October 2005: Fright Fest

Versions of this object suddenly hang from the women's room cubicles at work. On the inside of the cubicle doors—to instill seasonal cheer, while serving as a reminder of being observed here, too, it appears.

When she sees aggressively ugly made-in-China decorative objects, Clever Sister will say, "now that was made by the Falun Gong prisoners—it's a cry for help!"

At noon on the 18th, I watch Jesus' Best Administrative Assistant, Dr. G. Zuss, and two women from his research staff leave the premises. They're off to a Boss' Day lunch! I can see it in Jesus' BAA's face, which glows even more feverishly than usual. She undoubtedly arranged this, in her ceaseless pursuit of Rapture™ preparedness points.

An Irish journalist has been very naughty toward he who presumes he is Boss Of The Whole World. Carol Coleman describes in great detail White House minions' pre-taping orchestration of her ten minutes with Bush. Including the offer of a possible interview with Laura, held out to ensure Coleman's good behavior.

That offer is withdrawn after Coleman tries cutting through Bush's talking points with, "...there is a feeling that the world has become a more dangerous place because you have taken the focus off Al-Qaeda and diverted into Iraq. Do you not see that the world is a more dangerous place?"

The event going off White House script as it does, an official complaint is lodged with the Irish embassy.

In another British reporting effort—BBC: God told me to invade Iraq, Bush tells Palestinian ministers.

About that so very holy war, Greg Palast describes a behind-the-scenes battle in which the State Department plus oil industry power brokers conquered Pentagon neoconservatives. Causing a "switch to an OPEC-friendly policy for Iraq...driven by Dick Cheney himself." Palast concludes that—

...Cheney, far from "putting the squeeze on OPEC," has taken his de facto seat there, assenting by silence to the oil monopoly's piratical price gouging. But hasn't OPEC's stratospheric crude prices choked the life out of America's auto industry and bankrupted half a dozen airlines? In the Vice-President's bunker the elimination of jobs of Democratic-leaning union members is likely seen as a bonus for the good deed of boosting oil industry profits far above the ozone layer.

Staggering amounts of death and destruction always being a small price to be paid—by other people.

And of course civil liberties have been a casualty all along—beginning with the initial election that had to be stolen for this gang to take power. There are always new examples, small and large.

A North Carolina high school student's assignment to take photos illustrating the Bill of Rights gets him a visit from the Secret Service.

And James Yee's book is just out. In this Democracy Now interview, Yee tells how, as a Muslim chaplain in 2001, the army relied on him to educate soldiers being sent to Muslim countries. And how much his superiors respected his ability to bridge the culture gap.

After being stationed in Guatanamo, Yee witnessed conditions for prisoners deteriorate over his time there. And, he began to hear reports of Muslim personnel being detained when they returned to the U.S.

Which is what would happen to Yee. He was taken to the naval brig where the American "enemy combatants" Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi were also held. In the manner familiar from this, Yee was transported to the brig wearing sensory deprivation devices, then held in isolation for 76 days.

Ultimately, all phony charges were dropped. Yee–

But what’s important is why did they bring those accusations against me? Clearly, to divert attention away from what the real issue was, what the real problem was, that the U.S. military, the U.S. government, made this huge mistake. They wanted to divert attention away from that and discredit me, because they knew, ultimately, I had raised many concerns and complaints about the treatment of detainees to the command.

In other domestic horrors, it's only a couple of months since Katrina, but they've been profitable ones for some. Naomi Klein on Purging the Poor. And Bob Herbert on Bush's photo ops: Bush's Pledge? The Joke's on the Poor.

Rosa Parks, R.I.P. With all her generation had to fight against, there were parts of the media that sometimes felt moved to point to things considered shameful.

October 2004: A Nightmare On Pennsylvania Avenue

2004's Scariest Halloween Costumes...
With what's at stake in the coming election, a couple brave members of our Department try talking sense into Cruella and Jesus' Best Administrative Assistant.

Since one of these is faculty, Cruella puts on a show of listening, while the guy—who really is quite conservative—talks reality about Bush.

