UnFairWitness

Bill Bennett's racist remarks

 

I wasn't going to comment on Bill Bennett's ugly, racist faux pas, but good lord, some people are trying to defend this garbage. 

CALLER: I noticed the national media, you know, they talk a lot about the loss of revenue, or the inability of the government to fund Social Security, and I was curious, and I've read articles in recent months here, that the abortions that have happened since Roe v. Wade, the lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30-something years, could fund Social Security as we know it today. And the media just doesn't -- never touches this at all.

BENNETT: Assuming they're all productive citizens?

CALLER: Assuming that they are. Even if only a portion of them were, it would be an enormous amount of revenue.

BENNETT: Maybe, maybe, but we don't know what the costs would be, too. I think as -- abortion disproportionately occur among single women? No.

CALLER: I don't know the exact statistics, but quite a bit are, yeah.

BENNETT: All right, well, I mean, I just don't know. I would not argue for the pro-life position based on this, because you don't know. I mean, it cuts both -- you know, one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up. Well --

CALLER: Well, I don't think that statistic is accurate.

BENNETT: Well, I don't think it is either, I don't think it is either, because first of all, there is just too much that you don't know. But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.

Cole says: "There is nothing for him to apologize for regarding this statement. It is a statement of fact, he was not advocating it, and, in fact, he noted that it would be an “impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do.”"  Cole goes on to say that an analogous situation would be "if you wanted to lower the rates of obesity in the United States, you could shoot all fat people."

First of all, it is most certainly NOT a fact that if every black baby in the US were aborted, crime would go down, for the very obvious, one would think even to a conservative, reason that babies don't commit crimes, now do they?  Or have Republicans passed some felony colic law while I wasn't looking?    And to make your fat analogy work, you'd have to shoot people who were at risk of getting fat sometime in the future.  Admittedly, that would be difficult to sort out, but if you stalk enough McDonald's drive-thrus and cookie aisles  at the grocery and pro-war Republican rallies and killed enough of those people you might be able  to execute enough future-fatties to make a difference.

No, what immediately popped into Bennett's murderous, authoritarian mind was that typically violent conservative impulse to eliminate problems by killing people, rather like his statement that beheading drug dealers was morally permissible. 

Just as George WMD Bush wants to preemptively nuke people unfortunate enough to have governments  on the Republican regime-change list (only after studying the very best intelligence, I'm sure), Bill Bennett fantasizes aloud about  preemptively killing people to reduce the crime rate in the US. 

Now, to see why Bennett's statement is racist, you have to look at the question that set him off on his exegesis of death as a solution to society's problems.  His sycophant caller had stated, assuming that Bennett would agree, no doubt, that, "the abortions that have happened since Roe v. Wade, the lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30-something years, could fund Social Security as we know it today."

And Bennett's response? "Assuming they're all productive citizens?"

Ah, productive citizens - no shiftless layabout babies.  Republicans hate those.   Next, "Maybe, maybe, but we don't know what the costs would be, too. I think as -- abortion disproportionately occur among single women? No." 

So, Bennett's thinking about demographics and abortion and, wait!  He read a book about that!  "....one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up." 

In Freakonomics, a lightweight pop-economics book, the argument that legalized abortion reduced crime rates was not racialized, but it's clear what Bennett was thinking when he read it.    And here, you get to peer into the abyss of the "conservative" mind as Bennett connects the dots.  He blathers on, "I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down."

As disgusting and unworthy of defense as Bennett's train of thought clearly was, Matt Yglesias is also inspired to defend it: "Not only is Bennett clearly not advocating a campaign of genocidal abortion against African-Americans, but the empirical claim here is unambiguously true. Similarly, if you aborted all the male fetuses, all those carried by poor women, or all those carried by Southern women, the crime rate would decline."

Oh, sure, let Bennet get away with gluing the figleaf of "an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do" back over his ass.   Why would anyone defend this line of thinking?  One might as well point out that Hiroshima was crime-free after August 6, 1945.  So what?  Another  way to eliminate crime is to simply lock everyone up or kill them.  Does anyone think that Bill Bennett hasn't thought of that?

Let's just reduce Bennett's "reasoning" down to the bones, why don't we?  Just kill all the poor women, all the black women, all the single women and any other women who might get pregnant and bring little criminals into the world.  Why take chances that they'll get pregnant again? 

Then you'd have the perfect conservative utopia.

AntiWar Rally coverage

UPDATE:  truthout just posted this photo:

C-Span is streaming live coverage of the Rally in Washington DC here.

William Rivers Pitt is live-blogging here and here.

UK Indymedia is posting reports on the London Rally here.

*****


UPDATE: 
WRP posts a little after noon:

Saturday 24 September 2005 12:06 PM

    The march just got huge all of a sudden. Medea Benjamin has taken control of things here on the street. Cindy Sheehan just took the stage and the whole place went berzerk.

There are still people making staements to a dwindling, bored looking crowd on the ANSWER stage on C-Span.  Is that the way these things always go?

UPDATE:
Scott Galindez says that the march is huge:

Mammoth
    By Scott Galindez

    Saturday 24 September 2005 1:54 PM

Huge is an understatement. The march has surrounded the White House. Hundreds of thousands. This is the largest march I have seen in the over two decades that I have been attending.

    The crowd is diverse. A true cross section of American culture.

    Too Big
    By William Rivers Pitt

    Saturday 24 September 2005 1:46 PM

The march is unable to move because there are so many people coming in from all directions. Constitution Avenue is a wall of humanity. I am up on the hill that holds the Washington Monument, looking down on the crowd. This is a massive, massive showing.

    Hot damn.

BradBlog has some of the earlier speeches from the Rally posted up if you missed them.  Cindy Sheehan is one of them.  You can also read Cindy's speech here.

UPDATE:An indymedia reporter in the march says he is seeing many families who say they came out because of Cindy Sheehan. Organizers with ANSWER are reporting that more than 250,000 people have come to march, with a crowd stretching 20 blocks.

