FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Frankie and Phil



Paz



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General: Number of capable Iraqi battalions falls

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

The number of Iraqi battalions capable of combat without U.S. support has dropped from three to one, the top American commander in Iraq told Congress today, prompting Republicans to question whether U.S. troops will be able to withdraw next year.

Gen. George Casey, softening his previous comments that a "fairly substantial" pull out could begin next spring and summer, told lawmakers that troops could begin coming home from Iraq next year depending on conditions during and after the upcoming elections there.

Click here for the rest.

So, lemme get this straight. The US cannot pull out, says the White House, until the Iraqi army is capable of defending the country from the insurgency, and that is supposed to happen soon. But the Iraqi army is getting smaller, not bigger. Something about this doesn't seem quite right.

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QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES
Means "Who Polices the Police?"

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

New Orleans probes possible police looting

The police department has launched an investigation into whether officers participated in the giant looting spree that overtook the city after Hurricane Katrina, a spokesman said today.

News reports in the aftermath of the storm put officers at the scene of some of the heaviest looting, the Wal-Mart in the Lower Garden District. Some witnesses — including a Times-Picayune reporter — said police were taking items from shelves.

"Out of 1,750 officers, we're looking into the possibility that maybe 12 officers were involved in misconduct," police spokesman Marlon Defillo said.

He rejected the use of the term "looting," but said authorities were investigating "the possibility of appropriation of non-essential items during the height of Katrina, from businesses."

Click here for the rest.

For all the good work the the NOPD did during the Reign of Chaos in the week after Katrina, this comes as no surprise: New Orleans cops have a well deserved bad reputation. My older brother, a cop-loving, far-right Republican who lived there for a time in the 90s, once warned me about police in the Big Easy, "If you get mugged, don't call the cops; they're liable to push the criminals out of the way and finish the job for them." Maybe Nagin will treat reconstruction as an opportunity to clean up New Orleans' "finest."

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THE SCANDAL RIDDEN REPUBLICAN PARTY

Well, my young blogging sidekick Miles, off for his first year at the University in Austin, jumps back into the fold and beats me to the punch by reporting the amazing indictment of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay on a conspiracy charge. So to read an excerpt on that, check Miles' post below. However, you, like me, may be curious as to how DeLay was indicted, when it had already become pretty clear that Travis County DA Ronnie Earle didn't appear to have the jurisdictional right to go after him. What happened?

From the Austin American-Statesman courtesy of Eschaton:

DeLay indicted, gives up leadership post temporarily

DeLay had appeared to escape criminal scrutiny as early as last year when Travis County prosecutors concluded they did not have the jurisdiction to pursue election code violations against him. Under the law, only DeLay's local district attorney, a Republican, had jurisdiction, and he expressed no interest in the case.

But a conspiracy charge falls under the criminal code, not the election statute that bans corporate money from being spent on a campaign. And Earle has the jurisdiction to prosecute DeLay for conspiring with others to circumvent state law.

Click here for the rest.

So there you have it. Conspiracy can be prosecuted from Austin, and, praise the Creator, that's what they're doing. The article also points out that DeLay is possibly facing two years in prison. Ha! I've been waiting a long time for this.

But the overall story is not just about DeLay. This high profile indictment simply reinforces the fact that the Republicans are now being rocked by multiple scandals. Why, the Senate Majority Leader is now under investigation.

From Bloomberg courtesy, again, of Eschaton:

Frist Faces Heat as SEC Orders Formal Investigation

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist faces a near-term ordeal unwelcome to anyone, particularly an ambitious politician: an official probe into his personal financial dealings by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The SEC authorized a formal order of investigation of Frist's sale in June of HCA Inc. shares, people with direct knowledge of the inquiry said yesterday.

And

The Department of Justice is also investigating the matter. HCA said Sept. 23 that it received a subpoena from the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, and Frist said he will cooperate with the prosecutor's office. HCA also said it "intends to cooperate fully.''

Click here for the rest.

Really, this is incredible. DeLay is under indictment, yes, but his counterpart in the Senate is under investigation by not one, but two Federal agencies. Ha! Adding fuel to this Republican scandal furnace is the arrest of a political appointee in Bush's White House last week.

From the Washington Post:

Bush Official Arrested in Corruption Probe

The Bush administration's top federal procurement official resigned Friday and was arrested yesterday, accused of lying and obstructing a criminal investigation into Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff's dealings with the federal government. It was the first criminal complaint filed against a government official in the ongoing corruption probe related to Abramoff's activities in Washington.

The complaint, filed by the FBI, alleges that David H. Safavian, 38, a White House procurement official involved until last week in Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, made repeated false statements to government officials and investigators about a golf trip with Abramoff to Scotland in 2002.

Click here for the rest.

It is very important to note that the lobbyist about whom Safavian is accused of lying to the FBI, Jack Abramoff, is linked to DeLay, former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed, and a whole host of other powerful Republicans. The GOP has, quite obviously, created a wicked web of corruption that would make the crooked Democrats of the past green with envy.

And let's not forget the cloud hanging over the White House concerning the outing of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame in a botched scheme of political retaliation against her husband, vocal Bush critic Joseph Wilson. Bush's brain, Karl Rove, and Cheney aid, Scooter Libby, are neck deep in that one, and there are probably more involved than we know about.

I've known for years how criminals are running the Republican Party, but my knowing doesn't really amount to much. Now the GOP looks as crooked as they are in reality, and the Democrats have the best opportunity they've had since Watergate to throw out the trash. Of course, opportunity and capitalizing on opportunity are two entirely different things. The Democrats have been handed a gift: alas, I only give them fifty-fifty odds to make something out of it. And I fear my odds-making is overly generous. They've got a good chance to take back both houses of Congress in '06, but do they have the balls to do what it will take?

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Guest Blogger Miles

The Lizard King Slithers Away in Disgrace

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was indicted today of "conspiracy in a campaign finance scheme."

"A Texas grand jury on Wednesday indicted Rep. Tom DeLay and two political associates on charges of conspiracy in a campaign finance scheme, forcing the House majority leader to temporarily relinquish his post. A defiant DeLay insisted he was innocent and called the prosecutor a “partisan fanatic.”

“I have done nothing wrong. ... I am innocent,” DeLay told a Capitol Hill news conference during which he criticized the Texas prosecutor, Ronnie Earle, repeatedly. DeLay said the charges amounted to “one of the weakest and most baseless indictments in American history.”

In Austin, Earle told reporters, “Our job is to prosecute abuses of power and to bring those abuses to the public.” He has noted previously that he has prosecuted many Democrats in the past.

...

"Republicans expressed their backing for DeLay, the first House leader to be indicted in office in at least a century.

“He will fight this and we give him our utmost support,” said Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois following a private GOP meeting.
DeLay said he was certain the indictment would be dismissed and shrugged off the charges as a “political witch hunt” designed to drive a wedge in the Republican ranks.


Ron will no doubt comment once he recovers from cardiac arrest.


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Ex-FEMA director defends Katrina response

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Brown admitted making mistakes during the storm and subsequent flooding that devastated large swaths of the Gulf Coast. But he accused New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, both Democrats, of fostering chaos by failing to order a mandatory evacuation more than a day before Katrina hit.

"My biggest mistake was not recognizing by Saturday that Louisiana was dysfunctional," Brown told a special panel set up by House Republican leaders to investigate the catastrophe which killed more than 1,000 people across Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

"I very strongly personally regret that I was unable to persuade Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin to sit down, get over their differences and work together. I just couldn't pull that off."

And

"I know what I'm doing, and I think I do a pretty darn good job of it," he said.

Click here for the rest.

I also heard him saying on the News Hour earlier this evening that the reason FEMA brought in so little ice is because the Federal Government shouldn't be in the "ice business." Brown's testimony today was nothing short of jaw-dropping. I'm reminded of former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling's claim before Congress that he did nothing wrong: despite FEMA's dismal failures parading for weeks in the press for the whole world to see, Brown thinks he did just fine. If he wasn't perjuring himself today, he's insane.

I could refute Brown's blame-shifting in detail if I was up for it, but why do that when David Neiwert over at Orcinus has already done it much better and more concisely than I could ever hope to do? Check it out:

Here's what FEMA does do, though: It provides emergency food and water. It coordinates emergency personnel, including rescue and medical workers. It oversees, coordinates, and helps facilitate such efforts as evacuation and communication when the disaster is a regional one.

Brown is trying to paint a picture of FEMA as a minor role player in disaster relief. The reality is that when a federal disaster is declared, FEMA takes charge of the scene, and every other agency defers to its directives and initiatives. But FEMA didn't show up in New Orleans until three days later. Why was that?

When Brown can answer that question, we may start getting a clearer picture of what happened in New Orleans.

Click here for the rest.

In other words, even if what he says about Nagin and Blanco is true, which it isn't, it doesn't matter. It's FEMA's job to smooth all that out, and they didn't show up until it was far too late. Brown's assertion of innocence is yet another amazing event in this era already saturated with amazing events. I'm pretty grossed out, actually.

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How the Katrina catastrophe proves that conservatives'
tax cut zealotry has left america vulnerable to disaster

From In These Times courtesy of the Daily Kos:

Overall, Bush's first budget introduced in February 2001 proposed more than half a billion dollars worth of cuts to the Army Corps of Engineers for the 2002 fiscal year. To be sure, these budget cuts were one in a number of cuts to public priorities like health care, human services, infrastructure and job training.

And it is true that the cuts to the corps came as the agency was being legitimately criticized: Some of its projects in recent years had run roughshod over environmental concerns, and others had been unnecessarily expensive products of congressional pork. However, instead of reforming the corps and getting it back on track, the White House used the criticism as a cover to gut the entire agency. The cuts were so deep, Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.) broke ranks with her party and penned a nationally-syndicated op-ed in April 2001 saying that "lives very likely will be lost."

Consider just a few of the specific examples: In the same budget that provided more than a trillion dollars in tax cuts, Bush proposed providing only half of what his own administration officials said was necessary to sustain the critical Southeast Louisiana Flood Control Project (SELA)--a project started after a 1995 rainstorm flooded 25,000 homes and caused a half billion dollars in damage. This 2001 budget proposal came in the same year that, according to the Houston Chronicle, federal officials publicly ranked the potential damage to New Orleans by a major hurricane "among the three likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this country."

Similarly, less than two weeks after Bush signed his tax cut on June 7, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that "despite warnings that it could slow emergency response to future flood and hurricane victims, House Republicans stripped $389 million in disaster relief money from the budget."

Click here for the rest.

Of course, there is some truth to the notion that taxation, in some circumstances, can go to far, or be unjust, or needlessly retard the economy. That's only common sense. Government is no more than the individuals who run it, and, like all human beings, such individuals are prone to error and corruption. However, the Conservative Movement has completely lost sight of the common sense that once drove it to demand responsible governance. Tax cuts for their own sake is now the principle that rules the minds of American conservatives, and that's really bad because taxes are absolutely necessary for government to provide the environment in which civilization is able to exist. That's ultimately what this is all about. Do we want civilization or not? Conservatives, most of them anyway, aren't even able to conceptualize the issue in such terms, but it doesn't matter because the results are the same: without taxes accompanied by wise spending, civilization does not exist. Katrina proved that. If conservative rule continues, we can kiss this nation goodbye.

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THE END OF HURRICANE BLOGGING AT REAL ART

Until another one comes along, that is.

So we lost power here about thirty minutes after I managed to get Friday's post up and we didn't get it back until yesterday afternoon. Needless to say, it was a sucky couple of nights. I know; I know: numerous individuals had it way worse than we did. East Texas got hit quite hard, as did southwest Louisiana. Even though the death toll from the storm itself was quite low, with a Mississippi man dying when a tornado overturned his mobile home, and a Texas man dying after being hit by a tree, there have been several deaths associated with the storm, like the tragic fire aboard an evacuating bus filled with elderly people from Houston, or the heat exhaustion death of a disabled girl stuck in evacuation traffic, or the horrible carbon monoxide deaths of five from a generator inside an apartment in Beaumont. Hell, the evacuation itself was a major hardship for hundreds of thousands, and we most certainly didn't have to deal with that. This time. But as my buddy Lex has observed, as relatively insignificant as my problems were, they were my problems--nobody had to deal with them but me.

And let me tell you, once Becky fell asleep, and I moved into my daily night owl thing, it sucked. The heat was bad, but I now know why, for most of human history, people slept at night instead of the day: with nothing but a candle and lame-ass radio stations to keep me company, I was bored out of my mind. I know Abraham Lincoln was great and all that, but there was no way I was going to try to blast out my eyes reading by candlelight.

It's all very ironic that I spent a few days worried sick about Houston being blasted to hell, and then, come to find out, we got hit here in Baton Rouge worse than most of my hometown did. Granted, Houston metro areas near the coast were pounded pretty hard--the town where I used to teach, Baytown, ended up without power or water. But it's still quite a twist.

So what happened? From the Houston Chronicle:

High pressure pushed Rita away from the
most dangerous paths for Houston area

Forecasters had thought the high pressure system dominating Texas — a common summer feature that yields warm, clear days and droughts — would weaken, allowing Rita to come storming through Texas.

But the state's high pressure system was butted up against another such system along the upper Gulf Coast, stretching across the southeastern United States.

That high pressure system turned out to be the one that weakened, steering Rita away from the middle of Texas' coast toward Louisiana.

"The Texas high just didn't weaken as anticipated," said Jill Hasling, president of Houston's Weather Research Center. "We got lucky."

Click here for the rest.

The rest of the article observes just how bad it was going to be if the original forecast had proven correct, which is why the decision that so many people made to evacuate was such a good call, even though most everything turned out all right, as far as life and death is concerned. I’m pretty amazed, in fact, by the mass exodus: my early guess is that so many people were freaked out by Katrina, and this includes me and my dad, that they decided not to fuck around. Quite a good thing, if you ask me.

Another good thing is that my favorite city, Katrina ravaged New Orleans, is in better shape than originally believed. From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Corps: N.O. may be dry again sooner than expected

Areas of the city newly flooded by Hurricane Rita could be pumped dry again within a week after levee damage is repaired, far sooner than initially predicted, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spokesman said today.

Workers dumped rock and sandbags into breaches in the city's Industrial Canal throughout the night and were expected to complete the repair Sunday, said Mitch Frazier, a spokesman for the corps.

The storm surge created by Rita eroded repairs made after Hurricane Katrina and sent water surging back into the already devastated Ninth Ward. Once the breach is closed, engineers now believe the area could be dry in a week, Frazier said.

Federal officials had said Saturday it would take two to three weeks to pump out the water delivered by Rita.

Click here for the rest.

And now some pics.

Like I said, Baton Rouge got hit harder than expected, with winds clocking near forty miles per hour along with around nine inches of rain, a rather nasty tropical storm effect. There was some flooding, like in our backyard:



Yes, Louisiana's newest marsh, our backyard.



Uh, the boat belongs to the guy next door. It's not here to rescue us--really, it wasn't that bad, at least, not here. Actually, things were somewhat worse way down the street:



And one block over, way down the street:



But we didn't have to deal with that. Like I said, not that bad. What was bad, however, was the psychological torment the electric company put us through. As I said above, we, like tens of thousands of other people in Baton Rouge, lost power the night Rita hit. But, the next day, the hard working men of Entergy showed up down the street to do their thing:



Unfortunately, their "thing" was to restore power for only the people at the end of the street, and not us or our neighbors.

Were these other guys going to help us out?



Hell, no! What about these guys over here?



'Fraid not.

So we got to spend Saturday night in 90 degree heat and darkness, and could look out the window at the houses down the street with all their fancy light and air conditioning. Torment!