Another time, I hear a youngish guy talking to Cruella. I haven't seen him before, but know he is Not Faculty. He's quite soft spoken and I pick up almost nothing, except an occasional, "Bush" ... until Cruella explodes, "Of course you'll LIE! You're A DEMOCRAT!"

I've been biting my tongue for months—yet another reason to curse the length of American campaign seasons! Now, I can't take it any more. I get up, walk across the room, and say with as innocent an expression as I can muster, "Cruella, are we supposed to talk about politics at work?"

She blasts back: "Oh, we talk about it all the time!"

She pauses, as something occurs to her. Then: "Don't tell me I hired a LIBERAL?!"

I smile, say nothing, then: "Oh my gawd, I CAN'T BELIEVE WE HIRED A LIBERAL!!"

Me (slowly, patiently): "Cruella, what do you think 'liberal' means?"

Now, in all the years I will know her: ask a question, and she will unhesitatingly blurt out some load of bullshit. The less she knows about a subject, the more confident she is of her bullshit—of course, this personality identifies with Bush, or with any thug who never admits to being wrong.

But just this once, on being asked to explain what a "liberal" is, Cruella slows down and hedges enough to show she has no idea of how to even bullshit an answer: "Now... that's a... tricky definition ..."

Rescued as Ghengis walks through the door, she turns to him: "WE HIRED A LIBERAL!"

Ghengis jerks his head toward her: "In my office!" She follows him there, and the door closes.

For an uncomfortable moment I imagine they are discussing what to do about the LIBERAL in their midst. But I calm down, knowing they have bigger fish, so must be working on plans for the frying.

By now, the visitor has turned his attention to Jesus' BAA. Soon to be heard saying, "We did too find so many WMD in Iraq!"

It's painful to witness the know-nothingism on display. If there were ever a reckoning for Bush, et al, these people will be like the Germans who still say, "The only thing Hitler ever did wrong was to lose the war."

Meanwhile, their fine, upstanding party engages in stuff like this—

Terry Anderson, a Democrat running for a state Senate seat and a former hostage in Lebanon, walked out of a debate with the Republican incumbent, Senator Joy Padgett... over Ms. Padgett's use of a photograph of him with an official of the Hezbollah terrorist group. Mr. Anderson said that the photograph in a Padgett brochure suggested that he was soft on terrorism, when in fact the picture was taken when he returned to Lebanon to confront the terrorists who held him captive from 1985 to 1991.

This in Ohio—which in terms of national election-rigging efforts is shaping up to be the Republicans' latest version of 2000 Florida.

Columbus-based Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, on Twelve ways Bush is now stealing the Ohio vote—

The Republican "November Surprise" to steal the 2004 election is in full force here in Ohio. With polls showing a dead heat, the GOP is staging an all-out attack on a fair vote count in the Buckeye State.

Fitrakis and Wasserman outline some highly creative techniques for infringing on the voting rights of "the wrong people."

Methods ranging from this—

Under an archaic Ohio law, both the Republican and Democratic Parties, or any slate of five candidates, may embed official election challengers inside polling places. The New York Times reported on Oct. 23 that the Republican Party intends to place thousands of lawyers and other GOP faithfuls inside the polls to challenge voters. Republican insiders confide here that the key goal is to jam lines and frustrate new voters... This is certain to be a major tactic in Cleveland's Cuyahoga County and other Democratic strongholds. The GOP is not planning to challenge voters in Republican districts.

To this—

Secretary of State Blackwell ruled that any voter registration form on other than 80-pound weight bond paper would not be accepted. This is an old law left over from pre-scanning days. Many voters who had registered on lighter paper, had their registration returned, even though the forms had been officially sanctioned by local election boards.

Because—

No Republican has ever won the presidency without carrying Ohio. This year the GOP seems determined to win it, no matter what they have do to the electoral process.

The more intense the activity, the more likelihood of slipping up, and some GOP e-mail traffic becomes public—

OCTOBER, 2004: Recently, we at GeorgeWBush.org happened to notice that our mail server had a default "catch-all" mailbox, which for the past several months had been quietly gathering any and all e-mails addressed to [INSERT-ANYTHING-HERE]@georgewbush.org. We felt the need to share.