Flooding in NOLA - Levees may breach

Water pouring into Ninth Ward; waist high and rising

  Water poured over a patched levee Friday, cascading into one of the   city's lowest-lying neighborhoods and heightening fears that Hurricane   Rita would re-flood this devastated city.

"Our worst fears came true. The levee will breach if we keep on the   path we are on right now, which will fill the area that was flooded   earlier," Barry Guidry with the Georgia National Guard.

Dozens of blocks in the Ninth Ward were under water as a waterfall at   least 30 feet wide poured over a dike that had been used to patch breaks   in the Industrial Canal. On the street that runs parallel to the canal,   the water ran waist-deep and was rising fast.

Riding out the storm on the highway

What happens when a couple of million people get in their cars and drive out of a city at once?  Well, they all run out of gas at about the same time, for one thing.  Here's how the Powers the Be intend to address the thousands of cars out of gas on the Houston area freeways:

"Now is not the time to get into your car to start the evacuation," White said. "We will get people who are stranded on the roadside off the roadside before the storm comes in," he said. "That is our commitment."

Gas stations along some of the major roads out of Houston and Beaumont, to the east, were running low on gas, said Steven McCraw, director of the governor's division of emergency management.

"We've traveled approximately 20 miles in nine hours with two sheepdogs," said Nick Nichols, who headed out of Houston at 6 a.m. on Thursday. "The orders were to evacuate from Houston, and ... we're out here on a parking lot."

The two National Guard tanker trucks, each carrying 5,000 gallons of gas, were sent at daybreak Friday to help thousands of people who had run low on gas while trying to evacuate, said Chief Master Sgt. Gonda Moncada, spokeswoman for the national guard.

The trucks were sent out to help motorists on Interstates 10, 45, 59 and 290, Moncada said.

Because nozzles on the military vehicles were too large to provide fuel to civilian vehicles, 1-inch nozzles had to be flown in, she said.

Moncada said that 10,000 gallons of gas might not be enough to help everyone who needs it.

TWO TANKER TRUCKS?  Yeah, that'll help.  So, now the city of Houston has evacuated partially to the highways, so people can face Rita in their CARS. 

And I-45, the main interstate north out of Houston, looks like this, just south of Dallas:

Yes, that's a bus full of Rita evacuees.  Most news reports describe the start of the fire as an "explosion" and the Houston Chronicle says the bus was full of frail, elderly evacueees, one of whom's oxygen tanks may have exploded after the bus developed a brake fire.

Running from Rita

Will Bunch rightly rants about the plight of Hortense, marooned in the Houston Greyhound terminal. 

The 73-year-old woman called the Red Cross today to find out what she should do about the storm. She said she was told to go to the bus station and tell them she had no money and needs to get out of the city.

"But when I got here, they said they couldn't help me," she said. "So now I'm just sitting here."

And now the bus terminal is closed.  Here's a current photo of the Houston bus terminal on the Houston Chronicle's Rita section:

Rick Bowmer / Associated Press

Samantha Thomas, 9, center, is followed by her mother Melissa Thomas and her brother Ryan as they wait outside the closed Greyhound terminal in Houston today. They were hoping another bus would arrive to aid in their evacuation from Hurricane Rita.

To top things off, about a hundred TSA gropers and luggage thiefs didn't show up for work today, so the airports are in chaos. Maybe the "authorities" forgot that when you issue a mandatory evacuation order people do things like evacuate, which would tend to make them absent from their jobs.

Will asks, "Where are the buses? Where's Michael Chertoff, and where's R. David Paulison? Most important, where's Bush? Rita is about 39 hours from land. Somebody needs to get their asses moving. And focus."

But, it's too late.  Even if buses could get to coastal Texas, they couldn't leave, because every highway is gridlocked.  It's taking people so long to get a few miles down the road that they're running out of gas after inching along for hours.  People are sitting in traffic jams that haven't moved so long that they're out walking around and playing football in the medians.  The gas stations near the highways are out of fuel, so some cars are stalling out in place in the snarled traffic, creating further obstacles.   Cernig at Newshog, blogging from San Antonio, points out the ironic possibility of evacuees riding out Rita in their cars on the highways.

UPDATE:  A poignant post on DKos by a man trapped in Houston tells the story better than any news report:

I didn't want to be one of those people standing on the roof of my house, holding up signs written in my own excrement screaming "Help Us" to the TV cameras. I didn't want to be one of those who insisted on sticking it out for reasons of ego, avarice or whatever.

But all routes out of Houston are now at a dead stop. We planned to leave the city early this morning using back routes that lay between I-45 and US 290 - the standard evacuation routes for our region - in hopes of avoiding the crush of traffic on the freeways. That did not work. We took 3 hours to move maybe 10 miles; we took only 20 minutes to return home. Barring some miracle where suddenly the roads clear up again (and even with opening all lanes northbound, I do not expect that to happen), we will be staying now.

Ironically, it was a relief knowing that we were no longer going to fight with 2 million other Texans for hundreds of miles on end. But now the sense of doom is setting in, as we now turn our attention to survival rather than escape. It feels like being on the Titanic before it goes down, only in slow motion and under a 90 degree Texas sun.

I definitely had other plans.

 

Read the rest....

Edgar Hollingsworth, RIP

Edgar Hollingsworth didn't make it.

Read Will Bunch's account of Edgar Hollingsworth's rescue from New Orleans.

What's going on in Basra?

Juan Cole (start at the link and read the next two posts as well) has assembled a timeline of events in Basra which is helpful in understanding yesterday's chaos, while lenin parses MOD's ongoing bizarre series of statements. 

As yet, the Iraqi and British stories are still at odds.

Mohammed al-Waili, the governor of Basra province, condemned the British for raiding the prison, an act he called "barbaric, savage and irresponsible"

"A British force of more than 10 tanks backed by helicopters attacked the central jail and destroyed it. This is an irresponsible act," al-Waili said, adding that the British force had spirited the prisoners away to an unknown location.