Remember how I've written about the six cats from New Orleans that we're sheltering on our screened-in back porch? Well, we had been keeping the back door shut in order to keep the alien kitties from mingling with our own three cats inside the house, but the heat was so intense, that I just had to say "what the hell" and open it up to try to get a cross breeze going. Two of the youngest ones, Kali and Gaia, managed to snake their way through the screen door and went wild:



Our three cats simply looked on, perplexed. Fortunately, there were no fights, just some errant hissing.

Out of all the minor annoyances did come one really nice event: they finally managed to come and pick up the debris left over from the previous hurricane.



Given the makeshift nature of this heavy trash unit, it's clear that the reason it's taken three weeks for them to come is that their resources have been stretched to the max. I'm grateful that they finally made it.

At last, life is returning to normal.

And now, the final word on Hurricane Rita, from my pal Mike over at This is not a compliment, who stayed in Houston during the storm, in weird ee cummings poetic form:

the tequila

the tequila
would like
me to tell you
we played chicken
with God
and we won.

'Nuff said.

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I'M BACK

And I just lost a post that took me two hours to put together. No need to bore you with the details, but I think it's safe to say that even when you know that you should always save your work before publishing, weird unforseen events occur to blow that all to hell. I'll try to re-do it tomorrow because it's just too damned late now.

It's all hurricane stuff that you've probably read already anyway.

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HURRICANE RITA GRAB BAG

I'm trying to get this post up in a hurry. We've got some heavy winds and rain here in Baton Rouge: Becky and I just heard a transformer blow, and the houses on the block behind us seem to be dark; fortunately, we've still got power, but who knows for how long? I just heard on television that the biggest problems here from wind and rain are supposed to be right now, from 8:00 to 10:00. Here's what WAFB TV posted yesterday about the potential for Rita riff raff here:

What Can Baton Rouge Expect from Rita?

Jay Grymes in the Channel 9 Weather Center wants residents of Baton Rouge and the surrounding areas to know what impacts we can expect locally from Hurricane Rita.

The metro area will experience wind gusts on the lower end of the tropical storm force scale, so expect up to 18 hours of winds reaching around 20 mph.

Rainfall expectations are between 3-5 inches, with localized pockets receiving between 6-8 inches depending on the severity of thunderstorms.

Jay says Baton Rouge will experience the worst of it beginning Friday afternoon until about mid-morning Saturday.

That's pretty much the whole story, but if you want to see it in context, click here.

I really should have posted earlier. What am I going to do without the internet? Read a book? Who does that anymore? Okay, I do still read books, but doing so by candlelight is no fun. At least I've got a roof over my head.

The Houston Chronicle is now saying that Rita is inching ever closer in our direction. It is now currently slated to make landfall just east of Port Arthur, Texas, very close to the Louisiana state line. Indeed, Katrina-ravaged New Orleans is being hurt by the storm surge and outer bands of rain--apparently the weakened levees have been breached again.

From the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

New Orleans' Ninth Ward under water again

Hurricane Rita's steady rains sent water pouring through breaches in a patched levee Friday, cascading into one of the city's lowest-lying neighborhoods in a devastating repeat of New Orleans' flooding nightmare. But levees on other canals were holding their own.

Dozens of blocks in the Ninth Ward were under water as a waterfall at least 100 feet wide poured over and through a dike that had been used to patch breaks in the Industrial Canal levee.

"Our worst fears came true," said Maj. Barry Guidry of the Georgia National Guard.

"We have three significant breaches in the levee and the water is rising rapidly," he said. "At daybreak I found substantial breaks and they've grown larger."

The levee on the other side of the Industrial Canal, which protected other sections of the city proper, were holding.

Click here for the rest.


The levee breaks. Again.

Guess what? As I write this, I've just discovered that we've lost our cable service, and therefore our internet access. I'm going to have to save this post, move it to my laptop, and use Becky's dial-up AOL service in order to get it up. I'd better hurry up with this. Woo-hoo. But then, given how things aren't so bad, I really ought not to complain.

I was going to move a couple of comments made by friends of mine on the post below up to the main page, but I'll just have to refer you down to them. My buddy Kevin, who lives in my and Becky's old place along I-10, not far from Baytown, which is in the mandatory evacuation area, has gone up to Kingwood to shelter with an old high school buddy, and left some interesting info in his comment. Mike Switzer, of This is not a compliment, left a good comment about staying in Houston, and people who tried to leave town, but had to turn around and come back due to the traffic chaos. Check 'em out, in the comment section beneath the post.

Actually, Mike's blogging this thing as long as he has power and internet access:

well...

we still don't know what exactly is going to happen here...
the "official" pronouncement is that Rita'll hit closer to the LA/TX border,
but Dr. Neil is still talking about a possible
direct hit to Galveston.

We should start seeing rain and tropical storm level winds in the next few hours...

Click here for the rest.

I think the Galveston scenario is definitely not going to happen now, but it seems like Houston's still going to get some heavy weather, probably much worse than what we get here in Baton Rouge. My friend Adam, who writes the Shattered Soapbox blog who currently attends the high school where I used to teach in Baytown is also staying, and he, too, is blogging about it:

Came back

We left at 6:30 am for Big Spring, Texas.

By about 2:20 pm we were in Liberty, and the storm had turned a lot more east, so we just came back. Took us like 20 minutes.

I really don't agree with being back here, mostly because we're planning on leaving again if we find out that the storm turns back this direction.

Click here for the rest.

Well, I guess that's all for now. I'm going to try to keep up with what's happening in Houston via dreaded dial-up internet access. Of course, you can go directly to my Houston news source yourself, the Houston Chronicle, if you like. Also, there's Houston television news; all three local news divisions are streaming their stuff live over the internet. Here's a link to KTRK's feed. If you're interested in Louisiana TV news, here's a link to the live feed from the combined resources of New Orleans' WGNO and Baton Rouge's WBRZ.

I'm really, really, really starting to get sick of this shit.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Yet another hurricane edition.

Frankie



Phil



Paz



Of course, we still temporarily have six more cats from New Orleans. Maybe I'll post more pics of them tomorrow.

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QUICK NOTE ON RITA

I'm planning a couple of larger posts later today, but in all the hooplah about Houston I kind of forgot that we're going to be dealing with the so called "dirty" side of the storm here in Baton Rouge--at the very least it'll be like a tropical storm. Hell, New Orleans' Ninth Ward neighborhood is flooding again because of the storm surge. At any rate, it's quite within the realm of possibility that we may lose power before I'm able to post again, so Real Art might go dark for a while.

Probably not, but who knows anything anymore about all this?

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HURRICANE RITA

I'm wondering if I should change the title of my blog to "Hurricane Blog." Is this a sign of things to come? Are we in for monster hurricane after monster hurricane? What's up with this? I have no idea.

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Rita turns farther from Houston

Hurricane Rita weakened this morning from a top-of-the-scale Category 5 hurricane to a Category 4 as it swirled across the Gulf of Mexico, and forecasters said it could lose more steam by the time it comes ashore late Friday or early Saturday.

And in the afternoon, Rita closed in on the Texas Gulf Coast and the heart of the U.S. oil-refining industry with howling 145 mph winds Thursday, but a sharper-than-expected turn to the right set it on a course that could spare Houston and nearby Galveston a direct hit. Instead, it looked as if Rita might come ashore near Port Arthur or Lake Charles, La., at least 60 miles up the coast.

But it was still an extremely dangerous storm — and one aimed at a section of coastline with the nation's biggest concentration of oil refineries. Environmentalists warned of the possibility of a toxic spill from the 87 industrial plants and storage installations that represent more than one-fourth of U.S. refining capacity.

And

NASA evacuated Johnson Space Center and transferred control of the international space station to the Russians. Storm surge projections put most of the NASA space center, situated about 20 miles southeast of downtown Houston, under water in the event of a hurricane above Category 2.

Click here for the rest.

Good news. For my friends and family, at least. However, my understanding is that Rita seems to be headed toward Beaumont, and that's still pretty close. Fortunately, my family all managed to get out. My younger brother somehow managed to get his boss to allow him to head up to College Station, but he'll have to go back pretty quickly. I think my email to my Dad did the trick: he's up in Austin at my older brother's place with my Mom and their dog. So, if worse comes to worse, my thousands of comic books stored at my folks place in Kingwood will be lost, but not my loved ones. Really, at a time like this, I wouldn't care if I lost everything I owned if the people I love are safe.

But it was hell for them getting out. My parent's exodus to Austin took twelve hours. You must understand, the trip from Kingwood, which is on the extreme northeast side of H-Town, to Austin usually takes only three and a half hours. The overall evacuation sounds like an even bigger mess than getting out of New Orleans was for most people.

Again from the Houston Chronicle:

Havoc from hurricane comes early to Houston's freeways

Sixteen hours to San Antonio and Dallas. Eleven hours to Austin. With over a million people trying to flee vulnerable parts of the Houston area, Hurricane Rita will be a nightmare even if Galveston doesn't take a direct hit. .

Trying to leave Houston on I-10, Ella Corder drove 15 hours to go just 13 miles today. Noticing cars out of gas littering the freeway, she turned off her air-conditioner to save fuel, but the 52-year-old heart patient worried the heat and exhaustion were taking a toll on her.

"All I want to do is go home," she said tearfully by cell phone. "Can't anyone get me out of here? "

Other evacuees' frustration turned into anger as the day wore on.

And

An elderly woman caught in a traffic jam in Fort Bend County died, apparently from the heat. Katy police, meanwhile, arrested a woman they said lost her cool on the freeway and assaulted another woman, who may have suffered a broken arm.

Click here for more.

What hell.

Of course, some of my friends either can't get out, won't get out, or aren't sure about whether to stay or leave. Here are some comments from the post below:

To leave, to stay. What a fucking mess. Pray for us all, Ron - I think we're gonna need it.

Anne Z

Anne is one of the two bigwigs with my theater home in Houston, dos chicas theater commune. She's extraordinarily talented, as is her husband Bob. Stay safe, ya'll.

Hey Ron, this is victoria. I was in your debate class your last year at Sterling.. I am sure you don't remember me, but I still check up on your website. I keep hearing different things about the hurricane--it's going to be a monster 5 and then I hear it is going to slow down to a 3. Things are always changing.. Almost everyone has left, but for those who decided not to, and then changed their mind, I think it's too late for them to leave(thanks to traffic), which is awful. I can understand how your dad is. Mine is the same, but he's working in El Paso, and my mom and I are stubborn, so he can't affect our decision to stay. We are just going to wait it out, and see how it goes. Hopefully, things go well. Of course, pray for all.

~~victoria

Actually, Victoria was one of my better debate students, and one of the most intelligent freshmen to ever come through my classroom over the years. I've forgotten lots of former students over the years - it's impossible to not forget some of them given the numbers - but I remember Victoria well. She's in Baytown, which is only about an hour's drive or so from Beaumont. Send her your good energy.

My buddy Mike, whose blog This is not a compliment is one of my daily stops, is also staying:

Yeah, there's no leaving now...

people are running out of gas before they get to Katy.

My friend Charlie has been on the road since 4 am and is only half way to Arkansas...

My car would overheat long before I ran out of gas.

So I've taped up my windows, and I'm about to head out to clean up the porch and then tomorrow it's moving things to the middle of the room, elevating what I can and covering records with tarps...

whoohooo!

I know a few folks here who REALLY didn't want to stay, but they waited too long and now they're giving up the idea of getting on the roads...

It's gonna be rough no matter what they do now, especially if they didn't prepare to stay before today.

My neighborhood Kroger was open still today, and they still had plenty of wolf brand chili and spaghetti-o's...so I'm all set...

and I've got Dr. Neil Frank to hold my hand and show me weather porn till I lose power...

and tequila, and whiskey, and the smoke...

I fully intend to be the king of New Atlantis by Sunday.

Mike

Mike, I hope to pay tribute and give you a courtly bow sometime soon in your aquatic kingdom. You stay safe, too.

Anybody who's interested can watch Houston's KTRK TV news coverage of the storm-event streaming over the internet--they've moved into 24/7 reporting, and it looks like they're bucking for some kind of award or something; they're doing good work.

Okay, I'm off to bite my nails.

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Rita grows into monster Category 5 hurricane

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Late Wednesday, Rita was centered about 570 miles east-southeast of Galveston and was moving west near 9 mph. Forecasters predicted it would come ashore along the central Texas coast between Galveston and Corpus Christi. Hurricane-force winds extended up to 70 miles from the center of the storm.

But with its breathtaking size — tropical storm-force winds extending 370 miles across — practically the entire western end of the U.S. Gulf Coast was in peril, and even a slight rightward turn could prove devastating to the fractured levees protecting New Orleans.

In the Galveston-Houston-Corpus Christi area, about 1.3 million people were under orders to get out, in addition to 20,000 or more along with the Louisiana coast. Special attention was given to hospitals and nursing homes, three weeks after scores of sick and elderly patients in the New Orleans area drowned in Katrina's floodwaters or died in the stifling heat while waiting to be rescued.

Military personnel in South Texas started moving north, too. Schools, businesses and universities were also shut down. Some sporting events were canceled.

Galveston was a virtual ghost town by mid-afternoon Wednesday. In neighborhoods throughout the island city, the few people left were packing the last of their valuables and getting ready to head north.

Click here for the rest.

I'm starting to get sick of this shit.

If I understand the science here correctly, global warming isn't behind the number of hurricanes created in the Atlantic, but it is behind the supercharging of them into monster storms--apparently, the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico are the direct result of greenhouse gasses heating our planet's atmosphere; this, in turn, creates the perfect environment for incubating small hurricanes into massive hurricanes. Remember, Rita was barely a category one storm as it passed the Florida Keys. Now it's really, really dangerous, and it stands to beat the crap out of my hometown, Houston.

Thanks a lot, fossil fuels. Yes, they keep our economy humming, but in the long run, they're destroying it, too. This is no longer something that's fucking over our grandchildren: this is fucking over us.

And - this is just so fucking typical - the man whose empassioned and logical rhetoric convinced me to flee Baton Rouge as Katrina was coming to Louisiana, my father, wants to stay in Houston!!! I'm beginning to think I'll never understand my old man. He's really stubborn, too, and the rest of the family has given up trying to convince him to leave--fortunately, my Mom's headed to Austin tomorrow morning, to take refuge with my older brother, Chris. That has me a bit worried, too, because the latest projections have Rita making landfall in Victoria, and then making a bee-line north to Texas' capitol city, but one hopes it will be decidedly weaker by the time it starts pounding the home of the Texas Longhorns.

At any rate, I decided not to speak with my Dad personally about this, because I'm afraid it would just piss him off. But he can't yell at an email. Here's what I sent him:

Dear Dad,

I understand that you've made up your mind about staying, so I'll be brief. As I'm sure you're aware, Rita is more powerful than Katrina was, and may very well maintain it's category 5 status when it makes landfall. It is ironic, indeed, that I now find myself compelled to make the same appeal to you that you made to me only a few short weeks ago.

I remember how you began your argument: "I have never run from a hurricane before, but..." Your reasoning was impeccable. You freely acknowledged that Katrina was probably not going to be a big factor in Baton Rouge, but you also observed that hurricanes often seem to have minds of their own, and it was in the realm of possiblity that we could have been directly hit. If we stayed and nothing happened, then fine. But if we stayed and Katrina hit, as unlikely as it seemed at the time, we could have been in serious trouble. Your logic was so compelling that I had absolutely no difficulty in deciding to hit the road, as much of a hassle as it was to do so.

You are now in exactly the same situation I was in when you called me with your passionate plea. Actually, your situation may even be more acute. I'm afraid you may be endangering your own life.

I understand your desire to stay and look after your home--you've put a lot of money, effort, and time into it. Decades, in fact. I don't need to tell you, however, that houses can be rebuilt, and possessions can be replaced. Human life cannot. Consequently, I very respectfully ask you to reconsider your decision not to evacuate.

