The people of New Orleans today

The Roof People


The Superdrome People


The Convention Centre People


The Freeway People


And The Stranded Tourist People

They're all in this together, and they're on their own for now.
Wes Clark said "It all comes back to leadership":

. . . Where is the leadership? Then just this morning, the President claimed that no one could have anticipated the levee breaches we've seen in New Orleans after Katrina hit. That's not leadership, that's an excuse. In fact, people have predicted this kind of disaster for many years, including President Bush's own FEMA in 2001, when they ranked hurricane flood damage to New Orleans among the three likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing America. Instead, funding
was significantly cut back, leaving key engineering projects on hold. Instead, this Administration focused on the war in Iraq, tax cuts, and private sector economic growth without asking the American people to make needed sacrifices for the good of the country. Again I ask you, where is the leadership? You've got to keep asking that question.

Ooh, I'm politicizing it AGAIN. Slap my wrist, somebody.

Great line of the day

In Blog in the time of cholera, Driftglass writes:

The path from the Christmas Tsunami to Hurricane Katrina to 9/11 is simply this: When your theology allows God to become the author of mass murder for His own inscrutable purposes, it is only a matter of time before the hatefully righteous that claim to be on His Buddy List start their own bloody race to the bottom in His Name. And whether they are perverting the Bible or the Koran, their aims are always the same; to destroy your capacity to reason by assassinating Science, to spread the hate and fear that give them purpose and power to every corner of the Earth. And to make you kneel.

Make time to read the whole thing.

Katrina relief

You can donate here for Canadian Red Cross Katrina relief projects.

Locator service: Salvation Army Team Emergency Radio Network SATERN

To volunteer or to donate to a worthy organization which puts dedicated people on the ground ASAP for disaster relief, click here for the Mennonite Disaster Service. They are already gearing up to send in their teams.

And for updates on disaster relief, see Disaster News Network

"Facing the unforeseeable"

There is no plan.
A National Guard MP in the Superdome described it: "This is mass chaos. To tell you the truth, I'd rather be in Iraq. You got your constant danger, but I had something to protect myself. [And] three meals a day. Communications. A plan. Here, they had no plan."
No, likely not.
Not for something like this.
And I can't fault them, not really.
Its just too horrible, too massive. The mind just refuses to grasp it.
Imagine if, say, a year ago. someone says to the city council of New Orleans "hey, guys, what if there is a hurricane and the levees fail and there are people drowned all over and there are no phones and the power goes out and the highways are broken and the streets are flooded and we have thousands of refugees in the Superdome and . . . "
Nope, not gonna imagine it, too horrible, makes me feel sick, sorreee -- let's just stick our thumbs in our ears and waggle our fingers and say NA-NA-NA-NA-NA until that annoying voice just goes away.
It reminds me about the Quebec ice storm of 1998.
They didn't have a plan either -- except for one little town south of Montreal who apparently had one of those nitpicking finnikin city managers who had a plan for EVERYTHING, so he had a bunch of volunteers out knocking ice off the town's transmission towers even before it stopped raining. They survived the ice storm quite nicely, thank you, and I hope that guy got a big raise.
Anyway, the report done about the ice storm concluded that there needed to be a "culture of emergency preparedness" established in Quebec, so that people would learn how to "face the unforeseeable" and figure out, in advance, what their most important problems would be if disaster struck.
It's just not something that people do very easily.
Seems to me that New Orlean's number one engineering priority now is closing those dykes.
And their number one human priority is doing something about communications -- even sending out city workers with bullhorns on boats to make announcements would be an improvement on what they are doing now, which is nothing.
And when I was looking for the ice storm descriptions, I came across this site with all sorts of survival kits -- for a hundred bucks you can buy a wind-up radio and flashlight kit, for example. Worth thinking about -- and a heck of a lot better than just sticking our thumbs in our ears and chanting NA-NA-NA-NA.

New Orleans refugees

Bit by bit, I think the news media is getting it. I'm not sure if government officials have got it yet.
This is a disaster.
There was a bit of a "blame the victim" thing starting up yesterday in places in the media and the blogosphere, to the effect that people in New Orleans should have known better than to stay behind so anything that happened to them was their own fault.
But the magnitude of this disaster has overwhelmed that excuse. Aaron Brown was going on tonight about how uncomfortable he was calling his fellow Americans "refugees" -- but finally concluding he had to use that term because that is exactly what they are. Joe Scarborough and David Schuster on MSNBC were talking about how many people in Biloxi died because they didn't have $20 for a tank of gas and so couldn't leave town. The New York Times editorial ripped Bush a new one:

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. We will, of course, endure, and the city of New Orleans must come back. But looking at the pictures on television yesterday of a place abandoned to the forces of flood, fire and looting, it was hard not to wonder exactly how that is going to come to pass.

