an excerpt from the piece by Sean O’Hagan:
In the ongoing tabloid-led witch-hunt, it is worth remembering that the Myth of Moss was created and sustained by us - the media and the public - and that she is an icon because we made her one. No matter how much we might have willed it, though, she was never a role model in the accepted sense. Burberry knew that. Chanel knew that. Rimmel knew that. They hired her for her edge and her outlaw cool as much as for her good looks and her sex kitten allure. In short, they too bought into the Myth of Moss in all its chemical potency. Only a Daily Mail reader or a chief constable could possibly reduce Kate Moss to something as dull and well-meaning as a role model. The rest of us loved her because she was anything but.
UPDATED: Here's another interesting bit from a Rebecca Traister Salon piece on the hypocrisy:
Of course, Moss' real error was in getting caught on tape, a situation that is certainly unfortunate for her, but just as inconvenient for fashion companies, now forced to place their favorite clotheshorse in the stocks, and to distance themselves from her by proclaiming their wide-eyed innocence.What this drama has done is lay bare the ugly skeleton that holds up a fashion industry that for some time has prized hollow cheeks and vacant eyes, stunted, prepubescent frames, and jutting collar bones from which fabric drapes beautifully. In other words, the body that is appealing to designers -- and thus to consumers -- is a body that looks like it has been ravaged by drugs. In order to stay employed, models must maintain this shape; to maintain the shape they must do something besides eat right and exercise regularly. Whether it's cocaine or speed or heroin or caffeine or cigarettes or anorexia or bulimia or some combination of the above, most adult women cannot get bodies that look like Moss' healthily, because hers is not a healthy body.
On Thursday, a spokeswoman for cosmetics firm Rimmel announced that the company was "shocked and dismayed by the recent press allegations surrounding" Moss, and that it would reconsider its relationship with her. Earlier, the CEO for Gloria Vanderbilt denim had told the press, "We would have second thoughts about using Kate Moss" again, and that "we weren't aware of any issues with Kate prior to this campaign."
The fashion companies' professions of surprise are hard to believe. Would it be more embarrassing for them to admit they hired a model who they knew had done drugs than it is for them to admit to never having picked up a paper? Moss has spoken of her own drug use many times, and did a widely reported stint in rehab in 1998. She has denied heroin use, and often claimed she was clean, but in 2003 she gave an interview in which she said that dabbling was fine, but that an earlier period she'd spent immersed in drug use "wasn't a nice time."
Moss' record alone renders Gloria Vanderbilt's and Rimmel's assertions of naiveté ludicrous. And what about H&M's statement to the New York Times, that "If someone is going to be the face of H&M, it is important they be healthy, wholesome and sound"? The spokeswoman also told the Times that after feedback, "we decided we should distance ourselves from any kind of drug abuse."
Remember Capt. Renault's assertion to Rick Blaine in "Casablanca" that he is "shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here," just before the croupier hands him his winnings?
If it were important that the face of H&M be healthy, wholesome and sound, the company would have very few working models to choose from, and everyone -- both in and out of the fashion industry -- knows that.
How Babies Are Made
Here's a list of replies Dallas women gave in the "who's daddy" section of the Child Support Agency forms. (Supposedly, they're all genuine. Actually, I don't think you could make these up):
1. Regarding the identity of the father of my twins, child A was fathered by Jim Munson. I am unsure as to the identity of the father of child B, but I believe that he was conceived on the same night.2. I am unsure as to the identity of the father of my child as I was being sick out of a window when taken unexpectedly from behind. I can provide you with a list of names of men that I think were at the party if this helps.
3. I do not know the name of the father of my little girl. She was conceived at a party at 3600 Grand Avenue where I had unprotected sex with a man I met that night. I do remember that the sex was so good that I fainted. If you do manage to track down the father, can you send me his phone number? Thanks.
4. I don't know the identity of the father of my daughter. He drives a BMW that now has a hole made by my stiletto in one of the door panels. Perhaps you can contact BMW service stations in this area and see if he's had it replaced.
5. I have never had sex with a man. I am awaiting a letter from the Pope confirming that my son's conception was immaculate and that he is Christ risen again.
6. I cannot tell you the name of child A's dad as he informs me that to do so would blow his cover and that would have cataclysmic implications for the economy. I am torn between doing right by you and right by the country. Please advise.
via Men's News Daily
Invasion Of The Peace And Quiet Snatchers
Do you know these women? Don’t get within 100 decibels, uh yards. They brought their babies to the Rose Café Friday morning, perhaps hoping to enhance the ambience by cutting the classical music, clinking glasses, and the dull murmur of adult conversation with the uninterrupted shrieks of their children.
The truth is, they didn’t care who they bothered -- although I was the only one who spoke up at the time, as usual. I am just not willing to sit there gritting my teeth that my eardrums and thoughts are being shattered. Later, a guy with a shaved head who'd been sitting opposite them looking pained at the noise and also my friend Kos commiserated with me about how rude these women were for bringing in their screaming kids. I'm sure there were others. The environment there is typically very calm and peaceful.
When I finally said something to them, they were aghast. Hey, ladies (and I’m using that term loosely), if I wanted to hear screaming babies, I’d go read my newspaper and eat my breakfast in a nursery school. Commenting on their oblivion to the presence of anyone but themselves in the place, I noted that my mother and father didn’t bring us anywhere until they were sure we didn’t disturb others. The mother giving me the finger repeatedly called me “ugly” and a “bitch” for suggesting they could be more considerate. She continued: “What do lonely, angry bitches like you know?” Well, a little something about public consideration, just for starters. I thought it was particularly funny that she suggested I look in the mirror (at my "ugly face") -- as if this would help me put a cork in her kid.
I suggested they read Cathy Seipp for tips on how to parent, since she seems to have done a very good job with Maia, generally has good ideas on the topic, and also seems to feel good manners are an essential part of the parenting mix. Of course, they accused me of hating children -- which I actually don't. I love my neighbors' kids so much that their 5-year-old actually calls me and asks me if he can come over and visit me when I haven't stopped by to see him in a few days. Then again, my neighbors are always concerned that their kids aren't bothering me -- and they never do -- because they're the first to say something if Jude and his friends are bouncing their ball on my house or my fence. Kids are kids, and a few shrieks or ball bounces, well, that's life. Persistent shrieks and noise, however, are another story.
Most hilariously, this woman not only didn't care whether anybody else was disturbed, she actually suggested they'd make it their business to come back to the Rose with their screaming kids in hopes of disturbing me again. My favorite part in our interaction, though, was when she accused me of being unhappy. In fact, I’m a very happy person, and generally come into the Rose all smiles. That said, I could be the ugliest, most miserable bitch on earth, and it doesn’t make them any less rude and inconsiderate for bringing their babies into an adult environment, letting them make ear-splitting shrieks, and failing to interrupt their conversation to take the kids outside or do anything to stop them.
Ladies, do society a favor and get your tubes tied.
This Christian School Isn't So Christian
What would Jesus do? Throw some little girl out of school because "Heather Has Two Mommies"? Seema Mehta writes in the LA Times that a "Christian" school in Ontario, CA, expelled a 14-year-old girl because her moms are lesbians:
Freshman Shay Clark, 14, was told to leave Ontario Christian High School after administrators learned of her parents' relationship this week."Your family does not meet the policies of admission," Supt. Leonard Stob wrote to Tina Clark, Shay's biological mother. The policy, he added, states that at least one parent cannot engage in practices "immoral or inconsistent with a positive Christian life style [sic] such as cohabitating without marriage or in a homosexual relationship."
The letter included two checks refunding $3,415, Shay's tuition for half the school year and an art fee. Attempts to reach Stob were unsuccessful.
Clark and her partner, Mitzi Gray, have been together for 22 years, and have three daughters; the others are ages 9 and 19. Clark and Gray said school officials learned of their relationship after Shay and another cheerleader were reprimanded for talking to the crowd during a football game Sept. 16.
Hmmm, Clark and Gray have been together 22 years? Seems the lesbos could teach the heteros a few things about commitment. Perhaps that's why it's really important to a lot of people that we don't legalize gay marriage.
Recycling Is Garbage
Hillary Johnson's fantastic business blog, Kerabu.com, pointed me to this 1996 John Tierney story, debunking the recycling myths. I particularly liked this quote:
Yes, a lot of trees have been cut down to make today's newspaper. But even more trees will probably be planted in their place. America's supply of timber has been increasing for decades, and the nation's forests have three times more wood today than in 1920. "We're not running out of wood, so why do we worry so much about recycling paper?" asks Jerry Taylor, the director of natural resource studies at the Cato Institute. "Paper is an agricultural product, made from trees grown specifically for paper production. Acting to conserve trees by recycling paper is like acting to conserve cornstalks by cutting back on corn consumption."
I'll tell that to the next SUV driver who gets my card on his or her behemoth ("How many dead Marines did it take to gas up your SUV? Stylish, aren't you?"), and suggests I'm evil for "wasting trees." Last night, I went for a run. Beyond the gas shortage question, there's the question of pollution. When it's humid here, nasty auto fumes absolutely hang in the air. Thanks, if you drive some behemoth for no real reason, for contributing to the rest of us breathing a bunch of crap out of your tailpipe. No biggie, huh? Tell that to kids who have an increased risk of asthma thanks to living near the freeway:
Scientists studying air pollution levels in 10 Southern California cities found that the closer children live to a freeway, the greater their chance of having been diagnosed with asthma. They report their findings in the November issue of the journal Epidemiology.Researchers also found that children who had higher levels of nitrogen dioxide, or NO2, in the air around their homes were more likely to have developed asthma. NO2 is a product of pollutants emitted from combustion engines, such as those in cars and trucks.
"These results suggest that tailpipe pollutants from freeway traffic are a significant risk factor for asthma," says lead author James Gauderman, Ph.D., associate professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School. "Considering the enormous costs associated with childhood asthma, today's public policy toward regulating pollutants may merit some re-evaluation."
"These results have both scientific and public health implications," says David A. Schwartz, M.D., director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the federal agency that funded the study. "They strengthen an emerging body of evidence that air pollution can cause asthma, and that exposure to outdoor levels of nitrogen dioxide and other traffic-related air pollutants may be a significant risk factor for this illness."
Researchers looked at the pollution-asthma link in 208 children who were part of the USC-led Children's Health Study, the longest investigation ever into air pollution and kids' health. The study has tracked the respiratory health of children in a group of Southern California cities since 1993.
The investigators placed air samplers outside the home of each student to measure NO2 levels. In addition, they determined the distance of each child's home from local freeways, as well as how many vehicles traveled within 150 meters (about 164 yards) of the child's home. Finally, they estimated traffic-related air pollution levels at each child's home using models that take weather conditions, vehicle counts and other important factors into account.
In all, 31 children (15 percent) had asthma. Scientists found a link between asthma prevalence in the children and NO2 levels at their homes. For each increase of 5.7 parts per billion in average NO2-which represents a typical range from low to high pollution levels among Southern California cities-the risk of asthma increased by 83 percent. Risk of wheezing and current asthma medication use also rose as NO2 levels increased.
They also found that the closer the students lived to a freeway, the higher the NO2 levels outside their homes. NO2 levels also corresponded with traffic-related pollution estimates from the group's statistical model.
It was not surprising, then, when they found that the closer the students lived to a freeway, the higher the students' asthma prevalence. For every 1.2 kilometers (about three-quarters of a mile) the students lived closer to the freeway, asthma risk increased by 89 percent. For example, students who lived 400 meters from the freeway had an 89 percent higher risk of asthma than students living 1,600 meters away from the freeway.
Now, in reading the article on this study, I thought there might be some connection as to whether large trucks are passing by frequently. Is the pollution that's hurting kids from them or also, substantially, from passenger cars and trucks? Well, in the absence of clear data on that, I asked my lungs, and they say emissions, when I'm running near the back end of a vehicle turning, etc., make them feel like crap.
To The Informationally Overwhelmed
My boyfriend/personal computer genius suggested that an outliner program would help me shovel vast piles of written data, humor, and thoughts into smaller, neater piles, thus making my writing process easier. Microsoft Word does have an outlining feature, but it's simple and clumsy to use. Well, my boyfriend researched the outlining programs out there (keeping in mind my writing process, which basically boils down to "turning anthropology data into comedy") and bought me Omni Outliner (the Pro version). It's changed my writing life, mainly through the ability to categorize and put lots of information into little collapsable pockets, thus keeping my being informationally overwhelmed to a minimum. You can download and try it for free here -- on a limited basis (it wouldn't allow me to put in more than 20 outline items in the free stage). I highly recommend it, especially to any other writers both blessed and cursed by ADHD. Ritalin and Omni Outliner. Who says technology can't save us?
Men As ATM Machines
Yet another man finds he's been paying child support for a kid who isn't his. Boys, a word of advice: Use a condom. A secondary word of advice: If you're too dumb to use a condom, insist on a DNA test before the court turns you upside down and shakes out your money:
The former mistress of convicted murderer Scott Peterson is back in the spotlight after a DNA test showed that her first child was not fathered by the man who was paying child support.Anthony Flores, 29, has been paying Frey $175 a month for nearly four years, his attorney, Glenn Wilson, said Wednesday. The father of the 4-year-old girl is actually Fresno restaurant owner Christopher Funch, Wilson said.
No one answered the telephone at Porky's Rib House on Wednesday, and Funch did not have a listed home number.
Wilson said Flores was preparing to file a court motion seeking visitation rights, which he has been denied, when the man received word last week that he was not the child's father.
The guy's paid for this kid for four years and he's been allowed no face time? Granted, we don't know if there's some reason he, in particular, should be denied visitation, but this sort of thing is all too common, and not for righteous reasons in many cases.
These days, you increasingly see stunts by fathers' rights groups -- in the continuing absence of fair treatment for fathers in the courts. Again, I'm not talking about giving some child abuser access to children, but giving ordinary fathers a fair shake...treating fathers as if they belong in their children's lives, not just expecting them to open their wallets and go away.
If feminists truly were for equal treatment for all -- they'd insist on seeing a little more fairness for fathers.
stunt link via Men's News Daily
Osama Takes A Back Seat To Jenna?
