Midnight Meme Of The Day

-by Noah

By now, we've all seen multiple clips of reporters and late night TV hosts going out and interviewing Trump supporters in the streets. It's easy. You just go up to some clown that's wearing a Trump hat, turn on the camera, ask your questions, and watch the crazy come pouring out. To be fair, though, (and I'm always fair), it doesn't seem to be just the most fervent Trump supporters. It's Republican voters in general. It has become impossible to tell the difference. If you vote like a Trump supporter, you are one; no hat required. No stupid slogan on your shirt, no confederate flag or white hood either.

As Hurricane Harvey flooded Texas and Señor Trumpanzee toured a couple of firehouses with The Whore Of Slovenia to sell some hats, a common statement by Republicans ran along the lines of "See. Trump is taking real action. Where was Obama during Katrina?" In the alternative fact based Republican World, Obama had been shirking his duties as president and was out playing golf somewhere, never mind that, in the real world of 2005, Obama was not the president and wouldn't be for another 3 years. Not only that, but then Senator Obama actually did go to New Orleans and lend a hand.

All of this leads me to these questions when I see someone wearing a Trump hat, shirt, sheet, hood, or whatever: Should such people, for their own good and ours, be allowed to operate machinery? Should we step up the growth of public transportation for them in order to keep our highways safer? Do they get their own busses? Could it be that there is a beyond intolerable amount of lead in red state drinking water? Or is it all just due to bad schooling and FOX "News"? Well, of course, it could be all of those things, or, it could be just that the Walter White, of Breaking Bad fame, is a real person, that things have been reversed and the Republican Big World of Alternative Facts is actually the real world, and the "real" world that I have been living in is a fictional TV world. If that's the case, then obviously Walter was every bit as wildly successful in selling meth to the real world masses as the show depicted, and Breaking Bad is really all a documentary. Silly me, I thought that was just well-done fiction.

This is no time to go soft on those marauding union terrorists Gov. Scott "The Lying Scumbag" Walker beat into submission

by Ken

Let me say at the outset that I am a singularly poor predictor of those game-changing moments When Right-Wing Scumbag Liars Go Too Far. With alarming frequency one of these hell-clowns says or does something that seems to me so irretrievably blatant that even the stupidest, most blinkered followers can't help but be shaken by, and nothing happens. Contrarily, on occasions when one of them goes A Lie Too Far, it's over something that in my mind should hardly have registered a blip on the Right-Wing Scale of Outrage.

Take the Katrinafication of New Orleans. Was I shocked and sickened by those images of fellow citizens abandoned to their fate by the savage imbeciles of the right-wing power trust? Especially as highlighted by those pictures of the monster Chimpy the Prez and the monster Young Johnny McCranky playing with birthday cake? Well, of course? Who wouldn't be? I'll tell you who I thought wouldn't be offended: the American public. After all, what was there in those pictures that was different from what that public had been seeing and hearing for ages? The "otherness" of those victims would normally have rendered them safely outside Real Americans' zone of concern. Didn't we learn just recently, in the wake of the hooha of all those police shootings of unarmed persons of color that Real Americans not only don't object but are happy to see their brave cops ridding us of their kind one by one?

Even now, don't ask me to explain why many of those Real Americans were jolted out of their complacent unreality by those images. In the same way, I don't know what NJ Gov. Kris "NJ Fats" Krispy said or did to cause the air to rush out of his campaign blimp. Yeah, his imbecilic blithering in London about the vaccination question was horrible, but compared with the horrors that lying scumbag had been routinely perpetrating on a daily basis, it seemed to me hardly worth a second thought. But clearly something happened. I'm not sorry it did, but I can't tell you what it is/was.

Looking at it again from the opposite direction, there were people who thought the starkly unprincipled stonewalling of questions it was simply too politically inconvenient for him to answer would set in motion a death spiral for the political ambitions of WI Gov. Scott "I Lie for the Hell of It" Walker. Yet here he is, the newest-crowned "front runner" for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination.

So now, do I think he's gone A Lie Too Far in his grotesque equating with Islamic terrorists those Wisconsin public-employee union members who, as targets of his no-holds-barred war of extermination on them, took to the streets to protest, about as American an exercise as you can imagine of the rights of free speech and assembly? Well, sure, I think it ought to open people's eyes to the kind of dishonest, demagogic, authoritarian tool of the plutocracy he has been, without apology, though perhaps with a fair amount of camouflage, since he entered political life. But does that mean I think it will have any impact with the throngs who apparently see him as their new Great White Hope?

I can't for the life of me see why. Still, he does seem to be attracting an unusual amount of unkind attention, and it couldn't happen to a more deserving scumbag.


POOR SCOTT WAS "MISCONSTRUED" -- AW-W-W-W!

I have to tell you, I was even more offended by the lies "Scumbag Scott" spewed to cover up his little gaffe than I was by the gaffe itself. The poor baby was "misconstrued." I realize he was kind of hemmed in. The usual dodges like "I was misquoted" or "I was taken out of context" were kind of taken out of play by, well, his own lying self. Reference his own damned tweet above. Misquoted? Not hardly. Taken out of context? Well, the toxic-gasbag provided his own context! So instead, he was "misconstrued." Puh-lease!

I've come up with two better (I think) explanations for this latest outburst of union-bashing by "Scumbag Scott," which I offer to his crisis-management team free of charge.

(1) He's that rare bird, a right-wing lying scumbag with a conscience.

It took me some disconnected-mind free associating to come up with this one, but it made sense when it hit me. Think of it as part of the "mandate" the governor hopes to win as he makes his way to the White House. Once he's ensconced in the Oval Office, I'm confident that he plans to continue his frontal assault on truth and decency. If, through some Katrina-like unforeseeable web of circumstances he should be exposed as a pathological liar, he can point back to incidences like this and say with considerable justice, "Did I ever pretend to be anything but a pathological liar? Isn't the record abundantly clear that the people who voted for me did so in full knowledge of who and what I am?"

I still kind of like this explanation, but it strikes me as awfully subtle for as unsubtle a pol as "Scumbag Scott," who doesn't usually traffic heavily in subtleties. So I've come up with another explanation.

(2) He meant exactly what he said.

One of the more potent screeches currently being screeched by the Right-Wing Noise Machine is the dastardly refusal of non-America-loving pseudo-Americans like the president of the United States to fill their conversation with hate-filled references to "Islamic terrorists." I expect that Governor Scott subscribes to this school of, er, thought. He's not the kind of guy to temporize or apologize in the face of his near-total ignorance about Islam. And along those lines, just as it's important to publicly call out "Islamic terrorists" for the tools of Satan they are, isn't it also important to call out other anti-American tools of Satan like, you know, union terrorists?

The truth is that unions were an indispensable part of the rise of the American middle class. But when did "Scumbag Scott" and the Right-Wing Noise Machine start giving a darn about the truth? American wants lies. Admitedly, they have to be just the right kind(s) of lies, but if anyone's prepared to gratify that wish, it's "Scumbag Scott."

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Willful Ignorance-- A Problem For Representative Democracy?

On Wednesday, Ken pointed out that more Louisiana Republicans blame Obama for the poor response to Hurricane Katrina than blame George W. Bush, 29-28%-- with another 44% "unsure." Perhaps most Louisiana Republicans didn't recall that they had never heard of Barack Obama in 2005 when Katrina struck. At the time he had been a U.S. senator for a few months. "Oh my God," I thought when I heard about this; "are these people voting? No wonder David Vitter was reelected!" But, it's hardly just Louisiana Republicans-- even if Louisiana does have the worst education results of any of the 50 states. "Seven in 10 Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. One in five thought that Obama was Muslim. In another famous poll, Americans were three times more likely to be able to name two of the seven dwarfs than two Supreme Court justices." And they can all vote... and buy automatic weapons. As Ken points out, "the insanification and imbecilization of the American public, a state actively pursued by right-wing strategists for decades, has reached the point where a scarifyingly large sector of the electorate has no conception of what a 'fact' is-- they truly believe that 'reality' is whatever the hell bizarre notions lodge in their heads... As I've pointed out here a number of times, the genius of so-called 'reality TV' is that it plays on the fatigue, or perhaps outright animosity, that a large segment of the public has developed toward, er, real reality, and their eager flight into what I like to call 'reality substitute,' based on the premise that reality is now defined as whatever it makes me feel best to believe. Obama was born in Kenya and has engaged in a lifelong conspiracy joined by who knows how many people to conceal it? I believe it, and it makes my blood boil."