Whatever you finally decide to do, please remember that I love you and you are in my prayers.

your son,
Ron

I hope this does some good. Man, even if my email is able to talk some sense into the old man, there's still the issue of my younger brother, Steve. He, like my father did for decades, works for Southwestern Bell, and is required to stay and work. After all, communications are a vital service; he's essentially in the category of "emergency personnel." This is going to be one hell of a nail-biter. Send your good vibes out to Texas, if you believe in that sort of thing.

At least I know the Feds will do their job this time around: Houston is where our President's father lives, too. I'm sure W's old man had enough horse sense to get the hell out.



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THIS MONTH'S STAR TREK CALENDAR PICTURE



Mr. Chekov immediately after being shot, but right before collapsing in a lifeless heap! Scream, Chekov, scream!

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LAST MONTH'S STAR TREK CALENDAR PICTURE

I got so caught up with the start of the semester and Katrina chaos that I forgot to post the calendar pic for August. I figure better late than never. Here it is:



Dr. McCoy with a bogus triox hypo!

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TWO FROM WORKING FOR CHANGE

Once again, my busy schedule is keeping me from doing much more than dropping a couple of excerpts and links. But it is good stuff. Check it out.

America learns the hard way that
Bush provides flash, not substance

Unfortunately, what the Bush White House is good at when it comes to national security is providing flash over substance, as Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana found out the hard way. After riding in a helicopter with the president and seeing machinery apparently working on the breached 17th Street levee, she was shocked the next day to find the work had mysteriously stopped.

"Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment," said the senator in a press release.

For far too long, this kind of shenanigan worked well for Bush, allowing him to narrowly win a second term. His administration was asleep at the switch on 9-11 even though "the system was blinking red," according to the then-CIA chief. Bush grabbed a bullhorn at ground zero and remade himself as a "war president" -- and suffered no real political damage from the failure to either capture Osama bin Laden or find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Click here for more.

Katrina reconstruction would be easier,
had Bush not squandered Clinton's surplus

It is an unenviable position for any president to be in: having to accommodate some $200 billion or more in unanticipated expenditures for what is clearly a federal responsibility to help the families of the region get back on their feet.

But that doesn't mean Bush didn't have it coming.

This president, you'll recall, inherited a budget surplus from the previous administration -- a cushion that could have been used to soften the budgetary blow of exactly this sort of monetary emergency. He made his bed, by recklessly wasting that surplus on bloated government spending, reckless tax cuts for his wealthy pals, and an even more reckless war in Iraq.

Now that he finds himself here, he has proposed to pay for it all by a combination of favorite conservative devices -- tax credits, enterprise zones, privatization -- that are a big part of how the budget surplus became a budget deficit in the first place.

Click here for more.

More of my always witty and poignant commentary tomorrow. I hope. Actually, I mean that I hope my commentary is always witty and poignant. I also hope I'll be able to produce some of that tomorrow. Okay, I'm always witty, at least. Right? Don't answer that.

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KRUGMAN ON KATRINA

The New York Times' resident Princeton economist takes a look at a couple of Katrina related issues, courtesy of the Unofficial Paul Krugman Web Page.

Not the New Deal

But George W. Bush isn't F.D.R. Indeed, in crucial respects he's the anti-F.D.R.

President Bush subscribes to a political philosophy that opposes government activism - that's why he has tried to downsize and privatize programs wherever he can. (He still hopes to privatize Social Security, F.D.R.'s biggest legacy.) So even his policy failures don't bother his strongest supporters: many conservatives view the inept response to Katrina as a vindication of their lack of faith in government, rather than as a reason to reconsider their faith in Mr. Bush.

And to date the Bush administration, which has no stake in showing that good government is possible, has been averse to investigating itself. On the contrary, it has consistently stonewalled corruption investigations and punished its own investigators if they try to do their jobs.

That's why Mr. Bush's promise last night that he will have "a team of inspectors general reviewing all expenditures" rings hollow. Whoever these inspectors general are, they'll be mindful of the fate of Bunnatine Greenhouse, a highly regarded auditor at the Army Corps of Engineers who suddenly got poor performance reviews after she raised questions about Halliburton's contracts in Iraq. She was demoted late last month.

Click here for the rest.

So, the reason we have such a crappy Federal Government is that it is run by people who don't believe in the Federal Government as an entity. It's quite amazing, actually, how the government-is-the-problem meme, which was so effective in catapulting the Republicans into their position of absolute power, has become so utterly dominant that it threatens literally to destroy the nation. I think this idea has essentially run its course: if we go any further in an anti-government direction, there won't be a government. Now if only our leaders could figure out how stupid they are, as if that's going to happen.

I wonder what kind of country this would be if conservatives had simply chosen to fight waste and fraud, instead of government itself: hell, if that were so, I might have some rightward tendencies myself.

Tragedy in Black and White

By three to one, African-Americans believe that federal aid took so long to arrive in New Orleans in part because the city was poor and black. By an equally large margin, whites disagree.

The truth is that there's no way to know. Maybe President Bush would have been mugging with a guitar the day after the levees broke even if New Orleans had been a mostly white city. Maybe Palm Beach would also have had to wait five days after a hurricane hit before key military units received orders to join rescue operations.

But in a larger sense, the administration's lethally inept response to Hurricane Katrina had a lot to do with race. For race is the biggest reason the United States, uniquely among advanced countries, is ruled by a political movement that is hostile to the idea of helping citizens in need.

Race, after all, was central to the emergence of a Republican majority: essentially, the South switched sides after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Today, states that had slavery in 1860 are much more likely to vote Republican than states that didn't.

Click here for the rest.

I continue to be amazed how so many white Americans, including countless liberals, are able to look at the African-American victims of Katrina all over television for weeks and still say "there was no racism." What would it take? Bush in a KKK robe and mask? I think it's safe to say that most whites tend to think of race in terms of individual attitudes and actions. Consequently, Bush's extraordinarily slow response in dealing with the disaster in New Orleans cannot, for most whites, be racism unless Bush is racist as an individual. Clearly, Bush is not in the Klan, but he does ride herd over numerous Federal institutions for which black Americans are simply not a priority. By the popularly believed racism-is-individual standard, that's not racism. But it's still whites with power screwing over blacks. In other words, it's what's known as institutional racism. Call it what you want: it still stinks.

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Grief, anxiety and depression follow disasters

From the Houston Chronicle:

The worst may be over for many Katrina evacuees, but for some the hardest part is just beginning: the emotional toll. Victims are struggling with large-scale trauma — grief, depression, anxiety, anger, guilt — and the next few months will tell whether the nation's overburdened mental health community is equipped to respond to the fallout.

The federal agency coordinating the nation's mental-health response estimates that as many as one-third of evacuees — or about 66,000 in Houston — could develop a stress-related disorder that requires professional help. Two in Houston who didn't get such help committed suicide during the evacuees' first two weeks here.

In Katrina's aftermath, more than one million people have been displaced, more than 400,000 jobs have been lost, more than 1,750 children are missing. Mental health specialists say they're staggered by the enormity of it all.

Click here for the rest.

I've mentioned how my and Becky's own evacuation has made me feel a weird empathy for the victims of Katrina: we hit the road in a hurry, with three cats, having no idea where we were going or what it would be like when we got there; we had car trouble and feared that we'd be caught out in the storm on the side of the road--uncertainty and fear ruled us for a couple of days. Of course, we got to come back to our home very quickly, with no damages, and all our creature comforts fully intact. We haven't even suffered a fraction of what the people of New Orleans have suffered. On the other hand, we've been depressed by the loss of our favorite city; we've been constantly in the presence of the people to whom the city belonged, but, again, our depression must be nothing like what they've had to deal with. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if the victims of Katrina have gone through even twice as much as I have, they've got to be hurting pretty badly in terms of their emotional lives. My suspicion is that many of them are hurting much, much more than twice as badly as us. Somehow the phrase "post-traumatic stress disorder" just doesn't do justice to it all.

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How the Free Market Killed New Orleans

From ZNet:

The free market played a crucial role in the destruction of New Orleans and the death of thousands of its residents. Forewarned that a momentous (force 5) hurricane was going to hit that city and surrounding areas, what did officials do? They played the free market.

They announced that everyone should evacuate. Everyone was expected to devise their own way out of the disaster area by private means, just like people do when disaster hits free-market Third World countries.

It is a beautiful thing this free market in which every individual pursues his or her own personal interests and thereby effects an optimal outcome for the entire society. Thus does the invisible hand work its wonders in mysterious ways.

In New Orleans there would be none of the collectivistic regimented evacuation as occurred in Cuba. When an especially powerful hurricane hit that island in 2004, the Castro government, abetted by neighborhood citizen committees and local Communist party cadres, evacuated 1.5 million people, more than 10 percent of the country’s population. The Cubans lost 20,000 homes to that hurricane---but not a single life was lost, a heartening feat that went largely unmentioned in the U.S. press.

Click here for the rest.

One of the students I teach in my entry level acting class came in wearing a gag "Nixon in '88" tee shirt last Thursday. Despite my liberalism and understanding of his crimes, I have a weird admiration for old Tricky Dick, which made me compliment my student's shirt. This led to a very brief conversation about politics--fearing that I might potentially alienate a pupil so early in the semester, I simply told him that I was actually conservative back in 1988, but now I'm very far to the left. "What about you?" I asked.

Great answer: "Man, I don't know. In my economics class I learned that some people think we should cut taxes to help business thrive, but others think we need to use tax money to help the needy. As far as what Bush is doing in those terms, I just don't get it one way or the other."

I responded that the truth about taxation and welfare was probably somewhere between the extremes, and that the Bush era has been making me reevaluate my understanding of conservatism: how can the Republicans possibly claim to be the party of fiscal restraint these days?

Despite our conversation's simplicity, I think we did a pretty good job of nailing down the central question in contemporary American politics: should we "tax and spend" or cut taxes and spending? Or, to make the question even more in line with current conservative thinking, should we cut taxes and increase spending? I think that the closing years of the 20th century made it pretty clear that the old, hardline ideolgies of absolute socialism and communism have been discredited as being ultimately impractical, although the reference above to Cuba's success with hurricane evacuation makes such an analysis somewhat problematic--actually, such a story makes a good point: despite overall failure, socialism has some good ideas. On the other hand, New Orleans' disasterous fending for itself for nearly a week after Katrina, coupled with Republicans' inability to abide by their own fiscal philosophy, show that there are serious flaws with the neo-liberal or "free market" ideology. That is, as with communism, absolute capitalism has also been discredited as being ultimately impractical. The problem is that our ruling class and media haven't yet figured it out; they're as blind as the old Soviet Politburo was in the days before Gorbachev.

So the problem facing America these days is twofold. First, we must, as a society, come to terms with the fact that the dominant economic ideology has severe problems in the real world. Second, after realizing that capitalism is just as flawed as communism, we must then figure out how to strike a working balance between freedom for money and meeting the needs of citizens. What I really want to know is when we're going to get serious about this, because, until then, American life is a big fucking joke.

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HARD TIMES AT THE HURRICANE PET SHELTER
Guest Blogger Becky on How She Got Four Cats Out

I’ve been staying in touch with Debbie since she left for California, and she called Thursday in a mild panic.

While registering their cats a couple of weeks ago at the animal hurricane shelter down in Gonzalez, which is midway between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, her son befriended one of the volunteers, who promised to keep a special eye on their kitties. The volunteer, Jason, called them Wednesday evening with a scary warning: they had better get their cats out or they could be shipped out of state, or worse. The shelter is overflowing, and he feared they would never find their pets again.

After a series of back-and-forth conversations between me, Debbie, her daughter-in-law and Jason, I hit the road with cat carriers, required paperwork, bottled water, and details describing the kitties’ precise location. Jason works for Cat Haven locally, and has been volunteering at the hurricane shelter. His dire warning to me: “It’s a really bad situation.”

I tried to steel myself for what I was about to encounter.

I was greeted by a couple of National Guardsmen, who directed me around the compound. The shelter is set up at the Lamar Dixon Expo Center, which typically hosts livestock events. Behind the long horse arena one sees from the road are eight shed buildings. Each building is about 75’ wide by 150’ long, and contains at least 100 stalls, each suitable for a single cow.

The bad situation was immediately obvious: every shed was stuffed to the gills. Not full of 100 cows, but full of thousands of cats, and dogs, and other critters I didn’t see.

I had to walk through a dog shed to submit the initial paperwork. A handful of volunteers were busy washing cages. Mountains of carriers were stacked outside, having been replaced by slightly larger wire cages. More volunteers could be seen taking dogs for a walk, one at a time in the sweltering heat. Inside the heat was even more oppressive, despite the shade. Most dogs lay panting. A few were wagging their tails and panting. One pair was viciously growling at each other from cages that were only about one foot apart. Other dogs were out of their cages, being treated by courageous volunteer veterinarians.

Both man and beast were hot, tired, and much too crowded.

After running back and forth a few times, I finally obtained clearance to retrieve all four cats. The volunteer tracked down a doctor at the cat shed, who almost jumped up and down when she realized I was actually taking some cats home. Most visitors are still dropping pets off, or wandering from stall to stall, hoping to find their lost companions.

I lugged out the cages, and by the time I got there, one of “our” cats was being swabbed with ice: they were concerned about his panting. No surprise.

I started the car and set the air-conditioner on high. The doc helped me lumber out with the heavier carriers, and secure the cats in the back seat. Several began to wail immediately once we were in motion. I heard the sounds of barf. Great, just keep driving, it’s only about 20 miles. Then I smelled crap, and louder wailings. My stress level went up, and the windows went down. Even louder wails. I cried a little, wishing Ron wasn’t at school and could have come with me. I felt angry and everyone and everything. I tried desperately not to think about the past two hours and the reality of the shelter. Focus, don’t crash, get home safe.

We did. That was Thursday afternoon.

Five cats on the porch: Kali and Triangle, who were already here, along with Blacky, Jynx and Gaia. At least they already know each other, and are settling into their tiny territories. Blacky keeps escaping, but coming back. Four cats inside: Mambo, who won’t tolerate any other felines, is locked in our study while we try to find a new, permanent one-cat human for her. And the originals: Paz, Phil and Frankie, who are a bit cranky, but generally good-natured under the circumstances.

And now it’s time to scoop some litter.

(Becky knows good and well that I'm the litter box guy: that's one mess she's not having to deal with. Anyway, here are some cat pics to go with her essay. The first two we were already housing, the next four were the ones she picked up on Thursday.)

Kali



Triangle



Blacky



Jynx



Gaia



Mambo



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KEEPING POOR BLACKS OUT OF THE BIG EASY
Don't Be Surprised Who Shows Up in New Orleans

From CounterPunch:

So, as Sonny Landreth puts it in his song "Levee Town," "Don't be surprised at who shows up, down in the Levee Town." As the waters recede, poor neighborhoods will be swiftly redtagged for the bulldozers and their erstwhile occupants scheduled for permanent expulsion. The post-Katrina "reconstruction" of New Orleans promises to be the first really big outing for the Kelo decision. Kelo? It will be recalled that on June 23 of this year, the US Supreme Court's liberals, plus Souter and Kennedy, decreed that between private property rights on the one side and big time developers with city councils in their pockets on the other, the latter win every time, using the weapon of eminent domain in the furtherance of "public purpose." As Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in her dissent, "the spectre of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton. Any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory." Or any black neighborhood with some simulacrum of the Garden District.

And

The scarcely suppressed class war in New Orleans was always what gave the place, and its music, its edge. And why, at least until now, the Disneyfication of the core city could never quite be consummated. Barely had the hurricane passed before Speaker of the House Hastert caught the Republican mood nicely with his remarks that the city should be abandoned to the alligators and Barbara Bush followed through with her considered view that for black people the Houston Astrodome represented ne plus ultra in domestic amenities.