I think the media are beginning to ask, and in increasing strident tones, "What the hell are you doing to help?"
Personally, I am tired of hearing FEMA people talk endlessly during TV interviews about how nice they are to have come so far -- I want to ask them "Yes, but what are you getting done? Are you making these people's lives easier or are you harassing them with BS red tape?"
In Houston, apparently, the Astrodome will be open to refugees -- but only the refugees who came from the New Orleans dome, not any refugees who got to Houston on their own but now have no place to stay. And there seems to be a lot of fuzziness about how that evacuation is being done and how long it will actually last.
And I hear the FEMA director talk about how people don't have any money, and then he calmly announces that they really should get some from somewhere, like maybe from the Red Cross -- so I guess it was OK for the American government to hand out cash in Baghdad, but not in New Orleans.
Joe Scarborough had a very sensible idea tonight (the polarity of the earth is reversing, I know, but he DID!). He said people close enough to the disaster area should just load up their trucks with supplies and drive down and drop them off, then turn around and go get some more. I guess this is what people were doing during another recent disaster that Joe covered in Pensacola, Florida, and these acts of kindness made all the difference to the desperate people there.

Don't you know me, I'm your native son?

Now it will hit the fan: Editor And Publisher reports on Times-Picayune stories about how the Pentagon transfered to Iraq some of the funds which the Army Corps of Engineers wanted to use to improve New Orlean's levees -- the ones now breaking.
Watching CNN and MSNBC coverage today was heartbreaking. The beautiful, historic city of New Orleans survived the story but is now dying because of its infrastructure. Hundreds of people will die with her. Armando is also asking why the levees failed.
Broken levees in New Orleans:


People escaping:


People waiting for rescue. Look at the oil slick on the water surrounding this house:

Great line of the day

"The Rolling Stones are about to go out on tour. Tickets are $100 a piece. But the good news is -- Medicare will kick in half." --Jay Leno, from Late Night Political Jokes

What an awful guy!

'Venezuela to sell cut-price heating oil to U.S. poor' Oh, that Chavez, what a terrible guy! How dare you sell stuff cheaper to the poor -- why, they might start to think that everyone should do this. Its positively COMMIE!

Monster mash

In 'Got Morals?' Dibgy notes

Breaking treaties, throwing off old friends and partners, ignoring our own constitution and the rule of of law creates an impression that the United States is unreliable, immoral and aggressive. It makes us less safe. Only shallow people think that our country can fight off the whole world. Only delusional people would want us to try. Our moral authority is not an impediment that we can or should toss off when it is inconvenient. It is an absolutely nevessary component of our national security.

Well, duhhh!
As obvious as it is, I guess it still needs to be said.
It occurred to me the other day that the Bush administration has created a monster -- an America which believes the president can do whatever he wants, and the administration can do whatever it wants, regardless of court rulings (ie, Gitmo) and treaties (ie softwood lumber). This may come back to bite the Republicans in the ass someday.
As for the rest of us, living next to the 400 lb gorilla has never been as much fun as it looked, but it becomes even more challenging when the gorilla thinks he can just take whatever he wants from any of the other cages, and throw his garbage everywhere too.
He did the mash
He did the monster mash
The monster mash
It was a graveyard smash
He did the mash
It caught on in a flash
He did the mash
He did the monster mash

Smoke Out

Barb promotes the Mark Emery Smoke Out: Come out! Come out! Wherever you are!! to a demonstration to stop the extradition of Mark Emery and the Vancouver Three.

Another smart dog story

I love stories like this AFP storyWell-trained dog bags a free ride home

When Archie the black labrador lost his owner on a lonely Scottish station, he proved his well-trained pedigree and jumped aboard the first train home. Not only did the dog catch the right train, he got off at the right station, the Mail on Sunday newspaper said. Owner Mike Taitt lost sight of Archie at Inverurie station, near Aberdeen in eastern Scotland, and was hoping someone would spot his tag and return the much-loved mutt. "He is a very intelligent dog," Taitt said. "When he could not find me, he simply took the right train home. He's been on that train before. I am convinced he knew it was the right one. But who knows?" Closed-circuit television footage shows the dog waiting for his master at the station before watching the Aberdeen to Inverness train pull in. Unable to find his owner, the black labrador decided to avoid a long walk home by nipping aboard the 20:38. He got out at the right stop, Insch, twelve minutes along the line to the bemusement of signalman Derek Hope. "There was a train conductor standing with Archie on the platform saying he had got on at Inverurie but didn't have a ticket," Hope said.

