"Immediate Action Now"

According to George Bush, This storm is going to "require immediate action now".

He said that a moment ago on CNN. 4 days after New Orleans was wipped off the map.

Juxtaposition

CNN is doing a really interesting thing right now. Condi is giving a press confernce talking about how much the administration is doing and has done with relief efforts, trying to white wash over the carnage.

So it's the same old bullshit. But it's the set up that's interesting. They've got a 6 way split screen with the other screens either showing the devistation and carnage, some showing the president hugging black folk as part of Operation: Photo Op, and various other scenes of New Orleans and Biloxi.

Instant cognitive dissonance. I'm feeling really dizzy. Then Tom Delay and Denny Hastert come on another screen talking about how they'll get to legislative releif within a "few weeks".

I... I... I...

Though you probably wouldn't know it from the number of posts the past couple of days, but really, I've been speechless for the past couple of days. The absolute heartlessness of these bastards is really beyond anything I could have imagined. And now this (stolen from DailyKos):

Senate Finance Committee members were informed this morning that Sen. Bill Frist will move forward with a vote to permanently repeal the estate tax next week, likely on Tuesday, ThinkProgress has learned.

One stands in awe of Sen. Frist's timing. Permanently repealing the estate tax would be a major blow to the nation's charities. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has "found that the estate tax encourages wealthy individuals to donate considerably more to charity , since estate tax liability is reduced through donations made both during life and at death." If there were no estate tax in 2000, for example, "charitable donations would have been between $13 billion to $25 billion lower than they actually were."

Callous, worthless, despicable, heartless.

Nothing is beyond Republicans. Nothing.

Link to original ThinkProgress page here

Some now say

On CNN, Wolf Blitzer just said "Some now say that funds for flood control has been cut since 9/11"

Wolf, you know, it is possible to actually find out whether or not, in fact, funds were cut. Try google.

Oh shit, looks like they were.

That took me less than a minute. That would leave me enough time for me to make sure my beard looked fabulous before the end of commercial break. Hypothetically speaking.

Failure Of Leadership

New Orleans is being evacuated. The president has just gotten back to work. He spent the last few days playing golf, strumming guitar, talking about WWII and Social Security Privitization.

Here's Senator Lautenberg according to the BBC:

Democratic senator Frank Lautenberg has accused the Bush administration of taking too long to respond.

"We are watching this devastation unfold on our televisions for days and you have to ask: where is the federal government?" the Reuters news agency quotes him as saying.

"We should have had a significant amount of troops and supplies there on the ground Monday."

And here's the same exact same event on the other side of the looking glass

Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) complained that President Bush should have had troops on the ground in New Orleans on Monday and then whined: "President Bush's wake-up call came awfully late." Idiocy! The fact that President Bush has dispatched the US Military to assist, including the USS Iwo Jima and the medical ship USNS Comfort, to help those in the hurricane ravaged areas seems to have escaped the New Democrats' attention--or at least their pontificating. But, if they had mentioned these it wouldn't have suited their ever-increasing-politically-motivated invectives against President Bush.

This piece of bile was written by Sher Zieve with The Conservative Voice. Fuck her (him?)!!!! Really, what the fuck! This president is sending in the navy after 4 DAYS! While people have been dying. And it's going to take several more days for them to get there. What the hell was the hold up? How low do these people want to set the bar? There is still not NEARLY enough rescue workers there, and a big part of that problem is that the people who's job it is to deal with this kind of shit, the National Guard, is IN FUCKING IRAQ! Good God, was overthrowing Saddam and helping to create an Islamic Republic really worth this? We were unprepared to deal with a disasater that could easily eclipse 9-11. The war in Iraq has demonstrably made us LESS SAFE. Remember there are dangers out there other than Islamic terrorism, and we don't have the capabilities to deal with them because our armed forces are tied up in Iraq, and while you're at it you can certianly make a damn good argument that we're less safe from terrorism now, too. In the years since the begining of the Iraq war, the number of international terrorist attacks has increased DRAMATICALLY. Coincidence?