Ken didn't specifically get into what this kind of willful ignorance says about the efficacy of democracy, but the implication that it isn't something that we can avoid thinking about was all over his post. The NY Times is urging Congress to get back to Washington to debate the Syrian crisis before Obama bombs the place. Presumably, among those debaters would be Steve Scalise, Lord Boustany, John Fleming, Rodney Alexander and Bill Cassidy, the 5 House Republicans from Louisiana. Is there any reason to assume they are less ignorant than the people who elected them? Not that I've seen. Boustany, for example, may be best known for an endless series of medical malpractice suits but he is also the congressman who bought a lordship title for himself and his wife online (for $18,500). And Congress hasn't exactly been a deliberative body in the last few years, has it?



The ruling class just watched that in Britain and did not like what they saw-- not one bit. David Cameron called Parliament together to vote on his plans to join Obama in an attack on Syria and... suddenly he had his legs cut out from under him-- by his own backbenchers. Always the spokesvehicle for the ruling elites of the world, The Economist was apoplectic. They called the vote "shocking and shaming."

Many deserve blame for the catastrophe. Some attaches to David Cameron. A parliamentary vote on a decision to go to war that is likely to entail the commitment of significant forces for a sustained period might be considered a necessity. In this instance, in which Britain would have played a very minor supporting role in a punitive action of limited duration that was most unlikely to put anyone from Britain’s armed forces in harm’s way, it was not. Far from the first time, Mr Cameron complacently misread the mood of his rebellion-prone party, a party which contains a sizable minority that seems content to heap humiliation on his head regardless of the electoral consequences and regardless of the standing of Britain’s prime minister in the world.

Nor did Mr Cameron adequately prepare the ground for yesterday’s debate. He could and should have done more to show why any parallels between what he was proposing and Tony Blair’s use of the “dodgy dossier” to take Britain to war in Iraq were wholly and contemptibly specious. In his desire not to overcook the evidence of the Assad regime’s systematic and large-scale use of internationally-banned nerve agents, he admitted that there was not “100% proof." He could, however, have shown that the case against Mr Assad was beyond all reasonable doubt-- the standard required for a conviction in a court of law. It was also a mistake to allow the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, to wind the debate up rather than his foreign secretary, William Hague. Arguments fall apart in Mr Clegg’s hands like sodden cardboard, whereas Mr Hague is probably Westminster’s best debater. It is also not clear why he threw the towel in so completely and immediately after the votes had been counted. There was still time and opportunity to change minds before a second vote which was scheduled for early next week.

But if Mr Cameron got some things wrong, at least he was trying to do the right thing: support Britain’s most important ally in an effort to show an evil dictator that he cannot continue to use the vilest weapons against his own people with utter impunity. Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, by contrast, did not seem to know what he was doing other than show he was not Tony Blair, which most people had already realised. Mr Miliband’s claim to require more evidence and to allow the UN weapons inspectors to complete their report, may have sounded reasonable to many people, but in reality was nothing more than a weaselly attempt to avoid taking sides either for or against military action. Given his supreme distaste for military intervention in Syria, nobody would be happier than Barack Obama if holes could easily be picked in the evidence. Mr Miliband’s depiction of Mr Cameron (and implicitly, Mr Obama) rushing to war without adhering to proper process was embarrassingly wide of the mark. Sadly, not one of his MPs had the guts to get up and say so (indeed some found his position distastefully hawkish).

Mr Miliband at least has the excuse of being leader of the opposition. He would have been right to question the government closely on the purpose and possible consequences of military action. He would also have been entitled to have withheld support if the government’s intended course of action appeared reckless or illegal, but he made the case for neither. Those who deserve the greatest opprobrium are the 30 Tory MPs who voted against their prime minister and a still larger group (including, it is said, more than one cabinet minister) who signalled only reluctant support for Mr Cameron. Increasingly, there is a tendency within the Conservative Party that takes such a narrow, Poujadist (or should that be Farageist?) view of national interest that it behaves as if Britain should cease to have any serious engagement with the outside world. It was no coincidence that some of the rebels are also among the party’s most Europhobic headbangers. They seem to care as little for the Atlantic partnership and NATO as they do for the European Union. They claim to be representing popular opinion, which is indeed weary of foreign wars and sceptical about the reasons for Britain’s involvement in them. But not even populist Tories should want foreign policy to be determined by opinion polls.

The only people who should celebrate yesterday’s vote are Bashar Assad and Vladimir Putin. Britain’s failure to stand by its allies and stand up to tyranny has diminished it in the eyes of the world.

The Economist, of course, would rather see Britain ignore representative democracy and turn towards authoritarian tyranny than not rush off willy nilly into a war with unknowable consequences. I bet they flipped out when Obama announced he'd be going to Congress on Saturday afternoon. Still, a bunch of Louisiana Republicans are no less trustworthy to make the decision than the political and social elites from the claustrophobic little world that is the transnational Economist.

Oh... and willful ignorance isn't just a problem among Republicans in the Old Confederacy. Try asking relatively well-educated and enlightened New Jersey voters about their looming gubernatorial election. They don't seem to be prepared to allow any facts to get in the way of their decision-making.

Teabagger Steven Palazzo Is Counting On No More Natural Disasters In His Mississippi District

Steven Palazzo (R-MS): putting his constituents at risk

I was happy enough to see arch-reactionary Blue Dog Gene Taylor defeated in 2010. Taylor, a shill for the Military Industrial Complex, represented Missisiisppi's Gulf Coast for twenty years. Disappointed Democratic voters didn't show up for the midterms in 2010, a Taylor was swept away as part of the Great Blue Dog Apocalypse. Very right-wing state Rep. Steven Palazzo beat him 105,613 (52%) to 95,243 (47%)-- quite the turnaround from Taylor's reelection two years before when he beat the Republican candidate 216,542 (75%) to 73,977 (25%). In 2008, when Obama lost every county in the district except Jasper, to McCain, Taylor won all 15 counties. No exceptions. 2 years later he lost 9 of those counties to Palazzo and this year the Democrats ran Matthew Moore, who racked up only 29% of the vote. Palazzo is one of Congress' most radical right members and also Mississippi's only member of Michele Bachmann's crazy Tea Party Caucus. His lifetime ProgressivePunch crucial vote score is 1.00, further right than Darrell Issa, Patrick McHenry, Eric Cantor and Marsha Blackburn. Only 4 Members of Congress have worse scores than Palazzo.

Last week, Palazzo was one of only 67 Members-- all Republicans, many unreconstructed Confederates like himself-- to vote against aid for the victims of SuperStorm Sandy. He joined crackpots like John Bircher Paul Broun (GA), date rape doctor Scott DesJarlais (TN), Virginia Foxx (NC), Louie Gohmert (TX), Tom Price (GA), Joe Wilson (SC), Jeff Duncan (SC), Trey Gowdy (SC) and the rest of the bottom of the barrel crap still fighting the Civil War to preserve "The Southern Way of Life" (slavery and feudalism), in voting against the aid. 161 Republicans and 193 Democrats voted yes. New Hampshire Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter, addressing this pack of degenerates explained that she and the rest of the pro-American congressmembers from both parties "voted for this funding because we are the U.S.A. and we always unite to help citizens who are hit by disaster.”

Palazzo stands out as the most hypocritical swine of the 67 because when he was a Biloxi official. in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated Gulf Coast, he squealed the loudest for federal aid for his district.