Click here for the rest.

This essay doesn't even get into the fact that many poor African-American New Orleanians won't want to come back if their lives end up being better wherever they ended up after evacuating. The destruction of New Orleans does, indeed, present a big opportunity for developers and racists to re-color the city in their favorite shades of white, but, conversely, it also presents a big opportunity to address the longstanding poverty issues facing blacks there for many decades: from the enormous amounts of federal money now flowing into the Crescent City, large chunks of it should be earmarked for revitalizing schools, job training, black entrepreneurialism, public health and child care, and public transportation to allow citizens to get to their jobs more easily. Poor New Orleans blacks should also be given low or no interest loans so that they can buy their own houses. In other words, all this reconstruction money can easily be used to entice the Big Easy's cultural backbone to return.

I've got a bad feeling, however, that's not going to happen.

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TRIAGE FOR N.O.
LSU To The Rescue

From Sports Illustrated, courtesy of CoSIDA, courtesy of BuzzFlash:

Blackhawk helicopters were carrying in victims who'd been stranded on roofs. Buses rolled in from New Orleans.... A lady fell out of her wheelchair and we scrambled to help her up.... A man from New Orleans was badly injured on his head. Five minutes later he was dead. Mothers were giving birth in the locker rooms.... A man was rolled in on a stretcher [suffering from] gunshots. A paramedic said a looter needed his boat and he wouldn't give it to him.... The auxiliary gym was being used as a morgue. I couldn't take myself down there to see it.

Click here for the rest.

Of course, I've already mentioned my school's massive triage for New Orleans on several occasions. I even took some pictures of all the activity. Thing is, I never got to see all the drama taking place inside LSU's basketball arena. From what I've read in this article, I'm glad I didn't try to get in--I'm sure it would have depressed me more than I already was. Fortunately, it's all over now. As far as I can tell, they've pretty much shut down most of it. Earlier today, I saw a large pile of military issue stretchers and straps behind the PMAC waiting to be picked up; all the Humvees in the nearby parking lot are gone, as is the constant stream of helicopters. But while it was all going on, it was a huge testimony to the good that people can do when they have to. All is not lost for the human race.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Phil



Frankie



Paz

NOTE: We're now sheltering a total of six cats from New Orleans. Pics of them later today.

ANOTHER NOTE: Rehearsal has once again drained my blogging abilities for the evening. I was too optimistic in promising six more cat pictures for tonight. But I'll get to then soon.

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MORE ON THE NEW ORLEANS WHITE ELITE'S
CONSPIRACY TO BAR BLACKS FROM RETURNING

Lending credibility to Wayne Madsen's report of a plan to keep poor African-Americans from returning to New Orleans, the Raw Story covers a Wall Street Journal article about how rich white New Orleanians want the city rebuilt, courtesy of Orcinus:

How do they want the city rebuilt?

"The power elite of New Orleans -- whether they are still in the city or have moved temporarily to enclaves such as Destin, Fla., and Vail, Colo. -- insist the remade city won't simply restore the old order. New Orleans before the flood was burdened by a teeming underclass, substandard schools and a high crime rate. The city has few corporate headquarters.

"The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services and fewer poor people. "Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically," he says. "I'm not just speaking for myself here. The way we've been living is not going to happen again, or we're out."

Click here for the rest.

Obviously, such sentiments are expressed in the carefully coded language of Southern racism in the post civil-rights era. Allow me to translate: "We're going to keep all those filthy violent lazy ni$$ers out of our once proud and pure white city. We're rich. We can do this. Fuck you." I'll give you one guess as to who these bastards voted for last November, and to whom they heavily contribute. That's right; they have a strong ally in the Oval Office who understands their special language all too well. I've got a really sinking feeling that these Nazi fucks are going to pull it off.

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THE REAL PRESIDENT BUSH
Living Too Much in the Bubble?

From Time courtesy of This Modern World:

Just as Katrina exposed the lurking problems of race and poverty, it also revealed the limitations of Bush's rigid, top-down approach to the presidency. "The extremely highly centralized control of the government--the engine of Bush's success--failed him this time," a key adviser said.

And

A related factor, aides and outside allies concede, is what many of them see as the President's increasing isolation. Bush's bubble has grown more hermetic in the second term, they say, with fewer people willing or able to bring him bad news--or tell him when he's wrong. Bush has never been adroit about this. A youngish aide who is a Bush favorite described the perils of correcting the boss. "The first time I told him he was wrong, he started yelling at me," the aide recalled about a session during the first term. "Then I showed him where he was wrong, and he said, 'All right. I understand. Good job.' He patted me on the shoulder. I went and had dry heaves in the bathroom."

And

Finally, if the Bush team initially missed the significance of a city with a majority of black citizens in peril, it may be because he has organized his presidency around a different segment of the population.

Click here for the rest.

This is nothing new. It's the same kind of blind arrogance and willful ignorance that's been coming out of the White House for five years now. The only difference is that the corporate media aren't playing along the way they used to. Earlier this evening, right before Bush's desperate address to the nation from the Big Easy's Jackson Square, Ted Koppel, according to my wife, ran a montage of White House statements about what was happening in New Orleans during the reign of chaos crosscut with scenes from what was actually happening on the ground; the effect clearly showed the White House's total divorce from reality. It makes me wonder if the President has any idea at all about what's actually going on in Iraq: the New Orleans debacle was played out live on television, piped into millions of American households, which ultimately forced Bush to do his job; Iraq, however, is thousands of miles away, and most US reporters are still "embedded." It's really difficult not to believe that this bubble reality within which Bush lives his life affects his entire Presidency, and, therefore, the entire nation.

One last thing. I threw in that final excerpt about race simply because it states well why I think that racism was a major factor in the White House's slow response to Hurricane Katrina. It's been quite surprising to me that so many white Americans are hesitant to consider the possibility that race played a role: "It's not race; it's class," I've heard people say countless times. Well, class did, indeed, play a role, but it is impossible to deny that poverty and race in America are hopelessly intertwined. Racism did play a role, but it wasn't the kind of Simon Legree, moustache twirling, archetypal racist media image that white Americans typically envision when they consider racism; rather, it was racism by indifference. As Kanye West observed a few days back, "George Bush doesn't care about black people."


Look at me! I'm the President!

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DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT MEANS TO MISS NEW ORLEANS?

The end of August and beginning of September was an emotionally grueling couple of weeks for me and my wife Becky. Not nearly as bad as what the victims of Katrina have faced, but pretty difficult nonetheless. From our nerve-wracking but ultimately needless evacuation at my father's urging from Baton Rouge to Tyler, Texas, which I'm beginning to believe has given me a weird empathy for the hundreds of thousands of displaced New Orleanians now scattered throughout the nation, to our horrified return to southeast Louisiana, to my witnessing of the massive triage for New Orleans at LSU, to communicating with a friend inside the city during the reign of chaos, to eventually housing her here for a few days, to sheltering three cats from the Big Easy, to finding ourselves neck deep in a sea of evacuees, this has been a wild ride.

If you've been reading REAL ART with any regularity since Katrina hit, it's obvious how I've become obsessed with it all. Or maybe it's not obsession; maybe I've had no choice but to be thinking about it constantly--after all, reminders are all over the place, and local news was covering it 24/7 until only recently. The destruction of New Orleans has become, irrevocably, a part of my life.

This would have been hard enough by itself, but, like many other Americans, the Crescent City is extraordinarily important to me. Becky had loved it for decades, and often visited there before I met her. I had only been there once, with my Southern Baptist youth group when I was a teenager--as one might expect, the Baptists showed me only the less interesting aspects of the city, so I might as well have not ever been there. After we had been dating for a few months, Becky absolutely insisted that we visit. I remember getting out of the car into the steamy summer of the French Quarter for the first time: it was like walking into a novel or movie. You just can't be there without feeling like you're in another reality, that magic exists, that there might just be hope for human existence. Like New York, you can feel jazz in the air. We've been there many times since; we spent our honeymoon there after we got married. We were even thinking about living there when I finish grad school.

The possibility that New Orleans might not exist again has made me sick to my stomach on more than one occasion. Spending time and sharing space with evacuees lamenting the city's plight has made things even worse. I'm so fucking sad.

Last Friday while I was inputting data at the office where I work, the internet radio station I was listening to played a Louis Armstrong song I've known for years, "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?" It was just too much. I started crying. It was like when my cat Alec was dying and I tried to cheer myself up by playing Chuck Mangione's "Feels So Good," a stupid thing to do because I can no longer hear it without getting depressed. Fortunately, I was able to get out of the office quickly, avoiding embarrassment, but now I'm totally haunted by this great song about being deprived of this great city. I hope to god that one day I can hear it without bursting into tears.

Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans
And miss it each night and day
I know I’m not wrong
this feeling’s gettin’ stronger
The longer, I stay away

Miss them moss covered vines the tall sugar pines
Where mockin’ birds used to sing
And I’d like to see
that lazy Mississippi
hurryin’ into spring

The moonlight on the bayou
a creole tune that fills the air
I dream about magnolias in bloom
and I’m wishin’ I was there

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans
When that’s where you left your heart
And there’s one thing more
I miss the one I care for
More than I miss New Orleans

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report finds Louisiana governor took necessary steps

From the Raw Story courtesy of BuzzFlash:

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) issued a report Tuesday afternoon asserting that Louisiana governor Katherine Blanco took the necessary and timely steps needed to secure disaster relief from the federal government, RAW STORY has learned.

The report, which comes after a request by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) to review the law and legal accountability relating to Federal action in response to Hurricane Katrina, unequivocally concludes that she did.

"This report closes the book on the Bush Administration's attempts to evade accountability," Conyers said in a statement. "The Bush Administration was caught napping at a critical time."

Click here for the rest.

Last week, Becky told me about a moderate-liberal coworker who seemed to be buying in, to some extent, to the right-wing spin about responsibility and Hurricane Katrina. That is, he was apparently saying that the Governor shares some of the blame because she waited too long to let the Feds in. My immediate response was to print up Blanco's August 27th declaration of emergency from the Louisiana state government website--it is now hanging on our refrigerator door like a child's A+ worksheet. At least we knew the truth. Thing is, it's pretty maddening that journalists didn't shove that declaration in Republican faces the moment they started spewing their vile bullshit; I guess it's still too much to ask the "fourth branch of government" to actually do their jobs. Fortunately, this new report makes it obvious to all where the real blame lies. Group that with what amounts to Bush's recent firing of FEMA chief Brown, as well as the President's admission of having dropped the ball on Katrina, the first time I can recall Bush ever admitting to having made a mistake, and no sane American can possibly blame anyone else for the post hurricane fiasco but the President.

In this age of illusion, even the brutally obvious must be supported with overwhelming evidence if one wants to counter the lies of the right-wing spin machine. The only reason "the blame game" became a partisan issue is because the Republicans wanted it that way. Now we know for sure: Bush screwed up. End of discussion.

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TWO FROM WORKING FOR CHANGE

Forgive me; I'm dead tired tonight, so I'm afraid the best I can muster is a couple of links and excerpts. But it's good stuff. Why, the first one comes from uber-Texan Molly Ivins:

The Graft Goes On

Of course, no one would suggest Halliburton and its subsidiaries get government contracts (more than $9 billion for reconstruction work in Iraq, with Pentagon audits thus far showing $1.03 billion in "questioned" costs and $422 million in "unsupported costs") just because Vice President Cheney is still on the payroll. Heavens no. The veep continues to receive deferred pay from the company he formerly headed -- $194,852 last year.

But Cheney has nothing to do with the Halliburton contracts -- that, friends, goes through none other than the noted lobbyist and former head of -- of all things -- the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Since Joe Allbaugh, who was Bush's campaign manger in 2000, left FEMA in December 2002, he has been busy making sure reconstruction contracts in Iraq go to companies that give generously to the Republican Party.

Now, aren't you ashamed of yourself for thinking there's something wrong with that? Besides, Allbaugh is now with a big-time Washington lobbying firm, where he also represents Shaw Group Inc., and -- viola -- Shaw Group, too, already has a $100 million emergency contract from FEMA for housing management and construction, and a $100 million order from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for Katrina repair.

Click here for the rest.

And this next one's even better, from the Washington Post's moderate-liberal columnist E. J. Dionne:

The end of the Bush era

And so the Bush Era ended definitively on Friday, Sept. 2, the day Bush first toured the Gulf States after Hurricane Katrina. There was no magic moment with a bullhorn. The utter failure of federal relief efforts had by then become clear. Monday's resignation of FEMA Director Michael D. Brown put an explanation point on the failure. The source of Bush's political success was his claim that he could protect Americans. Leadership, strength and security were Bush's calling cards. Over the last two weeks, they were lost in the surging waters of New Orleans.

But the first intimations of the end of the Bush Era came months ago. The president's post-election fixation with privatizing part of Social Security showed how out of touch he was. The more Bush discussed this boutique idea cooked up in conservative think tanks and Wall Street imaginations, the less the public liked it. The situation in Iraq deteriorated. The glorious economy Bush kept touting turned out not to be glorious for many Americans. The Census Bureau's annual economic report, released in the midst of the Gulf disaster, found that an additional 4.1 million Americans had slipped into poverty between 2001 and 2004.

Click here for the rest.

See? That wasn't so bad. Unless the content of these essays is making you sick to your stomach. That's bad. But you really do need to know what these robber barons are up to: if word gets out, really, really gets out, there's a good chance of the Democrats winning back one or both houses of Congress in '06. That's when the fun really gets started. Investigations out the butt. Impeachment? We can only hope.

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MY BIGGEST FEAR FOR THE BIG EASY
Dallas meeting plans reconstruction of
New Orleans without poor African Americans

From the Wayne Madsen Report courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe:

September 9, 2005 -- According to well-informed New Orleans sources, New Orleans' wealthiest families, including those who are direct descendants of the French who settled New Orleans (not the Acadians [Cajuns] who were poor refugees from British tyranny in Nova Scotia) are meeting in Dallas today with Bush administration officials, New Orleans city officials, wealthy Texas oilmen, and bankers to plan for the reconstruction of New Orleans. These wealthy New Orleans residents live in the gated community of Audobon Place, a section of the city near the Garden District replete with personal helipads that still has running water and sewage and was only slightly affected by hurricane Katrina. It is now reportedly being patrolled by private Israeli security forces. Yesterday's Wall Street Journal ran a piece with more details on this story.

The Dallas meeting focused on rebuilding and re-zoning New Orleans without the "criminal element," a code word for the city's poor African American community.

These New Orleans residents have been scattered across the United States and are now under the control of FEMA. There is an understanding by the wealthy New Orleans elite that the poor will never be able to return. The Journal reported that the person who chaired the Dallas meeting was Jimmy Riess, one of the wealthy New Orleans elite who also served as Mayor Ray Nagin's Chairman of the Regional Transit Authority, which is in charge of the city's buses, trolleys, and trains. New Orleans sources report that public transportation was purposely not used to evacuate the poor New Orleans residents as a means to depopulate the poorer and more flood-prone sections of the city. In fact, after the properties in New Orleans poorer communities are razed many of the deed records of the poor and middle class contained in government offices and title companies of Orleans Parish and neighboring Jefferson Parish may end up being casualties of the flood. As one New Orleans source put it, "people will not have proof they ever owned anything." As for renters and residents of public housing, they will be prevented from returning to their native city, according to New Orleans sources. Louisiana's Republican House member Richard Baker, a strong Bush ally, may have tipped his hand about the future plans for New Orleans when he told a group of lobbyists, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."

The French-American elite of New Orleans are among the city's "rich and famous." They run the Mardi Gras "crews" (Krews) or clubs, secret hereditary societies that sponsor the annual pre-Lenten festival. Many also run large oil companies and are long time supporters of the Bush family and their associated oil and gas cartels.