Fuck I need another drink. These people are disgusting.

John asks good questions

I wish someone had some answers

That good ole Bush Economy

Link

Even as the economy grew, incomes stagnated last year and the poverty rate rose, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday. It was the first time on record that household incomes failed to increase for five straight years.

The portion of Americans without health insurance remained roughly steady at 16 percent, the bureau said. A smaller percentage of people were covered by their employers, but two big government programs, Medicaid and military insurance, grew.

The census's annual report card on the nation's economic well-being showed that a four-year-old expansion had still not done much to benefit many households. Median pretax income, $44,389, was at its lowest point since 1997, after inflation.

Though the reasons are not wholly clear, economists say technology and global trade appear to be holding down pay for many workers. The rising cost of health care benefits has also eaten into pay increases.

After the report's release, Bush administration officials said that the job market had continued to improve since the end of 2004 and that they hoped incomes were now rising and poverty was falling. The poverty rate "is the last, lonely trailing indicator of the business cycle," said Elizabeth Anderson, chief of staff in the economics and statistics administration of the Commerce Department.

The census numbers also do not reflect the tax cuts passed in President Bush's first term, which have lifted the take-home pay of most families.

But the biggest tax cuts went to high-income families already getting raises, Democrats said Tuesday. The report, they added, showed that the cuts had failed to stimulate the economy as the White House had promised.

"The growth in the economy is not going to families," said Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island. "It's in stark contrast to what happened during the Clinton administration."

In related news:

Exxon Mobil Corp., the world's largest publicly traded oil company, reported a 32 percent increase in second-quarter profit as it reaped the benefits of soaring oil and natural gas prices.

Net income for the April-June quarter rose to $7.64 billion, or $1.20 per share, from $5.79 billion, or 88 cents per share, the year before. Excluding one-time items, earnings totaled $7.84 billion, or $1.23 per share, Exxon said yesterday.

The adjusted earnings just missed analysts' expectations for profit of $1.24 per share, according to a Thomson Financial survey.

Revenue totaled $88.57 billion, a gain of 25 percent from a year earlier.

Awful

I can't even understand how something like this can happen. Over a thousand people killed in a stampeed. How does something get that out of control? Where does that kind of fear come from?

Good question

John asks a good question.

Preaching To The Converted

Right now on C-SPAN there's a speech by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Looney Tunes) frothing all over an Iowa county Republican meeting. It's like a Gallager show. They have the local Young Republicans walking around handing out paper towels to the people in the front row. He spent most of the time talking about pork chops on a stick and 800 lbs pumpkins. But he did say a couple things that struck me.

First, he said that there's a lot of data from those few countries in Europe that have legalized gay marriage show that causing less and less straight marrages (the theory being that it "cheapens" marriage as a concept, I guess). So I did a little googling and, first off, the first country in the world to legalize same sex marriage was The Netherlands in 2001, so it might seem a little premature to be checking trend lines, and secondly, the other other place I could find that talking point was in The Weekly Standard, and even then it takes some pretty serious logical stretches to make their point.
I

n Sweden, as elsewhere, the sixties brought contraception, abortion, and growing individualism. Sex was separated from procreation, reducing the need for "shotgun weddings." These changes, along with the movement of women into the workforce, enabled and encouraged people to marry at later ages. With married couples putting off parenthood, early divorce had fewer consequences for children. That weakened the taboo against divorce. Since young couples were putting off children, the next step was to dispense with marriage and cohabit until children were desired. Americans have lived through this transformation. The Swedes have simply drawn the final conclusion: If we've come so far without marriage, why marry at all? Our love is what matters, not a piece of paper. Why should children change that?

So the lack of "shotgun weddings" helped destory marriage. What a shame. It was obviously a perfect institution.

Oh, right, Brownback.

He was also talking about stem cells, and he said that everything is either a person or it's property. So if we allow stem cell research those people will be legislated as property. The implication being that stem cells = slavery.