GeorgeWBush.org being another project of the whitehouse.org team.

Attached to two of the E-mails are spreadsheets labeled, "caging." These files contain names and addresses of Jacksonsville,FL residents of predominately black areas—evidence of plans to target these voters and keep them "caged," through election day challenges.

In the years to come, the caging planners will be rewarded with high positions in government, and in that criminal enterprise, the Republican Party.

This year, it's up to We The [wrong] People to spend every possible moment before deadlines registering new voters—in hope that increased numbers can outweigh the vote suppression efforts.

And it's up to us to convince everyone we know to vote Democratic.

A month ago, Clever Sister forwarded the plea she sent to an ex-pat friend who prides himself on not voting. Besides outlining just how bad things here have become in four years, CS sends thorough directions on overseas registration, absentee voting, and all possible voting options and sources of information.

Among her entreaties—

Bush stole the election by only 537 votes in Florida!
Every vote counts this year.
SO your vote could be the one that rids us of Bush.

In spite of the media spin & news blackout
NBC owned by GE
FOX very right wing
CNN Time Warner
50% of the country gets it & wants Bush out...

We spend every free hour working to defeat Bush –
don't let the polls fool you: they are bullshit!
They don't call people with cell phones, people with caller ID don't answer - they only call elderly republicans!

And I've been typing my fingers to the bone, trying to get through to a friend I've known since 6th grade. From all I know of her history, I would expect her to be turned off by the pitch to the authoritarian personality. But then again, decades of right-wing propaganda and corporate media consolidation have done their work.

It all leaves my friend, like so many, as easily misled—all her time is taken up by work and family problems. She isn't exposed to "news" until her husband tunes in Fox. She believes that she was able to repair the car and squeak by one more year because Bush gave her a "tax rebate." And, there's no convincing her the latter is actually an "advance," to be repaid many times over in the future.

And she keeps bringing up what her has husband told her: that gunshots were fired at a Bush campaign office. CS tracks that down as being reported only in TN: by local papers saying, by the way, there was a bank robbery in progress across the street!

That's all it takes to create a legend to terrify my friend, distracting her from the fact that she has a draft-age son. So I keep trying anything—excessive caps and all—to get her attention:

I met Max Cleland briefly at a rally a couple months ago. He's a Viet vet/TRIPLE AMPUTEE who was head of Vets' Admin, then senator from Georgia. He lost his Senate race in 2002 after Rove ran ads calling him unpatriotic & comparing him to Osama! He was very popular in Georgia, & the election was conducted on touch screens controlled by a Republican company, so it's probable that he actually won.

But I mention it because this gang slimes anyone they run against, and they MAKE UP EVERYTHING! There's absolutely no relation to reality, but they lie over & over until a lot of the public believes it.

I was just reading a long article about past campaigns by Rove, & the tactics he uses over & over (including a phony recount in '94). One time, Rove printed up smear literature against HIS OWN candidate, to make it look like the other side was pulling dirty tricks!

They're getting away with sending inadequately equipped troops to be sitting ducks. All the years Kerry's been in Congress, vets from all over the country (not just his own state) knew they could go to him when they had problems with the VA, & he's always helped them. But how many people who won't admit that Bush is exploiting the military will fall for the lies about Kerry? They have to paint him as opposite of what he is: someone who knows what war is like, deeply cares about vets, & wouldn't go looking for unnecessary wars.

And on that last point—there's new confirmation of what's seemed apparent all along—

Two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, who held many conversations with then-Texas Governor Bush in preparation for a planned autobiography.

"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, 'If I have a chance to invade?. If I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency." Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father's shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. "Suddenly, he's at 91 percent in the polls, and he'd barely crawled out of the bunker."
...

According to Herskowitz, George W. Bush's beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House - ascribed in part to now-vice president Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan. "Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade."

September 2008: Wrapped In The Flag And Carrying A Cross

Just in case there was ever doubt that Sinclair Lewis' line captured native facism precisely—Sarah Palin debuts on the national stage.

Photo: Joeff Davis

A week later, watertiger spots—

The Sarah Palin Superhero ACTION FIGURE? What is she, The Embezzler?