Jameson, that is. For a moment, I thought I was reading The Onion. But, no, it's a Washington Post story by Barton Gellman on the latest bright move by the party of small government:
The FBI is joining the Bush administration's War on Porn. And it's looking for a few good agents.Last month, the bureau's Washington Field Office began recruiting for a new anti-obscenity squad. Attached to the job posting was a memo from FBI headquarters to all 56 field offices, describing the initiative as "one of the top priorities" of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and, by extension, of "the Director," Robert Mueller.
The new squad will divert eight agents, a supervisor and assorted support staff to gather evidence against "manufacturers and purveyors" of pornography -- not the kind exploiting children, but the kind that depicts, and is marketed to, consenting adults.
"I guess this means we've won the war on terror," said one exasperated FBI agent, speaking on condition of anonymity because poking fun at headquarters is not regarded as career-enhancing. "We must not need any more resources for espionage."
Among friends and trusted colleagues, an experienced national security analyst said, "it's a running joke for us."
Yeah, increasingly, so is our government, for us. It's almost funny, too, for anyone who's never heard of the First Amendment.
There's more:
Applicants for the porn squad should therefore have a stomach for the kind of material that tends to be most offensive to local juries. Community standards -- along with a prurient purpose and absence of artistic merit -- define criminal obscenity under current Supreme Court doctrine."Based on a review of past successful cases," the memo said, the best odds of conviction come with pornography that "includes bestiality, urination, defecation, as well as sadistic and masochistic behavior." No word on the universe of other kinks that helps make porn a multibillion-dollar industry.
Excuse me, but if you're an adult who wants to get peed on, and another adult wants to pay to watch, why is that the government's business?
But Gonzales endorses the rationale of predecessor Meese: that adult pornography is a threat to families and children. Christian conservatives, long skeptical of Gonzales, greeted the pornography initiative with what the Family Research Council called "a growing sense of confidence in our new attorney general."
Oh, I get it. When I was a kid, my mom and dad wouldn't let me watch The Three Stooges, Gilligan's Island, The Brady Bunch, or any of the other shows all the other neighborhood kids got to watch. There's a name for this sort of behavior: it's called parenting. Why can't it be brought back to stop Johnny from watching Shaving Ryan's Privates?
porn nannies story link via Obscure Store
Where Were Your Legislators Post-Katrina?
Joshua Holland pushes for good governance on Alternet:
There was plenty of government to go around somewhere. The image of hundreds of school buses, which could have evacuated New Orleans residents, that were lying under 10 feet of water in an abandoned city depot is emblematic. The federal government had water, medicine, food and security at hand, in addition to the transportation needed to get it down to the coast in a hurry. As the Washington Post's Bill Arkin wrote, "The problem wasn't the lack of resources available. It was leadership, decisiveness, foresight. The problem was commanding and mobilizing the resources, civil and military."And the sad and unsettling statement by President Bush that the military is the "institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations" only drove the point home. Katrina showed that Americans need a more inclusive idea of security from their representatives, instead of just the usual platitudes about "strong defense."
The vivid failure to protect American citizens in harm's way gives progressives a rare opportunity to change the subject in an important national discussion; right now, a unified left could reframe the debate about the role of government from whether smaller is better to a discussion of what we expect it to do. The way to do that is to highlight a concept that should become a shibboleth for progressives: the imperative of good governance.
Good governance is a catch-all phrase used by scholars of comparative politics. They define it differently, but in its most succinct form, the idea has four parts. First, and most importantly, good governance means responding to the needs of your citizenry. That may seem painfully obvious to you and I, but the world is full of leaders who don't get it -- or don't care to.
...Don't listen to the rhetoric coming from either side, just look at their legislative proposals and ask, cui bono?, or "who gains?" The legislation bouncing around makes one thing clear: No matter what the Nader set says, there is without a doubt a dime's worth of difference between the two parties' governing philosophies.
Just a few examples. While Illinois Democrats Rahm Emmanuel and Barack Obama were pushing legislation to speed tax refunds to hurricane victims, UPI reported that Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., and Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., were busy searching for a dead body rich enough to pay estate taxes so that they could put the repeal of the so-called "death tax" back on Congress's legislative agenda. Unfortunately for them, so few people are wealthy enough to pay the tax that, so far, their search has been fruitless.
Legislators went to their pet issues, and it was so revealing that the Washington Post ran a story headlined, "Some GOP Legislators Hit Jarring Notes in Addressing Katrina."
While Representative Jim McDermott, D-Wash., formerly a child psychologist, offered legislation that would extend benefits to tens of thousands of children in need of relief, Rick Santorum, R-Penn., was looking out for his donors, one of which is the corporate AccuWeather meteorological service. So he got busy in the days following the disaster by advancing legislation that would keep the National Weather Service out of the business of predicting the next deadly storm.
Naturally, both parties approved the emergency supplemental spending bill by a wide margin. But while several dozen conservative legislators led by Todd Aiken, R-Mo., were trying to push an amendment that would mandate cutting the non-defense budget by 2.5% across the board, Democrats were also proposing comprehensive, long-term aid to the stricken areas for housing, keeping kids in school and healthcare.
...At the same time, the New York Times reported that "Republican leaders in Congress and some White House officials see opportunities in Hurricane Katrina" to advance controversial legislation like "giving students vouchers to pay for private schools, paying churches to help with temporary housing and scaling back business regulation." In addition to President Bush's suspension of federal prevailing-wage laws, Senator James Inhofe, R-Okla., offered a bill that would allow the EPA to suspend environmental regulations during the reconstruction. These acts are the very essence of poor governance: placing cronyism and ideology over the needs of devastated communities.
Parking Meters With Credit-Card Readers
FishbowlLA has the bad news:
West Hollywood brought us transvestite prostitutes in the eighties. And once again, the city is innovating in curb-based commerce....As for me, call me old-fashioned, but I think I'll stick with cold, hard coins. It just feels more manly.
George Wimps Out On Genocide
Nicholas Kristof writes in The New York Times that George Bush is soft on genocide:
It's been a year since Mr. Bush - ahead of other world leaders, and to his credit - acknowledged that genocide was unfolding in Darfur. But since then he has used that finding of genocide not to spur action but to substitute for it.Mr. Bush's position in the U.N. negotiations got little attention. But in effect the United States successfully blocked language in the declaration saying that countries have an "obligation" to respond to genocide. In the end the declaration was diluted to say that "We are prepared to take collective action ... on a case by case basis" to prevent genocide.
That was still an immensely important statement. But it's embarrassing that in the 21st century, we can't even accept a vague obligation to fight genocide as we did in the Genocide Convention of 1948. If the Genocide Convention were proposed today, President Bush apparently would fight to kill it.
I can't understand why Mr. Bush is soft on genocide, particularly because his political base - the religious right - has been one of the groups leading the campaign against genocide in Darfur. As the National Association of Evangelicals noted in a reproachful statement about Darfur a few days ago, the Bush administration "has made minimal progress protecting millions of victims of the world's worst humanitarian crisis."
Incredibly, the Bush administration has even emerged as Sudan's little helper, threatening an antigenocide campaigner in an effort to keep him quiet. Brian Steidle, a former Marine captain, served in Darfur as a military adviser - and grew heartsick at seeing corpses of children who'd been bludgeoned to death.
In March, I wrote a column about Mr. Steidle and separately published photos that he had taken of men, women and children hacked to death. Other photos were too wrenching to publish: one showed a pupil at the Suleia Girls School; she appeared to have been burned alive, probably after being raped, and her charred arms were still in handcuffs.
Mr. Steidle is an American hero for blowing the whistle on the genocide. But, according to Mr. Steidle, the State Department has ordered him on three occasions to stop showing the photos, for fear of complicating our relations with Sudan. Mr. Steidle has also been told that he has been blacklisted from all U.S. government jobs.
The State Department should be publicizing photos of atrocities to galvanize the international community against the genocide - not conspiring with Sudan to cover them up.
Time Warp Fever
Yuppies? Yuppies? Beyond the fact that nobody's called anybody that in eons, I haven't seen anybody in this town who looks like they have a real job for at least ten years. What's next, Ecuadorians Out Of Alaska!?
Darwin's Suffering
There was a very moving piece on Charles Darwin by author, journalist, and Pulitzer winner John Darnton in Monday's LA Times:
Some years back, I was given a tour of Down House, Charles Darwin's country estate, and allowed to sit in the special chair in which he wrote "The Origin of Species" and other revolutionary works. The chair was one he had devised himself: High-backed, stuffed with horsehair, it had casters attached so that he could scoot around his study to reach his books, his working table and his microscope. He had fashioned a cloth-covered board to fit over the arms as a writing surface.Once ensconced there, with the board lowered in place, I felt an indescribable thrill, like a child settling into the swing at a country fair when the bar descends to lock him in place. What a giddy ride Mr. Darwin has given us!
But I was equally intrigued by what I was shown next. The curator guided me to a nearby corner and pushed aside a curtain. Behind it Darwin had constructed a makeshift lavatory — a porcelain washbasin set inside the raised floor. It was, the curator explained, a crude vomitory. Often during his morning writing, sometimes more than once, Darwin's stomach would seize up. He would thrust aside his writing board, rush over and retch into the basin.
We tend to forget what a rough time Darwin had in his own day. He became a chronic invalid with multiple maladies so confusing that most biographers believe they must have been psychological in origin. After five years of romantic adventures sailing around the world on the Beagle, digging up fossils in South America and riding with the gauchos through hostile territory, he returned to England and immured himself in a quiet village in Kent. He turned pathologically shy in front of groups, so much so that he did not attend any of the historic debates over his theory of natural selection. And he was a world-class procrastinator: It took him 22 years to publish his theory, and he only did it when a competitor, Alfred Russel Wallace, came up with the identical idea.
To me, the explanation for these eccentricities seems clear. A gentle and nonconfrontational if unshakable soul, Darwin was paying a personal price for following the dictates of scientific principles to their logical end. When he began his career as a naturalist, he was a believer — originally he wanted to become a country vicar — but he followed his formidable intellect wherever it led, and it caused him to become the instrument that would overturn the hallowed dogma of Western religion.
Darwin suffered so we could...stop research on stem cells and continue to believe in god and the Easter Bunny, sans evidence that either exists? The truly tragic epilogue is how far we haven't come.
Tax Dollars For The Few
(And they don't even want them!) Sick, sick, sick. Rebecca Claren writes on Salon of the massive pork being shoveled from Washington to Alaska. Get this -- an Alaskan town of 50 people is slated to get a bridge nearly as long as the Golden Gate Bridge and 80 feet taller than the Brooklyn Bridge:
With a $223 million check from the federal government, the bridge will connect Gravina to the bustling Alaskan metropolis of Ketchikan, pop. 8,000."How is the bridge going to pay for itself?" asks Susan Walsh, Sallee's wife, who works as a nurse in Ketchikan. She notes that a ferry, which runs every 15 minutes in the summer, already connects Gravina to Ketchikan. "It can get us to the hospital in five minutes. How is this bridge fair to the rest of the country?"
The Gravina Bridge is one of a record 6,371 special projects, or "earmarks," in the Transportation Equity Act, a six-year $286 billion bill that rivals the recent energy bill in its homage to the pork barrel. No politician better flaunts an ability to bring home the bacon than Alaska's Don Young. As chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, and Alaska's lone congressional representative for 32 years, the elder statesman wrangled $941 million for Alaska in the bill, making Alaska, the nation's third least populated state, the fourth-biggest recipient of transportation funds. The money for the bill is fed by a gas tax at the pump, but this slush fund isn't redistributed to all Americans equally: The bill spends $86 per person on a national average; it spends an estimated $1,500 on every Alaskan.
"It seems to me that Don Young let his power go to his head," says Erich Zimmermann, senior policy analyst for Taxpayers for Common Sense. "It's out of control. Alaska manages to do well because Young and [Sen. Ted] Stevens are in positions to get lots of dollars, but it's taking advantage of the power they've been given. This bill is far too large at a time when deficits are supposed to be important."
Neither Young nor Stevens, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, returned phone calls from Salon. However, the two Alaskans, especially Young, have been loud and proud about their prowess to harness big bucks for transportation. They have repeatedly bragged that new roads and bridges will spur development and industry in Alaska. While speaking to a crowd in Ketchikan last year, Young referred to fellow Republican Stevens' prowess at rounding up pork, and said, "I'd like to be a little oinker myself." Young was so proud of the House version of the transportation bill that he named it TEA-LU, after his wife, Lu. He has said of the bill, "I stuffed it like a turkey."
Indeed. Included in the bill's special Alaska projects is $231 million for a bridge that will connect Anchorage to Port MacKenzie, a rural area that has exactly one resident, north of the town of Knik, pop. 22. The land is a network of swamps between a few hummocks of dry ground. Although it may or may not set the stage for future development, the bridge, to be named "Don Young's Way," will not save commuters into Anchorage any time, says Walt Parker, a former Alaska commissioner of highways.
"I wouldn't want the bridge named after me," says Parker, laughing. "Neither bridge makes much sense, but a lot of people are going to make a lot of money building the bridge, and then they'll have it, and it will have to be maintained. Alaska needs transportation money, but it needs to be spent in the right places."
Don Young's Way indeed. What would you call it: State Representation Bordering On National Treason? Your suggestions below.
Debt Wrong
Borrowing from Asia to pay for Katrina is the name of the game, says The New York Times:
President George W. Bush didn't say during his speech in New Orleans the other night how he would pay for his promise to rebuild the Gulf Coast states. Allow us to explain: Every penny of aid approved by Congress so far and all subsequent aid - perhaps as much as $200 billion - will be borrowed, with most of it likely from Asian central banks and other foreign investors. That means additional interest of about $10 billion a year indefinitely.
Don't get us wrong. In the main, it makes sense to borrow for huge, vital and unexpected projects (World War II comes to mind). Such borrowing spreads the immense costs over generations, all of which presumably benefit from the extraordinary spending. The problem is that the United States was deep in hock before Katrina - and for many of the wrong reasons. Unless Congress changes the pre-Katrina priorities laid down by Bush, necessary borrowing for Katrina will occur on top of unjustified borrowing. The resulting deficits could create deep economic distress, including higher interest rates, slower economic growth, future tax increases and constraints on the government's ability to be responsive, both to crises and to everyday needs, like health care. Growing deficits also pose a security threat because increasing foreign indebtedness risks eroding America's position in the world.