Palazzo’s future congressional district, including his hometown of Biloxi, Miss., was ravaged by the 2005 storm. Roughly a month after Katrina made landfall, Palazzo-- then Deputy Director and CFO of the Biloxi Housing Authority-- did not mince words when he addressed what was necessary in order to repair the damages.

“We will rebuild and we’ll provide homes for those displaced; but we cannot do that until it is funded,” Palazzo said in a pamphlet published by the Biloxi Housing Authority and still available online. “We’re ready to do the work-- but we simply do not have the financial resources on our own to handle a catastrophe like Katrina.”

“Tell our national leaders-- don’t send more inspectors-- we know what’s damaged and how to fix it,” Palazzo continued. “Send us money so we can put families back together and do our part to rebuild our community.”

The handout includes a breakdown of the “Total Funds Needed Right Away,” ultimately requesting more than $38.5 million in federal largess.

In April of 2006, the Sun-Herald of Biloxi, Miss. credited Palazzo with helping the Housing Authority “win a $7.2 million grant to replace housing for displaced residents.”

Southern Mississippi voters (see video below) need to pray that they never have a natural disaster there again that calls for congressional aid. I suspect a lot of northern congressmembers will be just looking for a little payback.

Has anyone researched how many kleptoplutocrats live within "disaster range" of nuclear power plants?

Short of the 24/7 television visual horror of the Katrina catastrophe, what might it take to penetrate the country's painstakingly constructed wall against reality? Surely we can't be rooting for the worst-case nuclear scenario in Japan, can we?

by Ken

I hope everyone has read Howie's post earlier today on the subject of the reaction of people supposedly "in the know," technically speaking, about the Japanese nuclear disaster-in-the-making. As he notes, this is yet another case in which the screeching ignoramuses and murderous kleptoplutocrats of the Right have been caught laying the groundwork for future episodes of the (in this case literal) destruction of the country as we once knew it. Nuclear disaster -- what, we worry?

Last month I took a lingering look at a New Yorker blogpost by Andrew Solomon on the developing insurgence in Libya, who had written about the Qadaffi regime for the magazine in 2006. One of the things that popped out at me was his description of one of the basic mistakes the regime had made since he wrote his piece, its "lack of attention to the poverty of the population."

Libya is North Africa’s most prosperous country, given its tremendous oil wealth and small population. Yet most Libyans live in deplorable conditions. The state provides little by way of civil society and does not take care of even the most basic government obligations. There are police to control people who stray from supporting the Leader, but there is little else. As a housing crisis has escalated in the past few years, the regime has made no effort to provide adequate public accommodation. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of the very few. It would have been easy for Qaddafi to raise the standard of living for the population as a whole either by creating a sustainable non-oil economy or simply by distributing some portion of oil revenues, but he chose to do neither. [Emphasis added.]

Since then, I've had occasion to read a wide assortment of reporting and commentary on the situations in, among others, Egypt and Tunisia and Morocco and Saudi Arabia and Burma. With eerie resonance, every single story included a local version of the same disconnect between the government (and the economically privileged elites who are in cahoots with it) and the general population. To a degree that beggars comprehension, the rulers have been in varying degrees ignorant of and utterly indifferent to the way the overwhelming majority of their subjects live.

Now these are all places in what we think of patronizingly as the "Third World." But the quotes kept sounding like the morning news here in the First World, where we reality has been overturned by a bizarre coalition of rampaging ideological hooligans, cultivatedly ignorant masses of stooge followers, and especially the financial kingpins pulling the strings.

Oh, Americans have stumblingly started to grasp the message that Somebody Up There doesn't give a crap about them. But in the cruelest of ironies, they've been gulled -- in part by the daily onslaught of lies from bought-off cynical exploiters like Rush and Bill-o and Sean and Glenn -- into blaming mostly the wrong people, in particular overlooking the kleptoplutocratic economic elites who have bought and paid for all the supposedly "grass roots" far-right-wing movements of the last several decades, up to and emphatically including the Teabaggers.

As raging sociopaths like the House Thug Republican leadership and satraps of criminal and societal malfeasance (you know, the people Howie's been writing about regularly (here, for example), like the Republican governors Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Rick Scott of Florida, John Kasich of Ohio, and Mitch Daniels of Indiana) do everything in their power to take a torch to civil society as it's evolved over the course of human existence, they count on the anger, fear, and carefully bred effective imbecility of the American masses.

Of course this behavior is nothing new to American right-wingers. Once you've sufficiently dumbed the populace down sufficiently, it's easy to assail and

the importance of labor unions and an entire system of government regulation that stand as, basically, our only counterweights to the tyranny of the Big Money kleptoplutocrats, who have shown themselves prepared to fight to with every resource at the disposal (with both the resources and the ability to use them have been increased humongously by its docile government stooges, emphatically including the predatory thugs of the tenaciously cutltivated extreme-right-wing Supreme Court majority), no matter how many billions of dollars it costs, to maintain their grasp on the trillions they've become accustomed to extorting and just plain plundering from the rest of us.

As Republicans announce their new laundry lists of mad-dog spending cuts, neither they nor the infotaniment noozers who pass on their latest ravings as if it was just political business as usual (which I guess it has indeed become) are concerned that they literally don't have a friggin' clue what they're talking about. It's only every now and then that around the edges a ray of reality illuminates a bit of the festering hellhole into which the elites plan to turn the country that most of us live in, as Howie pointed out in the case of the huge slashes the Republican crazies have planned for matters of nuclear safety.

But it's only when catastrophe strikes on a scale sufficient to compel the attention of the infotainment noozers and of a ghastliness sufficient to penetrate the reality-blocking fortress walls of the minds of the American public through endless TV repetition that Americans at large sort of get a primitive version of the lesson of conservative "governance" (nongovernance would be more accurate -- or, better still, misgovernance). Honestly, I thought Americans were so heavily fortified against reality that even those days of nightmare TV images of Katrina-struck New Orleans wouldn't register, but it turned out that I was wrong.

I wasn't the only one who was wrong, though. Remember Young Johnny McCranky and "Chimpy the Prez" George Bush cutting birthday cake while the city drowned in the wake of years of plutocratic neglect of the flood-control system and days of meteorological warnings which should have allowed for at least some preparation to cope with what was coming, with general complicity from a federal bureaucracy that had been transformed into a do-nothing network of crooks who took it as their mission to prove that government can't do anything right.

As I hinted above, we mustn't for a moment underestimate the importance of the crucial, long-in-the-works project of stupidification of the American public, about which both Howie and I have written frequently. From the standpoint of the economic elites, America needs morons, and their billion-dollar think tanks have found ways to deliver them.

Nor is it a coincidence that the Right, whose existence is predicated on its famous Noise Machine, made up of a cluster of hard-core liars whose every word is aimed at making its listeners know even less than they did before about subjects they previously knew very little about, launched an utterly bogus but tragically successful campaign against ACORN, which had committed the cardinal sins of providing assistance to the economically nonprivileged and adding large numbers of such people to the voter rolls. (As Michael Moore pointed out recently, the one thing we have going for us against the kleptoplutocrats is our potential large numerical advantage at the ballot box, and they're only too keenly aware of the danger to them of actual democracy.)

Or that they've targeted the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and National Public Radio, since public radio in particular is perhaps the only quasi-organized voice that at least attempts to penetrate the veil of nonreality so rigorously maintained by the combined infotainment noozemedia. The terrible thing is that virtually all of these fact-free lynch-campaigns undertaken in the last dozen years have succeeded. The people who should have been in the trenches fighting back have generally sat back cowering if not actually, and incredibly, nodding agreement.

It's a reminder that the kleptoplutocrats can't do it on their own -- not even with the redoubtable assistance of all their hired stooges. They count on being able to hornswoogle a nation of painstakingly cultivated morons. Only a sucker would bet against them.


SPEAKING OF "OUT OF TOUCH," YVES SMITH PAYS
TRIBUTE TO OUR EVER-CARING FEDERAL RESERVE

NY Fed Prexy William Dudley -- "Let them eat iPads"?