And about that skimpy outfit—

With the amounts she and her husband have been been stealing from Alaska, you'd think she'd be able to afford some pants.

And with the newly national scrutiny, one of the stories to emerge is that, under Mayor Palin, the city of Wasila charged rape victims for their forensic tests.

As the Republican Convention itself gets underway, Glenn Greenwald reports on 9/1—

Beginning last night, St. Paul was the most militarized I have ever seen an American city be, even more so than Manhattan in the week of 9/11 -- with troops of federal, state and local law enforcement agents marching around with riot gear, machine guns, and tear gas cannisters, shouting military chants and marching in military formations. Humvees and law enforcement officers with rifles were posted on various buildings and balconies. Numerous protesters and observers were tear gassed and injured.

Amy Goodman and two Democracy Now producers are among the journalists and hundreds of demonstrators arrested by those riot troops.

Before the regime skips town, the stage is being set for the final looting of the treasury. Ian Welsh on 9/20—

What I'm hearing is that the gun being held to Congress's head is the fear of a money market meltdown. These funds are integral to the economy, yes, but 700 billion is far more than is needed to bail them out...

So the gun that Paulson is holding to Congress's head, while not filled with blanks, is a BB gun. He's trying to stampede Congress into giving him more money and more power than he actually needs to fix the ostensible problem by acting as if there's no time to think through, or disaster will occur almost immediately.
Why?

Well, that 700 billion bails out Paulson's friends and colleagues at the highest levels (most of the little people will still lose their jobs). It preserves the world that Paulson worked in all his life. It means that Wall Street and the Banking industry doesn't have to change how they do business. The people in charge of it will stay in charge and they will stay rich.

A few months later, Matt Taibbi will illustrate that the Goldman Sachs previously led by Paulson has manipulated the market and been behind every economic bubble since the Great Depression.

I haven't been able to locate the quote, but one morning I hear a radio news clip of Paulsen making a Bushian threat, along the lines of, "I can't keep the economy safe if Congress doesn't authorize the money."

Yes, our economy and selves are in the safest of hands...

Hurricane Ike slams Texas, and local authorities have taken their lessons from the Feds' Katrina record. As seen in the apparent effort at cleansing undesirables—

Galveston Island residents were told to flee Hurricane Ike or face "certain death," but the Sheriff has inexplicably decided not to evacuate 1,000 prisoners from the county jail, even though serious flooding has already begun.

It's bad enough to risk the inmates' lives, but downright bizarre to me that the Sheriff is willing to risk his deputies...

As well as learning the lesson of muzzling media coverage of fatalities.

September 2007: "It's That Time Again"

September 11: time again, says watertiger, for
"A moment of silence"...

(Photo: AP/Charles Dharapak)

Whitehouse.org Newsroom stops adding new material this month. This, after more than six years of channeling the Bush inner frat boy accurately—if far more articulately than the original.

The news reports end on 9-14, with President Addresses Nation on the Way Forward to Surging Back Towards Desperately Spinning the Clusterfuck That is Vietraq.

Which followed the President's Remarks Preceding Moment of Compulsory Silence Commemorating Annual Orgy of 9/11™ Patrio-Grief, and the 9/6 Transcript of President's Call of Support to Un-Resigning, Embattled Family Values Warrior Senator Larry Craig of Idaho.

Craig resigns, then takes it back and returns to the Senate.

The Minneapolis airport men's room experiences a tourism boom.

"After all, I have my reputation to maintain"—as watertiger puts it—Craig being back at work in time to vote against the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes bill.

Since mid-August, peaceful protests in Burma continued to grow, under the leadership of Buddhist monks. The brutal crackdown begins September 26.

In Finding George Orwell in Burma, Emma Larkin writes of traveling the country and meeting people who joke bitterly that Burmese Days was not the only book Orwell wrote about the place.

From a Mother Jones review—

What Larkin discovers is, well, Orwellian. Describing the junta, she writes, "The grand plan, if there is a plan at all, is to abolish the power of thinking." In Mandalay she finds a George Orwell book club debating the author’s legacy. Not surprisingly, 1984 is banned there, but a book collector digs up an old copy of Animal Farm, calling it "a very Burmese book... Because it is about pigs and dogs ruling the country!"

