Avast, me hearties!

Aaarrrrhhh!
This be it -- today be the international Talk Like A Pirate Day at last! Dave Barry writes:

Every now and then, some visionary individuals come along with a concept that is so original and so revolutionary that your immediate reaction is: "Those individuals should be on medication."
Today I want to tell you about two such people, John Baur and Mark Summers, who have come up with a concept that is going to make you kick yourself for not thinking of it first: Talk Like a Pirate Day. As the name suggests, this is a day on which everybody would talk like a pirate. Is that a great idea, or what? There are so many practical benefits that I can't even begin to list them all.
Baur and Summers came up with this idea a few years ago. They were playing racquetball, and, as so often happens, they began talking like pirates. And then it struck them: Why not have a day when EVERYBODY talks like a pirate? They decided that the logical day would be Sept. 19, because that -- as you are no doubt aware -- is Summers' ex-wife's birthday.
Since then, Baur and Summers have made a near-superhuman effort to promote Talk Like a Pirate Day. As Baur puts it: "We've talked like pirates and encouraged our several friends to, every Sept. 19, except for a couple where we forgot."
And yet, incredibly, despite this well-orchestrated campaign, the nation has turned a deaf shoulder to Talk Like a Pirate Day. In desperation, Baur and Summers turned to me for help. As an influential newspaper columnist, I have the power to "make or break" a national day. You may recall that almost nobody celebrated Thanksgiving until I began writing about it in the 1970s.
I have given Baur's and Summers' idea serious thought, looking for ways to improve it. One variation I considered was Talk Like a Member of the Lollipop Guild Day, on which everybody would talk like the three Munchkins in the film version of "The Wizard of Oz" who welcome Dorothy to Munchkin Land by singing with one corner of their mouths drooping down, as though they have large invisible dental suction devices hanging from their lips. But I realized that would be stupid.
So I have decided to throw my full support behind Talk Like a Pirate Day, to be observed this Thursday, Sept. 19. To help promote this important cause, I have decided to seek the endorsement of famous celebrities, and I am pleased to report that, as of today, Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, Britney Spears, Brad Pitt, Oprah Winfrey, the Osbournes, Tiger Woods, Ted Koppel, the Sopranos, Puff Doody and the late Elvis Presley are all people who I hope will read this column and become big supporters. I see no need to recruit President Bush, because he already talks like a pirate, as we can see from this transcript of a White House press conference:
REPORTER: Could you please explain either your foreign or your domestic policy?
PRESIDENT BUSH: Arrrrr.
To prepare for Talk Like a Pirate Day, you should practice incorporating pirate terminology into your everyday speech. For example, let's consider a typical conversation between two coworkers in a business office:
BOB: Hi. Mary.
MARY: Hi, Bob. Have you had a chance to look at the Fennerman contract?
BOB: Yes, and I have some suggestions.
MARY: OK, I'll review them.
Now let's see how this same conversation would sound on Talk Like a Pirate Day:
BOB: Avast, me beauty.
MARY: Avast, Bob. Is that a yardarm in your doubloons, or are you just glad to see me?
BOB: You are giving me the desire to haul some keel.
MARY: Arrrrr.
As you can see, talking like a pirate will infuse your everyday conversations with romance and danger. So join the movement! On Sept. 19, do not answer the phone with "hello." Answer the phone with "Ahoy, me hearty!" If the caller objects that he is not a hearty, inform him that he is a scurvy dog (or, if the caller is female, a scurvy female dog) who will be walking the plank off the poop deck and winding up in Davy Jones' locker, sleeping with the fishes. No, wait, that would be Talk Like a Pirate in "The Godfather" Day, which is another variation I considered ("I'm gonna make him an offer that will shiver his timbers").
But the point is, this is a great idea, and you, me bucko, should be part of it. Join us on Sept. 19. You HAVE the buckles, darn it: Don't be afraid to swash them! Let's make this into a grassroots movement that sweeps the nation, like campaign-finance reform or Krispy Kreme doughnuts. I truly think this idea could bring us, as a nation, closer together.
But not TOO much closer. Some of us will have swords.