In other violence in Basra, an Iraqi journalist working for the New York Times was killed in a manner frighteningly similar to the murder of Steve Vincent after men claiming to be police officers abducted him from his home.  The Times reports:

An Iraqi journalist investigating the infiltration of Basra's police force by extremists from the Shia militia was abducted and killed by masked men who identified themselves as police.

Fakher Haider, a 38-year-old Shia Muslim reporter covering Basra for The New York Times, was found dead with his hands bound and a bag over his head in a deserted area on the city’s outskirts yesterday morning.

On Sunday, Haider filed reports about the angry demonstrations that followed the arrest by British forces of two high-ranking members of the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to the hardline Shia cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

Shortly after midnight, two cars - one unmarked, the other a police car - were driven up to his apartment building. Three men, carrying AK-47 assault rifles, ransacked the flat removing mobile phones and videotapes.

Haider, a father with three children aged 5, 7and 9, told his wife not to worry as he was led outside and bundled into one of the waiting vehicles.

Hours later, she was called to identify his body at the city morgue. He appeared to have been shot more than once in the head. His back was bruised, suggesting he had been beaten.

In recent months, Haider had confided to friends that he was worried about the increasingly violent atmosphere in Basra. In July, gunmen in a pick-up truck chased his car and fired at him - he escaped after driving off-road and firing his pistol into the air, he told a friend.

Many of Haider's most recent photographs, showing British military vehicles targeted in Basra, had been published on the ironically-titled They Love Us Really website which highlights the difficult relationship between locals and the coalition forces.

Among the images is a chilling picture of US consulate workers loading the body of Steven Vincent, a freelance journalist attached to the New York Times who was executed in Basra last month, into the back of an ambulance.

Vincent, too, had been inquiring into the extent to which the police force in Basra had become a tool of Shia extremists. Their deaths have taken on an enhanced political significance with the breakdown of relations between the local police force and British troops based in the city following yesterday's prison ram-raid.

The website the Times mistakenly reports as "They Love Us Really" is actually Crisis Pictures.  Here's the page of Basra photos, including the Steve Vincent shots.

Meltdown in Basra

Times reports:

Two British undercover soldiers were arrested in by Iraqi authorities in Basra today after exchanging gunfire with Iraqi police and killing one, officials said.

The arrests prompted British troops to send a military patrol to the police station where the soldiers are being held which then led to a riot, during which two British tanks were set on fire, according to witnesses.

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An Iraqi official told the Reuters news agency that the two British soldiers, who were travelling in a civilian car, were detained this morning. The official said he had been informed by the British military that they were undercover soldiers.

"They were driving a civilian car and were dressed in civilian clothes when a shooting took place between them and Iraqi patrols," he said. "We are investigating and an Iraqi judge is on the case questioning them."

A Basra police source said the two men, who he said were wearing Arab costume, had opened fired at a police patrol when they were asked to stop. Photographs of the British soldiers showed them with light beards. One of them was wearing bandage around his head.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence confirmed that two British soldiers were in Iraqi custody but said he was unsure of the circumstances of their arrest.

"We are urgently liaising with the Iraqis to find out what is happening," said the spokesman, who declined to comment on reports of the events that followed the arrests.

Ismail al-Waili, head of Basra's Security Committee, told the Associated Press that once news of the gun battle spread, British soldiers surrounded the building where men are being held and a crowd quickly gathered.

Reports and television pictures showed the crowd pelting the British vehicles with stones and setting two tanks on fire. Soldiers could be seen scrambling out of the tanks.

itv adds:

The tank is seen coming under attack, apparently from petrol bombs.   

A crowd gathers around the tank as it tries to reverse away from trouble.

Within moments the top of the tank was ablaze, although it was not clear if the vehicle itself was on fire or if the flames came from materials burning on top of the tank.

One soldier climbed out of the tank's hatch and jumped clear of it, as the crowd pelted him with stones.

AWC reader DB sends in this additional Yahoo photo:

All the Iraqi constitutions

Riverbend is blogging about the draft Iraqi constitutions.

"We took this convention center down"

Since some of the sludge has subsided in New Orleans and some survivor stories have begun to trickle in, it's possible to find a new perspective in some of the statements made during the worst of the disaster the government made of the rescue effort.  I didn't see this particular briefing at the time it was made, but I was enraged and sickened when I came across it today.  This is  Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, chief, National Guard Bureau, who oversaw the National Guard response in NOLA, briefing the Department of Defense on Saturday, September 3rd, the day after Bush did his "tour" of the area.  Remember that until the Friday (Sept 2) that Blum is talking about, no National Guard troops set foot in New Orleans. Here's why (emphasis mine):

Defense Department Briefing on Ongoing National Guard Response to Hurricane Katrina

GEN. BLUM:  Good morning gentlemen.  I just got back late last evening from New Orleans and the stricken areas in Mississippi along the Gulf Coast, and if you want I’ll give you a quick assessment of what we’ve seen--Dramatic changes in the last 36 hours.  The security situation in New Orleans continues to improve. The most contentious issues were lawlessness in the streets, and particularly a potentially very dangerous volatile situation in the convention center where tens of thousands of people literally occupied that on their own. We had people that were evacuated from hotels, and tourists that were lumped together with some street thugs and some gang members that -- it was a potentially very dangerous situation.

 

           We waited until we had enough force in place to do an overwhelming force. Went in with police powers, 1,000 National Guard military policemen under the command and control of the adjutant general of the State of Louisiana, Major General Landreneau, yesterday shortly after noon stormed the convention center, for lack of a better term, and there was absolutely no opposition, complete cooperation, and we attribute that to an excellent plan, superbly executed with great military precision. It was rather complex. It was executed absolutely flawlessly in that there was no violent resistance, no one injured, no one shot, even though there were stabbed, even though there were weapons in the area. There were no soldiers injured and we did not have to fire a shot.

 

           Some people asked why didn't we go in sooner. Had we gone in with less force it may have been challenged, innocents may have been caught in a fight between the Guard military police and those who did not want to be processed or apprehended ["those" turned out not to even exist], and we would put innocents' lives at risk. As soon as we could mass the appropriate force, which we flew in from all over the states at the rate of 1,400 a day, they were immediately moved off the tail gates of C-130 aircraft flown by the Air National Guard, moved right to the scene, briefed, rehearsed, and then they went in and took this convention center down.