Click here for overall context.

(Investigative reporter and former US security apparatus guy Wayne Madsen doesn't use permalinks for his posts, so I copied and pasted the entire article.)

In many ways, this meeting very much reflects the opportunism the right wing displayed in the wake of 9/11. That is, most Americans see only tragedy on the Mississippi Delta and hope to rebuild as quickly as possible; the wealthy elite, on the other hand, see a chance to get a few things they've wanted for years. After 9/11, it was a shopping list of "reforms" that had little to do with terrorism, and, for the most part, they got what they wanted. It remains to be seen what will happen with New Orleans, but if history is any indicator, in a couple of years the cultural element that ultimately made the Crescent City so wonderful will be gone forever.

Never mind the injustice of using this horrible event to essentially evict an enormous group of politically powerless people, this could really drive a stake through the city's heart. All the cool stuff that tourists and residents alike love about New Orleans absolutely depends on the poor African-Americans these rich white racists want to get rid of. Most of the entertainment and local color of the French Quarter bubbles up out of those blighted neighborhoods hardest hit by the flooding. Without the Big Easy's black culture, New Orleans might as well be a theme park: poor blacks, quite literally, provide the sense of authenticity that makes everything come together.

Indeed, New Orleans novelist Anne Rice wrote about exactly that point last week. From the New York Times courtesy of Common Dreams:

Do You Know What it Means to Lose New Orleans?

Through this all, black culture never declined in Louisiana. In fact, New Orleans became home to blacks in a way, perhaps, that few other American cities have ever been. Dillard University and Xavier University became two of the most outstanding black colleges in America; and once the battles of desegregation had been won, black New Orleanians entered all levels of life, building a visible middle class that is absent in far too many Western and Northern American cities to this day.

The influence of blacks on the music of the city and the nation is too immense and too well known to be described. It was black musicians coming down to New Orleans for work who nicknamed the city "the Big Easy" because it was a place where they could always find a job. But it's not fair to the nature of New Orleans to think of jazz and the blues as the poor man's music, or the music of the oppressed.

Something else was going on in New Orleans. The living was good there. The clock ticked more slowly; people laughed more easily; people kissed; people loved; there was joy.

Click here for the rest.

This elite conspiracy to destroy what made New Orleans great cannot be allowed to come to fruition. If it does, the rich will get richer, but their city will lose everything--it will become just another city, full of chain stores and Clear Channel music, a shadow, culturally, of it's former self. I have no idea how to stop this; after all, the rich and powerful usually get their way in America. But I do know that if they get away with their plans, it will be a crime worse than Bush's negligence with Katrina in the first place.

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INCREDIBLE BEFORE AND AFTER
NEW ORLEANS PHOTO GALLERY

From Five Days with Katrina courtesy of Marsi's Blog:

On Sunday August 28 I woke up at 5 in the morning to go to my morning job at the Chateu Sonesta Hotel. The night before, we had been warned that Hurricane Katrina was preying her eyes upon us. In the history of New Orleans, there has NEVER been a direct hit by a hurricane. In everyone's mind, this hurricane would follow the same path that hundreds of past storms had done before. However, because of the size of the storm and ferocity which it tore through South Florida, the citizens of the The Big Easy prepared themselves as best they could... this is my tale of the events...

Click here for the pics.

These are some really good, high resolution photos, 197 of them. I know that pictures can't really do justice to what was going on there in the wake of Katrina, but this is probably as close as you're going to get if you weren't there. Here's a sample:


Some streets in the Quarter, especially those close to Canal, began to overflow

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N.O. SAINTS, LSU TIGERS BOTH POST
DRAMATIC VICTORIES FOR LOUISIANA

From the AP via ESPN:

Reason to cheer: Saints beat Panthers in final seconds

Football is no longer a simple game for the New Orleans Saints. They'll play this season for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, a burden they'll carry every time they step on the field.

The Saints won Sunday for their deluged city and the displaced victims of the Gulf Coast region, getting two touchdowns from Deuce McAllister and a 47-yard field goal from John Carney with 3 seconds left in a 23-20 season-opening win over the Carolina Panthers.

"In the back of our minds, we know we have to give them one tiny bit of hope," said New Orleans quarterback Aaron Brooks. "We have complete faith in what we are doing because every time we go out there, it is our job to give them hope that every day will be a better day."

The Saints have visited shelters in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, spending time with fans who had lost everything. Each time they heard the same request: Win a game for us.

Click here for the rest.

And again from the AP via ESPN:

No ordinary season-opening win for LSU

For LSU, football has a stark look this season.

"This is not a made-for-TV movie," coach Les Miles said. "This was a real-life trauma where friends and family had to stay in the dorms and the town swelled to take in the New Orleans evacuees. We are treating people that are injured and disadvantaged 200 yards from our stadium. We have a scrimmage, and Blackhawk helicopters are flying people from New Orleans over our heads."

The fifth-ranked Tigers traveled halfway across the country to play their "home" opener Saturday night -- a 35-31 victory over No. 15 Arizona State in Miles' debut as LSU's coach.

The game should have been the second this season in Baton Rouge, La., but Hurricane Katrina washed out the opener against North Texas on Sept. 3. A week later, the Tigers were in Tempe, forced off campus by the influx of people who turned the basketball arena into what athletic director Skip Bertman called the largest triage center in the United States.

Click here for the rest.

Not since the Aggies beat the Longhorns in Austin in the wake of the Texas A&M bonfire tragedy that happened a few days before the game have I seen the communal healing power of football work its magic. Behind all the hooplah, behind all the statistics and mascots, is something people don't seem to talk about all that much: football is a community activity, bringing people together in enormous ceremonies of cohesion. Usually, this is simply something that we do here in America, a unique manifestation of our culture, but sometimes, like this weekend, it counts for much, much more. I know; I know. It's just a game. But you have to look at the emotional ramifications here. The Tigers' and Saints' victories are a statement to the people of Louisiana that all is not lost, that we will prevail. Just a game? No, these two wins represent the collective hopes and dreams of an entire state. I'm happy to be here, if only to be a part of all that.

By the way, with the Longhorns' defeat of Ohio State, and Michigan's loss to Notre Dame, LSU was able to rise from the number five slot of the AP poll to number three: my two college teams are now in the top three! This is weird. I'm used to losing.

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Texas wins first-ever matchup with Ohio State

Time for a hurricane break. From the Austin American-Statesman:

The stakes could not have been bigger for such an early-season matchup. The victory puts Texas at 2-0 and trailing only Southern Cal in the polls. The road victory at Ohio State makes the Longhorns an early favorite to stay in the national title picture.

Fittingly, this matchup of two of the sport's heavyweights played out like a heavyweight fight. Texas took a 10-0 lead in the first quarter, only to see Ohio State counterpunch its way to a 16-13 lead at halftime.

And

That left Texas needing a score with five minutes on the clock.

The Longhorns' game-winning drive was aided by a costly pass-interference penalty against the Buckeyes and culminated with a catch in the end zone by a falling Sweed. Officials reviewed the the 24-yard touchdown and ruled that the catch was good. Pino added the extra point for the victory.

The Longhorns recovered a fumble and nearly punched in another touchdown but came up 1 yard short. That led to Larry Dibbles' sack of Smith deep in the end zone for a safety with 19 seconds left and a 25-22 win.

Click here for the rest.

This was a total nail-biter. I had pretty much written the Longhorns off, even though they were only down by six points, when they scored that last touchdown with only 2:37 left on the clock. Becky was already in bed when I started yelling "Yes! Yes!"

She called out, "I'm glad you're having fun, honey."

I called back, "I'm not sure if I'm having fun or if I'm horrified; I'll let you know when the game's over."

When Ohio State fumbled the ball and Texas recovered moments later, I was pretty sure that I wasn't horrified. Then that safety got me doing the hook 'em 'Horns sign with my hand while I was hopping around the room. God, what a great game! At last, something to shout about.


Limas Sweed's touchdown catch late in the fourth quarter

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OUR WOMAN IN NEW ORLEANS (part two)
Guest Blogger Becky Updates Debbie's Story

Read part one here.

My friend evacuated from New Orleans Tuesday, 9/06 with her 86 year old step-dad, 20 year old son and wife, and six cats. They stopped in Gonzales, LA and left four cats at a shelter there, to be picked up as soon as possible.

The young couple and dad had a place to stay, and Debbie came to our house. She brought just a few small bags, along with her elder cat, and a kitten she rescued during the storm.

She got the kids and dad on a plane to Sacramento Thursday, and then left Friday with a couple from New Orleans; they were headed to somewhere near Los Angeles.

While she was here, I met a couple of dozen NOLA evacuees while driving them to various places. With one exception, they were in good spirits, which continues to amaze me. I stuffed my despair, in hopes of feeling useful while doing some small favors for those displaced.

I heard horror stories of Armageddon-like post-hurricane survival, told with humor and hope. Even while lamenting lost neighborhoods, schools, merchants and restaurants/bars/coffee shops, my friends spoke of dreams, plans and ideas for reconstruction and revival.

New Orleans will rebuild.

But can it ever be the same?

An interesting commentary from locals was about the Mardi Gras Indians. They speculated that the generations-old tradition of the Indians could easily be lost; so many people, while high in stature in their tribe, or krewe, are still desperately poor, and may have little chance to return to their home. They described the Indian’s fierce determination to participate in a cultural tradition, despite economic impossibilities: costumes are recycled every year, with sequins saved like gems. They also described those costumes as some of the very best of Mardi Gras, creative and wonderfully elaborate.

Another conversation focused on possible scenarios for the nouvelle New Orleans: an Amsterdam-like fantasy of canals; a smaller city with more art and less crime; a place of hard work and unfailing determination. There were a dozen more spin-offs of various themes. Hope was obvious, sadness yet to be visited.

So, I ask myself and the seemingly-fractured universe: can New Orleans ever be the same? How can it truly be the same, when so many are housed in air-conditioned, impersonal camps, possibly never able to return? I think I might be learning the concept of faith.

In the past few days, I never saw a single person from New Orleans cry.

And now that Debbie’s on her way to a forced vacation in California, and her cats are miraculously managing to temporarily integrate our household, and Baton Rouge is thronging with shell-shocked New Orleanians, we’re trying not to cry.

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Trapped in New Orleans

From CounterPunch courtesy of the Socialist Worker, two radical EMS workers from San Francisco who were attending a conference in the Big Easy when Katrina hit relate the tale of their eventual escape:

Flush with the necessities, we offered food and water to passing families and individuals. Many decided to stay and join us. Our encampment grew to 80 or 90 people.

From a woman with a battery-powered radio, we learned that the media was talking about us. Up in full view on the freeway, every relief and news organizations saw us on their way into the city. Officials were being asked what they were going to do about all those families living up on the freeway. The officials responded that they were going to take care of us. Some of us got a sinking feeling. "Taking care of us" had an ominous tone to it.

Unfortunately, our sinking feeling (along with the sinking city) was accurate. Just as dusk set in, a sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces and screamed, "Get off the fucking freeway." A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water.

Once again, at gunpoint, we were forced off the freeway. All the law enforcement agencies appeared threatened when we congregated into groups of 20 or more. In every congregation of "victims," they saw "mob" or "riot." We felt safety in numbers. Our "we must stay together" attitude was impossible because the agencies would force us into small atomized groups.

In the pandemonium of having our camp raided and destroyed, we scattered once again. Reduced to a small group of eight people, in the dark, we sought refuge in an abandoned school bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We were hiding from possible criminal elements, but equally and definitely, we were hiding from the police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies.

Click here for the rest.

There's actually a six degrees and Kevin Bacon thing going on for me with this essay. Becky's friend Debbie from New Orleans who has been staying with us the past few days is originally from San Francisco and still has lots of contacts there. The above linked story was sent to me as a forwarded email, first sent by people who know the authors. Small world. It just goes to show how Katrina has affected the entire nation.

As far as the content of the story is concerned, which mostly explains how, in the absence of any official relief inside the city, people had to depend on each other but were continually thwarted by what little official presence there actually was, I think we're going to hear a lot in the coming weeks about how large numbers of evacuees have been treated like utter shit by officials at all levels of government. For crying out loud, earlier today I read about what amounts to a secluded detention center under heavy security in Oklahoma where "the occupants of the camp cannot leave the camp for any reason" for the next five months!!! Really, it's starting to look like last week's debacle was only Act I.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING
Two from New Orleans Temporarily
Join Our Usual Cast of Furry Neurotics

Little Sheba, the kitty from New Orleans who we've been taking care of for about a week, left us yesterday to move into her new apartment here in Baton Rouge. However, Becky's friend Debbie, also from the Big Easy, left her two cats in our care while she sets up a temporary life in San Francisco. So without any further ado, I present our latest hurricane kitties:

Kali



Triangle



But let us not forget our usual cast of feline divas:

Frankie



Phil



Paz



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Hurricane Reality vs. Right-Wing Ideology

From AlterNet:

While Katrina didn't have any direct impact on the debate, images are more visceral than statistics. It's hard to sit in a comfortable, dry place watching the abandoned poor fight for their lives, and argue that the growing class divide in this country is a figment of the left's imagination, or that our current socio-economic arrangements are the best we can do.

Directly related to class is the idea of social cohesion. "United we stand" is a central tenet of the American narrative. Whatever your background, your status, your ideology, we pull together when the chips are down. But in New Orleans it became clear just how transparent that fiction is. Our sense of community -- if the ideal ever truly existed -- has now deteriorated to such a degree that only the threat of deadly violence holds the whole show together.

Click here for the rest.

I posted another essay hitting on this topic recently, a picture, too, but it's a message that bears repeating: neither "small government," nor the private sector is capable of dealing with a disaster like Katrina. Actually, there are about a billion problems with which "small government" and business cannot deal, but Katrina is vividly fresh in everybody's minds, and serves as a terrifying illustration of what conservatives want America to be. That is, I don't really think that conservatives actually wanted a disaster like what hit New Orleans to happen, but their anti-government, pro-wealthy policies ultimately amount to that--it's all very much about ignoring what you don't like to hear. Conservatives insist that the only way to a prosperous and healthy nation is by this maxim: "The government which governs least governs best." That means no intervention for the poor. That means allowing big business to do whatever it wants. That means ending virtually all social services and forcing citizens to fend for themselves.

Well, oftentimes people are indeed quite capable of fending for themselves. But not always. Any ideology that overemphasizes "rugged individualism" is off in fantasy land. And that's where many American conservatives are right now.

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NEW POLLS SHOW DISAPPROVAL
FOR BUSH'S HANDLING OF KATRINA

From CBS News courtesy of the Daily Kos:

President George W. Bush's overall response to Katrina meets with disapproval today -- a dramatic change from the public’s reaction just after the storm hit on August 29th. Last week, in the two days immediately after Katrina made landfall, a majority of Americans said they approved of Bush's response, although more than a third were not sure. Now, only 38 percent approve. A majority disapproves.

Click here for the rest.

And from Zogby International, again courtesy of Kos:

President Bush’s job approval rating took a hit in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, dropping to a historic low of 41%, a new Zogby America poll reveals. The same survey found the nation’s forty-third president would lose election contests against all of his predecessors since Jimmy Carter.

The Zogby America survey of 1157 likely voters, conducted from September 6 through 7, 2005, has a margin of error of +/-2.9 percentage points.

The public rates the performance of all levels of government in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina negatively, with 36% giving the President passing marks on his handling of the crisis—slightly higher than the 32% who give government in general good marks for its handling of the storm that devastated New Orleans and much of the Gulf coast.

Click here for the rest.

