I'm not dead yet

But I'm close. Damn, last week was an ass-kicking. I think I slept maybe seven hours in seven days.

Maybe it's because I haven't seen the news in a week, but I'm feeling optimistic. Happy, even. Can America be all bad? If America is doing so terribly, why are record numbers of Mexicans braving the deserts for a chance to live in our worst neighborhoods, go to our worst schools and work below our already-too-low minimum wage? (Answer to rhetorical question: because Canada's too far away)

If you've managed to rationalize that everything that happened with Katrina was not the result of a massive governmental failure, here it is: more people are crossing the border now then they were before 9/11. We have even stepped up efforts to police the borders, yet more people now than in 2001 are sneaking across. The Bush Administration's Homeland Security and Patriot Act and War in Iraq have made us less safe than we were before 9/11.

It's almost as if there were..two Americas.

When I realized it had been months and I hadn't heard anything atrocious about Wal*Mart, I thought maybe they'd gone out of business.
Nah, I just hadn't been paying attention. Wal*Mart's still in business--in fact, they made ten billion dollars in profit last year. Today, they're being sued because they have been illegally denying their employees lunch breaks. Wal*Mart broke a state law requiring employers to give their people a half hour unpaid lunchbreak. Christ.
Every time we try to have a discussion about poverty in this country, there's always somebody who chimes in with the little-known fact that compared with the rest of the world, American poverty rocks. And compared with the third world, Wal*Mart's policies aren't too bad. Wal*Mart doesn't use child labor, or slaves, and they usually follow minimum wage laws, and less than 25% of their employees are illegal..but this is America. You know, a first world country. A country where employees get lunch breaks.

Weapons of Mass Repression

Scientists from the Vatican, a miniscule country located inside the city of Rome, have just perfected a new superweapon, which they threaten to aim at gay targets all across the US. Their new gayness detector, dubbed "gaydar", will seek out and punish gay priests within our borders. This gaydar is said to be able to detect gayness even in those who have been sexually inactive for a decade or more.
Well, I assume that they have something like that, because how else are they going to enforce their new "no gay priests" policy? Even gaydar isn't foolproof--I think the ladies know what I'm talking about. Hell, mine goes off every time I see Senator Rick Santorum*.


*that's not a dig on Santorum. It's just that there's just something about him that screams closet case to me.

Politics as usual

Remember that time that I said that we'd have a bipartisan senate committee look into Katrina? Yeah, well that ain't happening. The Democrats and the Republicans have shot down each others' attempts to get to the bottom of this (Senator Clinton had proposed an independent council, Bill Frist had proposed a bipartisan senate committee). It only took about two weeks to go from "let's do all we can to help the victims of Katrina" to "up yours, biatch."

Serious Question

I haven't been following the American political scene for very long, so I honestly have no perspective on how bad the Bush administration really is. Am I naive to think that politics aren't usually this sleazy? Or, to put it another way,
If political logging had been around in 1992, and I'd had a political log about everything that's sleazy and wrong about the Clinton Administration, could I have updated it five days a week?
Could the Suburban Guerrilla update ten times a day? Could that Atrios guy update like, every hour? Would Atrios get hundreds of thousands of hits per day, four hundred comments in thirty minutes, from people who hate the Clinton Administration just as much as him?

You know it's bad when it's considered a huge, breaking-news story when the President takes responsibility for shit that's his fault. Biggest news all day, because this guy doesn't take responsibility for anything. Notice that he doesn't even apologise. Notice that he only did this after his poll numbers reached record lows.

Rob from the poor to give to the rich.

My math isn't all that good. Two hundred seventy-two billion British pounds amounts to what, five hundred billion US dollars? That's about right.
Five hundred billion. That sounds familiar--is that the amount of money that the Iraqi war has cost us? (Actually, yes, but that's not what I'm posting about today.) No, five hundred billion dollars is the amount of tax that rich multi-national corporations are stealing from the third world. Each year.
In comparison, the first world gave about 576 billion dollars of Foreign Direct Aid in 2003. Too bad that most of it was eaten by corporations, eh?

Update: speaking of ripping off the poor, Katrina has delayed the budget cuts, but it hasn't stopped them. Republicans still plan on cutting funding to programs like Medicaid, foodstamps, and student loans (yeah, that last one is going to suck for yours truly). This effort will save our government $35bil over five years. Meanwhile, Republican-led efforts to extend the tax cuts will cost $70 bil. That's $70bil to extend the tax cuts on capital gains and dividends taxes. I don't know what those are either. It's something that only rich people have to worry about, the poor dears.
It's considered common knowledge that Republicans are better with money than Democrats. It's also common knowledge that $35bil is less than $70bil.