While we're on the subject of the powers that be being totally disconnected from the general population, Yves Smith has a great post on her Naked Capitalism blog, prompted by a stupefying piece of bluster from New York Fed President William Dudley. Reuters reported that Dudley, faced with "persistent questions from the audience on food inflation . . . said people forget that even as the price of food is rising, other prices are falling. He mentioned the price of the iPad 2, prompting guffaws from the audience."

Yves continues:

Now before you forgive this as standard economist thinking . . . the Wall Street Journal’s Economics blog makes clear Dudley was speaking to people in Queens:

The central banker hit the iceberg when he was trying to defend his belief–one shared by many private-sector economists–that underlying inflation in the U.S. economy is low despite a worrisome surge in commodity prices which Dudley said the Fed would be “unwise” to overreact to. The grief Dudley got indicates the Fed is facing a growing gulf between how it and the public at large perceives inflation. If this disconnect widens, it could risk undoing the public’s confidence that the Fed will be able to keep price pressures at bay.

Dudley’s day went south when he was pressed by several audience members about how he can view inflation as low when things such as grocery prices are marching higher. One participant asked “when was the last time, sir, you went grocery shopping?”

The central banker told the audience “I certainly acknowledge food prices have gone up.” But he added some prices are lower and noted “Today you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1, that’s twice as powerful,” as an example of favorable price dynamics. His example was greeted with widespread grumbling in the audience, in a display of conspicuous discontent unusual for a Fed speaking event.

The WSJ piece is still a bit of a fail, in that it attributes the gulf between the Fed and the great unwashed as being due to that food prices are “highly visible” and hence are in everyone’s face when they rise.

Hello! What planet are these people from? Yes, the food and fuel prices are noisy, so the Fed focuses on so-called core inflation. But using only one metric is naive and in this case overlooks the fact that food and fuel loom large in the household expenditures of lower income people. And does Dudley not understand that eating, heating your house, and getting to work are non-discretionary activities, contrary to technology purchases like the iPad?

Plenty of finance ministers and central bankers in emerging economics believe QE2 [i.e., the Fed's second round of "quantitive easing," in which, according to Wikipedia, "the central bank creates money which it uses to buy government bonds and other financial assets, in order to increase the money supply and the excess reserves of the banking system"] has played a significant role in stoking commodities inflation, including food prices. There is some evidence to support that view although the jury is very much out (perishable commodities, which cannot be hoarded and thus reflect fundamentals better than ones that are storable, as well as non-exchange traded commodities in India, such as cooking oil, do not show the same degree of price appreciation as exchange traded agricultural goods have). But there is a large cohort that would applaud if the idea that Bernanke had said, “Let them eat iPads” got traction.

If only people of a Teabagger-type mentality understood that they're funded and consequently manipulated by the very people in cahoots with the likes of "iPad Bill" Dudley to make sure that absolutely as few dollars as absolutely necessary are permitted to trickle out of their clutches down to us unwashed masses.

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Guest Post By Roger Pippin: Will The Re-Flooding Of New Orleans Be Another Predictable Surprise... Again?

Ivor van Heerden-- knows too much about why Katrina happened

Roger Pippin, a native of South Louisiana and alumni of Louisiana State University, is a researcher in emergency communications and management science. He is currently living and working in the Harlem community of New York City, leading workshops on the history and impact of Hurricane Katrina, and is moving to Atlanta next month to join the Centers for Disease Control as a research fellow.

Besides eating too much utility pizza and writing all day, I’m working with a non-profit group here in New York. We recently sat down for an interview and casual show and tell with Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, the directors of Trouble the Water, a documentary about Hurricane Katrina. Now bear in mind that these guys produced Fahrenheit 9/11, so as you can imagine, they have some pretty strong and well articulated opinions about Katrina. At the end of our time together, I asked Mr. Deal the question “what do you think was the real reason behind Katrina?”-- a question I ask of anyone involved in a substantial way just to see their answer. His reply stuck with me because it was the most lucid and simple thing I have ever heard about Katrina: “The tragedy of Katrina happened because people in power made a decision that other people were going to die.”

Indeed, the chess board is that simple, but the pieces have complex stories.

As a simple boy from Louisiana now spending a little time in the Big Apple, I have found that one way to explain the convoluted mess of Hurricane Katrina to people is to compare some of its features to 9/11.

Both of these events were life-changing for many people, they both created many casualties, they both involved a massive clean-up effort, and they both were completely predictable by anyone who knew anything about intelligence management, communication science, and had half a brain in their head.

They both were, to use the language of Max Bazerman, a “predictable surprise”-- a type of event that is empirically predictable, but psychologically unacceptable to predict. In other words, something that happens because of the human tendency to avoid making a decision that involves incurring significant cost in the present in exchange for the mitigation of theoretically catastrophic cost in the future. You could pay now, but maybe you’ll get lucky and things will just stay the same (Wall Street, anyone?)

It is here that the similarities between 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina end. Hurricane Katrina obviously did not receive the same level of coordinated response as 9/11. More importantly, 9/11 did not take place in Louisiana, a place that is as wonderful and charming as it is backwards and corrupt. At this moment, I am scared for my friends and family in New Orleans and South Louisiana. Hurricane Katrina was The Event for many people because it was like watching a nightmare in slow motion. At this moment I know that it will happen again. It is as predictable as algebra and inevitable as gravity.

Because Louisiana State University has fired Dr. Ivor van Heerden, a research scientist who has criticized the Army Corps of Engineers and their role in the construction of the levees, I worry that the state itself and New Orleans in particular are headed in direction that will make the re-flooding of New Orleans another predictable surprise, again.

Was Louisiana State University professor Dr. van Heerden fired from his position because he dared to criticize the engineering skills of the Army Corps of Engineers? Is LSU worried about their funding from the Feds so much that they are willing to throw out the truth along with their dignity and responsibility towards the citizens of Louisiana? Does this criticism of the ACE put LSU in a position where they have to fire van Heerden because they are dependent on Federal grant money to keep up the status quo? Probably. The facts of the case seem to answer all of these questions in the affirmative.

But because LSU won’t/can’t release any comments or documents about ongoing personnel decisions, we may never really know. Instead of drawing the dots that may or may not be there, I’ll stick to the ones that glare out to me, namely, the dots that, when looked at from far above the fog of bureaucracy, spell out the words expertise and public safety. How is the role of expertise corrupted when it comes to public safety?

These are the relevant facts: Dr.Ivor van Heerden was the Deputy Director of the LSU Hurricane Center and Associate Professor of Research with the Civil and Environmental Engineering department at LSU. He will be let go within a year. Now, there’s a lot of people in various comment sections of the blogosphere that argue that since he’s still there, why is everybody up in arms that he was fired? The answer is that egg-head jobs aren’t like normal jobs. If you are a professor and you haven’t made tenure yet, you can be fired for all kinds of reasons: not publishing enough, not glad handing the right departmental oldsters, anything really that the tenure committee decides. Yet, unlike regular jobs, most of the time your get a 6 month or 1 year heads up before you canned. Nevertheless, he still got the axe.

Recently the The Nation pointed out that Van Heerden was the leader of "Team Louisiana," the official independent state-funded investigation of the Katrina flooding. That panel found that the levee failures reflected poor design, bad science and shoddy engineering on the part of the Corps. The Bush Administration had held the levee failures were an "act of God."

Calling the failures an act of God essentially means that no one is responsible for the failure of the levees because no one could have planned for an event like Hurricane Katrina. Van Heerden’s point is that the danger was always there, and we could have planned for it. My point is that if we can’t put our finger on the reasons why the levees fail, then they will fail again. At this point, I’m sure some Bushite will throw up their hands and mash their teeth about how they don’t want to play the blame game. Indeed, the blame game does not interest me in the slightest, but the reason behind the levee failures is still a pertinent and scientifically valid question. It is not our job to sue the company that made the toxic waste that allegedly caused the cancer, but it is our task to find out where that waste may be.