Reality bites

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

This always was a complete crock.
It is from Ron Susskind's article, Without a Doubt about Bush's faith-based administration.
I don't mean that the Susskind story was a crock, but rather, this idea that reality could be ignored. This is the "Bush Bubble" that George Bush lived in, the belief that Bush was infaliable, always right and that reality, if it conflicted with Bush's belief, was wrong.
Like all the bubbles which came before it - tech stocks, dot coms, Hawaiian time-share condos -- it did seem to have substance. A few people did make a few dollars. But when the bubble burst, then everyone said -- hey, its empty! There's nothing there!
The bubble has now burst.
Combine this story: Bush Katrina Ratings Fall After Speech -- with this one: Rove Off the Record . And the truth whacks you upside the head -- everything the Bush Administration believes to be true is JUST NOT TRUE ANYMORE, and they can no longer make people believe it just by saying it.
With Bush's speech last week, the media echo chamber and the Washington pundits seemed to think that Bush did OK -- not really Churchillian great, but not too bad, really.
But Rasmussen shows that Bush's poll numbers with the general public actually fell four points more after his speech, from 39 per cent in favour to 35 per cent in favour. So people saw through all the Disney castle lighting and the compassionate-sounding tripe and the Rove-in-charge reassurance, and turned off. We don't believe you anymore, George.
In the Rove story, it says Rove talked about the issues du jour to a bunch or power-brokers:

On Katrina: The only mistake we made with Katrina was not overriding the local government...
On The Anti-War Movement: Cindy Sheehan is a clown. There is no real anti-war movement. No serious politician, with anything to do with anything, would show his face at an anti-war rally...
On Bush's Low Poll Numbers: We have not been good at explaining the success in Iraq. Polls go up and down and don't mean anything...
On Iraq: There has been a big difference in the region. Iraq will transform the Middle East...

And as I was reading this, I realized -- this is just tripe! Completely. NONE of these things are true. And just saying these things will NOT create a new reality. Not anymore.
"We create our own reality"? Oh yeah? You and what army? Get real! Grow up!
We don't believe you anymore, Karl.

Terrific

Congratulations to Meg Brubacher and Bonnie Deekon -- this news story "CTV.ca | Canadians mount dog rescue effort in New Orleans" notes that they drove to New Orleans and returned late Thursday night with 15 dogs, including seven puppies. Deekon is director of the Cambridge & District Humane Society, where the dogs will be put up for adoption.

Only in Canada, eh?

"Hamilton (2-10) remains last in the East, its playoff aspirations literally hanging by a thread."
This sentence in the Globe and Mail coverage of the Calgary-Hamilton game gave me a chuckle -- because where but in the CFL could a team with a 2-10 record still have "playoff aspirations"?
Only in Canada, eh?

Now we know

Well at last. Now we know. In Spinning the war -- off to the state level, Oregonian columnist David Sarasohn from the Oregonian explains who is really to blame for all that trouble in Iraq.

A high-level White House official explained today that problems in the war in Iraq have been largely caused by state and local government failures. 'All the Americans over there come from a state,' said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. 'There are real limits to what you can expect the federal government to do.' The idea that having a U.S. Department of Defense makes war an exclusively federal responsibility, he noted, is as mistaken as the impression that having a Federal Emergency Management Agency means that a federal agency should manage emergencies. 'Look at the problems we're having in Iraq,' he said. 'Public safety, utilities, running elections. Those are state and local responsibilities. The federal government has been trying to help out, but those things aren't really our job.' The official, who insisted that the initials of the country he works for not be published, noted that the Bush administration has not wanted to stress the failures of state and local governments in Iraq, which he called 'Fallujah finger-pointing.' But, he pointed out, 'People talk about all the garbage in the streets of Baghdad, but collecting garbage is a state and local responsibility. And I don't want to even get into the question of who's fallen down on Iraqi mass transit.'

Thanks to Today in Iraq for the link.

Joke of the Day

Today in Iraq with the joke of the day:
Q: What's Bush's position on Roe v. Wade?
A: None. He didn't care how people got out of New Orleans.

The great photos from New Orleans

In our society, we capture and realize the significance of an event through the photographs it produces. Here are some of the photos from New Orleans which I found to be the most powerful.

A man carrying his cat and searching for help: to me, this photo summarized everything that New Orleans people went through to leave their city.