Federalism

Billmon has an interesting post about the Iraqi constitution. He says

But even taking the analogy at face value, the objectives sought by the dominant parties in Iraq are the opposite -- in almost every way -- of those pursued by the majority of the delegates in Philadelphia.

Our framers sought a solution to the seemingly intractable problems of a weak, decentralized confederacy of semi-independent states: precisely the kind of government the ruling coalition of Kurds and Shi'a Islamists now want to create in Iraq, with the apparent blessing of the Cheney administration. What the American founders feared most -- the decomposition of the union into three or four mutually hostile regional confederacies -- is now the official goal of U.S. policy.

But while the US and Iraq are both examples of failed experiments of Brittish colonialism, the similarities end there. Our Founding Fathers had all agreed on at least a basic philosopical framework, found in the Declaration Of Independence. By the time of writing the Constitution they were, for the most part, hammering out the details of how best to accomplish what was really the worlds first true secular republic. Of course there were arguments about how much power was to be concentrated in the federal government and how much should be relegated to the states. Those arguments still exist today. But even before that they had already agreed on the whole inalianble rights thing.

The Iraqis who are actually sitting at that table are not the same philosophers and politicians who had thrown in their lots together at the start of a revolution. They are representatives of factions who have a history of antagonism and are not even free to negotiate because at the end of the day, they have to answer to their camps. They have all been thrown into this convention after all spending decades in exile, each coming up with their own conflicting Project For A New Iraqi Century.

Billmon makes another good point when he says

Federalism and anti-federalism, as everyone at the time understood the terms, applied to the American states as pollitical entities, not ethnic or religious ones. There was no group comparable to the Kurds in 1787 -- i.e. a separatist national minority demanding an autonomous region drawn along ethnic lines. (Not unless you count the native Americans, and nobody invited them to Philadelphia.) Nor was there a huge religious majority insisting on the right to set up its own state-within-the-state, like the Shi'a parties are now.

The identity of a North Carolinian or a New Yorker were nearly as strong as the centuries old tribal distinctions of a Sunni or Kurd. This illustrates modern conservaties pathological inabilty to contextualize. As much as they talk about the Constitution In Exile, what they're really doing refusing to admit that what they have is simply an interpritation of the Constitution. When you try to translate a governing document like that from a pre-industrial society to a post-industrial society, it's not as simple of taking a literal reading. That doesn't work in every instance and so there's times when it is necessary to squeeze parts of the Constitution to fit situations that the framers couldn't have anticipated. They do the same thing with the Bible. They refuse to accept that any other interpretation than theirs is legitimate, becuase they claim to know the intent behind those documents. Of course, concidering that these are the same people who named the Clear Skies initiative, for example, I can't say that's too comforting.

Okay, so I'm rambling. It's late. Basically, what I'm saying is that these guys constantly try to overlay their view of current political and social issues over historical situations where there may be no real parallels. And now they're creating this cognitive feed-back loop by trying to take their fucked up version of history and apply it to Iraq!

But the radical Republicans do need to really watch what's going on there now (and I mean the real news, not just the Pentagon press-releases). Because the real corallary here is not America 1786 but America 2005. The religious right spends millions of dollars a year trying to impose their version of Religion on the US, and as Iraq is proving right now, theocracys just don't work in such heterogenious societies because you'll never be able to consolidate enough power to impose your version of the Koran (or the New Testiment) over that many people with opposing views.

So is it even worth the effort and innevitable bloodshed to keep a united Iraq? It was cobbled together by the Brittish a hundred years ago, and since we're looking for historical analogies right now, look at Yugoslavia. It was an attempt to unite peoples that didn't really have a historical or even a practical reason for being tied together as one country, and it almost seems inevitable that that ended in bloody civil war because once you lose an over-bearing totalitarian character such as Saddam Hussein or Josiph Tito then you end up with warring factions fight over limited resources.