 

           Those that were undesirable ["Undesirable?"  Who?]to re-enter the convention center were segregated from the people that we wanted to provide water, shelter and food. Those people were processed to make sure they had no weapons, no illicit dugs, no alcohol, no contraband, and then they were escorted back into the building. Now there's a controlled safe and secure environment and a shelter and a haven as they await movement out of that center for onward integration to their normal lives.

 

            It's a great success story -- a terrific success story.

The hostility toward the people trapped at the convention center permeates this entire account, from the idea that the most "contentious" issue was "lawlessness" rather than the needs of people who'd been without water and food for days to the Iraq-esque characterization  of the tens of thousands at the convention center as having  "literally occupied that on their own," a "potentially very dangerous situation."  Dangerous?  Who exactly was this General worried about?  It seems clear that he was worried about National Guardsmen, not Americans in need of help.

"We waited until we had enough force in place to do an overwhelming force."

As if the convention center were Fallujah.  "....yesterday shortly after noon stormed the convention center, for lack of a better term, and there was absolutely no opposition, complete cooperation, and we attribute that to an excellent plan, superbly executed with great military precision."  Not because, as Dumas Carter, 30, eight-year veteran NOPD officer, one of six local cops who stayed on duty at the Convention Center complex in the days after Katrina put it:

Lots of people on the street were asking me where to go. I'm telling them the truth, which is I don't know, they haven't told us anything. They're telling us that somebody told them that they were told by another person who was somebody in charge of something that the Convention Center was being set up as a secondary evacuation point with food and water. Those people went to the Convention Center, and there was no food or water there for them. So now there's no water, there's no police--everybody's left the city except for the six of us. And now there's 20,000 people with no extra security down there.

We just told people that the National Guard was handling the evacuation effort, and they're not talking to us. So we've got all these people at the Convention Center, and now the captain is saying, okay, you all got to get out of the hotel. They're going to riot and they're going to burn the fucking hotel down. They're going to start this big massive thing, they're going to start killing people on Convention Center Boulevard, it's going to be a big massacre.

At this point it's like four days into it, and we're trying to explain to the captain, these people are so tired and thirsty and hungry they couldn't flip over a lawn chair if they wanted to riot. I won't say anything bad about my captain. My captain was making good decisions based on bad information. And my captain had to realize that he had to run a district of a hundred [officers], not all of whom had the testicular fortitude to stick this all out. So to keep morale up, he moves them out of the line of fire so they can sleep in a car somewhere. Whatever. That's what he had to do. When he got the proper information, he said we didn't have to leave the hotel. He said, just do the right thing. I trust you all. Do what you need to do.

So we hunkered down again. Our hotel was at the corner of Gaiennie and Convention Center. If you walk into a door 40 feet over, there's 20,000 people. And they were not staying inside the Convention Center because of the murders and robberies going on inside there. They were all on the neutral ground staring at us. We don't have many supplies, so we're not passing shit out. We barely have enough for us to get by the next two days. Occasionally another police car would drive by and stop and ask if we were all right, then drive on. No patrol presence whatsoever.

The majority of the people were staying outside. We were hearing all kinds of horror stories from inside, murder to rape to robberies to shootings to beatings. There was no way to verify any of that stuff. Ninety-seven percent of these people were behind us. They wanted us to be the police and they loved that we were still there. We were the only police they saw for four or five days. The majority of the conversations were, "Baby, I know you're being left here just like we're being left here and you don't know anything, but if you find out something, could you tell us?" My response was, you've got the radio--you tell us what's going on. And these people would come over and give us bulletins as they heard it from the news.

I talked to lots and lots of those people there. Ninety-nine percent of the conversations were people coming up to us asking, Where's the food? Where's the water? When are the buses coming? Where are they taking us? People were coming up with dying children, with elderly people who were dying and needed medical attention. We need diabetes medication, we need heart medication. Where can I get medical assistance? We don't know, we don't know, we don't know.

Where did all this garbage about riots come from?  Why was the National Guard outside of town preparing an armed assault in force on 20,000 Americans trying to survive the worst hurricane in the history of the US?  General Blum: "As soon as we could mass the appropriate force, which we flew in from all over the states at the rate of 1,400 a day, they were immediately moved off the tail gates of C-130 aircraft flown by the Air National Guard, moved right to the scene, briefed, rehearsed, and then they went in and took this convention center down."  Took the convention center down?  Wow, just like
Fallujah.

UPI, reporting on Blum's "storming" of an American city, makes the Iraq mentality even more explicit:

On Friday, 1,000 National Guard troops and police executed a 'clear and hold' mission on the New Orleans convention center. Once host to the 1988 Republican National Convention, the convention center was now unofficial host to thousands of refugees - squatters all - who were mixed in with criminals and thugs. There was no official government presence there.

Clear and hold is a tactic being used across Iraq as troops come across recalcitrant neighborhoods or cities rife with insurgents or terrorists where there is no effective U.S. presence. It`s a way to start from scratch.

About 12 hours before the National Guard was clearing the convention center, the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment began a clear and hold operation in the town of Tall `Afar.

Recalcitrant neighborhoods or cities rife with insurgents or terrorists!  Squatters!?  Squatters?!  Every American should be questioning why language like that is used in the press without challenge.  The UPI article goes on, and it becomes more difficult to distinguish whether the author is writing about the US or Iraq:

Like in New Orleans, the military hope in Tall `Afar was to avoid blood shed. A battalion commander told UPI that, ideally, the entire troublesome southern neighborhood [9th Ward?] would clear out. This would allow a thorough search and destroy mission for weapons and bomb-making equipment. Those who wanted to come back into the city when the operation -- still ongoing -- was finished would be registered and issued ID cards. The ID cards, mandatory at all times, will allow U.S. and Iraqi troops to stop people in the streets during future patrols and check the names against the evolving list of insurgent suspects gleaned from interrogations and tips. It`s a surprisingly effective tactic, if low-tech. Counter-insurgency is mostly long, slow leg work.