Published under a pseudonym, with concealed identities of quoted Burmese, Larkin's book is a touching, sad read.

If his experiences in Burma were what inspired Orwell's most significant work, the "Orwellian" practices he discovered there are not unique—not with their usefulness to repressive rulers everywhere.

It's "abolish the power of thinking" that the "senior Bush aide" of Ron Suskind's interview is talking about, when he says of journalists—

"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."

September 2006: Safety Last

"Security Kiosk Fail"

It's the fifth anniversary of the jewel of Bush's Trifecta. And with mid-term elections on the way, there's a panic level in need of being stepped up.

Andrew Greeley called it correctly in September 2002: Media ignored calm amid the 9/11 chaos—

In some sense, Sept. 11 was a victory over the terrorists. Socially responsible free Americans prevented the loss from being much worse. Yet, the response of the planning agencies has been to establish more and more elaborate command-and-control structures, which will force a population that is not about to panic into panic behavior.
...

The media got the story all wrong because the panic paradigm is still pervasive and because no one in the media had read the disaster-research literature. They thus reinforced the propensity of those running the country not to trust the good sense and social concern of ordinary folk. Rather, they want to control everything with such ditsy ideas as the proposed Homeland Security Department. That plan would take union and civil service protections away from government workers and accomplish little else.

In no time flat our country became "The Homeland," without comment from the major media. Forgetting for a moment the massive theft it's enabled, the term in itself is deeply disturbing. And since 2001 I've only seen two guesses at the origins of the term.

Back in 2002, in The Strange Career of "Homeland Security," Margie Burns suggested that the term originated from the Institute for Homeland Security, a military contracting-CIA-Sun Myung Moon connected group, founded in 1999.

And while conducting this interview, Thom Hartmann quotes—

...Rudolf Hess introducing Adolf Hitler in 1934 at the Nuremburg rallies. This is from Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" movie...Notice the word "Heimat". And then he says, 'für alle Deutschen in der ganze Welt': 'All of the Germans in the entire world'. "Dank ihrer Führung" – thanks to our Führer – wird Deutschland sein Ziel erreichen, Heimat zu sein". 'Heimat zu sein' – a homeland here we have. "Heimat zu sein für alle Deutschen der Welt. Heil Hitler! Seig Heil! Sieg Heil!" And then he introduces Hitler and Hitler gets up and speaks and starts using the word 'homeland' for the very first time. And I don't remember the world 'homeland' ever being used in the context of the United States before now.

Barbara Bush may have said it in a very different context, but it's certainly the case that "This is working out very well for them." Only too true, when—Thom Hartmann again—Bush has "used 9/11 as his own 'Reichstag fire' to gut the Constitution and enhance the power and wealth of his corporate cronies..."

Which brings us to the upcoming vote on the Military Commissions bill, which Glenn Greenwald calls, The legalization of torture and permanent detention.

Mark Danner later writes a piece about the International Red Cross report on torture of detainees in CIA custody. The report is released in 2007, and Danner's article appears in 2009. But Danner notes (in section 4 of the article) how much we knew, so many years earlier—

News of the "black sites" first appeared prominently in the press—on the front page of The Washington Post —in December 2002...A year and a half later, after the publication and broadcast of the Abu Ghraib photographs—the one moment in the last half-dozen years when the torture story, thanks to the lurid images, became "televisual"—a great wave of leaks swept into public view hundreds of pages of "secret" documents about torture and the Bush administration's decision-making regarding it... There have been many important "revelations" since, but none of them has changed the essential fact: by no later than the summer of 2004, the American people had before them the basic narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government decided to torture prisoners and how they went about it.

In other doings of the Family Values Party, sexual harasser of male congressional pages, Mark Foley resigns. Fellow Republicans have covered up his behavior for at least six years—after learning about it from a page in 2000.

It's not long before Fox News footage labels Foley, "Democrat."