...A day after his speech from New Orleans, Bush ruled out tax increases to help pay for Katrina. Now Bush should also tell Congress to rule out new tax cuts for the rich. Taking responsibility for the response to Katrina means taking fiscal responsibility as well.
Clinton Gets It
Clinton assails Bush's hurricane relief effort, writes Philip Shenon in The New York Times:
Clinton said the inability of many poor, largely black residents of the Gulf Coast, to evacuate their homes during the hurricane was in part a result of the sweeping tax cuts during the Bush administration and other policies that had left the victims without the money for transportation to flee.
"It's like when they issued the evacuation order," he said. "That affects poor people differently. A lot of them in New Orleans didn't have cars. A lot of them who had cars had kinfolk they had to take care of. They didn't have cars, so they couldn't take them out."
"This is a matter of public policy," he said. "And whether it's race-based or not, if you give your tax cuts to the rich and hope everything works out all right, and poverty goes up and it disproportionately affects black and brown people, that's a consequence of action made. That's what they did in the 80's; that's what they've done in this decade."
In the middle, when he was president, he said, "we had a different policy."
A White House spokesman had no immediate comment to Clinton's remarks. In recent weeks, the Bush administration has vigorously rejected any suggestion that the race or poverty slowed the U.S. response to the disaster.
Noting that statistics showed a sharp drop in poverty during his presidency, Clinton said: "You can't have an emergency plan that works if it only affects middle-class people up, and when you tell people to go do something they don't have the means to do, you're going to leave the poor out."
When do people in this country start seeing the light instead of the PR?
There's Tax And Spend...
And then there's spend and spend and spend some more. In the spending department, George Bush makes drunken sailors look like the lead grannies in the "live simple" movement. Fareed Zakaria writes that today's Republicans believe in pork, but they don't believe in government -- which means we have the largest, weakest, most dysfunctional U.S. government in history:
Adversity builds character," goes the old adage. Except that in America today we seem to be following the opposite principle. The worse things get, the more frivolous our response. President Bush explains that he will spend hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding the Gulf Coast without raising any new revenues. Republican leader Tom DeLay declines any spending cuts because "there is no fat left to cut in the federal budget."This would be funny if it weren't so depressing. What is happening in Washington today is business as usual in the face of a national catastrophe. The scariest part is that we've been here before. After 9/11 we have created a new government agency, massively increased domestic spending and fought two wars. And the president did all this without rolling back any of his tax cuts—in fact, he expanded them—and refused to veto a single congressional spending bill. This was possible because Bush inherited a huge budget surplus in 2000. But that's all gone. The cupboard is now bare.
Whatever his other accomplishments, Bush will go down in history as the most fiscally irresponsible chief executive in American history. Since 2001, government spending has gone up from $1.86 trillion to $2.48 trillion, a 33 percent rise in four years! Defense and Homeland Security are not the only culprits. Domestic spending is actually up 36 percent in the same period. These figures come from the libertarian Cato Institute's excellent report "The Grand Old Spending Party," which explains that "throughout the past 40 years, most presidents have cut or restrained lower-priority spending to make room for higher-priority spending. What is driving George W. Bush's budget bloat is a reversal of that trend." To govern is to choose. And Bush has decided not to choose. He wants guns and butter and tax cuts.
People wonder whether we can afford Iraq and Katrina. The answer is, easily. What we can't afford simultaneously is $1.4 trillion in tax cuts and more than $1 trillion in new entitlement spending over the next 10 years. To take one example, if Congress did not make permanent just one of its tax cuts, the repeal of estate taxes, it would generate $290 billion over the next decade. That itself pays for most of Katrina and Iraq.
How Georgia Keeps Poor Black People From Voting
Some terrific letters to the editor about this in The New York Times. Here are two of the six:
To the Editor:Several dozen full-time black Atlanta college students tried to buy the Georgia ID card to vote in local elections on Sept. 20. They were denied access to the ID card because they refused to surrender their home-state driver's licenses to the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Is there a shred of doubt that the new Georgia poll tax is more about politics than about fraud prevention?
Janice L. Mathis
V.P., Rainbow/PUSH Coalition
Chicago, Sept. 13, 2005
To the Editor:Not only is the new Georgia voter ID law passed by Republican lawmakers and signed by a Republican governor a poll tax, but it is also de facto total disenfranchisement of all who cannot drive.
As you note, these people are often the poor, the black and the elderly, who historically vote for Democrats.
There are only 58 locations that sell the ID cards in a state with 159 counties, and there is virtually no public transportation throughout Georgia.
If a person has no driver's license, how on earth is he or she supposed to get to the locations where the cards are sold?
Mim Eisenberg
Roswell, Ga., Sept. 12, 2005
For more on how democracy is being threatened by sleazy electoral processes, read Steal This Vote, by Andrew Gumbel.
Elmore Leonard Novel, Free!
He's been called "The Poet-Laureate Of Wild Assholes With Guns."
Now, you can read his latest novel, "Comfort to the Enemy," for free here. Elmore is the first of a number of novelists who will be serialized weekly in a new section in The New York Times Magazine called "The Funny Pages."
I also highly recommend The Hot Kid, which features the first appearance of Carl and Louly, two characters you'll read about in "Comfort." Oh yeah, and above, Elmore just happens to be seated in one of the locations from "The Hot Kid" -- the original electric chair, “Ole Sparky," from Oklahoma State Prison at McAlester, Oklahoma.
Here's what Mike Ripley has to say in his review of "The Hot Kid" in England's Birmingham Post (the most recent one of many):
"Leonard is incapable of writing a boring line of dialogue"Elmore Leonard is one of the most important and influential American crime writers since Raymond Chandler. The Hot Kid (Weidenfeld, £12.99) is something of a return to his roots as a writer of Westerns, for although updated to the 1930s and set in the bad lands of Oklahoma, this is basically a quickest-the-draw, US Marshals versus bank robbers yarn set to a “Duelling Banjo” soundtrack.
And a very good one it is too, with a large cast of lowlife desperadoes, gangsters’ molls and morally ambiguous law enforcement officers. There are also passing mentions of real life Depression pin-ups such as Bonnie and Clyde, Machine Gun Kelly and John Dillinger, all vying with each other to become Public Enemy No 1.
This ferociously cool fable proves once again that Leonard is incapable of writing a boring line of dialogue and you begin to think that maybe his very notes to the milkman should be preserved in a library somewhere.
They probably are.
But, that's not all! Don't forget to listen to Elmore, too. Here are four fantastic podcasts, by Gregg Sutter. Sure, I'm biased, but I still think you'll think they're great.
photo by Gregg Sutter
Vanity Fare
Brit-in-America Emma Forrest sounds off in the London Observer about, among other things, Paris Hilton's recent appearance on the cover of Vanity Fair:
To get away with putting her on the cover, Vanity Fair had to make an executive decision that Paris Hilton is somehow empowering. And, instantly, post-feminism becomes pre-feminism, like the hypothetical point where communism meets fascism. Contributing comment, Camille Paglia misfires badly by claiming her a progeny of Madonna. Whatever you think of Madonna, she came to New York City broke, with no support from her family. The post-fame, leaked nude shots were from her days when she worked as an artist's model so she could keep paying for tuition with the revered Martha Graham dance troupe, with whom she was training eight hours a day.And though she was selling sex a full 20 years before Paris, the difference, crucially, is that she was vamping it. As opposed to launching a career from hardcore sex.
Which, in truth, wasn't even what made the Hilton video a national talking point. It was the fact that she takes calls on her ever-present cell phone during coitus. That hyper self-involvement in the face of a world falling apart - ignore and insulate - is what earned her equal admiration from aspirational American women as well as horny men.
Again, whatever you think of her music, Madonna spent her money on Frida Kahlo paintings and first-edition Anne Sexton books.
...Paris has already been lauded as an inspiring role model for young women on the cover of the UK's Glamour. And this month she stares, eyes the blue of killer jellyfish, from the front of Tatler.
Just as the Bush administration's tactic of 'say it often enough and it becomes true' has worked, so the phenomenon of Paris is: 'See it often enough and it becomes relevant.'
In another era, Pamela Anderson, the working class girl from Canada, made a fortune on the brilliant lie: 'I want you.' Infinitely more sinister, the lie behind Hilton's dead-eyed gaze is: 'You want me.'
Who's Running This Place?
When do we get to take back the country from all the fundamentalists and corporations on the (taxpayer) take? Here's more about business of usual in the Bush USA from Frank Rich:
WHEN there's money on the line, cronies always come first in this White House, no matter how great the human suffering. After Katrina, the FEMA Web site directing charitable contributions prominently listed Operation Blessing, a Pat Robertson kitty that, according to I.R.S. documents obtained by ABC News, has given more than half of its yearly cash donations to Mr. Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. If FEMA is that cavalier about charitable donations, imagine what it's doing with the $62 billion (so far) of taxpayers' money sent its way for Katrina relief. Actually, you don't have to imagine: we already know some of it was immediately siphoned into no-bid contracts with a major Republican donor, the Fluor Corporation, as well as with a client of the consultant Joe Allbaugh, the Bush 2000 campaign manager who ran FEMA for this White House until Brownie, Mr. Allbaugh's college roommate, was installed in his place.It was back in 2000 that Mr. Bush, in a debate with Al Gore, bragged about his gubernatorial prowess "on the front line of catastrophic situations," specifically citing a Texas flood, and paid the Clinton administration a rare compliment for putting a professional as effective as James Lee Witt in charge of FEMA. Exactly why Mr. Bush would staff that same agency months later with political hacks is one of many questions that must be answered by the independent investigation he and the Congressional majority are trying every which way to avoid. With or without a 9/11-style commission, the answers will come out. There are too many Americans who are angry and too many reporters who are on the case. (NBC and CNN are both opening full-time bureaus in New Orleans.) You know the world has changed when the widely despised news media have a far higher approval rating (77 percent) than the president (46 percent), as measured last week in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.
Like his father before him, Mr. Bush has squandered the huge store of political capital he won in a war. His Thursday-night invocation of "armies of compassion" will prove as worthless as the "thousand points of light" that the first President Bush bestowed upon the poor from on high in New Orleans (at the Superdome, during the 1988 G.O.P. convention). It will be up to other Republicans in Washington to cut through the empty words and image-mongering to demand effective action from Mr. Bush on the Gulf Coast and in Iraq, if only because their own political lives are at stake. It's up to Democrats, though they show scant signs of realizing it, to step into the vacuum and propose an alternative to a fiscally disastrous conservatism that prizes pork over compassion. If the era of Great Society big government is over, the era of big government for special interests is proving a fiasco. Especially when it's presided over by a self-styled C.E.O. with a consistent three-decade record of running private and public enterprises alike into a ditch.
What comes next? Having turned the page on Mr. Bush, the country hungers for a vision that is something other than either liberal boilerplate or Rovian stagecraft. At this point, merely plain old competence, integrity and heart might do.
A Spano Blog Item Without Errors!
Our favorite woozy writer-woman in Paris, the LA Times' Susan Spano, should be proud of herself. There isn't a single sentence in her current "blog" item that I can pick on as wrong. Then again, there aren't any sentences at all.
It seems Madame Spano finally got herself a digital camera -- only two years after everybody's grand-mère. Perhaps she thought, if she didn't actually write a "blog" item, she'd escape some of the harsh weekly criticism from readers (surprise, surprise: she never prints my corrections to her now-infrequent reader comments pages) about her constant errors and lazy reporting.
Click the link above for five unremarkable photos, and a "Name That Place" quiz that should be shifted over to the kiddie section of the paper -- except that it's so mind-numbingly simplistic, lacking even a multiple-choice list of clues with each photo. Silly...that would require thought and effort! And maybe even a little mirth.
But, Spano, poor dear, couldn't manage to give a word of explanation or even a link to details written by others about each of these locations. Or to even check spelling (wrong on the museum! -- and this is a longtime reporter for a major daily!) or put in accents where appropriate. And out of five photos, two are of Parc Monceau, yet she can't even manage to refer to that consistently.
But, not to worry, Suze! As always, I'm here to Ken Layne you ("fact-check your ass") and pick up the slack. And again, the photos are at the Spano link above. My links below are to actual information about them:
Photos #1, #3: L'Eglise de la Ste. Trinite -- corrected by Amy as: L'Église de la Sainte-Trinité, located in the 9th arrondissement, near Gare St. Lazare and Galeries Lafayette, my favorite place to buy wild hair ornaments, cheap (see the Evita Peroni boutique in the far corner of the first floor, especially in February and July, when stuff's on sale).
But, enough consumerism. Let's hear what Olivier Messiaen, organist, has to say about the massive instrument in Sainte-Trinité (in the link just above):
In the world, there are many instruments that are larger than the one in St. Trinité. Among these, the organ in the Immaculate-Conception Basilica in Washington (USA), the organ in St. John-the-Divine Cathedral in New York (USA) and the large French instruments: St. Ouen in Rouen, Notre-Dame, Sacré-Coeur-de-Montmartre, and St. Sulpice in Paris. All these instruments are beautiful, imposing. The organ in St. Trinité equals them in power, in majesty and may surpass them in mystery and poetry.
Hmmm, interesting! Probably much more to know about this place...that is, if one has the will to raise one's fingers over the keyboard and type the letters that make up the church's name into Google.
Photo #2: La Musee Chernuschi -- which Spano misspelled and omitted the accent on and incorrectly made "museum" the feminine "la" instead of the masculine "le." Yes, that's three errors in three words, corrected by Amy as follows: Le Musée Cernuschi. Here's Rachel Kaplan's 1997 write-up on it (from the link above):
Of the thousands of people who frequent the Parc Monceau in Paris, few realize that an elegant white stone mansion at the edge of the park, built in the 1870s, now houses one of the most impressive collections of ancient Chinese art in Europe. Known as the Cernuschi Museum, it was left to the City of Paris one hundred years ago, by the wealthy Milanese financier and philanthropist Henri Cernuschi (1820-1896).Today, only certain art connoisseurs know that Cernuschi was one of the first collectors in France to have the aesthetic discernment to amass an important collection of Chinese and Japanese art. An atypical amalgam of innovative tycoon and romantic revolutionary, Cernuschi became a serious collector partly through a series of inauspicious circumstances.