The complete disregard for the people as independent actors in both Baghdad and New Orleans, as if they are but impediments in the way of efficient military operations is chilling.  Over and over we see in Iraq that the concept of people having wills of their own let alone basic human rights is absent from military and state rhetoric or planning.  Now we see Americans being subjected to the same thinking and approach, with no reason to assume that it's temporary - indeed it seems to be standard operating procedure now, ingrained in the culture of the state's agents of force - yet another Mission Accomplished for the Warfare State.

Most vacuous conversation ever

Via Alex at Martini Republic, Condoleeza Rice and Bill O'Reilly:

O’Reilly: The truth of the matter is our correspondents at Fox News can’t go out for a cup of coffee in Baghdad.

Rice: Bill, that’s tough. It’s tough. But what — would they have wanted to have gone out for a cup of coffee when Saddam Hussein was in power?

Bill: No, no-but after three years you expect a little security in the country...

Condi: ...there is security...

Bill: They can't get coffee...

There is security in Iraq?  Not even Bill "Shut Up" O'Reilly is buying that whopper.

Presidenting is hard work

U.S. President George W. Bush writes a note to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during a Security Council meeting at the 2005 World Summit and 60th General Assembly of the United Nations in New York September 14, 2005. World leaders are exploring ways to revitalize the United Nations at a summit on Wednesday but their blueprint falls short of Secretary-General Kofi Annan's vision of freedom from want, persecution and war. REUTERS/Rick Wilking Email Photo Print Photo

Original Reuters photo

Funniest Bush screen cap ever, in case you missed it....

ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL

BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Death, destruction, fabulous opportunities

Jonathan has put together a post that shows a horrifying aspect of some political responses to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The Fourth Anniversary Of An Enormous Opportunity

And yet, behind their tears, there seems to be something else. When they think no one is looking, you glimpse another expression flitting across their face. You think it couldn't be. But—yes, incredibly enough, they're smiling. Because before the bodies are cold, before the mothers have stopped shrieking, our leaders are thinking:

This is really a FANTASTIC OPPORTUNITY.

Kinda like this:

"The devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina offers an historic opportunity to revitalize the Gulf Coast."

-- Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN)

Photo from AMERICAblog

Bye Bye Brownie

"In government, the scum rises to the top." - Friedrich Hayek

"Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job." - G WMD Bush, September 2, 2005

Brown resigns.

Iraq excuses recycled for Katrina failures

Laura Bush, on the government-exacerbated catastrophe in New Orleans

Laura Bush said reporters are ignoring good news and focusing on the problems: ''I think we've seen a lot of the same footage over and over that isn't necessarily representative of what really happened."

Donald Rumsfeld, on looting in the government-created disaster in Baghdad:

"The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, 'My goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?' "

FEMA: Heartless in Houston

Dr. Andrew Schamess on his experiences while helping evacuees from New Orleans at the Houston Astrodome:

After a couple of hours in the medical clinic I was pulled aside with a few others to screen evacuees to relocate to a cruise ship. A cruise company had offered a ship docked in Galveston. We were supposed to decide who was healthy enough to board. There was a very nice geriatrician named Aimee Garcia, and - of all people - Robert Rakel. He's the author of Conn's Current Therapeutics and a popular textbook in family medicine. An old Public Health Service hand, he'd come down with everyone else to voluteer. He's not Sean Penn but, OK, for me, he's a celebrity.

They kept us sitting around for about two hours, during which time we decided which conditions to screen for and made up a checklist. They weren't going to tell the evacuees where they were going until they got to Galveston. Aimee and I objected - you can't just bus people out to Galveston and then tell them they're going on a boat. They have a right to make their own decisions.

Everyone agreed, once the argument was made - but in the end it was a moot point. We went over to the staging area across the arena at 10:45 p.m. There were two employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which was coordinating relocation to the cruise ship, and about twenty-five people who were identified as FEMA "contractors". Evidently their job was to process the paperwork. They stood out a bit as paid employees in a sea of volunteers.

Come 11:00, the FEMA employees decided to knock off. The processing would have to wait until tomorrow, they declared - as if it made little difference whether four hundred hot, miserable evacuees got to leave the Astrodome now or later. This lassez-fair attitude struck me as inappropriate in representatives of the agency whose slow response left thousands of New Orleaneans to die in the flood. I told the FEMA supervisor this. She smiled and assured me that my concerns would receive full attention in the morning. Then she left for her hotel.

Read the rest....

Mayor ready for armed standoff with FEMA

WWLTV.com | News for New Orleans, Louisiana | Local News

3:32 P.M. Ben Morris, Slidell mayor: We are still hampered by some of the most stupid, idiotic regulations by FEMA. They have turned away generators, we've heard that they've gone around seizing equipment from our contractors. If they do so, they'd better be armed because I'll be damned if I'm going to let them deprive our citizens. I'm pissed off, and tired of this horse$#@@."

Americans last

Rightie bloggers are trying to put a positive spin on the appalling pictures coming out of New Orleans, the most striking features of which are the unbroken seas of black faces staring at the cameras from the hellish, stinking concentration camps at the Superdome and convention center. In the latest of several posts aiming to rebut the charge of racism in the way the evacuation was managed, John Cole writes, "This isn't a race thing. This was a money thing....." in an attempt to argue that the poor people were the ones held at gunpoint at the "evacuation" centers. In that the vast majority of poor people in New Orleans are African-American, this spin can be not entirely inaccurate. What it doesn't do is explain the story of these two British girls:

" TWO sisters last night told of the horror of being trapped in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina."Rebecca and Charlotte Scott, 20 and 19 "respectively, arrived home in Reading yesterday after five days trapped in the hurricane-"devastated Louisiana city. They spent three nights sheltering with thousands of refugees in the New Orleans Superdome, huddled with other British women inside a ring of men protecting them after terrifying rumours of rapes and murders.
[...]
Charlotte, who studies geography at Swansea University, said: "The first night was not nice. It was like a long car journey without moving. "I can't fault the authorities at all. The US Air Force, the army and the police were all great.