Recently, van Heerden was removed as the deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center. Soon he will be without a job at all. Engineering professor Marc Levitan resigned from his position as the director of the LSU Hurricane Center over the firing of van Heerden. Less than two weeks ago, students at LSU protested the firing of Dr. van Heerden. Citizens of New Orleans have also protested the firing of van Heerden, who has become somewhat of a local hero. As a former academic, I can tell you that when the public starts protesting against the firing of a professor, then something is up.

So here’s a quick review-- Back in 2006, when van Heerden’s book The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina (a wonderful book full of data, although the prose is somewhat tortuous) came out, a work that was critical of the Government and the Army Corps of Engineers, the New York Times reported that:

A message from Mr. [Michael] Ruffner, the vice chancellor for communications [at LSU], to Dr. van Heerden after their meeting stated that the university wanted to be in on helping with the recovery of Louisiana, "not in pointing blame.” In an interview Mr. Ruffner said Dr. van Heerden's training in environmental management did not qualify him to comment on engineering matters. "We don't see him as a viable source to be discussing the engineering aspect of the levees," he said. "I have an advanced degree in communications, but that doesn't qualify me to comment on the New York Philharmonic."

This type of dangerous and infantile argument is repeatedly leveled, both officially and unofficially, against van Heerden and in general anybody who speaks about the Gov’s FUBAR before, during, and after Katrina. Now, despite the dozens of issues with this situation, here’s where things really start to go down the toilet for LSU, because this is the point where LSU officials, true to their style, begin to depart from any semblance of reality. What has to be made clear is that van Heerden has a PhD in marine science. Apparently, Ruffner doesn’t understand that levees that hold back water from drowning cities occasionally have interaction with substances called “water” and “soil,” topics which are covered in monastic detail by marine scientists. In fact, van Heerden is an expert on geotechnical soil issues that pertain to foundational failures. Or, to parse it down a bit for the Ruffner crowd, van Heerden knows a lot about dirt that goes under stuff, stuff like levees. Ruffner admits that he isn’t qualified to conduct the Philharmonic, but omitted in his reasoning is the fact that he isn’t qualified to speak about geotechnical soil issues either. But, his job is to be the chief spin-minister of LSU, so this is to be expected.

Even more interesting is the implication of this for experts caught in similar circumstances between the truth and hard place (made of government funding).

What does it mean to be an expert in an academic and research environment composed of various, interlocking, monetary fulcrums? I’m old enough to know the reality is that funding trumps scientific validity half the time anyway, but the funding that LSU might be buying by firing van Heerden is not purchased with firing one man, it is purchased via the safety of over a million human beings living in the New Orleans metropolitan area who will not be protected in the future because the truth of an engineering failure has been willfully oppressed, and therefore will not be corrected to any substantial degree.

What the bureaucrats at LSU don’t get is that expertise is no longer a matter of simple specialization. Although we still see the conflation of the two in some of the natural sciences, and perhaps even some branches of theoretical mathematics, the idea that the topical area on your PhD diploma means that you are only an expert in that area is laughable. First, sometimes people who get advanced degrees keep learning, reading, and doing things in other areas, which is sometimes part of being a responsible intellectual-- you go where the evidence demands, even if its into a related field that isn’t written on your diploma. Second, technology such as levees is cannot be compartmentalized into a specialization such as civil engineering. Levees are a type of technology that represents a sort of expertise “nexus,” a physical manifestation of where many specializations meet. For example, consider the science and art of prosthetic limbs. The A-list for this technology includes electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, rehabilitative therapists, sculptures, and physicians. What people like Ruffner are arguing is that only the physician is qualified to speak about prosthetic limbs, whereas the mechanical engineer who specializes in prosthetic limb development is not qualified to speak because he isn’t an M.D... The same situation is going on with LSU attempting to muzzle van Heerden. You can’t understand an event like Katrina from a viewpoint of academic specialization. Any attempt to do so will result in a false description and diagnosis of the problem. Academic specializations were developed in a day and age (in Germany) when those categories made sense, but they have no place in a catastrophic failure like Katrina, which requires solid investigative skills and good general scientific expertise, not fidelity to your original specialization.

Even though van Heerden’s degree is not in civil engineering, he still knows a hell of a lot about levees, and moreover the dirt underneath them, which might be an important thing if, say, a hurricane went over New Orleans and pushed the levees out of the ground because the soil wasn’t structurally sound enough to support said levees. Hypothetically speaking, of course.

Van Heerden also know a lot about how the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO), built by the ACE at tremendous cost with almost zero return, has allowed salt-water into the wetlands and thus destroyed both the marsh and its ability to lessen the effects of storm surge that helped destroy the levees. But that has nothing to do with levees, only the water that pushes on them, so it’s irrelevant, right?

Van Heerden was still the deputy director of the Hurricane Center and head of Team Louisiana when the downplaying of this qualifications began, but most damningly against LSU, every other scientific and engineering body that has examined the New Orleans Levee problem agrees with van Heerden, with the exception of the Army Corps of Engineers. For example, Raymond Seed, a UC Berkeley professor of engineering said very plainly in a letter to the American Society of Civil Engineers that "'My own University (U.C. Berkeley) was also approached in an inappropriate manner during that same Winter of 2005-06, but such untoward pressures were simply rebuffed. That, in the end, probably goes right to the heart of what really separates a top-flight university with one of the top Colleges of Engineering in the nation (and the top-rated Department of Civil Engineering in the nation) from a university like LSU."

Burn. It’s also interesting that the American Society of Civil Engineers refers to the breaking of the New Orleans levees as “the worst engineering catastrophe in U.S. history.” What about the money? Nola.com reported that

The federal government is the largest source of research funding for universities, and LSU was lining up tens of millions of dollars for coastal and wetlands work-- much of which might be partnered with the corps. Having one of its professors lobbing bombs at the feds made some at the university fear for the LSU pocketbook.

If you’re from Louisiana, this might not be a surprise for you. Because all of Louisiana’s oil platforms are more 3 miles off our coast, the Federal Government receives all of the oil and gas royalties produced by those facilities, unlike states like Texas and Wyoming that get to keep the money. Louisiana produces between 20 and 25% of all of the oil and natural gas in this country, and so obviously if we got to keep that money, I would not be writing this because the levees would have been made out of gold-reinforced concrete topped with diamonds and therefore still standing. But, because the Feds get all the cash, universities like LSU are almost totally reliant upon them to ration out money, and the Army Corps of Engineers is practically forced to build everything on the cheap. All of this begs the question of who is really at fault-- I would say that the ACE has some responsibility here, but it is really the Feds that want van Heerden to shut up. If everyone woke up to the idea that Louisiana would be the richest state in the Union if we kept our own petro-royalities, the Feds might lose their infinite piggy bank. If people realized that if we had that money we could build levees that would last a thousand years, then the Feds couldn’t keep Louisiana on a leash to maintain its golden goose status. The ACE is not the ultimate problem, the Fed’s greed is, and the ACE is only an agent of that greed.

Some people might argue that with these kinds of monetary stakes, maybe LSU should fire van Heerden for the greater good of the University, another cash cow with its 35,000 students and kick-ass football team. Of course, that line of reasoning makes perfect sense, as long as we unblinkingly buy into the unsaid assumption. It makes sense to fire him as long as the only ethical model we have to gauge this situation is cost-benefit analysis in terms of sheer dollars. I start from a very different place, namely, preventing people from dying and cities being destroyed.

Consider what will happen to the next guy in this position. Will he stifle the truth in order to not rock the boat even though it means that south Louisiana will flood again and again? Why does funding for LSU take precedence of the safety of the citizenry? Money is always a factor, but this entire line of thought is the exact same kind of logic that made the event what it was in the first place-- save money now, spend hundreds of billions in the future to repair the inevitable damage. Sure, ditching van Heerden means LSU gets its blood money for the next couple years, but the cost will be the re-flooding of New Orleans and hence the rebuilding of the city and the housing of hundreds of thousands of people. What is LSU going to do, get rid of everyone that wants to talk about the real reasons that New Orleans was made into a wasteland?