As a prominent sympathizer with the insurgents of the 1871 Commune, he was arrested, albeit briefly, and then released. Deeply shocked and horrified by the wave of people (some of whom were his friends) who were killed or imprisoned during this bloody popular uprising, in September 1871 he embarked upon an eighteen-month voyage around the world that would take him to China and Asia by way of America.
One of Cernuschi's most unusual and obscure acquisitions was a mammoth ancient molded bronze basin from the Warring States period (475 B.C. - 221 B.C.), referred to as a kien or "mirror," presumably because the water inside it reflected the light from nocturnal cermonial torches. Displayed prominently on the museum's ground flor, it remains the largest known Chinese basin from that period.
Photos #4, #5: Parc Monceau. We'll go with blogger Auntie M's bit on this gorgeous park in the 8th arrondissement of Paris (bordering on the 17th). Auntie M might not be on the payroll of the LA Times, but she writes whole sentences, and includes informative links!
In 1778 Louis Philip II, the Duc de Chartres and Orleans, known as Philippe Egalite, bought the territory that would become Monceau Park. His park designer, de Carmontelle, was charged with designing "an outstanding garden bringing all times and places together." The result was a whimsical garden with fake Roman ruins, a Dutch windmill, a ruined fort and an Egyptian pyramid!When the toll walls were built around Paris in 1787, the section that corresponds to today's Boulevard de Courcelles was surrounded by a ditch so that the Duc's view would be unobstructed. A beautiful rotunda was built instead of an observation post to fit in with the environment of the park.
In 1793, during the French revolution, the garden was confiscated from the Duc. In the 1850s, the city of Paris bought the garden. The garden was inaugurated in its current configuration by the Napoleon III in 1861. Ever since, only statues have been added to the grounds.
Perhaps it's just me, but if you're going to get paid for a job, it seems only fair to make a wee bit of effort from time to time? I know so many people in Paris who would be fascinating reads, or, at least, moderately interesting ones.
And then there's the embarrassing lack of fact-checking. On that museum above, it just takes three clicks on Google to see there's only one hit for Chernuschi, 96,300 for Cernuschi, and 29,700 for Musée Cernuschi. After that, there's a quick toddle over to the Larousse French/English dictionary to check whether musée is masculine or feminine, and whether it has an accent.
Why...why...why? Please, somebody explain to me the mystery of this woman's continuing employment.
Who's That Hairy Liberal?
Promoting collectivism and government meddling? Why, it's Rick Santorum, writes Jonathan Rauch in Reason:
Freedom, for Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and others, was an end, not just a means. A government that allows individuals to pursue happiness in their own fashions, they believed, is most likely to produce a strong society and a virtuous citizenry; but the greatest benefit of freedom is freedom itself. Civic virtue ultimately serves individual freedom, rather than the other way around.It was in this tradition that Goldwater wrote, "Every man, for his individual good and for the good of his society, is responsible for his own development." Note that word "and": Individual and social welfare go together—they're not in conflict. All the government needs to do, Goldwater said, is get out of the way. "The conservative's first concern will always be: Are we maximizing freedom?" Reagan spoke in the same tradition when he declared that government was the problem, not the solution to our problems.
Goldwater and Reagan, and Madison and Jefferson, were saying that if you restrain government, you will strengthen society and foster virtue. Santorum is saying something more like the reverse: If you shore up the family, you will strengthen the social fabric and ultimately reduce dependence on government.
Where Goldwater denounced collectivism as the enemy of the individual, Santorum denounces individualism as the enemy of family. On page 426, Santorum says this: "In the conservative vision, people are first connected to and part of families: The family, not the individual, is the fundamental unit of society." Those words are not merely uncomfortable with the individual-rights tradition of modern conservatism. They are incompatible with it.
Santorum seems to sense as much. In an interview with National Public Radio last month, he acknowledged his quarrel with "what I refer to as more of a libertarianish Right" and "this whole idea of personal autonomy." In his book he comments, seemingly with a shrug, "Some will reject what I have to say as a kind of 'Big Government' conservatism."
They sure will. A list of the government interventions that Santorum endorses includes national service, promotion of prison ministries, "individual development accounts," publicly financed trust funds for children, community-investment incentives, strengthened obscenity enforcement, covenant marriage, assorted tax breaks, economic literacy programs in "every school in America" (his italics), and more. Lots more.
Though he is a populist critic of Big Government, Santorum shows no interest in defining principled limits on political power. His first priority is to make government pro-family, not to make it small. He has no use for a constitutional (or, as far as one can tell, moral) right to privacy, which he regards as a "constitutional wrecking ball" that has become inimical to the very principle of the common good. Ditto for the notions of government neutrality and free expression. He does not support a ban on contraception, but he thinks the government has every right to impose one.
The quarrel between virtue and freedom is an ancient and profound one. Santorum's suspicion of liberal individualism has a long pedigree and is not without support in American history. Adams, after all, favored sumptuary laws that would restrict conspicuous consumption in order to promote a virtuous frugality. And Santorum is right to observe that no healthy society is made up of people who view themselves as detached and unencumbered individuals.
"But to move from that sociological truism to the proposition that the family is the fundamental unit of political liberty," says Galston, "goes against the grain of two centuries of American political thought, as first articulated in the Declaration of Independence." With It Takes a Family , Rick Santorum has served notice. The bold new challenge to the Goldwater-Reagan tradition in American politics comes not from the Left, but from the Right.
Fashions Of The Times
Marc Jacobs in The LA Times, by Booth Moore:
After Marc Jacobs' groundbreaking, darkly romantic fall collection, all eyes were on him this week as everyone wondered: What will he do next? Leading up to Monday night, many fashion insiders were also making side bets on how late things would start after last season's show was delayed an hour and a half, prompting an apology on the designer's website.Jacobs did not disappoint. Although he was ready on time — which in the fashion world means a half-hour late — the crowd was left waiting an extra 10 minutes for tardy celebs Lindsay Lohan and L'il Kim. Way to go, girls.
All was forgotten when the show opened with the Penn State University Band marching onto the runway playing a version of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" with trumpets blowing, drums thumping and batons twirling, signaling Jacobs' intent to revisit one of his favorite themes: teen angst.
Marc Jacobs in The New York Times, by Cathy Horyn:
The confetti that 30 minutes earlier had exploded from the ceiling in a silvery rain now lay in clumps on the bleachers. Caroline Kennedy had left with her two daughters. Uma Thurman had come and gone. Robert Duffy, the business partner of Marc Jacobs, stood on the littered runway. He remarked that there were things in Mr. Jacobs's show on Monday night that he had first seen him attempt at the start of his career. "But 15 or 18 years ago we had no money for beautiful fabrics, for embroidery," Mr. Duffy said. "We had, like, five pairs of shoes for a whole show."Money changes everything. Mr. Jacobs opened his spring show with 95 members of the Penn State marching band, led by a spangled, baton-tossing majorette. He had the kind of magnificently stiff couture fabrics that would make Hubert de Givenchy tremble like a Chihuahua. He had diamond jewelry, crocodile shoes and examples of his new watch line.
But as Mr. Duffy suggested, a fashion show isn't just a 15-minute bath of excitement before you go to dinner. It represents the values and assumptions a designer has held most of his life. Money does make a difference, but only if the basic ideas are there in the first place.
Notice any difference in the quality of writing and thinking?
What Are They Reconstructing?
Dan Froomkin writes in the Washington Post about Bush's speech:
"Republicans said Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff and Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, was in charge of the reconstruction effort."
Clearly, it's a massive effort to reconstruct Bush's image, with the some side benefits for the flood victims he forgot until the nation gave a collective gasp at his behavior:
Rove's leadership role suggests quite strikingly that any and all White House decisions and pronouncements regarding the recovery from the storm are being made with their political consequences as the primary consideration. More specifically: With an eye toward increasing the likelihood of Republican political victories in the future, pursuing long-cherished conservative goals, and bolstering Bush's image.That is Rove's hallmark.
Rove, Bush's long-time political adviser and the "architect" of Bush's ascendancy, was rewarded after the 2004 election with a position at the White House with overt policy responsibilities. But whereas in some previous White Houses, governance took precedence over campaigning once the election was safely over, Rove has shown no sign of ever putting policy goals above political ones. (See my Rove profile .)
Tonight's speech promises two classic features of the Rove approach.
Bush will take advantage of powerful imagery -- the Associated Press reports the speech will be held in historic Jackson Square, with the famous St. Louis Cathedral as a backdrop -- and he won't risk having anyone around who might disagree with him or ask an impertinent question. In fact, the AP says, there won't be a live audience at all. (And even the journalists covering the event are being told they won't be allowed to stray from their press vans.)
As for the speech itself, it will inevitably seek to answer any naysaying about Bush by recasting him in the heroic, leadership role he played after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks -- while advocating a range of measures that are dear to the conservative political agenda.
Politics as usual! What a surprise that Bush didn't speak before a live audience -- lest flood victims "give him a Cheney" -- a verbal wedgie like that Cheney got from the doctor whose house was destroyed (who told him to fuck off). No, but how do you really feel about the Bush-Cheney golf-while-you-lose-your-house response? And most depressingly, how many people will be fooled into thinking he cared and does care -- about more than spinning his approval rating back up -- just because Karl Rove paid somebody to write him a moving speech?
The Speech Bush Didn't Give
By Tim Grieve on Salon:
The president says he's ready to "take responsibility" for whatever the federal government did wrong in the wake of Katrina, and you've come through with a veritable flood of ideas about where he could begin.Here's the speech that War Room readers might write. Douglas O'Morain of Austin, Texas, gets us started, and then a list of would-be presidential advisors too long to mention fills in the blanks and connects the dots from there.
"My fellow Americans, while many people were at fault for our country's poor response to Hurricane Katrina, I am the president, and the buck stops with me. In addition to being the commander in chief, I believe that the president has a moral obligation to protect the people to the best of his ability. And in this case, I did not perform for you as I did on September the 11th, 2001. While I believe that there are many reasons behind the debacle in New Orleans and elsewhere in the wake of the hurricane, I accept full responsibility for the failures of the federal government. I will not shirk from blame; I will not pass the buck.
"I take responsibility for not having shown concern about the people or the situation in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast until it became clear that it was a public relations disaster for my administration. I take responsibility for the fact that Katrina will go down as one of the 10 deadliest natural disasters in our nation's history -- and that the other nine all happened before helicopters were widely available for rescue missions.
"I take responsibility for packing FEMA, a federal agency America depends on in national emergencies, with political hacks with no real qualifications for doing life-and-death jobs. I take responsibility for not making geography skills a priority for FEMA. I take responsibility for the fact that, while fires blazed out of control in New Orleans, 600 firefighters were stuck in a FEMA seminar on customer service in Atlanta. I take responsibility for telling Brownie that he was 'doing a heck of a job,' when, in fact, he sucked.
"I take responsibility for not asking Dick Cheney to end his vacation sooner; for not asking Condoleezza Rice to end her shopping spree in New York sooner; for not asking Donald Rumsfeld to cut short his trip to the ballgame and mobilize soldiers for the relief effort. I take responsibility for sending large numbers of National Guard members from Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Florida to Iraq, making it impossible for them to act quickly to aid and protect their homeland.
"I take responsibility for allowing one of my senior administration officials to insinuate that that I ignored the delay in the deployment of federal troops because I didn't want to seem like I was bullying some chick governor.
"I take responsibility for allowing the nation's poverty rate to rise four years in a row. I take responsibility for the fiscal policies and war plans that have left our country unable to perform its primary duty of protecting its citizens without going into further debt. I take responsibility for failing to give the Army Corps of Engineers adequate funds to build and fortify levees in New Orleans. I take responsibility for consistently burying scientific evidence about global warming and other issues and paying people to reword scientific reports so that they line up with my way of thinking.
"I take responsibility for pretending to play guitar in California while New Orleans was flooding.
"I take responsibility for saying, 'I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees,' when practically anyone who lived in New Orleans for the past 100 years could have anticipated it. I take responsibility for countless phony uses of the word 'folks' instead of 'people' to convince as many knuckle draggers as possible that despite my massive wealth, Yale education and privilege I am really just as dumb and illiterate as they are.
"I take responsibility for the suffering that will follow from my decision -- between photo-op hops to the safest sites in the battered Gulf Coast -- to suspend the Davis-Bacon Act protections for laborers working to rebuild the Gulf Coast and New Orleans. I take responsibility for issuing 'no-bid,' 'cost-plus' contracts to those helping to rebuild hurricane damaged areas so my close personal friends and cronies can make millions taking advantage of the worst natural disaster in America's history -- just like they did in Iraq. I take responsibility for trying to further my political goals of allowing private/religious school vouchers, smashing unions, weakening environmental regulations and giving Halliburton a blank check during this time of great crisis.
"I take responsibility for having failed to say 'I take responsibility' for anything until it was politically expedient to do so. I take responsibility for being such an arrogant, cranky, vindictive twit that my loyal aides have to draw straws to see which unlucky one has to bring me a reality check. I take responsibility for putting myself in the position of being elected to the most powerful position in the world knowing full well that I have neither the experience, the imagination nor the human compassion that is a prerequisite for the job."
How To Get To Heaven
Not that there is a heaven. But if there were...
And then there's Just Another Day On The Edge:
Both photos taken Tuesday, September 13, by Gregg Sutter, from the Ironworkers Local 433 job site in Century City -- a 12-story building going up right now.
Preventing Abstinence Promotes AIDS
Twisted theocrats here and in Uganda have succeeded in reducing condom availability -- with fatal results, says a Kaiser Foundation commentary:
Uganda became Africa's leader in reducing the spread of HIV by promoting abstinence, faithfulness and consistent condom use, but now this "balanced approach is tilting, and Ugandans will die as a result," a New York Times editorial says (New York Times, 9/4). The Ugandan and U.S. governments over the past couple of years have placed an increasing interest in promoting abstinence and fidelity in marriage, with condoms being distributed only to people who cannot manage either prevention tactic. U.N. Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa Stephen Lewis and other AIDS advocates last week said the Bush administration's policy of emphasizing abstinence-only prevention programs and cutting federal funding for condoms have contributed to an alleged condom shortage in Uganda and undermined the country's HIV/AIDS fight. Lewis said in a teleconference sponsored by health and human rights groups that "there is no question that the condom crisis in Uganda is being driven and exacerbated by [the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief] and by the extreme policies the administration in the United States is now pursuing" (Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report, 8/30). The shift in policy from promoting condom use to abstinence-only education "threatens to undermine the country's success in bringing AIDS into the open," the editorial says. If those who use condoms "are branded as immoral," it will "drive the epidemic back underground," the editorial adds, concluding, "No one knows better than the Ugandans that lives are saved when AIDS is treated as a public health challenge, not a moral crusade" (New York Times, 9/4).