"They told us to stick together and not go in the dark parts."
[...]
"The sisters paid tribute to an Australian traveller named Bud Hopes and National Guardsman Sergeant Garland Ogden, who helped them get out the stadium.Rebecca said: "We owe them so much. If we'd been on our own I don't know what we would have done."

The girls were moved by officials to a nearby basketball centre, which was being used as a medical centre, on Wednesday.  They spent 24 hours helping to wash and feed elderly evacuees before being transferred to the severely damaged Hyatt Hotel on Thursday and finally getting a coach to Dallas, Texas, and a flight to Gatwick Airport on Saturday morning.

So they found better accommodations for British white girls and selected other foreigners on Wednesday, while Americans were forced to remain coralled in the hellholes with no food or water. From this story we learn that these lucky ones were smuggled  out on vegetable trucks:

Last Thursday morning, the group was packed into a vegetable truck and told to be as quiet as possible about leaving. They were taken to the Hyatt Hotel in New Orleans where Miss Sachs, 21, slept in a damp and smelly boardroom. Finally, on Friday morning, they were taken in buses to Dallas from where they began journeys home.

So, who did you have to be to get so lucky in New Orleans last week?

The international contingent were moved to a separate area to keep them safe from the poor and desperate, from drug addicts and mentally ill who also had no means of escape. "On the second night, the military told us the generator would be going out and it would be pitch black. We were told not to use a torch because we could be attacked for it," Miss Sachs said.

***

Foreign travellers in the Superdome had herded together for safety, after warnings from US air force personnel.

"There were 40 or 50 of us. The lads were on the outside and the girls were on the inside and we just made sure that we didn't leave any of our bags."

***

The military told all non-US citizens to stay together for safety, Ms Sachs added.

They later told them they would be secretly smuggled out in groups of 10 under cover of darkness as it had become too dangerous for them to remain in the stadium, she told BBC News.

"When we were leaving, people were going 'Where are you going?' and giving us looks.

"But the military got us out, which we were all thankful for."

***

Jenny Sachs, of Sheffield, told how soldiers had to smuggle her out of the Superdome in secret.

She said they had told her the lights would go out before the rescue, and warned her not to use a torch for fear of attack.

The US Military is supposed to "protect" who, now? Foreign nationals over Americans? Is this a "class thing," "race thing" or something even more evil than we can bear to contemplate? What possible reason could there have been to treat ANY of the people left in New Orleans differently? Weren't the Americans at least equal to Brits and Aussies? Was it that the foreign nationals had diplomats looking out for their interests? If so, what does that say about who was looking out for the interests of Americans?

Anyone? Any righties want to take a shot at explaining why Americans were kept, starving and dying in the NOLA camps at gunpoint, as foreigners were "smuggled" out to the Hyatt and evacuated ahead of them? Are these guys - Bud Hopes and National Guard Staff Sgt Garland Ogden - heroes?

As the Australians left the Superdome, food and water were almost non-existent and the stiflingly hot arena was filled with 25,000 people and the stench of human waste.
[...]
Mr Hopes, 32, said: "That was the worst place in the universe. Ninety-eight per cent of the people around the world are good. In that place, 98 per cent of the people were bad.
[...]
Mr Hopes said the Australians owed their lives to a National Guard Staff Sgt Garland Ogden, who had broken the rules to get the tourists out of the dome, with 60 people being evacuated to a medical centre.

Nice. It's really nice that these people were saved from Bad Americans. After all, what better mission for the American National Guard than liberating foreigners? Maybe the important question about the deplorable treatment of the Americans in the NOLA "shelters" shouldn't be about whether race or class was the criteria, but about nationality.

The Cavalry can't get past FEMA

Aaron Broussard,  president of Jefferson Parish on Meet the Press:

Sir, they were told like me. Every single day. The cavalry is coming. On the federal level. The cavalry is coming. The cavalry is coming. The cavalry is coming. I have just begun to hear the hooves of the cavalry. The cavalry is still not here yet, but I have begun to hear the hooves and were almost a week out.

Three quick examples. We had Wal-mart deliver three trucks of water. Trailer trucks of water. Fema turned them back, said we didn't need them. This was a week go. We had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a coast guard vessel docked in my parish. The coast guard said come get the fuel right way. When we got there with our trucks, they got a word, FEMA says don't give you the fuel. Yesterday, yesterday, fema comes in and cuts all our emergency communications lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in. he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards said no one is getting near these lines.
[...]
The guy who runs this building I'm in. Emergency management. He's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said. Are you coming. Son? Is somebody coming? And he said yeah, Mama. Somebody's coming to get you.. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday. And she drowned Friday night. And she drowned Friday night. Nobody's coming to get us. Nobody's coming to get us. The Secretary has promised. Everybody's promised. They've had press conferences. I'm sick of the press conferences. For god's sakes, just shut up and send us somebody.

via Atrios, Wonkette

Video here, courtesy Wonkette

The Potemkin Photo Op

Blah3 has all the info pulled together:

All of this information has turned up in one spot or another on the web since yesterday, but I wanted to put it all together in one spot for a reason. Bit by bit, parts of Bush's trip were shown to be less truthful than we deserved. But when you look at the entire trip - and all of the deceit that went into each part of it - it's an inescapable fact that from beginning to end the trip was a menu of lies and self-serving actions that didn't do the region any good. In some instances, like the helicopter groundings halting rescue ops, the trip could conceivably actually killed more people.

Fed Up: TRANSCRIPT of mayor's damning interview

Daily Kos: TRANSCRIPT of mayor's damning interview

Hear the video (linked within CNN report)

Enterprising Kos poster  Karen Wehrstein transcribed this horrific interview of  NOLA mayor Ray Nagin's interview with Garland Robinette of WWL Radio.
This is a small excerpt  – read the whole thing:

RN: I have no idea what they're doing, but I'll tell you this. You know, God is looking down on all this... and if theyre not doing everything in their power to save people, they are going to pay the price. Because every day that we delay, people are dying... and they're dying by the hundreds, I'm willing to bet you.