While there's this, from the godly Dallas area—

FRISCO, Texas -- An award-winning Texas art teacher who was reprimanded after one of her fifth-grade students saw a nude sculpture during a trip to a museum has lost her job.

The school board in Frisco has voted not to renew Sydney McGee's contract after 28 years.

September 2005 (II): Cui Bono NOLA

No matter how much horror the regime has unleashed there, Iraq is far away—and easily ignored by most Americans, who can't even pronounce the name.

A disaster at home, compounded by the regime's lack of interest—that got more attention, at least early on.
Mario Tama/Getty Images

But with the residents most affected being poor and the wrong color, it was easy for New Orleans to end up treated as Baghdad.

The Wall Street Journal on no-bid contracts, subhead: "White House uses practices criticized in Iraq rebuilding for hurricane-related jobs."

Mike Davis' The Predators of New Orleans is all too familiar—

...The speed with which Washington suspended the prevailing wage standards of the Davis-Bacon Act and swung open the doors of New Orleans to corporate looters such as Halliburton, the Shaw Group, and Blackwater Security, already fat from the spoils of the Tigris, contrasted obscenely with FEMA's deadly procrastination over sending water, food and buses to the multitudes trapped in the stinking hell of the Louisiana Superdome.

Also familiar: U.S. agency blocks photos of New Orleans dead.

As are grim predictions of a poisoned environment—Cover-up: toxic waters 'will make New Orleans unsafe for a decade'

And on the subject of the environment, David Helvarg's text and photos are a must.

Mike Davis: "The death of New Orleans had been forewarned; indeed no disaster in American history had been so accurately predicted in advance." The regime's deafness to warnings, too, is just like Iraq. As it is just like 9-11.

Davis reviews the scientific research preceding Katrina—work that had been stepped up ever since "a close call with Hurricane Georges" in 1998.

Of course, just as in Iraq—and the post-9-11 security biz—disaster is of use to the same players. In the Washington Post on September 8: Former FEMA Chief Is at Work on Gulf Coast.

Mike Davis—

When Republicans took over [FEMA]...in 2001, it was treated as enemy terrain: the new director, former Bush campaign manager Joe Allbaugh [my bold], decried disaster assistance as "an oversized entitlement program" and urged Americans to rely more upon the Salvation Army and other faith-based groups. Allbaugh cut back many key flood and storm mitigation programs, before resigning in 2003 to become a highly-paid consultant to firms seeking contracts in Iraq.

"An inveterate ambulance-chaser," Davis says of Allbaugh and his present activities in Louisiana. Timothy Noah calls him a "disaster pimp".

The scenes from New Orleans are so shocking, that parts of the media are closer than usual to doing their job.

But the skin color of so many of the victims will not be overlooked for long.

Side-by-side AP photo captions: white people "find" supplies; black people "loot" them.

Congressman Richard Baker (R, Confederacy): "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."

By mid-month—Karl Rove is "in charge of the reconstruction effort." Dan Froomkin—

Rove's leadership role suggests quite strikingly that any and all White House decisions and pronouncements regarding the recovery from the storm are being made with their political consequences as the primary consideration. More specifically: With an eye toward increasing the likelihood of Republican political victories in the future, pursuing long-cherished conservative goals, and bolstering Bush's image.

Along with the political operation's work, hate radio and the rest of the right-wing media are there to demonize the victims in the minds of the credulous millions they reach.

This story does come out: Police in Suburbs Blocked Evacuees, Witnesses Report.

More to the point, even if a quote, the UK Independent says, 'Racist' police blocked bridge and forced evacuees back at gunpoint.

And the entire account is here. Written by emergency service workers who happened to be attending a conference and "spent most of the next week trapped by the flooding--and the martial law cordon around the city." They observe—

...What you will not see [in media accounts], but what we witnessed, were the real heroes and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: the working class of New Orleans.

The maintenance workers who used a forklift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators. Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, "stealing" boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters. Mechanics who helped hotwire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the city. And the food service workers who scoured the commercial kitchens, improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded.

Most of these workers had lost their homes and had not heard from members of their families. Yet they stayed and provided the only infrastructure for the 20 percent of New Orleans that was not under water.