People in Uganda are now desperate for condoms:
Reports indicate that in some areas, including those with large numbers of internally displaced persons, people desperate to prevent HIV infection have begun using garbage bags as condom substitutes.Similar trends are underway in a number of other countries, including Zambia, where reduced supplies of condoms and shifts in funding of prevention programmes are leaving millions at risk, and Kenya, Namibia, and Tanzania, where U.S. funding is indirectly supporting the resurgence of fundamentalist religious movements and undermining effective HIV prevention, CHANGE says.
In a related development, right-wing Senator Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, demanded that the United States stop financing a Central American HIV-AIDS prevention programme, run by Population Services International (PSI), a nonprofit group.
In a letter to Pres. Bush, Coburn -- a medical doctor -- complained about PSI's "Noches Vives" and other programmes. Noches means nights; Vives is a brand of condoms.
Because most prostitutes in poor countries don't show up at local clinics to ask for condoms, PSI sponsors Noches Vives, sending aid workers to bars, brothels and other places where prostitutes congregate. They go from table to table, handing out condoms, sometimes using bananas as props, showing people how to use them.
Coburn wrote that PSI's funding is up for renewal, and PSI has applied for tens of millions more to continue the project, adding, "There is something seriously askew at USAID when the agency's response to a dehumanising and abusive practice that exploits women and young girls is parties and games."
"It's a simple activity for largely illiterate people," said Michael Holscher, regional executive director for PSI. "We can't just stand up in a bar and say, 'AIDS will kill you.' With an interactive activity, we can hold their attention, sometimes for as long as an hour."
Shortly after Coburn's letter, USAID cut off money for the programme.
Rev. Tim Simpson of the newly-formed Christian Alliance, told IPS, "This is an absolutely tragic situation that is being compounded by the extremist ethics of Christian fundamentalists, who place sexual purity ahead of saving lives."
"The scourge of HIV/AIDS ought not be the occasion for trotting out the right wing's failed attempts at abstinence education," he said. "They don't seem to be nearly as concerned about Africans dying as they are about keeping Africans from having sex outside of marriage."
"But one infected prostitute can destroy the lives of hundreds of people in a very short period of time, so there is no question that the need is acute. It is time that the U.S. government stops listening to groups like Focus on the Family and instead starts focusing on reality," Simpson added.
via Metafilter
Find A Human
Thank you, thank you, Jackie Danicki. In response to my post about ATT customer "service," she posted the link to get around all the ad crap and wait times in customer service. Jackie, you are literally a lifesaver.
Brown's Stench
This Village Voice blog item by Ward Harkavy looks back on how differently Brown dealt with another disaster -- of minor proportions, compared to New Orleans. Looks like payoffs during an election year to get Floridians to vote Republican.
Don't Lie To Me, You Leaping Losers
I just called ATT, my overpriced former home phone company, to see how much I still owe (since I switched to the slightly less overpriced Verizon, after they got their "switch!" offers up to a check for $100.) The recording I heard went as follows:
"We are experiencing a slight delay due to positive response to ATT products and services."
Oh, bull feces. What you really mean is:
"Yo, consumer, despite your completely ridiculously expensive phone service, we're too cheap to cut into our enormous profits by hiring an adequate number of employees, so screw you, you're gonna wait!"
Put some more employees on, you phone turds, because nobody believes that crap, least of all, me.
Bye-Bye God!
Ding-dong, the Pledge is gone! Well, at least, there might be hope it's on its way out...or, at least, the god part might be:
Reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools was ruled unconstitutional Wednesday by a federal judge who granted legal standing to two families represented by an atheist who lost his previous battle before the U.S. Supreme Court.U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton ruled that the pledge's reference to one nation "under God" violates school children's right to be "free from a coercive requirement to affirm God."
Obviously.
Going Places Without The Ben Dover
For just $79.95, writes Joe Sharkey in The New York Times, you can have your hostility removed before boarding an airplane:
NOT to put too fine a point on it, but I'd rather take a whack up the side of the head with a sack of cobblestones than wait in a long line to be treated badly when my turn comes.This helps explain why I told Steve Brill last week to please take my $79.95 and sign me up. Mr. Brill, who founded Court TV and The American Lawyer magazine, is now the chief executive of a company called Verified Identity Pass. If Mr. Brill gets his way (and he usually does), his company's Clear Registered Traveler Program could soon have many members paying $79.95 each year to obtain an identity card that allows them to pass through airport checkpoints without being treated like a prisoner being hustled to the cellblock.
The program is only now in an early test phase at Orlando International Airport in Florida. It's one of six registered-traveler programs that have been tried this year at various airports.
...What they all have in common is the means to let travelers identify themselves with a thin card encoded with their biometric data - iris and fingerprint scans - that the T.S.A. has checked against what Mr. Brill's company describes as "various terrorist-threat-related databases" and concluded that you have passed muster.
...The reward for that is expedited passage through security in a designated lane, along with the assurance that you won't be randomly hauled aside for one of those secondary inspections and pat downs. Other future benefits, Mr. Brill said, might exempt travelers from much disliked rules like having to take off their shoes or remove laptops from their cases.
To obtain a Clear Registered Traveler card, an applicant provides the company with his or her name, address, birth date, Social Security number, and two forms of government-issued ID. Digital images of an applicant's fingerprints and irises are made. The biographical and digital information is then sent to the T.S.A., which checks it. Mr. Brill's company says it guarantees restitution of any financial loss that might arise from the "highly unlikely event" that its basic information on you is used for identity theft.
The company does not get access to the T.S.A.'s evaluation, nor to any financial or other information on the applicant. Neither the company nor the applicant is told why an applicant is rejected.
Will you pay? Think about how much you make an hour and how much time you spend waiting in airport lines every year. Even if you're on the low rung at McDonald's, it seems to make a whole lot of sense to shell out.
Diversity Training, Hollywood Boulevard-style
Ugly comes in many different colors, shapes, and sizes!
Yoohoo, God?
Remember the tsunami? Here's what Cathy Young wrote about god afterward, in a Reason piece rather presciently subtitled: "After the deluge, the God talk":
Last December, as the world tried to grapple with the devastating scope of the tsunami that hit South Asia—at last count, the death toll stood at nearly 300,000—the tragedy became fodder for fatuous religious discussions, focusing on an ancient question: How can a just, good, all-powerful, all-loving God allow evil to happen and innocents to suffer?...The evangelist Anne Graham Lotz, daughter of the Rev. Billy Graham, made a more startling (and more original) claim on the Fox News show The Heartland: “Maybe in the Muslim world…people would see that Americans are not, perhaps, what the wicked propagandists would say, but they were good people and a caring people and we’re going to help them. So God—you know, he has a greater purpose.” God committed mass slaughter just to give America an opportunity to improve its image abroad?
...When God is thanked for answering a prayer with a miraculous deliverance, it raises the inevitable skeptical question: What about all those who likewise prayed but perished nonetheless? Is the idea of a deity cherry-picking those who will survive a deadly disaster really comforting? After September 11, some credited God with ensuring that there were far fewer people than usual both in the hijacked planes and in the targeted buildings. You’d think that God could have simply tipped off the FBI.
Yet in a supposedly secularist culture where conservatives gripe that you’re not allowed to talk about God anymore, mainstream public discourse rarely questions boilerplate rhetoric about God’s higher purpose and the mystery of His ways. When an American soldier serving in Iraq was killed in a helicopter crash while flying home for his mother’s funeral after her sudden death from an aneurism, newspaper accounts reverentially repeated a minister’s assertion at the double service that God surely had a plan for mother and son. The press coverage of the memorial service for Pat Tillman, the former National Football League player who passed up a multimillion-dollar contract to enlist in the Army and was killed in action in Afghanistan, almost uniformly omitted his brother’s remark from the podium: “With all respect to those who have been up here before me, Pat’s not with God. He’s not religious. He’s dead.”
Drunk Doctoring
Medical residents are made to work incredibly stupid hours, and now a study out of the University of Michigan gets into exactly how stupid they are:
The sleep deprivation of overworked residents impairs their neurobehavioral performance to the same degree as a blood alcohol concentration of .04 to .05, researchers here say.In simulated driving tests, residents who had worked a heavy call rotation had similar reaction times and rates of attention lapses, omission errors, and crashes as those who had ingested alcohol, reported J. Todd Arendt, Ph.D., of the University of Michigan, in the Sept. 7 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
..."Because sleepy residents may have limited ability to recognize the degree to which they are impaired, residency programs should consider these risks when designing work schedules and develop risk management strategies for residents, such as considering alternative call schedules or providing post-call napping quarters," the study authors advised.
While the study findings are "notable" and cause for concern, the study did not directly evaluate residents' performance on medical tasks, said Drew Dawson, Ph.D., of the University of South Australia in Adelaide and Phyllis Zee, M.D., Ph.D., of Northwestern University in Chicago.
In an accompanying editorial, they noted the caveats of a quick fix. "Despite the appeal of restricting working hours, it is important to consider potential negative ramifications," they wrote. "In some scenarios, limiting working hours may increase risk to patients and physicians. For example, restricted working hours may lead to restricted access to health care practitioners through a reduction in the labor supply, insufficient clinical preparation for the 'real world,' increased sleep restriction in senior physicians, or increases in error rates due to work intensification."
Worse yet, it's not just residents who work the insane hours -- it's the doctors doing the big jobs, like a friend of mine who's a liver transplant anesthesiologist. I guess you just have to hope you get the doctor who's been on 10 hours, not 14 or more.
They Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To
The power just came back on here on beachside Los Angeles after a massive brownout. Luckily, I had the perfect high-tech communications device for power outages.
But while it seems, so far, that this is not an act of terrorism but an act of crumbling infrastructure, it was a lesson to me: Keep the car gassed up, the cell phone charged, and have a plan. I'm on deadline at the moment, but my director of emergency services/boyfriend is coming up with one now.
Kevin Roderick has power outage details, as always, at LAObserved.
Who's Yer Daddy?
Wendy McElroy writes about a bit of progress for men in the paternity fraud department:
On Aug. 31, a small but precedent-setting case was decided in the Superior Court of New Jersey. The plaintiff discovered he was not the biological father of his eldest 'son', now in his 30s. The court affirmed the duped dad's legal right to sue the natural father for the cost of raising the 'child' and removed some limitations imposed by a lower court.The precedent: for the first time, New Jersey has extended a clear statutory deadline for filing on paternity cases. For the first time, a biological parent may be forced to pay child support for an offspring emancipated over 15 years ago.
The significance: family courts are beginning to reflect a growing impatience with paternity fraud; perhaps this is in reaction to a shift in societal attitudes.
Predictably, the pathbreaking New Jersey decision raises more questions. For example, if a deliberate fraud was perpetrated for 30 years by both the biological mother and father, why is only the father held liable?
Well, in this case, most creepily:
...The court found, "BEC (the mother) owed plaintiff nothing for the support of DC" because she had also paid her fair share. Moreover, "the act of adultery...does not violate any law" and was mitigated by the joy and benefit "plaintiff enjoyed from the love and affection" of the "child he thought was his."I am uncomfortable with this reasoning.
Adultery is not and should not be against the law; consenting adults have an absolute right to have sex together without government interference. The sexual act may be immoral or otherwise unsavory but it should not be illegal.
But making an innocent third party legally and financially responsible for the consequences of that sex act is an entirely different matter. And the mother must have perjured herself on several legal documents during the divorce and child settlement arrangements when she attested to RAC's fatherhood.
At least two questions bear on whether the mother should be liable. The first: should the law intrude into family matters? The second: if the law becomes involved, should fraud be tolerated?
My ideal society includes explicit contracts into which people voluntarily enter before becoming parents; DNA testing might be a standard provision. The law (or other third party) would become involved only as an arbiter of disputes or as a rescuer in cases of physical abuse.
That society doesn't exist. People resist parental contracts and the law inevitably becomes involved in competing claims over children.
And, when a legal proceeding occurs, intentional fraud should be punished.
I can't find the exact study, but a cognitive neuroscientist I know told me he'd blood and DNA-tested a reasonable sample of children for paternity and found that 25%! were not fathered by the man who thought he was their biological parent. One out of four! That's a whole lot of back payments -- half of which should come from the sneaky, conniving mothers.
Take Your Girlfriend To Work Day
My boyfriend is the literary researcher for a crime novelist, and gets to meet some fascinating people and go some pretty interesting places on the job. This weekend, he had to go to an ironworkers' picnic in Whittier to continue his research for a movie, and I went along.
Ironworkers are "the cowboys of the skies" -- the guys you see ambling along a girder 50 stories up:
Their job is to unload, erect, and connect fabricated iron members to form the skeleton of a structure. Structural Ironworkers work on the construction of industrial, commercial, and large residential buildings, as well as on towers, bridges, stadiums and prefabricated metal buildings. They also erect and install pre-cast beams, columns and panels.
Right now, a number of the guys I talked to at the picnic -- from Local 433 -- are working on a building in Century City. "Not that big," one guy said. "Just 12 floors." Twelve floors up, no net? Big enough.
It's an exceptionally dangerous job. From time to time, an ironworker falls off a girder, which they call "falling into the hole." These shirts commemorate the guys who didn't make it.
At the picnic, a couple of cop pals of the ironworkers were hanging around on these cool buggies. Well, one cop and a stand-in when I took the picture.
It's a myth, by the way, that the ironworkers are all Mohawk Indians.
The most entertaining moment of the day was when I asked this guy for his job description, and he rattled it off rapidfire:
chop or work on top,
rig or dig,
fuck, fight, hold the light,
pump, push, or take compleeete control!"
Al Quaida Threat On LA
Brady Westwater's reporting it on his site via an ABC item. And so is Brady Westwater. And...Brady Westwater. Notice any Los Angeles publications missing from this blog item?