We're getting reports in calling that are breaking my heart, from people saying, 'I'm in my attic...I can't take it any more. The water's up to my neck. I don't think I can hold out. And that's happening as we speak.

And you know what really upsets me, Garland. We told everybody the importance of the 17th Street Canal issue. We said, please, please take care of this, we don't care what you do, figure it out.
[...]

I don't want to see anybody do any more goddamn press conferences.  Put a moratorium on press conferences.  Don't do another press conference until the resources are in this city, and they come down to this city, and stand with us, with their military trucks and troops that we can't even count.  Don't tell me there are 40,000 people coming here, they're not here!  It's too goddamn late!

Get off your asses and let's do something.  Let's fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country!

GR: I'll tell you, right now, you're the only politician that's called, and called for arms like this.  And whatever it takes, the governor, the president... whatever law precedent it takes, whatever it takes... I bet that the people listening to you are on your side.

RN: Well, I hope so, Garland.  I am just... I'm at the point now, where it don't matter.  People are dying.  They don't have homes.  They don't have jobs.  The City of New Orleans will never be the same.  And it's time.

(Then there's silence.  Background studio noise comes up as the microphones self-adjust to pick something up.  You hear sniffling... Nagin's in tears.  Interviewer too.)

GR: We're both pretty speechless here.

RN: I don't know what to say.  I've got to go.  Okay.  Keep in touch.

 

This is unforgivable

American politician  Kathleen Blanco, having apparently learned nothing from the murder of Brazilian  Jean Charles de Menezes at the hands of law enforcement with "shoot to kill" orders, has issued a statement that should send chills up the spine of every American:

Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco said the 300 troopers from the Arkansas National Guard had been authorised to open fire on "hoodlums'' who have been terrorising the flooded city in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

[...]

"These troops are fresh back from Iraq, well trained, experienced, battle tested and under my orders to restore order in the streets,'' Blanco said.

"They have M-16s and they are locked and loaded.

"These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will,'' said Blanco.

Just let that sink in a moment.

How likely is it that these troops will think this person is a "hoodlum?"

"Bigfoot" is a bar manager and DJ on Bourbon Street, and is a local personality and icon in the city. He is a lifelong resident of the city, born and raised. He rode out the storm itself in the Iberville Projects because he knew he would be above any flood waters. Here is his story as told to me moments ago. I took notes while he talked and then I asked some questions:

Three days ago, police and national guard troops told citizens to head toward the Crescent City Connection Bridge to await transportation out of the area. The citizens trekked over to the Convention Center and waited for the buses which they were told would take them to Houston or Alabama or somewhere else, out of this area.

It's been 3 days, and the buses have yet to appear.

Although obviously he has no exact count, he estimates more than 10,000 people are packed into and around and outside the convention center still waiting for the buses. They had no food, no water, and no medicine for the last three days, until today, when the National Guard drove over the bridge above them, and tossed out supplies over the side crashing down to the ground below. Much of the supplies were destroyed from the drop. Many people tried to catch the supplies to protect them before they hit the ground. Some offered to walk all the way around up the bridge and bring the supplies down, but any attempt to approach the police or national guard resulted in weapons being aimed at them.

There are many infants and elderly people among them, as well as many people who were injured jumping out of windows to escape flood water and the like -- all of them in dire straights.

Any attempt to flag down police results in being told to get away at gunpoint. Hour after hour they watch buses pass by filled with people from other areas. Tensions are very high, and there has been at least one murder and several fights. 8 or 9 dead people have been stored in a freezer in the area, and 2 of these dead people are kids.

The people are so desperate that they're doing anything they can think of to impress the authorities enough to bring some buses. These things include standing in single file lines with the eldery in front, women and children next; sweeping up the area and cleaning the windows and anything else that would show the people are not barbarians.

The buses never stop.

Before the supplies were pitched off the bridge today, people had to break into buildings in the area to try to find food and water for their families. There was not enough. This spurred many families to break into cars to try to escape the city. There was no police response to the auto thefts until the mob reached the rich area -- Saulet Condos -- once they tried to get cars from there... well then the whole swat teams began showing up with rifles pointed. Snipers got on the roof and told people to get back.

He reports that the conditions are horrendous. Heat, mosquitoes and utter misery. The smell, he says, is "horrific."

He says it's the slowest mandatory evacuation ever, and he wants to know why they were told to go to the Convention Center area in the first place; furthermore, he reports that many of them with cell phones have contacts willing to come rescue them, but people are not being allowed through to pick them up.

People growing more and more desperate after FIVE DAYS of misery and abandonment are driven to survive in any way they can.  Hunter writes eloquently on the unspeakable horror that is New Orleans now:

The common televised theme is of reporters traveling to hard hit areas in New Orleans or the smaller communities, and reporting no FEMA presence, no National Guard presence, no food, no water, no help -- and this is day 5. "Where is the government?" has been the predominant theme of the day. Apologists are being met with barely concealed disgust, in more and more quarters. Bush administration cuts to the levee system are being widely reported. FEMA inaction is being roundly criticized by ever-more-urgent live feeds from disheveled media figures with stunned expressions.

The Convention Center situation appears to be horrific, with deaths of elderly and infants due to dehydration already now occurring. It's not clear if anything can be or is being done tonight, or how many will die between now and the morning, or what will happen then.

The lawlessness is rampant. It's important to note, however, that the lawlessness wasn't rampant on Monday. It wasn't rampant on Tuesday. We heard only twinges of it on Wednesday. Today, from the sounds of the reports, a city devoid of all hope devolved into absolute chaos.

It is nighttime again in New Orleans, and after four days of no food, no water, no communications, no security forces, and no apparent discernible plan that they can see, trust and hope that rescuers will arrive seems all but gone. If the forces had arrived on Tuesday, things would be different.

It is simply too stunning, too shocking, too soul-draining. Nobody knows where the emergency relief has been. Nobody can quite understand why the response to the catastrophe only now seems shuddering to life.