I think they can and they will, and this is my point. This attack on expertise is not about who is qualified to speak about what. The attack and firing of van Heerden isn’t even about tenure or academia; the ivory tower is so corrupt that it is the height of naiveté to look to it as a place of redemption for galvanizing the populace in the quest for truth. The firing of van Heerden is about getting rid of evidence so that the system that oppresses Louisiana and keeps the Feds happy continues. It’s about making the public un-safe so that the people of Louisiana will continue to do what they’re told, and therefore keep those royalties in the hands of the Man.

The officials at LSU are Bush cronies and lackeys, so what. Because that administration seemed to reward being incapable and mediocre is not my concern. We should ferret out stupidity in any form. And I hate to be a cheese ball and semi-quote Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, but I feel like LSU is so concerned with squabbling over scraps from the Feds table that they’ve missed their god given right to something better. Is the ACE to blame? Sure, sue them to hell if you can (the lawsuit against them started a few days ago; interestingly van Heerden is set to be a witness-- too bad his credibility is wrecked). But there’s plenty of blame to go around, and if you look at this situation with the right frame of mind, you’re bound to see that the ACE simply for what it is-- just another special interest group. They’re selfish and somewhat incompetent, but not the devil behind the strings.

If you want to save van Heerden, save New Orleans, and get the levees rebuilt correctly, then we have to get our own money and stop relying on the Feds and ACE. Everything else is just fingers in the dam. Any other path is folly.

Make no mistake, New Orleans will flood again, and then you will see what I am talking about. For me, it will be another day where I have to blink the tears away from my eyes and say “I told you so.”

We've heard plenty about black marauders in New Orleans after Katrina, but not so much about anti-black violence by whites

It seems New Orleans has an even better-kept secret. Within the historic (and now largely black) Algiers district of New Orleans -- set off from most of the city proper by being across the river, and principally accessible by ferry -- lies the nearly all-white enclave of Algiers Point, scene of white anti-black violence researched by A. C. Thompson.

"Facing an influx of refugees, the residents of Algiers Point could have pulled together food, water and medical supplies for the flood victims. Instead, a group of white residents, convinced that crime would arrive with the human exodus, sought to seal off the area, blocking the roads in and out of the neighborhood by dragging lumber and downed trees into the streets. They stockpiled handguns, assault rifles, shotguns and at least one Uzi and began patrolling the streets in pickup trucks and SUVs. The newly formed militia, a loose band of about fifteen to thirty residents, most of them men, all of them white, was looking for thieves, outlaws or, as one member put it, anyone who simply 'didn't belong.'"

-- A. C. Thompson, in "Katrina's Hidden War," in the Jan. 5 Nation

by Ken

"The existence of this little army isn't a secret, " says Thompson. "In 2005 a few newspaper reporters wrote up the group's activities in glowing terms in articles that showed up on an array of pro-gun blogs; one Cox News story called it "the ultimate neighborhood watch." A shooting victim, Donnell Harrington "recounted his ordeal in Spike Lee's documentary When the Levees Broke."

However, Thompson continues, "until now no one has ever seriously scrutinized what happened in Algiers Point during those days, and nobody has asked the obvious questions. Were the gunmen, as they claim, just trying to fend off looters? Or does Herrington's experience point to a different, far uglier truth?"

Thompson spent 18 months investigating, with support from the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, ProPublica, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and New America Media.

I tracked down figures on all sides of the gunfire, speaking with the shooters of Algiers Point, gunshot survivors and those who witnessed the bloodshed. I interviewed police officers, forensic pathologists, firefighters, historians, medical doctors and private citizens, and studied more than 800 autopsies and piles of state death records. What emerged was a disturbing picture of New Orleans in the days after the storm, when the city fractured along racial fault lines as its government collapsed.

Herrington, [his cousin Chris] Collins and [his friend Marcel] Alexander's experience fits into a broader pattern of violence in which, evidence indicates, at least eleven people were shot. In each case the targets were African-American men, while the shooters, it appears, were all white.

And, in case you were wondering, none of them were punished. There appears to have been no investigation of the shooting of Herrington, Collins, and Alexander.

Lance Hill, executive director of Tulane University's Southern Institute for Education and Research, told Thompson:

"By and large, I think the white mentality is that these people are exempt -- that even if they committed these crimes, they're really exempt from any kind of legal repercussion,. It's sad to say, but I think that if any of these cases went to trial, and none of them have, I can't see a white person being convicted of any kind of crime against an African-American during that period.

"You can trace the origins of the Algiers Point militia to the misfortune of Vinnie Pervel," Thompson writes. The 52-year-old white building contractor and real estate entrepreneur had his Ford van carjacked by an African-American man who attacked him with a hammer. "Vowing to prevent further robberies," Thompson writess, "Pervel and his neighbors began amassing an arsenal. Pervel says he also feared for the safety of his mother, in her 70s. 'We thought we would be dead. We thought we were doomed.'"

And so Pervel and his comrades set about fortifying the area. One resident gave me video footage of the leafy barricades the men constructed to keep away outsiders. Others told me they created a low-tech alarm system, tying aluminum cans and glass bottles together and stringing them across the roads at ankle height. The bottles and cans would rattle noisily if somebody bumped into them, alerting the militia.

Pervel and his armed neighbors point to the very real chaos that was engulfing the city and claim they had no other choice than to act as they did. They paint themselves as righteous defenders of property, a paramilitary formation protecting their neighborhood from opportunistic thieves. "I'm not a racist," Pervel insists. "I'm a classist. I want to live around people who want the same things as me."

In some ways the story is most notable for what Thompson couldn't find out. It's not surprising that official records of that period are spotty and incomplete, but he had to sue the coroner, who in violation of the law refused to make available what records he did have. Those records proved almost useless, but he was shocked to find out that the New Orleans Police Department was only investigating three shooting incidents from the period. The NOPD wasn't exactly forthcoming either.

It's not a pretty story, but can we really allow it to simply pass unaccounted for? Even Vinnie Pervel is surprised that nobody except Thompson has ever come to ask him about a shooting that took place a few feet from his house (in which he says he had no involvement). "I'm surprised. If that was my son, I'd want to know who shot him."

#

McCain's Disgraceful Opportunism In The Face Of Gustav

So while McCain and Palin rush willy-nilly-- I wonder when the crash course on Neocon foreign policy with Randy Scheunemann starts-- to New Orleans to take advantage of the devastation from Gustav and use it as a backdrop for their campaign, Obama is mobilzing his donor and volunteer base to actually help out. Last spring it was exactly the same thing in Iowa when the Mississippi flooded. McCain ran for the photo-ops, disrupting rescue operations and siphoning off crucial assets to meet his campaign needs. Obama helped raise money for the victims.

With Gustav heading right towards New Orleans this morning, Obama told reporters in Lima, Ohio, "We can activate an email list of a couple million people who want to give back. I think we can get tons of volunteers to travel down there if it becomes necessary."

Obama said was planning to "stay clear of the area until things have settled down and then we'll probably try to figure out how we can be as helpful as possible."

Asked whether rival John McCain's visit to Mississippi Sunday was appropriate, Obama said concern about deadly storm is not a partisan issue.

"The thing that I always am concerned about in the middle of a storm is whether we're drawing resources away from folks on the ground because the Secret Service and various security requirements sometimes it pulls police, fire and other departments away from concentrating on the job," Obama said.

"I'm assuming that where he went that wasn't an issue."

One of the more vicious of the brigade of McCain's crooked lobbyists, Rick Davis, immediately projected McCain's sickening opportunism onto Obama.

Told Obama had criticized McCain and Palin on the campaign trail over pay equity, Davis continued: "So he attacks us while there's a hurricane going on and John McCain suspends his convention basically. What bigger contrast can you have about putting your country first?"