Little Shiva Goes To Burning Man
One of my favorite wildwomen has her photos up here. Click on the photos to make them bigger -- so you can read the sign on "Panty Camp":
"Yes, most of them are USED (but washed). Girls: Deal with it. Guys: You're welcome."
You'll find Little Shiva's Ministry Of Fun here. She's in charge of keeping Charlotte, North Carolina frightened awake. (And that's a good thing, in case you were wondering.)
The Surreal Deal
A compelling slide show of 194 photos taken by a French-quarter dwelling Nicaraugan hotel worker in New Orleans -- before, during, and after Katrina.
Yes, I seem to have run out of words today, so I'm all pictures here in AdviceGoddessland. Back to my regular overflow tomorrow, I'm sure.
*link is fixed.
They Sell Horses, Don't They?
George Bush's Monica
Jon Stewart's got it just right:
"The real question is, in the four years since 9/11, you have to ask yourself: Has the government's advancements, procedures, etc. made us safer, given us more comfort that they will have an effective, or more effective, response to catastrophic events? And I think it's very clear that the answer is 'Oh sh[bleep]t, we're in trouble.'"Now, for people who are saying, 'Well, stop pointing fingers at the President. Left-wing media is being too hard.' No. Shut up. No. This is inarguably, inarguably a failure of leadership from the top of the federal government.
"Now, now, this is [audience applause], remember when Bill Clinton, I don't know if you remember this, when Bill Clinton went out with Monica Lewinsky? That was inarguably a failure of judgment at the top. Democrats had to come out and risk losing credibility if they did not condemn Bill Clinton for this behavior. I believe Republicans are in the same position right now. And I will say this, Hurricane Katrina is George Bush's Monica Lewinsky. One difference, and I'll say this, the only difference is this: That tens of thousands of people weren't stranded in Monica Lewinsky's vagina. That is the only difference."
Walkie Stalkie
Great article by Cathy Seipp on stalking. I particularly liked this excerpt:
...I've interviewed (Gavin) de Becker, author of the bestseller "The Gift of Fear" and other books, and have noticed he's refreshingly impatient with men who pooh-pooh women's experience of being bothered by strangers. Reading in his books about how to keep teenage girls safe from unwanted attention, I thought of things I hadn't in years. How my sister and I used to be regularly asked by strange men if we were twins, for instance, which of course insulted both of us.De Becker told me that at one group he addressed, a man complained that he was in an ice-cream shop, "and there were these two teenage girls who looked like sisters, but I wasn't sure, and because I read your book I didn't feel I could ask them if they were sisters." Perhaps the man was expecting to be assured that friendly small-talk was OK. Instead, de Becker told me, he responded sharply: "Why should a 50-year-old man be asking teenage girls these personal questions? Do they have some duty to reveal their lineage to you?"
Although many of his views -- that battered women do have a choice to leave, that murderers are created by abusive or neglectful parents -- go against the grain of our Don't Blame the Victim society, none, de Becker says, has been more controversial than his simple insistance that women do not have to be nice - that they have, in fact, the right to be rude.
New Orleans With Everything
This site has links to it all -- SkipBolenStudio.com...satellite imagery, relief operations, and blogs.
Hitchens On The Little Putz
Christopher Hitchens rightly states that it is the government's business to protect us from religious fanatics -- specifically some old Orthodox Jewish guy performing circumcisions (a bizarre and barbaric primitive religious practice), who's giving little babies his Herpes.
Female genital mutilation, for example, is quite rightly banned under federal law, and no religious exemption is, or ever should be, permitted. The Mormons were obliged to give up polygamy and forcible marriage before they, or the state of Utah, could be part of the United States. A Christian Scientist who denies urgent medical treatment to his or her children may well be hauled up for reckless endangerment, as may those whose churches teach redemption through violent corporal punishment. The First Amendment does indeed forbid any infringement of religious freedom, but it is not, as was once said, part of a suicide pact, let alone a child-abuse one.Let's by all means hear from Rabbi David Niederman of the United Jewish Organization in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who emerged from his meeting with Bloomberg to inform us that: "The Orthodox Jewish community will continue the practice that has been practiced for over 5,000 years. We do not change. And we will not change." You can preach it, rabbi, but you have no more right to practice it than a Muslim imam who preaches the duty of holy war has the right to put his teachings into effect. And Rabbi Yitzchok Fischer, the 57-year-old man who ministered to the three boys in question, is currently under a court order that forbids him from doing it again—pending an investigation by the health department. What "investigation?" If another man of that age were found to be slicing the foreskins of little boys and then sucking their penises and their blood, he would be in jail—one hopes—so fast that his feet wouldn't touch the ground. If he then told the court that God ordered him to do it, he would be offering precisely the defense that thousands of psychos have already made so familiar. Preach it rabbi. Preach it to the judge.
A few years ago I traveled to Calcutta with the brilliant photographer Sebastião Salgado, who has made the eradication of polio his signature cause. In 2001, there was a real chance that this childhood-wrecking and frequently lethal malady could go the way of smallpox. Only a few outposts, usually in very bad war zones like Afghanistan, had not been reported as "clear." (The two sides in the civil war in El Salvador observed a truce so that the vaccine could be safely distributed.) But some mullahs in Bengal spread the rumor that the vaccine led to impotence and diarrhea (a bad combo) and urged mothers to keep their children away from the nurses and physicians. Most Bengalis are too smart to listen to ravings like these, which exactly resemble the view of Dr. Timothy Dwight, one of America's founding divines, that vaccination against smallpox was an interference with the divine design. However, in northern Nigeria, where imams now hold state power in many provinces, the polio vaccine has been denounced as a plot "by the US and the UN [!]" to "sterilize Muslims." In consequence of this fatwa, the disease has returned to Nigeria this year and also spread back to several African countries that thought they had bidden farewell to it. Decades of patient and skillful work have been ruined, along with the lives of uncounted children.
Jewish babies exposed to herpes in New York, thousands of American children injured for life after the rape and torture they suffered at the hands of a compliant Catholic priesthood, prelates and mullahs outbidding each other in denial of AIDS … it's not just your mental health that is challenged by faith. Anyone who says that this evil deserves legal protection is exactly as guilty as the filthy old men who delight in inflicting it. What a pity that there is no hell.
Circumcision is a medical practice done for non-medical reasons, as one quote on this site, Mothers Against Circumcision, notes. Give a man a choice, when he's of age, to have a piece of his weenie hacked off, and what do you think he'll say? How come we're against female genital mutilation, but not male genital mutilation? What if the female genital mutilators claim they're clit-clipping for religious reasons? What then? It's all primitive and barbaric, and should be stopped. By law. Immediately.
But, don't just take my word for it. Here's what Dr. Paul Fleiss wrote about the subject at, sorry, have to laugh just a little, foreskin.org.
Here's one last quote about the topic from the sidebar of the Mothers Against site:
"I believe the time has come to acknowledge that the practice of routine circumcision rests on the absurd premise that the only mammal in creation born in the condition that requires immediate surgical correction is the human male." Thomas Szasz, M.D.
A Great Work Of Fiction
...Otherwise known as FEMA bumbler-in-chief Michael Brown's resume. A few days ago, somebody defended Brown by noting that he had served as "assistant city manager with emergency services oversight" of the city of Edmond Oklahoma. Not exactly, it turns out, according to this TIME Magazine article by Daren Fonda and Rita Healy:
Before joining FEMA, his only previous stint in emergency management, according to his bio posted on FEMA's website, was "serving as an assistant city manager with emergency services oversight." The White House press release from 2001 stated that Brown worked for the city of Edmond, Okla., from 1975 to 1978 "overseeing the emergency services division." In fact, according to Claudia Deakins, head of public relations for the city of Edmond, Brown was an "assistant to the city manager" from 1977 to 1980, not a manager himself, and had no authority over other employees. "The assistant is more like an intern," she told TIME. "Department heads did not report to him." Brown did do a good job at his humble position, however, according to his boss. "Yes. Mike Brown worked for me. He was my administrative assistant. He was a student at Central State University," recalls former city manager Bill Dashner. "Mike used to handle a lot of details. Every now and again I'd ask him to write me a speech. He was very loyal. He was always on time. He always had on a suit and a starched white shirt."In response, Nicol Andrews, deputy strategic director in FEMA's office of public affairs, insists that while Brown began as an intern, he became an "assistant city manager" with a distinguished record of service. "According to Mike Brown," she says, "a large portion [of the points raised by TIME] is very inaccurate."
That isn't the only howler on this C.V. Read the whole article at the link above. What on his resume isn't fabricated in some way...apart from his name? As I said before, there's patronage in every administration, but the smart ones send the "fail upward" types on ambassadorships to places like Lichtenstein.
Weather Of Mass Destruction
Thomas Friedman on the unraveling of the Bush administration's carefully controlled image:
It was just a gut reaction that George Bush and Dick Cheney were the right guys to deal with Osama. I was not alone in that feeling, and as a result, Mr. Bush got a mandate, almost a blank check, to rule from 9/11 that he never really earned at the polls. Unfortunately, he used that mandate not simply to confront the terrorists but to take a radically uncompassionate conservative agenda - on taxes, stem cells, the environment and foreign treaties - that was going nowhere before 9/11, and drive it into a post-9/11 world. In that sense, 9/11 distorted our politics and society.Well, if 9/11 is one bookend of the Bush administration, Katrina may be the other. If 9/11 put the wind at President Bush's back, Katrina's put the wind in his face. If the Bush-Cheney team seemed to be the right guys to deal with Osama, they seem exactly the wrong guys to deal with Katrina - and all the rot and misplaced priorities it's exposed here at home.
These are people so much better at inflicting pain than feeling it, so much better at taking things apart than putting them together, so much better at defending "intelligent design" as a theology than practicing it as a policy.
For instance, it's unavoidably obvious that we need a real policy of energy conservation. But President Bush can barely choke out the word "conservation." And can you imagine Mr. Cheney, who has already denounced conservation as a "personal virtue" irrelevant to national policy, now leading such a campaign or confronting oil companies for price gouging?
And then there are the president's standard lines: "It's not the government's money; it's your money," and, "One of the last things that we need to do to this economy is to take money out of your pocket and fuel government." Maybe Mr. Bush will now also tell us: "It's not the government's hurricane - it's your hurricane."
An administration whose tax policy has been dominated by the toweringly selfish Grover Norquist - who has been quoted as saying: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub" - doesn't have the instincts for this moment. Mr. Norquist is the only person about whom I would say this: I hope he owns property around the New Orleans levee that was never properly finished because of a lack of tax dollars. I hope his basement got flooded. And I hope that he was busy drowning government in his bathtub when the levee broke and that he had to wait for a U.S. Army helicopter to get out of town.
The Bush team has engaged in a tax giveaway since 9/11 that has had one underlying assumption: There will never be another rainy day. Just spend money. You knew that sooner or later there would be a rainy day, but Karl Rove has assumed it wouldn't happen on Mr. Bush's watch - that someone else would have to clean it up. Well, it did happen on his watch.
As I've heard a few people say, it's not "the blame game," but the responsibility game. Where's Dad? Do we have a dad? Or a smirking boy cowboy in charge. In a crisis like this one, when a president really needs to act presidential -- and not just send in the cavalry, but be the cavalry...George Bush has failed pretty pathetically. Hey, but the guy's got a golf game to practice, right?
Grilled Like A Ball Park Frank
Scott McClellan was roasted but good about FEMA and what the president knew and when he knew it in the September 7 White House press briefing:
Q Scott, does the President retain confidence in his FEMA Director and Secretary of Homeland Security?MR. McCLELLAN: And again, David, see, this is where some people want to look at the blame game issue, and finger-point. We're focused on solving problems, and we're doing everything we can --
Q What about the question?
MR. McCLELLAN: We're doing everything we can in support --
Q We know all that.
MR. McCLELLAN: -- of the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA.
Q Does he retain complete confidence --
MR. McCLELLAN: We're going to continue. We appreciate the great effort that all of those at FEMA, including the head of FEMA, are doing to help the people in the region. And I'm just not going to engage in the blame game or finger-pointing that you're trying to get me to engage.
Q Okay, but that's not at all what I was asking.
MR. McCLELLAN: Sure it is. It's exactly what you're trying to play.
Q You have your same point you want to make about the blame game, which you've said enough now. I'm asking you a direct question, which you're dodging.
MR. McCLELLAN: No --
Q Does the President retain complete confidence in his Director of FEMA and Secretary of Homeland Security, yes or no?
MR. McCLELLAN: I just answered the question.
Q Is the answer "yes" on both?
MR. McCLELLAN: And what you're doing is trying to engage in a game of finger-pointing.
Q There's a lot of criticism. I'm just wondering if he still has confidence.
MR. McCLELLAN: -- and blame-gaming. What we're trying to do is solve problems, David. And that's where we're going to keep our focus.
Q So you're not -- you won't answer that question directly?
MR. McCLELLAN: I did. I just did.--
Creepy Religious Nutters Were On The Taypayer Dole
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) rightly suspended the funding of the weirdly named "Silver Ring Thing" program after the ACLU of Massachusetts filed a lawsuit:
The lawsuit cites the organization's own documents describing the use of SRT "as the primary outreach" by which it is bringing "our world to Christ." Many such examples are documented in the complaint, but the real proof is in the actual SRT event. The young people who attend the events and pledge virginity until marriage receive an "Abstinence Study Bible" and a silver ring inscribed with a reference to the Bible verse, "God wants you to be holy, so you should keep clear of all sexual sin. Then each of you will control your body and live in holiness and honor." Participants are also encouraged to accept Christ as their savior and become born again.Furthermore, the Silver Ring Thing program, as well as most other taxpayer funded abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, tells young people that condoms are ineffective, promotes out-dated gender stereotypes, ignores LGBTQ youth, and includes anti-abortion rights messages, among other egregious ideologically driven information. Moreover, no abstinence-only-until-marriage program, including SRT, has ever been proven to be effective, and in fact, some have been shown to cause harm. Recent research has shown that virginity pledges, a common component of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, including SRT, significantly undermine contraceptive use when pledgers become sexually active, and that pledgers who have not engaged in vaginal sex are more likely to participate in oral and anal sex than "virgins" who have not pledged.