AP photo/ Roger Deforest

August 31 - a family with no place to go

Times-Picayune /David Grunfeld

This was the photo which brought home to many Americans the reality of Katrina:
Finding the woman in the photo

Matt Rourke /Austin American-Statesman

The marines arrive at the Dome at last

AFP/File/James Nielsen

Life goes on -- the Decadance Day parade on Sunday, Sept. 4 in the French Quarter had only about two dozen participants, but still, it went on.

AP Photo/Rick Bowmer

The "Here lies Vera" photo, which made people realize how many bodies were lying on the streets.

AP Photo/Dave Martin

Canadian navy arrives in Biloxi

AP Photo/Rob Carr

The big-dog-ugly-woman guy:

Michael Democker / Times-Picayune

Johnny White's Sports Bar and Grill never closed

AP Photo/Cheryl Diaz Meyer

See hundreds of other Times-Picayune photos here.

Say it ain't so, Joe

It's painful, isn't it - nails-on-the-blackboard painful.
Just about every news story you will read about New Orleans recovery over the next two years could already be written.
Like this one: Money Earmarked for Evacuation Redirected -- oh, who would not have guessed?
And this one: FEMA, Slow to the Rescue, Now Stumbles in Aid Effort -- so now, no one can get through to FEMA to apply for help.
Here's what will happen next:
The FEMA applications for help will be delayed for months and months, both because applications will just be lost outright and because every non-perfect application will be "returned to sender" and get lost in the mail.
Then, whenever people actually do get their cheques, there will be such serious shortages of repair goods that people won't be able to repair their homes before winter. ie -- lumber, electrical wire, flooring, windows. Predictably, there will be calls to get more Canadian softwood lumber by dropping the tarrifs, which the US lumbermen will resist with every fiber of their being
Undoubtedly, there will be a huge land-grad in New Orleans, with developers pushing the city, state and federal governments to assert "eminent domain" over vast areas of property to prevent a lot of low-income housing from being rebuilt. Every level of government will try to get in on the action.
Finally, there will be a perfect storm of shoddy home-repair outfits stealing people's money left and right.
And for every single one of these happenings, someone in the Bush administration will say "Gee, we never expected THIS to happen! We don't have any plans to deal with it."

Good Better Best

Tab, The Calgary Sun


Tab, The Calgary Sun


Cam Cardow, Ottawa Citizen

Being poor is crying when you drop the mac and cheese on the floor

There has been a lot of talk lately about poverty, because of Katrina of course and the horrendous disproportionate impact that storm had on poor people.
John Scalzzi writes about the reality of Being Poor. This is a painful list to read:

Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs . . . Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away . . . Being poor is living next to the freeway . . . Being poor is coming back to the car with your children in the back seat, clutching that box of Raisin Bran you just bought and trying to think of a way to make the kids understand that the box has to last . . . Being poor is a heater in only one room of the house . . . Being poor is hoping your kids don't have a growth spurt . . . Being poor is Goodwill underwear . . . Being poor is not enough space for everyone who lives with you . . . Being poor is thinking $8 an hour is a really good deal . . . Being poor is an overnight shift under florescent lights . . . Being poor is finding the letter your mom wrote to your dad, begging him for the child support . . . Being poor is stopping the car to take a lamp from a stranger's trash . . . Being poor is making lunch for your kid when a cockroach skitters over the bread, and you looking over to see if your kid saw . . . Being poor is people angry at you just for walking around in the mall . . . Being poor is the police busting into the apartment right next to yours . . . Being poor is hoping you'll be invited for dinner . . . Being poor is people thinking they know something about you by the way you talk . . . Being poor is needing that 35-cent raise . . . Being poor is your kid's teacher assuming you don't have any books in your home . . . Being poor is six dollars short on the utility bill and no way to close the gap . . . Being poor is crying when you drop the mac and cheese on the floor . . . Being poor is picking the 10 cent ramen instead of the 12 cent ramen because that's two extra packages for every dollar . . . Being poor is a box of crayons and a $1 coloring book from a community center Santa . . . Being poor is hoping the register lady will spot you the dime . . . Being poor is a cough that doesn't go away . . . Being poor is a lumpy futon bed . . . Being poor is knowing where the shelter is . . . Being poor is seeing how few options you have . . . Being poor is having to live with choices you didn't know you made when you were 14 years old . . . Being poor is people wondering why you didn't leave.