These numbers make much more sense than the Gallup numbers I posted yesterday--I don't understand how any honest person who watched the real life drama unfold in New Orleans last week can believe that Bush did a good job. I have no idea how Gallup got such a different result. Heck, for all I know, Gallup had the more accurate poll, but the Zogby and CBS polls do what Gallup couldn't; that is, they help make it easier to believe that Americans are compassionate and intelligent people. It is important to note that that both of these new polls also show great dissatisfaction with the state and local response as well. Indeed, as many have observed, there's plenty of blame to go around. However, the lion's share of blame belongs to the President, whose Department of Homeland Security has "primary responsibility" for dealing with disasters such as Katrina: it was their job to make sure that state and local officials did their jobs, and in that they failed utterly.

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THE WHITE HOUSE AND KATRINA: STONEWALL AND LIE

The White House, trying to control the political damage in the wake of Katrina, is currently engaged in a two-prong counteroffensive against its critics. They're relying on Rovian tactics that have worked well for them in the past, lying and stonewalling. The first part, lying, has manifested itself in terms of blaming state and local officials, despite DHS's proclamation that they assume "primary responsibility" for dealing with disasters, and attacking critics as being partisan. An example of the second part, stonewalling, was evidenced today at a White House press briefing.

From Editor and Publisher, courtesy of BuzzFlash:

White House Press Briefing: Angry Reporters Hit
McClellan Hard on Hurricane, Ask if Heads Will Roll

Q I just want to follow up on David's questions on accountability. First, just to get you on the record, where does the buck stop in this administration?

MR. McCLELLAN: The President.

Q All right. So he will be held accountable as the head of the government for the federal response that he's already acknowledged was inadequate and unacceptable?

MR. McCLELLAN: The President's most important responsibility is the safety and security of the American people. He talks about that often. That is his most important responsibility. Again, there's going to be plenty of time to look at the facts and determine what went wrong and what went right and how the coordination was between the state and federal and local authorities. Right now we've got to continue doing everything we can in support of the ongoing operational activities on the ground in the region to help people.

Q Well, the President has said that this government can do many things at once: It can fight the war on terror, it can do operations in Iraq, and aid and comfort people in Louisiana. Can it not also find time to begin to hold people accountable? It sounds, Scott, as if the line that you're giving us -- which is, you don't want to answer questions about accountability because there's too much busy work going on --

MR. McCLELLAN: Wrong. No, wrong.

Q -- is a way of ducking accountability.

MR. McCLELLAN: You don't want to take away from the efforts that are going on right now. And if you start getting into that now, you're pulling people out that are helping with the ongoing response, Terry. Not at all. The President made it very clear, I'm going to lead this effort and we're going to make sure we find out what the facts were and what went wrong and what went right. But you don't want to divert resources away from an ongoing response to a major catastrophe. And this is a major catastrophe that we -- and we must remain focused on saving lives and sustaining lives and planning for the long-term. And that's what we're doing.

Q And there are people in Louisiana and Mississippi who are doing that job very well. Your job is to answer the questions.

MR. McCLELLAN: And I have.

Q By saying you won't answer.

MR. McCLELLAN: No, by saying that there's a time to look at those issues, but now is not the time, Terry.

Click here for the rest.

And the whole thing just goes on like that. Reporters ask hard questions, and Press Secretary McClellan snakes around them. It was a frustrating read, but I suppose I should be used to this by now--after all, it's what they've been doing since it was obvious that there were no WMDs in Iraq. What 's really sad is that, as usual, Karl Rove's masterful manipulation of the media and public opinion appears to be working to some extent.

Again, from Editor and Publisher courtesy of BuzzFlash:

First Gallup Poll on Hurricane Response
Finds Americans Extremely at Odds

A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released this morning shows that the country very divided over who is primarily to blame for the poor emergency response to the hurricane castastrophe on the Gulf Coast.

Despite much criticism directed at the White House and federal government in the past week, President Bush seems to be maintaining much of his core support.

While 42% of respondents characterized Bush's response to the disaster as bad or terrible, 35% said it was good or great. Federal agencies got exactly the same marks. State and local officials fared only a little better--their response was described as bad or terrible by 35% and good or great by 37%.

Again, the views were strongly based on partisan leanings, with Republicans giving the president good grades on this issue by a 69% to 10% margin, while Democrats' views were precisely the opposite. But independents gave Bush a thumbs down by 47% to 29%.

Click here for the rest.

At least the swing vote doesn't seem to be fooled. But the conservative base, as usual, is ready to believe whatever bullshit Republican loyalists drop on the road, and that is, at least, disheartening. The truth is that Bush fucked up big time, and thousands of innocent Americans are dead as a result. Like I keep saying, this is not debatable: Bush swore to the US public after 9/11 that he wasn't going to let chaos and confusion get in the way of disaster relief ever again. It was his job to make sure everything ran smoothly, but he just straight-up failed.

For more on Bush's paralysis in the face of Katrina, check out this well documented timeline, from Think Progress courtesy of Eschaton, of Katrina related events from Friday, August 26th to Saturday, September 3rd. It's quite damning.

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New Orleans Activist Malik Rahim Blasts Mayor Nagin

Lest anyone think I'm being unfair by attacking only the Federal Government, from Democracy Now, an interview with a former Black Panther and longtime New Orleans activist about the failure of local authorities:

The very first thing he should have done is made sure that one, that the medical assistance he knew it was going to be needed was made available. He should have had that in place. He should have had food in place. He should have had water in place. He should have had ice in place. He should have had generators in place. That's something that the city could have done. Even if they had to commandeer them from these stores. You know, you have backup generators in every one of these high rise buildings. What's in them? People not living in them? So, why couldn't he take them? Or he could put people in them. You know, he didn't do either. You know? It's all about property. Everything is about property. I tell you what, look at Cuba. Any time a hurricane -- when that -- when Hugo was passing through Cuba, and it was about to hit Havana, Cuba -- the Cuban government came through there and took everybody out of Havana. I mean, everybody was safe. They didn't have this kind of madness. So, I mean, so why are we going through it?

Click here to read, listen to, or watch the rest of the interview.

I've been very clear, I think, about the fact that the disaster response for New Orleans was riddled with failure from top to bottom. So why go after the feds as unmercifully as I have? In the wake of the emergency response failures and chaos of 9/11, Bush decided that it had to be the Federal Government that would make sure that such a thing never happened again. Billions of tax dollars have flowed into DHS since then for that very purpose. The long and the short of it all is that, since the spring of 2003, the Federal Government has "primary responsibility" for coordinating and dealing with disasters such as Katrina. When Governor Blanco declared a state of emergency in Louisiana on August 26th, days before the hurricane actually hit New Orleans, it was DHS's show. They were in charge. And they were nowhere to be found for many days. That's why it's their fault. There's simply no debate here. There's no discussion as to responsibility for the overall failure. It was DHS's job to make sure that the system didn't collapse, and they failed to do so.

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Dealing With Political Disaster

From the Washington Post courtesy of the Daily Kos:

But now, facing what is clearly a full-scale political disaster, Rove and a handful of other masterful political operatives have gone into overdrive. They are back in campaign mode.

This campaign is to salvage Bush's reputation.

Like previous Rove operations, it calls for multiple appearances by the president in controlled environments in which he can appear leader-like. It calls for extensive use of Air Force One and a massive deployment of spinners.

It doesn't necessarily include any change in policy. It certainly doesn't include any admission of error.

It utilizes the classic Rovian tactic of attacking critics rather than defending against their criticism -- and of throwing up chaff to muddle the issue and throw the press off the scent.

It calls for public expressions of outrage over the politicization of the issue and of those who would play the "blame game." While at the same time, it is utterly political in nature and heavily reliant on shifting the blame elsewhere.

Click here for the rest.

Down here in Louisiana, we know better, but I fear that the rest of the country might not be so lucky. Heh. "Lucky." It takes the destruction of a major city and thousands of deaths to make us all so "lucky" to know that the White House is full of shit. But I digress. Karl Rove, who really ought to already be in jail, is currently doing what he does best, what he has been wildly successful doing for years now. Remember last November? Bush was able to minimize discussion of his own awful record and focus the media and just enough of the public on the slime campaign against Kerry such that he won. That sad truth, especially in this journalistically disabled environment, is that lies and mud-slinging work. And Rove is the master.

This morning I heard a couple of minutes of that scumbag drug addict Rush Limbaugh trashing state and local officials in Louisiana: "They're blaming the President because they're the ones who actually failed, and they're all Democrats!!!" As usual, that's a fucking lie, especially because local Republicans have harshly criticized the President as well. But lies work, and Rove's campaign-mode gambit is paying off with the base--my Dad, one of the faithful, has already sent me a couple of forwarded emails blaming both America's "socialist" policies for the disaster and, as usual, gays and lesbians. Thank god for the "delete" button. Those bastards are going to keep this up, and if national Democrats are true to form, they'll be too scared to "politicize" an event that was blatantly political before Hurricane Katrina even had a name. There's a good chance that the US political culture may learn absolutely nothing from New Orleans, and that thought is so sickening that I almost cannot bear it.

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The Post-Katrina Era

From AlterNet, UC Berkeley linguistics professor George Lakoff on the language of post-Katrina politics:

The moral of Katrina is mostly being missed. It is not just a failure of execution (William Kristol), or that bad things just happen (Laura Bush). It was not just indifference by the President, or a lack of accountability, or a failure of federal-state communication, or corrupt appointments in FEMA, or the cutting of budgets for fixing levees, or the inexcusable absence of the National Guard off in Iraq. It was all of these and more, but they are the effects, not the cause.

The cause was political through and through -- a matter of values and principles. The progressive-liberal values are America's values, and we need to go back to them. The heart of progressive-liberal values is simple: empathy (caring about and for people) and responsibility (acting responsibly on that empathy). These values translate into a simple principle: Use the common wealth for the common good to better all our lives. In short, promoting the common good is the central role of government.

The right-wing conservatives now in power have the opposite values and principles. Their main value is Rely on individual discipline and initiative. The central principle: Government has no useful role. The only common good is the sum of individual goods. It's the difference between We're all in this together and You're on your own, buddy. It's the difference between Every citizen is entitled to protection and You're only entitled to what you can afford. It's the difference between connection and separation. It is this difference in moral and political philosophy that lies behind the tragedy of Katrina.

Click here for the rest.

In other words, the man-made disaster in New Orleans this past week has been years in the making. Noam Chomsky has observed on multiple occasions that the net effect of the last quarter century of conservative "reform" has been to destroy the civil society. It doesn't matter if the guy in the apartment upstairs has a heart attack because it's his problem, not yours. It doesn't matter if 200,000 people got stuck in New Orleans because they couldn't afford to leave: they should have gotten themselves into a better financial position like all of us responsible people.

To this day, despite my middle age sense of leftism, I still believe that there is a kernel of truth within a lot of conservative maxims--free money for the poor, for instance, does indeed strike me as a disincentive to work and self-improvement; "personal responsibility," when it means getting up and going to work everyday and doing a good job, or making sure that your loved ones have enough to eat and a roof over their heads, is quite a good thing. But Bill O'Reilly's "Who's Looking Out for You?" style of mindset (answer: no one) is sadism, pure and simple. "Personal responsibility" is one thing; "fuck you, too bad" is another. Conservatives, sadly, have abandoned the former and embraced the latter. Really, New Orleans is but the most spectacular example of many.

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Tension apparent as Bush visits Louisiana

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

BATON ROUGE, La. — Like estranged in-laws at a holiday gathering, President Bush and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco kept their distance as both toured a relief center for storm victims day. At their next stop, the Republican president kissed the Democratic governor on the cheek, but it wasn't clear whether they had made up.

State and federal officials are all facing public criticism for a slow response to the crisis. Behind the scenes, each suggests the other is to blame.

In front of the cameras during Bush's visit to the Gulf Coast states today, the president and Blanco said little to each other, focusing instead on thanking relief workers.

"I know I don't need to make any other introduction other than 'Mr. President,'" Blanco said tersely, turning the microphone over to Bush after praising emergency management officials during a stop with Bush at an emergency operations center.

Click here for the rest.

Down here in Louisiana, officials and rescue workers are openly mocking the Federal Government. Just a while ago I heard a Washington Parish official on the radio talking about all the progress they had made, but he went the extra mile to point out that FEMA had nothing to do with any of it. Nationally, Republican loyalists, including DHS Secretary Chertoff, have been trying to lay the blame for all the chaos on the locals. But we know better. Bush's FEMA fucked New Orleans. That's not going to be forgotten here for many years to come.

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Can FEMA Do Anything Right?

From the Daily Kos:

Just take a look at this list of stories:

FEMA won't accept Amtrak's help in evacuations
FEMA turns away experienced firefighters
FEMA turns back Wal-Mart supply trucks
FEMA prevents Coast Guard from delivering diesel fuel
FEMA won't let Red Cross deliver food
FEMA bars morticians from entering New Orleans

We know FEMA's budget and operations have been gutted. We know FEMA's currently run by a washed-up hack attorney who couldn't even get a job at Jacoby & Myers. But this is beyond outrageous. I am sure there are plenty more stories like this; I collected these in just ten minutes on Google News and DKos. Looking at this list, it would be hard to blame you if you thought FEMA actively wanted rescue and relief operations to fail.

And

FEMA blocks 500-boat citizen flotilla from delivering aid
FEMA fails to utilize Navy ship with 600-bed hospital on board
FEMA to Chicago: Send just one truck
FEMA turns away generators
FEMA: "First Responders Urged Not To Respond"

Click here for the rest.

Where have all our tax dollars been going? We would have probably been better off spending our money on heroin and whores. At least we'd be getting a little carnal fun. Instead, New Orleans lies in ruins, and thousands are dead. And it's Bush's fault.

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Storm Exposed Disarray at the Top

From the Washington Post courtesy of...well, I forget; it's probably from Kos or Eschaton, maybe This Modern World:

New leaders such as Allbaugh were critical of FEMA's natural disaster focus and lectured senior managers about the need to adjust to the post-9/11 fear of terrorism. So did his friend Michael D. Brown, a lawyer with no previous disaster management experience whom Allbaugh brought in as his deputy and who now has the top FEMA post. "Allbaugh's quote was 'You don't get it,' " recalled the senior FEMA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "If you brought up natural disasters, you were accused of being a pre-9/11 thinker." The result, the official said, was that "FEMA was being taxed by the department, having money and slots taken. Because we didn't conform with the mission of the agency."

"I'm guilty of saying, 'you don't get it,' " Allbaugh said. "Absolutely." The former FEMA chief said he had encountered bureaucratic resistance to thinking about a "monumental" disaster, such as Katrina or 9/11, rather than the more standard diet of "tornadoes and rising waters."

But experts in emergency response inside and outside the government sounded warnings about the changes at FEMA. Peacock said FEMA's traditional emphasis on emergency response "all went up in smoke" after 9/11, creating a "blind spot" as a result of a "police-action, militaristic view" of homeland security. When it came to natural disasters, "It was not only forgetting about it, it was not funding it."

Jack Harrald, director of the Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management at George Washington University, said FEMA's natural disaster focus was nearly liquidated. "We ended up spending a lot of money on infrastructure protection and not the resiliency of the actual infrastructure," Harrald said. "The people who came in from the military and terrorist world thought we had the natural disaster thing fixed."

Click here for the rest.

This sounds very much like the attitude evidenced by the Bush administration toward terrorism in the months before 9/11. That is, early on, Bush staffers are on record as having criticized the Clinton administration as being "obsessed" with Osama bin Laden--the White House then proceeded to de-emphasize terrorism as a priority, and started focusing on missile defense and other cold war toys and games. Then 9/11 happened, and Bush changed his priorities accordingly. I think. Anyway, the long and the short of all this is that it appears that FEMA simply lost sight of what it was supposed to be doing. Now, thousands more than were lost on 9/11 are dead, and Bush, through his negligence, is responsible.