And I searched for a photo of Archie but couldn't find one on the web.

Shorter Brooks

Winning in Iraq: THIS strategy will WORK, I tell you!

Great line of the day

From the Binghampton, New York newspaper storyPeaceful siege makes chicken hawks squawk.

In an example of a great mind getting right to the heart of a matter, [Fox commentator] O'Reilly wrote last week: "No one in their right mind would want Michael Moore, George Soros or Cindy Sheehan calling the shots in the war on terror." Granted. Then again, could they botch the job any worse than the people now calling the shots? [emphasis mine]

Next year country

This National Post story - Klein must share: expert is simply unbelievable. "Thomas Courchene, senior scholar at Montreal's Institute for Research on Public Policy and a professor at Queen's University, said yesterday a portion of Alberta's projected $7-billion surplus should be shared with the other provinces."
Now I haven't checked with anyone because I don't want to ruin my amateur standing, but I think we have a formula for this. It is the federal-provincial equalization formula and it makes sure that the "have" provinces share with the "have-not" provinces.
If Ontario falls into the have-not category, then Alberta will share with them (unlike, say, Newfoundland, who negotiated their own deal outside the formula).
Now, I realize it is contrary to the rules of the universe that Ontario would ever fall into a "have not" category in comparison to Alberta, but take it from me, folks, from a province which has bounced back and forth depending on resource revenues, being a "have not" province is no shame -- its just the way things are that particular year.
There's always next year.

Chickenhawk is as chickenhawk does

I'm not sure that I was very clear about what I meant in my recent post about America's new chickenhawk policy in Iraq.
First, let's define chickenhawk. A chickenhawk isn't just someone who supports a war, or someone who evades the military during a war. Rather, a chickenhawk is someone who does both -- who vocally and 'hawkishly' promotes a war, to the point of deriding the patriotism of anyone who opposes it, but who then deliberately finds excuses to chicken out of fighting in it. Thus the term "chicken'-'hawk'
Bush was chickenhawk about Vietnam, defending it in college debates but then getting Daddy to arrange a spot for him in the National Guard so he wouldn't have to go and fight overseas. Cheney was another vocal Vietnam supporter, who engineered five deferrments because he had better things to do with his life than fight the war. Most of the top people in the Bush administration can be called chickenhawks because they derided the patriotism of the anti-war protestors while also purposefully avoiding fighting in Vietnam. In my opinion there is nothing wrong with any American boy who avoided the Vietnam slaughter any way he could -- just don't go around at the time, or 30 years later, boasting about what a big-time patriotic war supporter you were!
Second, let's look at the reason Bush now gives for keeping the war going in Iraq. As he said in his weekend radio address "if we do not confront these evil men abroad, we will have to face them one day in our own cities and streets . . . the safety and security of every American is at stake in this war . . . By advancing the cause of liberty in a troubled region, we are bringing security to our own citizens and laying the foundations of peace for our children and grandchildren." So Bush's policy now is that war in Iraq must continue so that terrorists will stay in Iraq instead of attacking Americans in America.
Third -- and now we reach my point -- to me, this is a chickenhawk policy, both cowardly and cruel.
Bush is promoting a war in which Iraqis will die so Americans don't have to. He is saying that innocent Iraqi men, women and children should continue to deal with terrorist car bombs and suicide bombers and mortar attacks and gun battles, so that Americans can stay safe at home. The only Americans who risk death are the American soldiers unlucky enough to be stuck in Iraq as bait.
Now, I am not saying that this is a policy that Americans either want or endorse. Americans in general have always fought their own battles. But Bush and his gang are chickenhawks -- always have been -- so its not surprising that they would come up with a policy which turns all Americans into chickenhawks too.
Bush has said numerous times since 911 that he thinks his job is to keep Americans safe -- I am sure he is quite sincere in thinking that he is doing his job if he can get terrorists to kill Iraqis instead of Americans.
But I ask, and the world should ask -- who gave Bush permission to use Iraqis as human shields? How cruel it is for America to force Iraqis to fight and die, just so that Americans themselves can be safe. Only a coward could come up with such a policy.