I have an email from this African fellow whose funds are frozen , , ,

Well, I was listening to parts of the Bush speech on the news last night and heard things like Bush actually talking about how racism had held people back and I thought, hey, maybe Katrina was a wake-up experience for more than just a few CNN and Fox reporters.
And then tonight I read Digby and gave my head a shake:

I cannot believe that any liberal in the country would take George W Bush's word about anything at this point, but apparently we all haven't learned our lesson yet. I'm not sure what it will take, to tell you the truth. But for those of you who believe he has somehow capitulated to liberal ideals, I would like to introduce you to a friend of mine from an African nation whose funds have been frozen ....

Place yer bets!

Justin Raimondo says Next Stop: Syria

This administration will stop at nothing - nothing! - to advance its Middle Eastern agenda, and that agenda consists of a single simple word: conquest. Anyone who really believes that Hurricane Katrina will divert this administration and the neocon cabal that has seized control of our foreign policy from pursuing their dreams of Empire is a fool. A new conflict will divert attention away from the incompetence surrounding the response to Katrina: the devastation and Bush's clueless efforts to ameliorate it will only encourage the White House to leave us with a lasting legacy of fresh horrors in the Middle East. Why are we in Iraq? All the better to go after Syria, then Iran. Saudi Arabia, too, is 'on the table' - and the feast has just begun.

Earlier, the betting seemed to be that Iran would be next, but the US isn't getting much traction right now on making Iran into the world's enemy du jour -- this Washington Post story says the US has created a powerpoint -- a powerpoint, for crying out loud! -- which unnamed US "presenters" have been shopping around the UN. The goal is to get the International Atomoc Energy Agency next week to as the Security Council for sanctions -- which the IAEA probably won't do anyway, but which Security Council certainly won't do because look how burned they got over Iraq -- fool me twice don't fool me again.
But anyway, the Bolton folks are trying -- very trying:

. . . titled "A History of Concealment and Deception," (the powerpoint) has been presented to diplomats from more than a dozen countries. Several diplomats said the presentation, intended to win allies for increasing pressure on the Iranian government, dismisses ambiguities in the evidence about Iran's intentions and omits alternative explanations under debate among intelligence analysts.

Sounds like a typical Bolton project, doesn't it - clumsy and clueless and assuming that everyone else is stupid. The story continues:

. . . Several diplomats said the slide show reminded them of the flawed presentation on Iraq's weapons programs made by then-secretary of state Colin L. Powell to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003. "I don't think they'll lose any support, but it isn't going to win anyone either," said one European diplomat who attended the recent briefing and whose country backs the U.S. position on Iran . . . Robert G. Joseph, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, acknowledged last week that despite European support, the Bush administration has traveled a tough road in persuading others that Iran should face consequences for a nuclear program it built in secret. "There's a great deal of resistance . . . on the part of many governments who don't seem to place, quite frankly, nonproliferation and Iran, a nuclear-armed Iran, at the top of their priority list," he told a congressional panel last week.

Gee, maybe somebody should tell them that the smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud. Then they'll take it seriously, I'm sure.
At the end of the story, the WP provides some more information about the powerpoint which just makes it sound increasingly pathetic:

With little new information from the [IAEA] probe, the Bush administration put together its own presentation of Iran's program for diplomats in Vienna who are weighing whether to report Iran to the Security Council. The presentation has not been vetted through standard U.S. intelligence channels because it does not include secret material. One U.S. official involved in the briefing said the intelligence community had nothing to do with the presentation and "probably would have disavowed some of it because it draws conclusions that aren't strictly supported by the facts." The presentation, conducted in a conference room at the U.S. mission in Vienna, includes a pictorial comparison of Iranian facilities and missiles with photos of similar-looking items in North Korea and Pakistan, according to a copy of the slides handed out to diplomats. Pakistan largely supplied Iran with its nuclear infrastructure but, as a key U.S. ally, it is identified in the presentation only as "another country." Corey Hinderstein, a nuclear analyst with the Institute for Science and International Security, said the presence of a weapons program could not be established through such comparisons. She noted that North Korea's missile wasn't designed for nuclear weapons so comparing it to an Iranian missile that also wasn't designed to carry a nuclear payload "doesn't make sense."