Since "A Thousand Points of Light" don't fill Republican off-shore accounts, FEMA interferes with volunteer relief efforts. As in, Doctor says FEMA ordered him to stop treating hurricane victims.

Services of volunteer morticians are spurned, as a contract is given to a Bush- (and Funeralgate-) connected company.

Late in the month, there are some press efforts at debunking the previous scare stories about flood victims as criminals. Seattle Times: Reports of anarchy at Superdome overstated. The article is much stronger than the headline—

The vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees — mass murders, rapes and beatings — have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law-enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know.

"I think 99 percent of it is [expletive]," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. "Don't get me wrong — bad things happened. But... 99 percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved."

The LA Times: Katrina Takes a Toll on Truth, News Accuracy—

Hyperbolic reporting spread through much of the media.

Fox News, a day before the major evacuation of the Superdome began, issued an "alert" as talk show host Alan Colmes reiterated reports of "robberies, rapes, carjackings, riots and murder. Violent gangs are roaming the streets at night, hidden by the cover of darkness."

The Los Angeles Times adopted a breathless tone the next day in its lead news story, reporting that National Guard troops "took positions on rooftops, scanning for snipers and armed mobs as seething crowds of refugees milled below, desperate to flee. Gunfire crackled in the distance."

..."I don't think you can overstate how big of a disaster New Orleans is," said Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute, a Florida school for professional journalists. "But you can imprecisely state the nature of the disaster.

...[Major Ed] Bush, of the National Guard, said that reports of corpses at the Superdome filtered back to the facility via AM radio, undermining his struggle to keep morale up and maintain order.

But, Bush said, those stories received scant attention in newspapers or on television.

"We had to convince people this was still the best place to be," Bush said. "What I saw in the Superdome was just tremendous amounts of people helping people."

And of reported attacks on journalists—committed almost entirely by police, as seen in the National Press Photographers Association's account.

Digby looks at history's repeating itself in the fear of supposed black mobs hampering rescue work—and the right-wing media's exploitation of the fear.

And Atrios runs a Rick Perlstein piece, rejected as an op-ed by outlets that normally publish him. Perlstein tells how a friend, doing volunteer work at a Gulf Coast shelter, reports the comments heard from local whites: that "local" women should be kept away from the shelter; that "gangs of blacks" are "harassing" business owners; that the shelter was "where they put all the criminals." Perlstein's reaction—

I immediately got that uncanny feeling: where had I heard things like this before?

The answer is: in my historical research about racial tensions forty years ago. I'm writing a book against the backlash against liberalism and civil rights in the 1960s. One of the things I've studied is race riots. John Schmidhauser, a former congressman from rural Iowa, told me about the time, in the summer of 1966, he held a question and answer session with constituents. Violence had broken out in the Chicago ghetto, and one of the farmers asked his congressman about an insistent rumor:

"Are they going to come out here on motorcycles?"

It's a funny image, a farmer quaking at the vision of black looters invading the cornfields of Iowa. But it's also awfully serious. The key word here is "they." It's a fact of life: in times of social stress when solid information is scarce, rumors fill the vacuum. Rumors are evidence of panic. The rumors only fuel further panic. The result, especially when the rumors involved are racial, can be a deadly stew of paranoia.

...One of the most riveting early accounts of conditions in New Orleans was an email sent around by Dr. Greg Henderson. "We hear gunshots frequently," he wrote. It wasn't long before that got transformed, in the dissemination, into: doctors get shot at frequently. An Army Times article reported that desperate evacuees at the Superdome, terrified that losing their place in line might mean losing their life, "defecated where they stood." Now, it's easy, if you take a moment to think about it, to understand that happening to people, perhaps elderly and sick, under unendurable conditions of duress. As circulated on the Internet, however, another interpretation takes shape: these people are not like us. Them. Savages that, if they come to your town, might just be capable of anything. Even if they are just lost, confused people, in desperate need of help.

Meanwhile, Bush orders over a week of flags flown at half-staff for Rehnquist.

Photo: Alan Chin, from a gallery of NOLA images here.