What a pathetic clown. At least he didn't bring up McCain's time in a cell in Hanoi. As John Arovosis put in at AmericaBlog yesterday:

Obama could have talked about how McCain going to the hurricane zone was irresponsible, self-aggrandizing, and endangered the lives of those in the region whose leaders would better spend their time evacuating their citizens rather than holding court with John McCain. Obama could have talked about how tacky and sleazy and opportunistic it is for John McCain to be considering using the Hurricane Gustav disaster zone as a backdrop for his political convention acceptance speech. Obama could have talked about McCain's vote against the Katrina Commission to hold the Bush Administration accountable for their disastrous non-handling of the previous hurricane. He could have talked about McCain's vote against extending unemployment benefits to Katrina victims. He could have talked about McCain's vote against Medicaid for Katrina victims. He could have talked about McCain voting against funding the Army Corps of Engineers. He could have talked about McCain seeking and receiving the endorsement of Pastor John Hagee after Hagee said Katrina was God's punishment against New Orleans.

And finally, Barack Obama could have talked about how John McCain went and ate cake with George Bush while people were literally dying in New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina struck. Hell, Obama could have, and should have, made this photo into a TV ad that he should run doing the entire Republican convention this week.

But Obama didn't do any of that.

This morning's NY Times is warns that "Officials predicted devastation for towns in its path, tidal surges of up to 14 feet and possible destruction of parts of New Orleans still recovering from Hurricane Katrina... With memories of the shaky response to Hurricane Katrina fresh," Bush and the Republicans are biting their nails and hoping nothing happens they get blamed for. McCain may even miss the convention entirely and just accept the nomination on a video feed from the Gulf Coast, avoiding having had his speech compared to Obama's.

Convention planners and delegates in St. Paul said, and McCain advisers acknowledged, that it could be politically perilous to continue the convention as the Gulf Coast braces for the arrival of Hurricane Gustav. The Bush administration’s unsteady response to Hurricane Katrina, which left New Orleans in ruins three years ago, outraged Americans, drew criticism from Mr. McCain and remains, for many, a stain on President Bush’s record.

As unintended consequences go, Hurricane Gustav does present some political opportunities for Mr. McCain. He looked like a man in charge on television Sunday as he described meeting with Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi and federal disaster officials. The tumult may also limit comparisons, which may have been unfavorable, between the Republican convention this week and the Democratic convention in Denver last week, where Mr. Obama’s acceptance speech drew more than 40 million television viewers.

There were 11 members of Congress who refused to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005-- naturally, all extreme right Republicans:

Joe Barton (R-TX)
Jeff Flake (R-AZ)
Virginia Foxx (R-NC)
Scott Garrett (R-NJ)
John Hostettler (R-IN, who lost his re-election bid)
Steve King (R-IA)
Butch Otter (R-ID)
Ron Paul (R-TX)
Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI)
Tom Tancredo (R-CO)
Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA, who was still trying to memorize a few of the 10 commandments)

Last night ABC-TV reported that in the interim since Katrina, the Bush Regime has done next to nothing to fix the problems. "Despite Congress authorizing $12.8 billion to rebuild the levees, only $3 billion has been spent." A levee expert was quoted saying that what Katrina didn't destroy, Gustav will:

"Huge areas of Louisiana are going to be devastated. We're going in essence to see what Katrina didn't destroy, what Rita didn't destroy in 2005 being destroyed now in 2008," said Ivor Van Heerden, a professor at Louisiana State University who wrote a book about why the levees broke during Katrina.

YOU CAN KILL SOMEONE WITH A GUN OR A KNIFE OR A MISSILE... OR A TRAILER-- OR WITH GOVERNMENT NEGLIGENCE

It's long been suspected that Gulf Stream knew very well they were selling the government trailers for Katrina victims that would seriously harm their health. This is the classic case of criminal profiteering and Henry Waxman's House Oversight Committee is finally exposing it to the public. Right now we're in the midst of another widespread salmonella outbreak-- tomatoes, cilantro and jalapeño peppers-- which is exactly what happens when anti-government Republicans sets out to systematically destroy the country's regulatory system. Their backward, reactionary ideology is all about the law of the jungle. The law of the jungle is getting an awful lot of people ill-- and not just from eating Mexican food.

As though the people made homeless from Katrina hadn't suffered enough, they were provided with housing that was making them ill. USAToday has a frightening story about Gulf Stream's criminal complicity regarding dangerously high levels of formaldehyde. The company covered this up and "did not tell anyone because it regarded the situation as a public relations and legal matter, not a public health issue."

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who convened hearings on the trailer issue, said internal documents from Gulf Stream, which provided the trailers to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, showed the company had found "pervasive formaldehyde in its trailers, and didn't tell anyone."

Gulf Stream received over $500 million from FEMA for 50,000 trailers for Gulf Coast residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Katrina victims now occupy 15,000 travel trailers in the region, a sharp drop from the more than 143,000 trailers that once housed displaced residents.

Prolonged exposure to formaldehyde can lead to breathing problems and is also believed to cause cancer. Complaints by trailer residents began popping up shortly after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, with residents of FEMA-issued trailers reporting frequent headaches, nosebleeds and other ailments.

Waxman said the documents showed that Gulf Stream's tests of 11 trailers showed levels of formaldehyde higher than that which can cause adverse health effects.

Tests also showed that over half of unoccupied trailers, which were sitting on lots awaiting transfer to displaced families, showed concentrations of formaldehyde at or above a level that Environmental Protection Agency says people should not be exposed to for more than eight hours in their entire lifetime.

"Gulf Stream never told any families living in its trailer about these test results," Waxman charged.
He also said the government was at fault.

"No one was looking out for the interests of displaced families living in FEMA trailers," Waxman said. "FEMA failed to do its job and trailer manufacturers took advantage of the situation."

And that's exactly the way George W. Bush, John W. McCain and their Republican and Blue Dog rubber stamps planned it-- only they hoped to not get caught. Watch with your own eyes:

AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT LOOK AT THE TRAGEDY OF KATRINA-- THE TANCREDO PERSPECTIVE

Most people would agree that the Bush Regime has botched the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina-- and botched it horribly. Even extreme right-wing loon, Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO), the KKK candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, remarked that "this whole fiasco has been a perfect storm of corruption and incompetence at all levels.” Unfortunately, Tancredo departs from the rest of the human race just after that.

According to today's Hill Tancredo is demanding that all spending on reviving New Orleans and the Gulf Coast be stopped once and for all. He said it's “'time the taxpayer gravy train left the New Orleans station' and urged an end to the federal aid to the region that was devastated by Hurricane Katrina two years ago. 'The amount of money that has been wasted on these so-called "recovery" efforts has been mind-boggling... Enough is enough.'"

One wonders if the good and decent citizens in the Denver suburbs will ever get that notion in their collective heads.

And don't think Tancredo is completely alone in his thinking about adandoning New Orleans. Many on the extreme fringes of the right, the kooks and loons who don't believe in the power of government to play a positive role in civilized society, all just over it (though, to be honest, I don't remeber this particular segment of the population ever beeing into it). Where most Americans see our neighbors and countrymen in need of help, they see moochers rejoicing in their own wrecked lives at the opportunity to live, albeit miserably and hopelessly, at the expense of others. This is, after all, the face of contemporary Republicanism: Larry Craig meets Grove Norquest:

Nobody is owed a living for the rest of his life because he had a bad break two years ago. Yet, we still have people affected by Katrina who have FEMA paying their rent. How sad and pathetic is it that these shiftless people are still leaching off their fellow citizens? Since when is being in the path of a hurricane supposed to give you a permanent "Get Out of Work Free" card?

REPUBLICANS STILL FAILING AMERICA ON NEW ORLEANS... AND EVERYTHING ELSE

Bush's failed Iraq policies cost the Republicans the House and Senate in 2006 and will devastate the party in 2008. But the seminal event where it finally clicked with most Americans that having George Bush in the White House-- whether one thought he was there legitimately or not-- happened two years ago. Rationally, no one can blame the hurricane part of Hurricane Katrina on Bush. But the catastrophe associated with it, for most Americans is what the Bush Regime is all about, at least domestically: incompetence plus an ineffectual philosophy of governance that works for the very rich and leaves everyone else out to dry-- or, in this case, drown.