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POLITICS, KATRINA, AND SHOPPING AT THE WINN-DIXIE

I’ve been so overwhelmed by what’s going on in New Orleans and how it’s affecting life here in Baton Rouge that I haven’t really written much about the political fallout from Katrina’s destruction. But I’ve been reading about it. Indeed, the left wing of the blogosphere was hitting the issue in full force by last Tuesday afternoon at the latest, which is when we got back to Baton Rouge, allowing me to make my daily rounds. I thought about jumping into the criticism of the Federal response, myself, but decided that I had plenty going on in my own life to write about, and that’s what I did. That’s what I’m continuing to do.

I heard on Saturday that the NAACP had issued a statement to the effect that now is not the time to be pointing fingers; now is the time to deal with the crisis. Usually, if one can ever think of a major crisis as being “usual,” I think that’s a wise thing to say. But this has not been a “usual” crisis, at least not for the United States. Compounding immeasurably the damage from the hurricane itself was the incredibly slow response from the Department of Homeland Security: it strikes me that all the finger pointing of the last week was crucial in getting the Feds to get to work. That is, the people who were supposed to “assume primary responsibility” for rescue and recovery, as the DHS proudly proclaims on its site, did not do it. They weren’t dealing with the crisis, and it is my belief that America’s massive outpouring of outrage essentially stuck a bee in the bottom of the Federal Government, forcing them to finally do something.

I have a great deal of respect for the NAACP, but they’re wrong this time. Given their failure thus far, I think public discourse really, really needs to dog the Feds in order to make sure that they complete the job. It took a lot of heat to get them to act, and I fear if that heat lets off, the action will end, or at least greatly lessen. Indeed, this is the most obvious lesson of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States: the government will not serve the people unless the people insist that it does so. Democracy only works if citizens participate.

Personally, I prefer the wisdom of African-American singer Kayne West: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Ain’t that the truth. It’s amazing how this disaster has left utterly exposed the vile racism that conservatives insist no longer exists. Most of the people who rode out the storm in New Orleans didn’t do so by choice; they did it because they didn’t have the economic means to get out. In other words, they’re poor. And most of them are black, essentially left behind by whatever evacuation programs the city and state were able to put together without Federal help. The Feds should have filled in the gaps on this, but didn’t. You may be uncomfortable calling that racism, but, whatever you want to call it, it’s a bunch of non-white people getting majorly shafted. There’s no getting away from that. Government inaction clearly and explicitly fucked over thousands of black people, killing many of them, a high-tech lynching of Biblical proportions.

Of course, that’s been going on slowly and quietly for decades. We just don’t talk about it. Well, we’re talking about it now.

The reactions of many white Americans simply add insult to injury. As West pointed out in his off-script speech on television the other night, the news media has been true to form, naming blacks “looters” and whites “finders.” I, myself, participated in a commenting debate at one of the Houston Chronicle’s blogs on the subject of NO evacuees coming to the Astrodome. I was utterly disgusted by what some Houstonians had to say about how the city was going to go to hell because of all those (black) people coming to town. My buddy Mike G emails me from H-Town:

The white New Orleanians have been on the talk radio shows warning Houston about the black people from NO coming to get them and some middle class subdivisions are trying to stop the smaller shelters from opening there. I guess the upshot of this storm is that the strong racial and economic divides of not just NO will be examined but of all over the country.

This is still a deeply racist nation. I know that many Americans are not racist, but we’re fooling ourselves to think that everybody, in their heart of hearts, agrees with us. All it took was one major crisis for the morons to start shooting their mouths off.

Beyond the race issue is the question about why FEMA, which is now a sub-agency of the Department of Homeland Security, waited so long before doing anything. The conservative response to that question that seems to be shaping up is that no one asked them to help until it was too late. But that’s total bullshit: Bush declared an emergency in Louisiana and called in FEMA on August 26th, days before the hurricane made landfall. Where were they? Why didn’t they take charge and coordinate the entire effort? Why did Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff not know about the horrors of the convention center until Thursday afternoon? This was their responsibility, and they failed utterly. DHS is an agency under Bush’s authority. Consequently, Bush failed utterly.

As Atrios over at Eschaton has asked, “what have they been doing for four and a half years?” All these billions of dollars they’ve been spending to revamp Federal response to disasters like this has apparently gotten us nothing. Nothing. What happens if there is another major terrorist attack? We’re screwed, big time.

And what's all this business about the Army Corps of Engineers budget for maintaining and improving the levees being gutted and transferred to the war effort? For god's sake, it was just a few hundred million! Now they're spending billions to clean up. The thing that really gets me is that I and countless other Americans have been loudly insisting for years that Bush’s evil isn’t simply because of his own weird brand of wrong-headed conservatism; the man is straight-up incompetent. Incompetent. People bashed Michael Moore, saying that his use of the footage of Bush reading My Pet Goat while the Twin Towers collapsed in Fahrenheit 9/11 was a cheap shot, but it’s pretty clear that he did the same thing again with Hurricane Katrina, eating birthday cake and rocking out with a country and western singer while people were dying in New Orleans.

I am sickened and disgusted by this man, which is surprising because I already thought that I had been as grossed out as I could get by the Iraq war. But these are fellow Americans Bush’s incompetence has killed. This is my favorite city that he seems content to drown. This is just down the road from where I type this right now. Throughout all these years of his awful leadership, if it’s fair to even use the word “leadership,” I have never felt hate for George W. Bush. But I do now.

So here I sit in a city that has doubled its population in a week’s time. The traffic, already nightmarish, has gotten worse. Stores are under stocked. The crime rate has gone up, but that’s all okay, because we’ll sort it out, and all these people have to live somewhere, don’t they? Just this afternoon, Becky and I went grocery shopping at the Winn-Dixie. For the first time, the majority of people there were not LSU students. No, these shoppers were middle aged and well dressed. I traded jokes with one woman who spoke with the distinctive New Yorkish dialect of a person born and raised in the Big Easy. I later reached between two suburbanite looking women in their 50s to get a bag of potato chips and heard this exchange: “Hey, you’re here too?” “Yeah, I’m a refugee like all the rest of us.” After that, one of the store’s employees was a bit more helpful and friendly than usual; “Are you finding everything that you need allright? Just let me know if you need help.” It seemed like he thought Becky and I were evacuees. Once he walked away, I realized that I hadn’t shaved in three days and was wearing a ragged Ocean Pacific tee shirt that I bought in 1982, and Becky still had grass in her hair from mowing the yard this morning. I guess we did look the archetypal part, but the funny thing is that most of the homeless there looked way better than we did. Hurricane Katrina has obviously hit across class lines—not even that fact, however, seems to have been enough to get the President to do his job. The couple in the checkout line in front of us bought $237 dollars worth of groceries, and much of that was pots, pans, plates, and cooking utensils. They were obviously setting up to stay for a while.

The point is that political and personal have become deeply intertwined here in the state of Louisiana. This is no longer simply an abstract debate on TV about events thousands of miles away in the Middle East. This is right here, right now. This is about peoples’ lives. This is about peoples’ deaths. For me, now, there is no difference between politics and my personal life. I’ve watched from the sidelines, fifty yard-line seats in fact, while politics have destroyed both a city I love deeply and the lives of every other person I meet on the street.

You bet I’m going to talk about politics.

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French Quarter Holdouts Create 'Tribes' to Survive

From the AP via AOL:

In the absence of information and outside assistance, groups of rich and poor banded together in the French Quarter, forming "tribes'' and dividing up the labor.

As some went down to the river to do the wash, others remained behind to protect property. In a bar, a bartender put near-perfect stitches into the torn ear of a robbery victim.

While mold and contagion grew in the muck that engulfed most of the city, something else sprouted in this most decadent of American neighborhoods - humanity.

"Some people became animals,'' Vasilioas Tryphonas said Sunday morning as he sipped a hot beer in Johnny White's Sports Bar on Bourbon Street. "We became more civilized.''

Click here for the rest.

Becky, who still uses AOL even though I dropped it last year, read this and said, "Oh my god. It's just like Debbie was telling me." Indeed, as this story, and Becky's conversation with her pal in Bywater (see post below) reveal, there are still many, many people inside New Orleans, and they are doing what they have to do in order to survive. This is as uplifting as the stories of raping and killing are depressing. The human spirit prevails.

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OUR WOMAN IN NEW ORLEANS
Guest Blogger Becky Hears from a Friend

Earlier today, my wife heard from the one friend that we knew for sure had stayed in the city before Katrina came. Here's the lowdown:

I Heard From My Friend in New Orleans Today

About eight o’clock this morning, while I was outside doing yard work, I could hear my cell phone ringing. When I retrieved my message, it was from my friend Debbie, who called to say that she was fine.

I met Debbie a little over a month ago, via the internet. After getting acquainted by email, I drove to New Orleans for the day to meet her in person. We went to a museum, a commie bookstore and ate a falafel sandwich on Frenchman Street. I was delighted to have made an interesting new acquaintance from my generation and with many similar interests. She’s originally from San Francisco, and lives in the Bywater neighborhood, which is only a mile or two from the French Quarter if one follows the river to the East. Debbie is 56, and a bona-fide San Francisco hippie who was there for the summer of love. She lives in NOLA with no air conditioning. She works six part time jobs, doing everything from paralegal work to jewelry making. She’s a breast cancer survivor, and was divorced about a year ago from her 20-years-younger musician husband. A wacky, fun, cool chick.

I knew she did not intend to evacuate. Her 86 year old stepfather lives with her part time, and is there with her now. She also has six cats, a young son and wife who live in the back house, and a car with no air conditioning. Her reasoning was that she’d rather hunker down for the storm than try to transport her family.

Needless to say, I’ve been concerned about her. I wrote her an email Tuesday night when we got back, simply saying that I hoped she got out and if she didn’t I hoped she was ok and to let me know if she needed any help. I decided against trying to call her cell phone, thinking that if it was working, she needed it for more important communiqués.

Listening to her message, I found out that she had some roof damage, but in general her house was ok. She was scared when the water started to rise, but flooding stopped one block short of her house. She said that the “lawlessness (was) fucking intense”, but guards were finally starting to show up. She mentioned her six cats, and signed off by saying “when this is all over and I get electricity back in a week or two, we should make plans to do something”.

I had to call, even if only to say that I was fairly certain it would be more than a week or two before she had power restored, and she should consider leaving, and could come here if needed.

She was in good spirits on the phone. She told me that everyone was fine, she had plenty of supplies, and was “having a ball”. She told of shots being fired constantly, and the “crackers” of the neighborhood: armed, patrolling and trying to prevent looting of abandoned houses. To the best of my knowledge, “cracker” is a derogatory name for white people, but I got the sense she meant the tougher young people who were brave enough to hit the streets. She said the crackers had found food and water in ruined stores, and were taking requests from neighbors for specific needs. They brought her more water, and her stepdad a bottle of scotch. Another day, they brought her a bottle of wine because it was her birthday. They brought her a generator, but she hasn’t been using it. It would make noise, and someone with bad intentions might get ideas. The man across the street is running his generator, though, and is charging cell phones for whoever asks.

She told of an elderly woman who went into a store with a flashlight looking for food, and was killed. Another neighbor was walking his dog and was shot in the face; it’s not clear why. The only news source she has is one radio station, and the word from the street.

She had to hang up because her “family was about to try to convince (her) to leave.” I’m betting she stays, at least for now.

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GOOD NEWS FOR NEW ORLEANS

It's about time. I just heard on local radio that the 17th Street Canal, through which all water pumped out of the metro area flows into the lake, has been patched! And without any Federal help as far as I can tell: this was an effort by the Louisiana National Guard and state and local officials. As soon as the pumps are working again, they can start to drain out the city. Of course, they still have to patch the levee, but that should be completed in the next couple of days.

Finally, something to celebrate.

UPDATE: I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. This completed repair is on the Jefferson Parish side of the canal, but I believe there is also break on the Orleans Parish side which hasn't been fixed yet. In other words, I didn't even realize that the canal was breached on two sides, which makes me realize I'm not quite sure about how all that anti-flooding infrastructure actually works. Suffice it to say, some progress has been made, but there's much more work to do.

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The natural outcome of decades of extreme conservatism

I got this from the Daily Kos, but I have no idea who first put it together:



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WITHOUT A DOUBT, THIS IS BUSH'S MESS

From the Department of Homeland Security's site, courtesy of AMERICAblog:

In the event of a terrorist attack, natural disaster or other large-scale emergency, the Department of Homeland Security will assume primary responsibility on March 1st for ensuring that emergency response professionals are prepared for any situation. This will entail providing a coordinated, comprehensive federal response to any large-scale crisis and mounting a swift and effective recovery effort. The new Department will also prioritize the important issue of citizen preparedness. Educating America's families on how best to prepare their homes for a disaster and tips for citizens on how to respond in a crisis will be given special attention at DHS.

Click here for more.

According to their own statement, the buck stops with the Federal Government. I'm certain that local and state governments have made their fair share of mistakes, too, but "primary responsibility" for dealing with Katrina belongs to Bush. I've been hearing something to this effect coming from scores of liberal bloggers these last few days: there were actually two disasters in New Orleans, one natural, and one man-made. Much of the carnage in the storm's wake could have been avoided, but wasn't. The President has a lot of explaining to do when this is all over. I'm especially interested in why Bush's apointee to run FEMA has absolutely no experience in dealing with disaster relief.

Thanks to Kos for that last link.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING ON SATURDAY
Special Hurricane Edition: Cat from New Orleans

The New Orleans woman staying with relatives next door about whom Becky wrote yesterday brought her cat with her. Unfortunately, someone there is extraordinarily allergic, so the kitty in question is now housed in our study. Here she is:

Sheba



Isn't she cute? And she looks a hell of a lot like Phil.

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Why is the Red Cross not in New Orleans?

From the American Red Cross courtesy of ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES:

Acess to New Orleans is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities and while we are in constant contact with them, we simply cannot enter New Orleans against their orders.

The state Homeland Security Department had requested--and continues to request--that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.

Click here for the rest.

That's completely insane. The Salvation Army is there--Bush was trying to send residents to them yesterday afternoon. Why allow the Salvation Army but not the Red Cross? The cynic in me suspects that the answer might have something to do with the Salvation Army's fundamentalist leanings being more valued by the Bush administration than the Red Cross' new-agey inclusivity. The pragmatist in me, however, suspects that the answer is simply gross incompetence. At any rate, this is totally outrageous.

UPDATE: Scratch the cynical thought. The Salvation Army thing was actually in Biloxi. Nonetheless, keeping aid agencies out of New Orleans because they "would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city" is just plain nuts. Thousands of people are slowly dying there. They need help right now. This is total insanity.

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EXODUS AFTERMATH
Guest Blogger Becky

(My wife fills in some of the gaps in my story about our evacuation from the hurricane zone, and brings us up to speed on what's been going on since then.)

Ron gave a great description of our so-called exodus, and relatively quick return. The only missing element was the fact that I really, really didn’t want to leave.

I was more fearful about hitting the road into the great unknown (in an eleven year old car with a re-built engine) than staying in our battened-down abode with plentiful supplies. I wanted to scream and argue against our leaving, but Ron’s dad was adamant, and Ron trusted his dad unequivocally. Something happened to my normal behavior and I acquiesced. In a reluctant, intentionally slow-moving daze, I tried to think of everything necessary that could fit into a Toyota Tercel. Ron deftly organized the payload, half of it being the cats and their supplies.

Instead of feeling like Hans’ co-pilot, I was an unwilling evacuee whose mild anxiety about the impending hurricane was kicked into bona fide fright. While I served my purpose along the way as route-planner and shelter-scout, I was otherwise useless. I broke down into sobs several times. I was oddly more afraid for the fate of the cats than for us: I imagined nightmare scenarios of their demise, or their simply being stuck in their carriers for what might be days.