September 2005 (I): Job Opportunities

The University presents me with a one-year of employment commemorative key ring, bearing the official seal. I find the reverse view the more appropriate one, what with its suggestion of a ball-and-chain motif.

Rehnquist conveniently dies this month, giving Bush the opportunity to withdraw John Roberts' nomination to Sandra Day O'Connor's former seat, and re-nominate Roberts to the Chief Justice gig. An ideologue young enough to have decades of sabotaging the country ahead of him.

Court is in session next month, creating yet another opportunity: to speed up the ramming of this appointment through Congress.

Democracy Now reviews Roberts' record. A major anti-abortion activist and one-half—his lawyer wife being the other half—of a forced birth power couple. Among his past efforts—

Roberts wrote the government’s brief in a 1991 case in which the Supreme Court held that government could prohibit doctors and clinics who receive federal funds from discussing abortion with their patients...

Roberts also co-authored a brief in the Supreme Court on behalf of the government in support of the anti-choice group Operation Rescue and six individuals who had obstructed access to reproductive health care clinics.

Some other things he's been up to—

During his time at the Washington law firm Hogan & Harston, Roberts practiced telecommunications, energy and other business law. The Wall Street Journal reports that business leaders who recently began reviewing records of the White House finalist list placed Roberts at the top of their candidate list.

Roberts may also have played a key role in the disputed 2000 presidential election. While his name did not appear on any of the briefs during the Florida recount, three unidentified sources told the Washington Post Roberts gave Gov. Jeb Bush critical advice on how the Florida legislature could name George W. Bush the winner at time when Republicans feared the courts might force a different choice.

...Roberts was part of a three-judge panel that handed Bush an important victory…when it ruled that the military tribunals of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, could proceed. The decision also found that Bush could deny terrorism captives prisoner-of-war status as outlined by the Geneva Conventions.

Danny Schecter asks, What Did Roberts Do in Florida? And posts screen shots from video suggesting Roberts was among the "Brooks Brothers" thugs as they shut down the 2000 recount. This appears on 9/29: the day Roberts will be confirmed and sworn in.

Thuggery from 2000, which of course made 2004 a cinch...Clever Sister forwards this, observing, "this is more proof that they stole the election - why is Cheney thinking of Kerry right now?"

In Mississippi, during a press conference, after telling the press that what needs to be done, gets done. A resident walked up to the gaggle and said this:

"Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cheney!! Go fuck yourself!!!

Cheney looked pissed. Really pissed.

A reporter then asked him, "Do you get that a lot, Mr. Cheney?"

He replied, "That's the first time I've heard it. Must be a friend of John er.. uh.. never mind."

There's a new investigation of Army prisoner abuse. Digby adds—

...I don't want to hear any more bullshit about "Lord of the Flies" in New Orleans. It's pretty clear that even our own highly disciplined military can lose their humanity without a whole lot of provocation. These weren't dipshit national guard hicks either. This was the 82nd Airborn. No excuses.

As much as Katrina revealed the ugly underbelly of poverty and race in the country, 9/11 revealed the ugly underbelly of sadism and blind fury. This is a sick culture.

A sickness she's looked at here and here, regarding online warporn, and military consumption of violent sexual images. In the context of dehumanizing the "enemy," and,

The fact that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney said, "we're taking the gloves off" certainly created an environment in which the rule of law seemed to have been completely tossed aside. This country went temporarily insane after 9/11. I guess the military hierarchy lost its bearings too, which I find surprising since the highest levels of the officer corps are steeped in the lessons of Vietnam and presumably understood that this was likely the road to perdition.

...Sadly, I think our sick culture at this point is actually rewarding those who decry the sense of personal responsibility that leads a soldier to speak out against depraved behavior --- and excuse barbaric, cruel behavior as a normal way to relieve tension.

Like Rush Limbaugh who says:

I think the reaction to the stupid torture is an example of the feminization of this country.

[...]

You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?

And finally: there have been actual prosecutions, and sentencings this month, of Lynndie England, et. al., for abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The only prosecutions of course, and of "dipshit hicks"—who couldn't get work at Walmart, but just happened to pack leashes in preparation for their jobs in Eye-raq.