And the article also notes that Pakistan leader Pervez Musharraf "refused to speculate on whether Iran, whose program was secretly aided by Pakistan's top nuclear scientist, had been designed for weapons production. But he said he feels confident Iran's aims are now peaceful and there was no need for Security Council action." So all in all, the Bolton program of demonizing Iran isn't going anywhere, so maybe Raimondo is correct and Syria is next up.

Canadian reporters are reporting the wrong news about emergency departments

Canadian reporters are all atwitter about the news in the new CIHR emergency room study that 57 per cent of emergency room visits are for non-life-threatening conditions. But the story they missed is what is happening to the people who DO have life-threatening conditions. From the Conclusion section: "Overall, physicians saw just over half of all patients with a cardiac arrest, major trauma, or other condition that represents a threat to life or carries an immediate risk of deterioration within five minutes of their arrival in the ED in 2003-2004. On the other hand, the report also shows that that 1 in 10 patients with these types of health problems waited 45 minutes or longer to be seen." [Emphasis mine]
UPDATE: In fact, the more I think about it, the more I wonder why this significant Conclusion was not listed in the "highlights" section from which the reporters got their stories. If I was a real reporter, I would be phoning up the report publishers tomorrow to ask them.

Living high

One of my favorite writers, Garrison Keillor, is writing for Salon again. Its an easy, gentle kind of writing, conversational, discursive, folksy -- nahhh, not really, just on the surface. Underneath, Garrison bites. Maybe it could be summed up by just saying that Garrison Keillor doesn't suffer fools.
Here is a section from his latest Salon column, Looking for higher ground:

Blanche DuBois said she always had depended on the kindness of strangers but that was before last week. Last week showed you pretty clearly that you should never ever get in a situation where you're trapped and don't have food or water. Nobody's going to come. Lower taxes and less government means you better live on a high bluff above the river and have plenty of money . . . I like New Orleans but I'd never live there. I enjoy the streetcars and the gumbo and the little gardens behind the high walls in the French Quarter and the easy view of life. It's a city where you can find people to talk to late at night and nobody is in a rush to get home . . . The downside of being the Big Easy is that visitors feel encouraged to show you a side of themselves you'd rather not see, the blithering drunkenness and bare-breasted ladies and plastic gewgaws of Bourbon Street and Mardi Gras. You don't have to be Baptist to find the company of drunks discouraging and New Orleans is a mecca for alcoholics. Big Easiness, however, is not conducive to good government and the city hasn't gotten much of that. There are large sections of town where the tourist is warned never to set foot. The schools are wretched and services are lousy and in a high-water-table city where even high ground is low and low ground is below sea level, the flood control system wasn't ever more than modestly adequate, and so last week the Big Easy got to know George Bush. You don't have to be drunk to be stupid. Here was a patronage appointee, the pal of a pal, in charge of the federal response to Katrina and he sat and waited to see what would happen and when it happened, he froze. As Mr. Bush said, he had no idea that the levees wouldn't hold. Truly. It's not how we used to do things, back when there was a sense of shame attached to government incompetence that costs lives, but it's different in America these days. Don't ever get in trouble, is my advice. Head upriver and look for high ground.

A completely irrelevant aside is that Keillor also narrated the famous Briish Honda Accord commercial -- watch it here, and if you want more info about it, see here.

Please God . . . we promise not to piss it away this time

One of the jokes going around in the 1970s oil shortage period, when the formerly-wealthy Houston oil barons were going bankrupt, was a bumper sticker which went something like this:
"Please, God, send us another oil boom. We promise not to piss it away this time."
I was reminded of this reading Ian Welch's hugely significant piece "American Genuis" on The Blogging of the President -- he talks about why the American empire-bubble will end.

No society that is not led well over long periods can prosper. The US appears to be in the last frenzy of looting of Empire. The end days are nigh, the looting has extended to eating the seed corn and twenty years from now, seed corn gone, Americans will find that America is not unique and that the sun does set on every great nation. As usual they will have been destroyed from within by the home grown rats, fat upon the grain of their fellow citizens.

I would like to hear Ian's opinions about what will happen to Canada when the bubble bursts.