"The Silver Ring Thing's program activities are just the tip of the iceberg in exposing what the federal abstinence-only-until-marriage programs are all about," Smith said. "The American people have endured a lack of oversight of these programs by our government for far too long. It is our hope that the decision to suspend funding to the Silver Ring Thing is the first of many, and that HHS will reexamine its entire portfolio of these unproven, and potentially harmful, programs," Smith continued.
Since 1982, the U.S. government has spent over a billion dollars on unproven abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. Of that billion, more than $750 million dollars has been spent in just the last eight years. The President is seeking an additional $206 million in his proposed Fiscal Year 2006 budget. However his request has been rebuffed by both the House and Senate Appropriators. While still funding these programs at an inappropriate level, lawmakers approved far less than the president's request.
"HHS is the nation's premier health care agency and should be funding programs that do not promote a particular religion or ideology, but provide young people with medically accurate and inclusive information that will promote the health and well being of all of our nation's youth," Smith said.
Why Men Earn More
Warren Farrell lays it out in the IHT:
Nothing disturbs America's working women more than the statistics showing that they are paid only 76 cents to men's dollar for the same work.
When I was on the board of the National Organization for Women in New York City, I blamed discrimination for that gap. Then I asked myself, "If an employer has to pay a man one dollar for the same work a woman would do for 76 cents, why would anyone hire a man?"
Perhaps, I thought, male bosses undervalue women. But I discovered that in 2000, women who own their own businesses earned only 49 percent of male business owners. Why? When the Rochester Institute of Technology surveyed business owners with MBAs from one top business school, they found that money was the primary motivator for only 29 percent of the women, versus 76 percent of the men. Women put a premium on autonomy, flexibility (25- to 35-hour weeks and proximity to home), fulfillment and safety.
After years of research, I discovered 25 differences in the work-life choices of men and women. All 25 lead to men earning more money, but to women having better lives.
High pay, as it turns out, is about tradeoffs. Men's tradeoffs include working more hours (women work more around the home); taking more dangerous, dirtier and outdoor jobs (garbage collecting, construction, trucking); relocating and traveling; and training for technical jobs with less people contact (like engineering).
Is the pay gap, then, about the different choices of men and women? Not quite. It's about parents' choices. Women who have never been married and are childless earn 117 percent of their childless male counterparts. (This comparison controls for education, hours worked and age.) Their decisions are more like married men's, and never-married men's decisions are more like women's in general (careers in arts, no weekend work, etc.)...And sometimes discrimination against women becomes discrimination against men: In hazardous fields, women suffer fewer hazards. For example, more than 500 marines have died in the war in Iraq. All but two were men. In other fields, men are virtually excluded - try getting hired as a male dental hygienist, nursery school teacher, cocktail waiter.
There are 80 jobs in which women earn more than men - positions like financial analyst, radiation therapist, library worker, biological technician, motion picture projectionist. Female sales engineers make 143 percent of their male counterparts; female statisticians earn 135 percent.
I want my daughters to know that people who work 44 hours a week make, on average, more than twice the pay of someone working 34 hours a week. And that pharmacists now earn almost as much as doctors. But only by abandoning our focus on discrimination against women can we discover these opportunities for women.
"God" Works In Mysteriously Contradictory Ways
Religious fanatics at one end of town are saying god brought the hurricane to punish people; at the other end, it's god was merciful.
Hmm, maybe, just maybe, nobody knows shit about what god is or isn't saying, because...there is no god and they're making it all up?
But, wait...Condoleeza might not know where those WMDs are, but she's seen god, and he's apparently on his way! Just like FEMA!
Fanatics link via Volokh.com; Rice and FEMA links from Sploid.
"Too Posh To Push?"
Loved that article title in the London Times. It's a piece, written by Ainsley Newsom, about artificial wombs, which may be upon us within the next 20 years:
Artificial wombs are not yet safe for human pregnancies. But if, as expected, the technology can one day be applied in human beings, scientific advantages may result.But Richard Ashcroft, reader in medical ethics at Imperial College London, fears a “foetal rescue act” to force drug or alcohol-addicted mothers to have their foetuses surgically removed. “I couldn’t think of anything worse,” he said.
It is also feared that scientists involved in cloning could continue their experiments without the need for surrogate mothers.
There is a danger too that some women who want babies but cannot face pregnancy or childbirth could take advantage of the artificial wombs — one step beyond being “too posh to push”. If they see their babies growing in a tank, would they bond with their newborns, or view them as commodities? Dr Ashcroft said: “Is creating children with artificial wombs having children at all, or is it a kind of manufacturing of children? It is deeply dangerous.”
Oh, please. Without suffering, a pregnancy isn't a pregnancy? That's called "the naturalistic fallacy" -- the dunderheaded thinking that just because something's natural, it's good.
There are women now who've had cancer and are physicallly unable to have kids, and have hired what I jokingly called a "rent-a-womb." Do they leave their babies in roadside rest stops? Do adoptive mothers not love their kids?
This is the same anti-science idiocy I encountered from a Kaiser shrink once, subbing for the guy who prescribes my Ritalin (for ADHD). He told me I really should get off the stuff. Let's see, it has few side effects for me, and really helps me concentrate, which really improves my writing, which, in turn, really improves my life.
I should get off it...why? Because he's uncomfortable with better living through chemistry? Likewise, what if women didn't have to swell up and get sick for nine months? Why is this a bad thing? Because some anti-science nut is used to seeing women get gigantic and spend their mornings bent over a toilet...and then, watching them, at the end in the delivery room, doing what compares to pushing a Ford Escort out a nostril? Charming.
The Mayor Misses The Bus
Hundreds and hundreds of them were left to take on flood waters instead of passengers. Yet another criminally negligent public official. And the guy was sitting right there in Flood Central. Absolutely disgusting.
I just voted in a special election (by absentee ballot, which I always do these days, for convenience and so I won't miss an election). As I drove off to mail my ballot, I was thinking about people who come to America from countries with oppressive regimes, and how passionate they are about the right to vote -- versus some of our natural-born citizens who, if they even vote, just go right down party lines, never giving too much thought to what a candidate is really all about.
I'm not saying we always have such great choices -- I can't even begin to tell you how I loathed Kerry -- but perhaps that's part and parcel of people not caring about democracy, taking it for granted because it's been around as long as any of them can remember.
A Grown Man Cries
Aaron Broussard, president of New Orleans' Jefferson Parish, appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press. By the end, he was sobbing uncontrollably:
RUSSERT: You just heard the director of homeland security’s explanation of what has happened this last week. What is your reaction?BROUSSARD: We have been abandoned by our own country. Hurricane Katrina will go down in history as one of the worst storms ever to hit an American coast. But the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will go down as one of the worst abandonments of Americans on American soil ever in U.S. history. … Whoever is at the top of this totem pole, that totem pole needs to be chainsawed off and we’ve got to start with some new leadership. It’s not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now.
Broussard detailed difficulties the local authories had with FEMA:
BROUSSARD: Three quick examples. We had Wal-Mart deliver three trucks of water. FEMA turned them back. They said we didn’t need them. This was a week ago. FEMA, we had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a Coast Guard vessel docked in my parish. When we got there with our trucks, FEMA says don’t give you the fuel. Yesterday — yesterday — FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in, he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards and said no one is getting near these lines…
Video and more of the text is at the ThinkProgress link above.
And here's how the commies do it when a category five hurricane comes:
Last September, a Category 5 hurricane battered the small island of Cuba with 160-mile-per-hour winds. More than 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated to higher ground ahead of the storm. Although the hurricane destroyed 20,000 houses, no one died.What is Cuban President Fidel Castro's secret? According to Dr. Nelson Valdes, a sociology professor at the University of New Mexico, and specialist in Latin America, "the whole civil defense is embedded in the community to begin with. People know ahead of time where they are to go."
"Cuba's leaders go on TV and take charge," said Valdes. Contrast this with George W. Bush's reaction to Hurricane Katrina. The day after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Bush was playing golf. He waited three days to make a TV appearance and five days before visiting the disaster site. In a scathing editorial on Thursday, the New York Times said, "nothing about the president's demeanor yesterday - which seemed casual to the point of carelessness - suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis."
"Merely sticking people in a stadium is unthinkable" in Cuba, Valdes said. "Shelters all have medical personnel, from the neighborhood. They have family doctors in Cuba, who evacuate together with the neighborhood, and already know, for example, who needs insulin."
They also evacuate animals and veterinarians, TV sets and refrigerators, "so that people aren't reluctant to leave because people might steal their stuff," Valdes observed.
After Hurricane Ivan, the United Nations International Secretariat for Disaster Reduction cited Cuba as a model for hurricane preparation. ISDR director Salvano Briceno said, "The Cuban way could easily be applied to other countries with similar economic conditions and even in countries with greater resources that do not manage to protect their population as well as Cuba does."
And to think they wanted to impeach Clinton because he lied about his penis.
The Guy's Got A Point...Or Ten
I'm not a Democrat, and I don't like Michael Moore (for the same reason I don't like Ann Coulter -- because I don't like liars), but he's right on with this letter:
Friday, September 2nd, 2005Dear Mr. Bush:
Any idea where all our helicopters are? It's Day 5 of Hurricane Katrina and thousands remain stranded in New Orleans and need to be airlifted. Where on earth could you have misplaced all our military choppers? Do you need help finding them? I once lost my car in a Sears parking lot. Man, was that a drag.
Also, any idea where all our national guard soldiers are? We could really use them right now for the type of thing they signed up to do like helping with national disasters. How come they weren't there to begin with?
Last Thursday I was in south Florida and sat outside while the eye of Hurricane Katrina passed over my head. It was only a Category 1 then but it was pretty nasty. Eleven people died and, as of today, there were still homes without power. That night the weatherman said this storm was on its way to New Orleans. That was Thursday! Did anybody tell you? I know you didn't want to interrupt your vacation and I know how you don't like to get bad news. Plus, you had fundraisers to go to and mothers of dead soldiers to ignore and smear. You sure showed her!
I especially like how, the day after the hurricane, instead of flying to Louisiana, you flew to San Diego to party with your business peeps. Don't let people criticize you for this -- after all, the hurricane was over and what the heck could you do, put your finger in the dike?
And don't listen to those who, in the coming days, will reveal how you specifically reduced the Army Corps of Engineers' budget for New Orleans this summer for the third year in a row. You just tell them that even if you hadn't cut the money to fix those levees, there weren't going to be any Army engineers to fix them anyway because you had a much more important construction job for them -- BUILDING DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ!
On Day 3, when you finally left your vacation home, I have to say I was moved by how you had your Air Force One pilot descend from the clouds as you flew over New Orleans so you could catch a quick look of the disaster. Hey, I know you couldn't stop and grab a bullhorn and stand on some rubble and act like a commander in chief. Been there done that.
There will be those who will try to politicize this tragedy and try to use it against you. Just have your people keep pointing that out. Respond to nothing. Even those pesky scientists who predicted this would happen because the water in the Gulf of Mexico is getting hotter and hotter making a storm like this inevitable. Ignore them and all their global warming Chicken Littles. There is nothing unusual about a hurricane that was so wide it would be like having one F-4 tornado that stretched from New York to Cleveland.
No, Mr. Bush, you just stay the course. It's not your fault that 30 percent of New Orleans lives in poverty or that tens of thousands had no transportation to get out of town. C'mon, they're black! I mean, it's not like this happened to Kennebunkport. Can you imagine leaving white people on their roofs for five days? Don't make me laugh! Race has nothing -- NOTHING -- to do with this!
You hang in there, Mr. Bush. Just try to find a few of our Army helicopters and send them there. Pretend the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are near Tikrit.
Yours,
Michael Moore
From L.A. to La.
UPDATED: Truck is now full. People are asked to give money to the Red Cross and other organizations.
A Santa Monica neighborhood got together to spearhead their own drive for the Katrina victims who've lost everything. I dropped off clothes and shoes yesterday, asked them what they needed, and told them I'd blog about it. It was incredible to see an entire block full of stuff dropped off, considering there was no mention of this in the LA Times, or in any formal way anywhere...just word of mouth. Here's what "Newcomer," who posted about the drive yesterday in my comments section and was working there, too, says they need now (and please read carefully):
Diapers, wipes (for babies and adults), blankets, practical shoes (tied together by the laces or with rubberbands), medicine (small bottles of aspirin, children's cold medicine, etc.), toothbrushes, toothpaste, small bottles of soap (like from hotels), tampons, sanitary napkins, non-perishable food, water, children's clothing, clean socks and new underwear for people of all ages.What they don't need: torn or dirty items (this is not a way to throw out your old stuff). Books, toys, stuffed animals, etc. will not be accepted anymore. Neither will things like (I kid you not) curling irons, waffle irons, toaster ovens, what have you. They may need these later but for now the emphasis is on the essentials.
Please ask people to sort their items by clothing type, etc., and if possible to bring them already boxed and marked in big letters. It would also be great if everyone who stopped by could stay for at least half an hour to help sort. The outpouring has been tremendous and no one was prepared for it. Maybe 30 people did all lthe work today, not nearly enough.
The truck is at 24th and Idaho, and it's taking stuff 9am-6pm Sunday, and Monday, 9am-3pm, when the trailer is leaving for New Orleans. If anyone has money to donate toward a third truck (they have a second one, a hundred-footer, going now, too) I have the cellphone number of one of the organizers.
More on the drive: The drive was spearheaded by Tom Browne and Debra Young Krizman, two parents of kids at the Franklin school adjacent the truck. Krizman writes, in an email being forwarded around:
Dear Friends and Parents,As some of you know I was born in New Orleans and raised in Louisiana until after my first year in college. I'm deeply saddened by the horrible destruction in New Orleans and surrounding cities by Hurricane Katrina. Too many of these people have lost everything--not only family members, shelter and employment but every creature comfort which we take for granted--food, water, a warm place to sleep, every article of clothing and every item they once owned are now gone.
Another Franklin parent (Tom Browne) is also from the New Orleans area and we've joined together to collect any items you might care to donate to the victims of this disaster. Tom has provided a huge 18-wheeler trailer and we will be outside of Franklin this weekend to load the trailer with your offerings.
Head Of FEMA Forced Out Of His Last Job
Apparently, running the horsey organization was too much for him, so the Bushies gave him the task of running national disaster relief. Here's an excerpt from the Boston Herald article by Brett Arends:
The federal official in charge of the bungled New Orleans rescue was fired from his last private-sector job overseeing horse shows.And before joining the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a deputy director in 2001, GOP activist Mike Brown had no significant experience that would have qualified him for the position.