The politics are omnipresent, but present only a hollow shell behind which a sea, an absolute frothing sea, of much worse realizations are crowding every mind.  This was a disaster the country had been preparing for. This was one of the disasters most predicted, most feared, most planned for. There was two days of advance warning, as the massive, category 5 hurricane shifted purposefully towards New Orleans. This was no terrorist attack -- this time, there was warning. This time, there was knowledge.

And yet, the much-reshuffled domestic security resculpted as a result of 9-11 simply didn't show up. It wasn't there. FEMA, which has been hacked, shuffled, and gutted in the last few years, proved unable to respond to a catastrophic emergency situation. The catastrophic emergency situation, along the Gulf Coast, the one that sounded the alarms two days before landfall, the one that triggered the warnings of nightmare scenarios known for years in advance, and yet if there was any advance plan at all, any knowledge at all, any fathoming at all of how to respond in the fourty-eight hours most critical for the survival of the victims, it didn't show up. The roads were clogged, the islands were flooded, the levees were breached, and homeland security wasn't there, leaving each state, each town, each police force, each wrecked band of shell-shocked survivors to fend, and make do, while convoys were organized and strategies prepared with seeming obliviousness to the urgency of the numbers and clocks. There is... almost nothing meaningful to say.

The apparent and most likely explanations for the failure, known long before the fact, are almost shattering when reread today, while the ongoing catastrophe unfolds around us.

We have witnessed two disasters this week. The first was an act of nature. The second was not. The second disaster, still ongoing, is unforgivable.

That's the only word that comes to mind, a word I keep repeating to myself. These deaths, these men, these women, these infants dying now in these hours didn't have to happen. They did not have to die waiting for convoys to gather outside their city or for reservists to stand alongside their shattered police forces. They did not have to wait in darkness and fear for help to arrive, only to struggle for days without that help ever coming.

This is not politics. This is not partisanship.

This is unforgivable.

And now they're unleashing the military with "shoot to kill" orders.  Is there any aspect of this nightmare that the government hasn't made worse?

Lake George

Wonkette - A Tragedy By Any Other Name

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9120777/

 The project should have been done two years ago, but the federal gov't diverted 80% of the funding to Iraq. Other areas had settled by a few feet from their design specs, and the money to repair them was diverted to Iraq

Baghdad on the Gulf of Mexico

When are Americans going to begin asking the obvious question:  "Is this how the much-vaunted Homeland Security Department handles a real disaster?"

WWLTV.com | News for New Orleans, Louisiana | Local News

(AP) The evacuation of the Superdome was suspended Thursday after shots were fired at a military helicopter, an ambulance official overseeing the operation said. No immediate injuries were reported.

"We have suspended operations until they gain control of the Superdome," said Richard Zeuschlag, head of Acadian Ambulance, which was handling the evacuation of sick and injured people from the Superdome.

He said that military would not fly out of the Superdome either because of the gunfire and that the National Guard told him that it was sending 100 military police officers to gain control.

"That's not enough," Zeuschlag. "We need a thousand."

*************This guy is blogging from New Orleans' Central Business District (the CBD), where he and a few other daring souls are holed up on the tenth floor of a building on Poydras Street:

New Orleans Police Department Status: The situation for the NOPD is critical. This is firsthand information I have from an NOPD officer we're giving shelter to. Their command and control infrastructure is shot. They have limited to no communication whatsoever. He didn't even know the city was under martial law until we told him! His precinct (5th Precinct) is under water! UNDER WATER -- every vehicle under water. They had to commander moving trucks like Ryder and UHaul to get around. The coroner's office is shut down so bodies are being covered in leaves at best or left where they lie at worst.

They don't even know their own rules of engagement. He says the force is impotent right now. They have no idea what's going on, no coordination, virtually no comms, etc. the National Guard is gonna air drop a radio system for them with 200 radios? They are getting very little direction.

The 3rd District bugged out to Baton Rouge because they flooded out.

His quote: "It's a zoo."

------

More from the Police Officer. I'm typing as fast as i can while he talks to us:He's only hearing bits and pieces. The people in the city are shooting at the police. They're upset that they're not getting help quickly enough. The fireman keep calling because they're under fire. He doesn't understand why the people are shooting at the rescuers. Here it is 5 days ago the Mayor said get out of town and nobody went and now they're pissed.

The National Guard was at the Hilton, but now the Hilton is evacuated. When they said the CBD was gonna get 6 feet of water, it seems like everyone evacuated.

He turned the corner onto Canal Street and it looked like a flea market. People breaking into every store, going to the neutral gound (median) and trading and selling everything.

They broke into Winn Dixie Monday Night. Do they steal food? No. Cigarettes and liquor. Store was a mess. All the meats were going to waste so the districts went over there to salvage food for officers. Many cops have been eating MREs.

The Iberville Housing Projects got pissed off because the police started to "shop" after they kicked out looters. Then they started shooting at cops. When the cops left, the looters looted everything. There's probably not a grocery left in this city.

Over 30 officers have quit over the last 3 days. Out of 160 officers in his district maybe 55 or 60 are working. He hasn't seen several since Sunday. HQ is closed, evacuated. No phones to contact them.

"HQ, be advised, we're going 10 7."

"Ok, y'all coming back on???"

"We don't know."

"We are extremely pleased with the response of every element of the federal government (and) all of our federal partners have made to this terrible tragedy," Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said during a news conference Wednesday in Washington.

 

The agency has more than 1,700 truckloads of water, meals, tents, generators and other supplies ready to go in, Chertoff said. Federal health officials have started setting up at least 40 medical shelters. The Coast Guard reports rescuing more than 1,200 people.

 

But residents, especially in Biloxi, Miss., said they aren't seeing the promised help, and Knight Ridder reporters along the Gulf Coast said they saw little visible federal relief efforts, other than search-and-rescue teams. Some help started arriving Wednesday by the truckloads, but not everywhere.

 

"We're not getting any help yet," said Biloxi Fire Department Battalion Chief Joe Boney. "We need water. We need ice. I've been told it's coming, but we've got people in shelters who haven't had a drink since the storm."