Will it ever stop? (Answer: no)

The latest steaming turd from the Bush Administration: a Halliburton subsidiary has been awarded the contract to clean up New Orleans. The Shaw Group (another of Joe Allbaugh's favorites) and Bechtel are also getting a piece of the pie.
I'm not even objecting to the Halliburton subsidiary because they are still paying Cheney. I object because Halliburton has been ripping off the military in Iraq. I don't trust them nor their subsidiaries.
Also, when was the bidding for these contracts? Doesn't the government normally bid on things like that? I don't follow business news much, but I don't remember hearing about any bidding going on.

Update: Yesterday I said that Michael Brown got canned. Blanton & Ashton point out that he is still very much employed. Thankfully, he can't do anything more to ruin the rescue efforts, but that idiot still has a job. What do you have to do to get fired from the Bush Administration? My gawd, it's like the friggin' mafia. Once you're in, you're in for life.

Update: Michael Brown has just resigned. Good for him.

It took me a while, but I finally found some relatively cheerful news to post on

Good news: the inquiry into the Federal Government's slow response to Hurricane Katrina will not be led by President Bush, but by a bipartisan Senate committee. Because how dumb is it to have the guy who is probably responsible for this mess leading the investigation? It's just like the time that OJ pledged to find the real killer. Also, I understand that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist requested this inquiry?

Michael Brown is not getting off either. Time Magazine has looked into his past and found that the official biography about him is misleading. He's cited as an assistant city manager, when he was actually an assistant to the city manager. Kind of like an intern. They also found that five of the eight head FEMA officials had no disaster experience. Three had direct ties to Bush's 2000 campaign, including Michael Brown.

Update: Michael Brown just got canned.

Liberty v. Safety

The Patriot act was signed into law only a couple of days after 9/11--strange how quickly it got written up. I remember the announcement, but what got me was the people who came out in support of it. Not congressmen or the president, but ordinary people. People who said that they wouldn't mind being searched as long as they could be safer.

I think that most people would, if things got bad enough, put safety before liberty. There's a principled few who'd say that liberty trumps safety always, all the time, no matter what. Ghandi. Patrick Henry. The people who signed the Declaration of Independence. But for many people, that time was 9/11. One terrorist attack and they signed the Patriot Act. I have a somewhat higher threshold--I don't know where it is. You don't know these things until they happen.

Well, it's 2005. We are less free than we were before September 11th. Are we any safer? Iraq is now a center for terrorism. In 2001 we did not have to worry about Iraq attacking us, and now we do, and it's pretty much our fault. There has been an increase in terrorist incidents worldwide. The federal government's response to a natural disaster with several days' advanced notice has been, at best incompetent, at worst diabolical, with FEMA director Michael Brown waiting until far too late to dispatch his people, spending an inordinate amount of energy on propoganda, and turning down other states' offers of help. No, it's 2005 and not only are we less free, we are less safe.

Like a friggin' ninja

September 11th was like reaching into your sock drawer and pulling out a rattlesnake. It scared us because it seemed to come out of nowhere.
The devastation in New Orleans did not come out of nowhere. We'd known for years that one day, a category five was going to hit New Orleans and then we'd really be in trouble. We knew two, three days before landfall that Katrina was going to hit the area. Well it's Sunday and we still have 20,000 people trapped in what has become a burning cesspool--20,000 people that we know of--with minimal food and water, and no sanitation or medical care. We don't know how many people have died, because we haven't finished counting them. There was a shelter, but no plans for what to do once everybody got there. We've got Fidel Castro offering to help us.
Senator Bill Frist, down in New Orleans as a medical volunteer, describes the chaos and claims that the US government didn't act fast enough. We've got Mike Brown (chief of FEMA, the guys who are supposed to be in charge here) who, if he isn't lying to us, he's at least very, very misinformed. He'll say for example, that the hospital evacuations are doing fine, when the situation is deteriorating rapidly. American citizens and the Red Cross have done extraordinary things, but there are some things that citizens can't do.
Bush has apologized and admitted that the response was too slow, but I am not sure if his administration can recover. Bush claimed that going into Iraq was necessary to protect us from terrorist attacks at home. Katrina was not like a terrorist attack..because a terrorist attack would come with no warning. Katrina had a two, three day warning, but response has been terrible. There is no way that these clowns could protect us from a terrorist attack.

To use Christianity for good.

Oh man, why doesn't this sort of thing happen in the US: A British environmental group and Christian group merge to stop climate change. They want to cut greenhouse gas emissions and invest in clean technology. They cite the obvious practical reasons as well as a moral obligation to protect the earth.
The movement has spread some to the US, but it's still very small on this side of the Atlantic. Could you see the big groups, like Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, doing something like this? Of course not. It's too sensible.