Those who weren't sharp enough to understand that the mantra of Grover Norquist, the Bush Regime's Ideologue-in-Chief-- that line about shrinking government down so it was small enough to drown in a bath tub-- was actually playing out in New Orleans, might have still understood the nature of Bushism as it was expressed by the #1 Republican in the Congress, Planet Denny Hastert: "It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed." People, American citizens, were still dying in the streets when Hastert said there would be no federal help for New Orleans. The Bush Regime itself tried to present a kinder, gentler face and made all kinds of promises, but for them, of course, the tragedy of New Orleans was another way to enrich themselves, their cronies and campaign contributors.

Bush is the first American president to have lost an American city. His regime's efforts to rescue New Orleans have been as ineffectual as everything else they say they are trying to accomplish-- although the Insider self-enrichment they never talk about has proceeded at a healthy enough clip.  This morning's NY Times features Barack Obama's plan for the actual recovery in New Orleans. Bush's greatest domestic failure and broken symbol of whatever bond he had with the American people can only be highlighted by Obama's and other Democrats' plans to bring back one of the great American cities. It isn't something you have heard Romney, Giuliani, or any of the other pathetic pygmies™ discussing.

The Gulf Coast restoration, Mr. Obama said, has been weighed down by red tape that has kept billions of dollars from reaching Louisiana communities. As president, he said, he would streamline the bureaucracy, strengthen law enforcement to curb a rise in crime and immediately close the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet in order to restore wetlands to protect against storms.

Mr. Obama also said that he would seek to lessen the influence of politics in the Federal Emergency Management Agency by giving its director a fixed term, similar to the structure of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FEMA director would serve a six-year term, under Mr. Obama’s plan, and report directly to the president.

...“Let New Orleans be the place where we strengthen those bonds of trust, where a city rises up on a new foundation that can be broken by no storm,” Mr. Obama is planning to say Sunday, according to remarks provided by his aides. “Let New Orleans become the example of what America can do when we come together, not a symbol for what we couldn’t do.”

Tomorrow John Edwards and Hillary Clinton will both attend a summit conference dealing with the rebuilding of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Bush's Gulf Coast coordinator is in New Orleans, busy playing politics and insulting the state and city leadership. Of course all 9 of the pygmies™ are otherwise engaged, each somewhere rasing money from fat cat donors. Bush himself will be in Seattle desperately trying to resuscitate the wrecked career of one of his rubber stamp congressmen, Dave Reichert, a lackluster backbencher about to be swept from office by a brilliant and outspoken Darcy Burner, whose campaign is raising as much money this week from online donors as Reichert is from the wealthy contributors eager to get their pictures taken with Bush for $2,300 each. (You can help Darcy make a monkey of Bush here.)

THE WALTER REED CATASTROPHE-- PAR FOR THE COURSE, THE BUSH REGIME COURSE

I hope our country survives the two more years of Bush's horrible, stolen 8 years in office. His is the most venal and corrupt and incompetent presidency in history. No one, not a Democrat, not a Republican, not an independent is anything short of disgusted with how grotesquely the Bush Regime has handled our wounded servicemen coming back from the wars. No matter how anyone feels about Bush's attack on Iraq, no one is satisfied with his attack on the health he has launched against our wounded military men and women. Ken and I have both been writing about the disgrace of Walter Reed Hospital. Now we find out that is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to providing care for our veterans.

Monday's Washington Post paints a sickening picture. Torn gowns, broken wheel chairs, mold, mice, rot, a lack of trained nurses... this is becoming the emblem of Bush and his foul, stinking regime.

Stories of neglect and substandard care have flooded in from soldiers, their family members, veterans, doctors and nurses working inside the system. They describe depressing living conditions for outpatients at other military bases around the country, from Fort Lewis in Washington state to Fort Dix in New Jersey. They tell stories-- their own versions, not verified-- of callous responses to combat stress and a system ill equipped to handle another generation of psychologically scarred vets... Soldiers report bureaucratic disarray similar to Walter Reed's: indifferent, untrained staff; lost paperwork; medical appointments that drop from the computers; and long waits for consultations.

Sandy Karen was horrified when her 21-year-old son was discharged from the Naval Medical Center in San Diego a few months ago and told to report to the outpatient barracks, only to find the room swarming with fruit flies, trash overflowing and a syringe on the table. "The staff sergeant says, 'Here are your linens' to my son, who can't even stand up," said Karen, of Brookeville, Md. "This kid has an open wound, and I'm going to put him in a room with fruit flies?" She took her son to a hotel instead.

"My concern is for the others, who don't have a parent or someone to fight for them," Karen said. "These are just kids. Who would have ever looked in on my son?"

To give unending tax breaks for his wealthy corporate supporters Bush has made the V.A. system untenable. "Nearly 64,000 of the more than 184,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who have sought VA health care have been diagnosed with potential symptoms of post-traumatic stress, drug abuse or other mental disorders as of the end of June, according to the latest report by the Veterans Health Administration. Of those, nearly 30,000 have possible post-traumatic stress disorder, the report said." The Bush Regime wrecked the V.A. system and there is a current backlog of over 400,000 benefit claims. To Bush and his rich supporters it's all just socialism. The individual stories in the Post are heartbreaking.

So am I trying to say that Bush has something against our country's military? No, he doesn't-- he just hates people from the other side of the track-- all of us but the richest 5%. He has the utmost contempt for working people and the middle class that has made this country great. Look how he has continued to bungle the reconstruction of New Orleans.

My friend Michael goes down there for Mardi Gras every year and he writes a piece for my travel blog. "In its own way," he writes, "this trip was as lovely as all of my prior visits, despite the knowledge that so much has changed, will never be the same, and needs to be done to insure the town’s future." In fact so much needs to be done-- so many solemn promises need to be kept-- that the city has decided to sue the government for $77 billion. Residents claim that it was the failure of the Army Corps of Engineers to develop a river outlet into the outlying wetlands that destroyed ecosystems and turned the shipping channel into a funnel for surging waters when Katrina struck on August 29 2005 and that the Corps built substandard levees that failed to protect the city.

Bush is still mouthing meaningless platitudes-- "I committed to the people of this part of the world and the Gulf Coast that the federal government would fund recovery, and stay committed to the recovery-- while less than half the $110 billion dollars committed by Congress has been spent. And as my buddy Michael-- and everyone else-- points out, "outside the downtown tourist area, large areas of the city remain disrupted with violent crime and murders on the rise and access to healthcare limited."

But the richest 5% of Americans have gotten obscenely richer while Bush has been in power and vast segments of our society have come under unrelenting pressure.

UPDATE: WALTER REED SCANDAL-- CONGRESS CALLS BUSH ON THE CARPET

Jeff Feldman at the Frameshop has a report on the congressional hearings into how the Bush Regime has treated our wounded soldiers. If you missed the broadcast, Jeff's managed to capture the essential moments very well. He suggests we avoid falling victim to White House spin in the Walter Reed debate, discussing it in terms of our soldiers' experiences, not buildings that Bush can claim to be fixing (like he claims to be fixing New Orleans and Iraq). Jeff suggests certain words like:

• neglect
• abuse
• cruel
• emotional
• suffering
• heartbreaking
• people
• families
• Treated in ways "a dog didn't deserve."

And, Crooks and Liars has some videos up already, including one of Jack Cafferty who draws the same conclusion I did about Bush, Katrina and Walter Reed.


UPDATE: WHY DOES BUSH HATE OUR FIGHTING MEN AND WOMEN?

By the way, when did Dear Commander-in-Chief know and what did he do about it when he did know? And is he a lying sack of crap who should be impeached along with any congressman who doesn't work towards that end? Just asking. Cliff's got some answers... and some more questions.