The Oklahoman got the job through an old college friend who at the time was heading up FEMA.
The agency, run by Brown since 2003, is now at the center of a growing fury over the handling of the New Orleans disaster.
"I look at FEMA and I shake my head,'' said a furious Gov. Mitt Romney yesterday, calling the response `"an embarrassment.''
...Brown was forced out of the position after a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervision failures.
"He was asked to resign,'' Bill Pennington, president of the IAHA at the time, confirmed last night.
Soon after, Brown was invited to join the administration by his old Oklahoma college roommate Joseph Allbaugh, the previous head of FEMA until he quit in 2003 to work for the president's re-election campaign.
There's political patronage in every administration, but don't they usually give the unqualified appointments as diplomats to Lichtenstein?
Titanic On The Bayou
Brilliant Frank Rich column in today's New York Times. Here's an excerpt:
New Orleans's first-class passengers made it safely into lifeboats; for those in steerage, it was a horrifying spectacle of every man, woman and child for himself.THE captain in this case, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, was so oblivious to those on the lower decks that on Thursday he applauded the federal response to the still rampaging nightmare as "really exceptional." He told NPR that he had "not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who don't have food and water" - even though every television viewer in the country had been hearing of those 25,000 stranded refugees for at least a day. This Titanic syndrome, too, precisely echoes the post-9/11 wartime history of an administration that has rewarded the haves at home with economic goodies while leaving the have-nots to fight in Iraq without proper support in manpower or armor. Surely it's only a matter of time before Mr. Chertoff and the equally at sea FEMA director, Michael Brown (who also was among the last to hear about the convention center), are each awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in line with past architects of lethal administration calamity like George Tenet and Paul Bremer.
On Thursday morning, the president told Diane Sawyer that he hoped "people don't play politics during this period of time." Presumably that means that the photos of him wistfully surveying the Katrina damage from Air Force One won't be sold to campaign donors as the equivalent 9/11 photos were. Maybe he'll even call off the right-wing attack machine so it won't Swift-boat the Katrina survivors who emerge to ask tough questions as it has Cindy Sheehan and those New Jersey widows who had the gall to demand a formal 9/11 inquiry.
But a president who flew from Crawford to Washington in a heartbeat to intervene in the medical case of a single patient, Terri Schiavo, has no business lecturing anyone about playing politics with tragedy. Eventually we're going to have to examine the administration's behavior before, during and after this storm as closely as its history before, during and after 9/11. We're going to have to ask if troops and matériel of all kinds could have arrived faster without the drain of national resources into a quagmire. We're going to have to ask why it took almost two days of people being without food, shelter and water for Mr. Bush to get back to Washington.
Most of all, we're going to have to face the reality that with this disaster, the administration has again increased our vulnerability to the terrorists we were supposed to be fighting after 9/11. As Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar, pointed out to The Washington Post last week in talking about the fallout from the war in Iraq, there have been twice as many terrorist attacks outside Iraq in the three years after 9/11 than in the three years before. Now, thanks to Mr. Bush's variously incompetent, diffident and hubristic mismanagement of the attack by Katrina, he has sent the entire world a simple and unambiguous message: whatever the explanation, the United States is unable to fight its current war and protect homeland security at the same time.
The answers to what went wrong in Washington and on the Gulf Coast will come later, and, if the history of 9/11 is any guide, all too slowly, after the administration and its apologists erect every possible barrier to keep us from learning the truth. But as Americans dig out from Katrina and slouch toward another anniversary of Al Qaeda's strike, we have to acknowledge the full extent and urgency of our crisis. The world is more perilous than ever, and for now, to paraphrase Mr. Rumsfeld, we have no choice but to fight the war with the president we have.
Tom Paine On Susan Spano
Comment on Our Lady Of No Comments (or very limited comments -- the ones not knocking her).
Pat Robertson's Operation Blessing Really Pays!
An old story in the Virginia-Pilot suggests charity really does begin at home -- at least for creepy, murder-advocating religious fanatic Pat Robertson:
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (AP) Airplanes sent to Zaire by evangelist Pat Robertson's tax-exempt humanitarian organization were used almost exclusively for his diamond mining business, say two pilots who flew them.Three airplanes were flown to Zaire in September 1994 by Operation Blessing. However, chief pilot Robert Hinkle said only one or two of the roughly 40 flights during his six months in the country could be considered humanitarian. All the rest of the flights were mining-related, he told The (Norfolk) Virginia-Pilot.
Robertson's spokesman first denied the accounts by Hinkle and a co-pilot, Tahir Brohi of England. Later, Gene Kapp, vice president for public relations at Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, said the planes turned out to be unsuitable for medical relief and that Robertson reimbursed Operation Blessing for their use.
"Without Mr. Robertson's generous overture, Operation Blessing would have incurred further expenses with its aircraft," he said.
Or...is it that Pat Robertson's favorite charity is...Pat Robertson? Diamond mining, by the way, is a dirty business. While a godless harlot like me wouldn't dream of investing in it or ever buying a diamond, our "man of god" seems to have not a problem in the world with it.
A book about the diamond industry that I bought and have been meaning to read: Blood Diamonds, by Greg Campbell. And here's the story, by Edward J. Epstein, of the brilliant marketing campaign, by NW Ayer in the late 1930s, that caused the overvaluing of diamonds, and led people to believe buying one was an obligatory show of love from a man to a woman. Let's see...if you're a woman, and you're not a prostitute, and a guy has to buy you a diamond for you to marry him...why don't you, in turn, have to buy him a boat?!
"Before Rudy Giuliani There Was James Lee Witt"
That's a quote from a Slate article about the former head of FEMA by Bruce Reed. Bush should fire the inexperienced, unqualified head of FEMA and bring back Witt. This is no time for patronage.
Hillary's On Target
Smart stuff over at JackandHill by Hillary Johnson about Target's New Yorker campaign. (Target was the sole advertiser in the August 22 New Yorker):
I'm intrigued by the initial assumption--that there's something crass or smarmy about such a deal. If we think of it in terms of patronage--Target wants to patronize the work of one of our leading cultural journals, thus also patronizing authors and illustrators, where's the fire? (There's also a tediously snarky story about the ad campaign in Slate, which is worth reading for the bit of Target history it gives.)Of course, I shop at Target and have always liked their particular consumer culture, and the part of their business culture that's visible to me--whereas I won't set foot in a Wal-Mart, largely because doing so is aesthetically depressing, from those ugly blue bibs they make the employees wear to the bad lighting and disheveled shelves, and also because my knowledge of their corporate culture includes the fact that they are corporate welfarists, and literally, as many of their employees also qualify for public assistance, meaning that even without setting foot in a WalMart, I'm subsidizing their bottom line with my tax dollars. (NB: when I heard Martha Stewart was to be jailed I went to Kmart and bought some bright red towels in protest, but they were awful, shedding red all over my skin even after a dozen washings. I'll stick to buying her magazine and give Kmart, which is also a depressing store with the personality of a chromosomally challenged character out of Deliverance, a pass from now on.)
Kinky_1Now, I don't know anything about Target's business practices other than what I see, but I do know that one of the signposts I use for judging the moral health of a company is their aesthetic and cultural integrity. And I know that talented designers with wit and flair have made deals with the company, and that their employees are always friendly and seem stress-free. I also know that when I was a newspaper editor, one of the best hires I ever made was of a freelance photographer who I met while shopping for a digital camera at Target--he was working behind the counter. His name is Nick Goodenough, and he went on to win the Association of Alternative Newspaper award for photography for us the following year (here's an example, at left). Nick is one of the hippest people I've ever met, and he would never have been found at WalMart or KMart--to me, that says something about the company.
Where does branding leave off and corporate culture begin? It's an interesting question, and one that isn't always transparent. Take the Body Shop, the company founded by Anita Roddick and known for its alledged philantropy and environmentalism. An anthology called Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot To Print edited by David Wallis includes a previously unpublished story about the hideous corporate culture behind the real Body Shop (a stolen business idea, tainted products, defrauded franchisees, miserable employees, and, yes, animal testing of products, contrary to their primary marketing claim). None of which, if true, is visible in the company's feel-good hype, or the fawning press coverage it has consistently received. Yet, I have never bought anything there, as something about the Body Shop alway struck me as off, without me having the faintest idea as to why....
So, while it's nice to think that corporate culture will always rise to the surface and become visible to consumers, WalMart and the Body Shop's huge indicates proves otherwise. But that just makes it all the more important, I think, to give Target a nod when they patronize the arts and pull it off with wit and class.
I highly recommend Killed, published by my oldest friend in New York (met him when he was 17 at the NYU housing office, after I transferred for my senior year from University of Michigan). Wallis is a stand-up guy who's determined not to let great articles die just because some magazines are too wimpy to publish them.
Help For Katrina Victims
My bookkeeper, who's nine months pregnant, moved to New Orleans just a few months ago. She had to leave in the middle of the night with her husband and two kids a few days ago and drive to Dallas. People who left like this barely have any possessions to their name. I went on Overstock.com and bought her a lavender Pashmina shawl. They're deeply discounted (about $75 with shipping), and extremely warm, soft, and cozy, yet don't take up much space.
A suggestion: If you know anybody who's left New Orleans, and they have an address at which you can send them stuff, either buy them something nice online or ship them some staple items. Or get them a gift certificate to someplace like Target. Just think about it -- having to replenish your entire life, down to socks and paper clips and salt and pepper. It's just terrible.
Here's word on what to do for people you don't know, from an email posted on BoingBoing, "attributed to a friend-of-a-friend rescue worker in New Orleans who wishes to remain anonymous":
I'm back in Baton Rouge, this time with all of my team. Sadly, we've had to pull out of New Orleans for now because things have gotten too dangerous.Who would have thought that in a country like ours. not some third world place, mind you, that there would be massive amounts of people trying to inflict harm on the very people that are putting their own lives on hold to help other. It's unreal what we're seeing. The criminal looters (if that's even a strong enough word for them) have been shooting at the helicopters that are the only hope that the city has right now of saving more lives and thereby preventing many more deaths. I can tell you that there isn't a single member of the two teams I'm with that aren't ready to go back in, shooting and all, but the fear is from the higher-ups who can't risk losing the helicopters and the boats. I can't believe it Jon. people of roof tops and in attics will die tonight because sub-human thugs are shooting at the only people who can help anyone right now.
Your friend is normally right to question money that the Red Cross spends to supports itself. Right now, though, they are the only game in town. Give to them and give generously. Word is that the money they get in the next month will go directly to the shelters here in the south so that those running the shelters can buy food and water NOW. They get funds out faster than any other agency and RIGHT NOW is what matters.
If your friend is just really dead-set against giving to them, the Salvation Army is the next best thing. When you donate to them you can designate that you want the money to go to Katrina's victims. There will be much small charities that do really good work popping up in the coming weeks and months but the people down here need money now.
UPDATED: Hillary Johnson, of the excellent new business/entrepreneur blog, Kerabu.com, likes Mercy Corps, which she links to on her shared blog with Jackie Danicki, JackandHill. She likes their history helping the tsunami victims, and she likes the rate of return: "Only 8% of what you give will be eaten up by adminsitrative costs."
Where's Rudy?
George Bush is no Rudy Giuliani:
George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end.
Who's In Charge?
Who's heading up FEMA? You are not going to believe this. Before Michael D. Brown was in charge there, he was...an estate planning lawyer! and counsel for the International Arabian Horse Association Legal Department! Nothing like hiring the qualified to be in charge of large-scale disaster management! (Isn't politics fun!?)
Link via Huffington Post
Where Isn't Pat Robertson?
One moment he's calling for the assassination of foreign leaders on TV...(and where's his Janet Jackson treatment from the FCC? I mean, doesn't a flash of titty pale by comparison to inciting murder?)...and lookee here, now his Operation Blessing is right at the top of the FEMA Web site...just a couple notches under the Red Cross.
Wow, Here's A Class Act
A few weeks ago, I complained (scroll down to bottom of link) about getting sales calls from Bottom Line, a newsletter I subscribe to with some good information on investing, privacy rights, consumer issues, etc. Because I'd just gotten back from France, and needed my sleep, I was especially outraged that they'd hired telemarketers to call and ask me to renew my subscription. I tried to find an email address to contact somebody at Bottom Line to make a complaint, but it was one of those companies that obscures the email addresses so they all flow to "editorial," etc., not to some specific person's name.
Anyway, when somebody wrote me back, I estimated my cost (in lost work time from being awakened, and stamps to mail the email to two addresses for the founder of the company, Martin Edelston, whom I'd looked up on Zabasearch.com), and told them the company owed me $254.74. I'd actually wanted to call Edelston at home, to see how he felt about having his privacy invaded, and suggest that having telemarketers harass his subscribers was bad business, but his number wasn't listed.
Most amazingly, after he got my email, he took action. He sent me a couple of books and a t-shirt, and a note of apology, including his thought that he was reconsidering the hiring of the telemarketing company. Then, even more amazingly, he sent me another book yesterday...and a check for $254.74! Now, there's a mensch! And a smart man, because I liked his newsletter and want to keep subscribing. I wrote him a nice thank you note, telling him his apology was accepted, and sent him a packet of my columns.
Why The Levee Broke
We sent our dollars to Iraq, writes Will Bunch on Alternet:
New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.
Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.
Newhouse News Service, in an article posted late Tuesday night at The Times-Picayune Web site, reported: "No one can say they didn't see it coming. ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."
In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to this Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness:
The $750 million Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection project is another major Corps project, which remains about 20% incomplete due to lack of funds, said Al Naomi, project manager. That project consists of building up levees and protection for pumping stations on the east bank of the Mississippi River in Orleans, St. Bernard, St. Charles and Jefferson parishes.The Lake Pontchartrain project is slated to receive $3.9 million in the president's 2005 budget. Naomi said about $20 million is needed.
"The longer we wait without funding, the more we sink," he said. "I've got at least six levee construction contracts that need to be done to raise the levee protection back to where it should be (because of settling). Right now I owe my contractors about $5 million. And we're going to have to pay them interest."
On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
Oh yeah, and the forces for defending our nation, "National" Guard, are in Iraq, too, or supporting the war effort. Oops!