In calmer moments, I pondered my reluctance to leave. I realized that if we owned our home here in Baton Rouge, I would have fought harder to stay. I thought about a friend in New Orleans who told me she intended to stay. She has her 84 year old stepfather living with her, and her young married son living on the second floor of her house. I haven’t heard from her. I hope she got out or had at least a week’s worth of supplies. I’m fairly certain her neighborhood didn’t flood significantly, due to it’s proximity to the river. But now fires are burning in various places, and she lived close to the chemical plant that was burning today.

I can understand why some people didn’t evacuate. I like to think if we lived in New Orleans, I would have left early and prepared. But would have I have clung desperately to my imaginary shotgun house, feeling some weird control in not jumping ship? Maybe.

Then again, that’s not why so many stayed behind. The vast majority of those stranded were desperately poor, without transportation or funds of any consequence.

The reality of what’s happening continues to sink in. The news is being broadcast 24 hours from Baton Rouge, with both local and New Orleans personnel. And I’m watching it too much, but it’s hard to drag myself away.

I went to work Thursday, where five people showed up to take their graduate nursing exams. One young woman was an evacuee from New Orleans, a June newlywed whose newly purchased home was probably destroyed. She was amazingly chipper considering her circumstances.

On the way home, I encountered a couple at the Circle K who were asking directions. I found out that they were in a frantic search to buy a house here. I didn’t get a chance to ask any details, as I was trying as best I could to relate what little I know about neighborhoods here. I gave them my city map, and wished them luck.

Later last night, Ron and I went outside to pry the iron lawn furniture I had tied together with bungee cords out from under a big pecan branch. While we were there, we met my neighbor’s mother’s friend, Barbara, who was hanging out in the back yard with her wine and cigarettes. The two women had left New Orleans late Sunday evening with their two dogs, heading north. They found a room in McComb, Mississippi that night, but were denied a room on Monday due to reservations that were being held for rescue personnel. They had nowhere to go, and literally drove through the storm, avoiding tree branches in populated areas and torrential rains in others. They spent Monday night on the sidewalk – I’ve forgotten where. They made it here to Baton Rouge Tuesday evening, and have managed to secure a small apartment as long as the landlord can evict a deadbeat LSU student.

Late this morning, my neighbor Ryan came over with his small chain-saw and another evacuee from New Orleans, Blaise, who was helping to clear big branches from both our yards. I didn’t ask them – they just came on over. I went outside to carry the pieces they were cutting. I wasn’t sure what to say to Blaise. I found out that his neighborhood probably wasn’t terribly flooded. I found out that Ryan helped him to rent the house behind us from our mutual landlord on a month-to-month basis. I found out that he didn’t necessarily expect his house to remain intact, due to potential looting or fire. He carried heavy branch parts from our back yard to the street for pickup someday. I offered our washer/dryer and bathroom if they need it until they get power turned on – which could be a week, since utilities are still not completely restored here. I felt lame and useless.

I came inside and watched more news and thought about what else I could do, besides staying off the roads as the local authorities have requested. Ron came back from his cancelled rehearsal – their director decided volunteering was more important. I would agree. Someone wake me from my air-conditioned haze, thank you. We called 211, the emergency volunteer telephone number. They took our information, but after four hours, we haven’t been contacted. Not surprisingly, medical personnel and truck drivers are needed. I told them we have cars.

We decided that if we don’t hear from 211 today, tomorrow we’ll check the website again for who needs what. It changes several times a day. Earlier today it was diapers and baby supplies, then I heard that need had been filled. Whatever it is tomorrow, we’ll go shopping and try to make a tiny dent. Tiny, tiny dent. And I’ve been staring at the boob tube, like a deer in the headlights, finishing off my 24-pack of Miller Light I bought Sunday afternoon when I figured we’d just be holed up for a day or so without power.

We have power. We have everything we could need. Others are dying in the streets of New Orleans.

I’ll save the political/social/organizational/structural commentary for our dear Ron, who has a significantly better handle on such things. I will only say that the hurricane happened Monday – it’s now Friday night, and many are still stranded, and I’m pissed…again…does it take a horrible natural disaster to make people wake up?

I’m off to languish in my air conditioning.

(Read Becky's last stint as guest blogger here.)

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Life goes on...

Paz



Phil



Frankie



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EXODUS or HAN SOLO, COOLEST MAN IN THE UNIVERSE
Running the hell away from Hurricane Katrina

Last Sunday afternoon, as Becky and I were making final preparations for riding out Katrina here in Baton Rouge, I called my parents. No one was home, so I left a message: “Um, isn’t anybody worried about us? Well, don’t; we’re taping windows, and have supplies, so everything should be okay.” I hadn’t yet heard from them, because they had only just returned from a vacation trip to Corpus Christi.

About an hour later, my Dad returned the call. He was worried about the fact that it was a category five storm. “Let me watch the news for a while and I’ll call you back,” he said. In my family, Dad is the hurricane expert. As a former lifelong telephone man, he had worked through four hurricanes, sometimes outdoors. I’ll always remember him getting in his car at the height of Hurricane Alicia back in 1983 and driving to work: communications are an essential service during an emergency—indeed, his work for Southwestern Bell was so important that it superseded any emergency obligations he had as a chief master sergeant with his Air National Guard unit, which was always activated during hurricanes. While I was growing up, I also watched him reading obsessively about hurricanes, and tracking them on his own map whenever one seemed to have the potential to be headed for Houston. It’s hard for me not to think of him as something as my personal tribal elder when it comes to the enormous storms that the Atlantic periodically shoots at the Gulf coast.

I was really hoping he was going to tell us to stay put. We weren’t really ready to bug out, and our three cats made things all the more daunting. I heard from him again pretty quickly. “Ron, I’ve never run from a hurricane before. But this thing is a category five storm, and I have to admit that the heaviest I’ve ever dealt with is category three. This is a really, really dangerous storm. I know it’s not supposed to be hitting Baton Rouge head on, but all it has to do is swing a few miles to the west, and then you’d be right in the middle of it. Please, please, please, get out of there now.” His logic was impeccable: the odds were in my favor, but if I lost the roll of the dice I could lose everything. This was an easy decision for me.

Becky got out the maps and asked where we could go—I 10 was at that point a virtual parking lot. My older brother, through my Mom, suggested that we head north, to Alexandria, where he had clerked in the early 90s at a Federal court. Becky plotted a course. We packed a few days worth of clothing, put the cats in their carriers, and headed out at around 4:30, knowing fully well that there would probably be no place for us to stay once we got to Alexandria. In other words, we hit the road not really sure of where we would end up. Having stayed up really late the night before, however, I was prepared to drive all night if necessary.

We did get stuck in traffic for about an hour trying to get over the Mississippi River and out of town, but once we got on Louisiana Route 1, it was smooth sailing. The traffic was heavy, of course, but not bumper to bumper. Really, Route 1 is something of a back road, which is how we were able to avoid the parking lot conditions we would have faced heading west toward Houston.

It was totally surreal seeing numerous military vehicles headed south while we and other evacuees were headed north.

As we finally approached Alexandria, we caught the only bit of storm that we would see. The rain started coming down heavily, in sheets blown by heavy winds. One of my windshield wipers was starting to come loose due to a botched replacement job I had done a couple of weeks before, so we pulled into the first convenience store we could find. Unfortunately, the parking lot had some enormous potholes that I just couldn’t see because the rain was so intense. I hit bottom twice, and my stress level ratcheted itself up accordingly. Now I had to check for damage under my car in addition to figuring out how to repair my windshield wiper.

At first glance, everything seemed okay under my car, so I looked at the wiper and decided it could be temporarily repaired with a twist tie. I headed into the store and bought the most expensive loaf of bread I’ve ever bought, at a whopping $2.17. But that was okay, because my repair job worked well enough. We headed into downtown Alexandria.

Soon after, we pulled into the local Holiday Inn at around 9:00. Becky went inside to check out the situation, while I stayed with the cats out in the car. I also called my parents to let them know that we had made it to Alexandria. My Mom told me to call my brother because he had been talking to a friend there who might be able to help us out. Becky got back in the car and told me that she had learned that the entire state of Louisiana was booked solid, and that maybe Longview, Texas was our best bet. Longview was like four hours away. The rain continued.

I pulled the car into the hotel’s parking garage and called my brother. Unfortunately, the “help” he offered was directions to the nearest Red Cross shelter, which had some sort of provision for dealing with pets, albeit elsewhere. That is, we were going to have to trust somebody else, in a wild and chaotic situation, to take care of our beloved kitties. Becky and I both felt that we were better off driving into the night. My brother was clearly disturbed when we rejected his suggestion, but it all worked out in the end. Still, Becky and I had no idea what we were going to do at that point: we didn’t know there was a room for us in Longview; we only had a suggestion from a random hotel clerk. But off we went.

We figured that we’d head up to Shreveport, and see what the situation was like there. If we couldn’t find a place, we’d cross the border into Texas. At this point, the rain had stopped, and I was feeling less stressed out, which was the perfect time to discover that there actually had been some damage from the massive pothole in Alexandria. I heard something dragging along my front right tire, and felt a drag on the car’s acceleration. Damn. I pulled the car over to the side of I 49, which we had transferred to in Alexandria, to check it out. Cars zoomed by at 70mph while I got out into the darkness with a flashlight to take a look. At this point, I feared the worst, being stranded on the road, with three cats, waiting for the hurricane to blast us. I’m not even a car guy; I only know how to change tires, batteries, and headlights. What if this was beyond my engineering abilities? I was pretty scared.

Quickly, I discovered that it was just a piece of molding that had come loose, and shoved it back up such that it seemed secure. I got back in the car, and once again we were on the road. I had to repeat this emergency repair job a couple more times until I removed a screw that was holding part of the molding up near the tire, allowing me to cram it further into whichever dark crevice I had been using. That seemed to do the trick, but I couldn’t get away from the fact that I felt like I was in the Millennium Falcon, making repairs on the fly, trying to escape a dark malevolent force, not knowing where to go.

Okay, I’m a geek, but little fantasies such as this make a nerve-racking situation a bit less painful: I’m not some schlep running away from a hurricane that probably wouldn’t even hit my home; rather, I’m Han Solo, coolest man in the universe. I said I’m a geek, didn’t I?

As we drove toward Shreveport, we looked at the parking lots beside all the roadside motels we saw: every single one of them seemed totally packed, no doubt, with New Orleans residents fleeing the storm. When we got to there, it was the same thing. All the motels appeared to be completely full. We even pulled into one place, but no one was at the front desk, and no one answered the bell—their parking lot was full, too. Onto Longview.

Somewhere along the way, Becky, our intrepid navigator, got a great idea. She called her friend Jeanne up in Ohio and asked her to hit the Internet to try to find us a room. This got a bit tricky because Becky was unable to charge her phone before we left, and my crappy phone has only a limited number of minutes, which are charged double when roaming. We had to conserve our phone time, which meant that we had to periodically check in with Jeanne to see if she had found anything. Just another stress-inducing difficulty to make our exodus all the more interesting. Or maddening. I forget which one. No, wait, I remember. It was maddening.

Finally, she found something in Tyler, Texas, hometown of football great Earl Campbell, but also a home for the Ku Klux Klan. Just our luck. We kept losing phone service, which was no surprise given that we were traveling—we also found out later that the Baton Rouge area code was jammed solid; no one could call in, but we could call out. Jeanne gave us a number right before we lost her. So we called Tyler’s Scottish Inn, and got some vague and confusing responses from the guy managing the place. Maybe he had a room; he wasn’t sure. Becky sweet talked him for a time, but in the end we had to wait for him to call us back. For a short time we were headed for Tyler, not quite sure if there was anything for us there. It was a pretty agonizing ten minutes.

Fortunately, he said he could set us up, and gave us directions. We continued to drive through the east Texas night.

When we got there at around two in the morning, the manager checked us in, but was again vague about our prospects for staying the next night. He said that maybe he had a room, but needed to see “how the reservations would work out.” We pressed him further on what he meant by that, but he simply repeated himself and told us that he would know better after lunch the next day. Becky and I speculated that, because this guy seemed to be a Middle Eastern immigrant, this was just some sort of cultural thing. Maybe it was some weird Bedouin-trading ritual, of which we had no knowledge, but I just couldn’t figure out what he hoped to gain by being so weird with us—it’s not like he was going to change his clearly posted rates by playing us for rubes. I still haven’t figured out what it was all about, especially because he immediately let us keep the room for a second night once we called him the next morning.

Because this place prohibited pets, we had to sneak the cats in, which was easy enough in the middle of the night. Our two older cats, Paz and Phil, were happy to be out of the car and their carriers, but our one-year-old, Frankie, went almost catatonic. He stayed in his carrier for a couple of hours, and then crawled under the bed. He didn’t emerge until I pulled him out when we left. Actually, we were a bit worried because he didn’t want to eat; he didn’t even want to hit the litter box that we brought with us. Fortunately, he recovered quite nicely once we returned to Baton Rouge.

In the room, I set up my laptop and used Becky’s AOL service to get on the net for some info. Unfortunately, our only option was dial-up, so it seemed to take forever for pages to load. Again, the Han Solo feeling guided me through yet another stress out. He dealt with crappy equipment during a crisis, and I did too—I keep telling you, I’m a geek at heart. Anyway, that’s why I didn’t really try to post from Tyler. The damn thing was taking too long. I can’t believe I’ve been using broadband for only three years. At least I managed to find out that LSU had cancelled classes Tuesday, which also eased my stress.

Still more Han Solo stuff: my car’s brake lights somehow got stuck in the “on” position. My Dad had no idea what to do about it and suggested unscrewing the bulbs in order to preserve the battery. Fortunately, a guy in the Wal-Mart automotive section suggested that it might just be a stuck sensor button, and he was right. I fixed it with duct tape. Just like Han Solo would have done.

It is also important to note, if only for local color’s sake, that I was slightly menaced by a big burly redneck in the Wal-Mart parking lot: he was walking right past me as I was getting out of my car and I said, “Hey, what’s up?” He just stared at me and moved toward his huge pickup truck, which, ironically, didn’t start. I really should have seized the moment, loved my enemy, and offered to help him jump-start it, but he made me nervous, and I had my own problems. I’ll do what Jesus would have done next time, I guess.

At the motel, we noticed that most of the license plates in the parking lot were from Louisiana. The scale of the evacuation was slowly sinking in. Here we were in the middle of nowhere, eight hours from the Big Easy, and most of these people appeared to be from the New Orleans area. Here’s what I wrote a couple of days ago about a brief conversation I had with one of the evacuees:

I spoke with an older woman who told me that she had lost everything and that she was pretty sure that a couple of family members had drowned. What can you say to that? My simple statement, "that's terrible; I'm so sorry," seemed trite, especially because I then broke off the conversation because Becky and I had to check out to leave for our home in Baton Rouge.

Indeed, the night before, we had seen on television what appeared to be the first report about the levees breaking. Even then, I still hadn’t quite figured out that my favorite city’s goose was cooked. Actually, it’s still pretty difficult to accept now, even after the wall-to-wall television coverage, even after witnessing the enormous triage set up just a few blocks away from where we live.

After sneaking the cats out, we hit the road again Tuesday morning, not knowing what the situation was like at our house in Baton Rouge, but happy to know where we were going. The trip back didn’t take nearly as long as the trip there and, with no hurricane threatening us, and plenty of daylight, it was much more pleasant. In addition to more military humvees and trucks, we also saw quite a few trucks and emergency vehicles, which had “disaster relief team,” or something to that effect written on them, headed south with us. Surreal. We made sure to get some more batteries, candles, and gasoline along the way, given that we expected the power to be out all over Louisiana’s capitol city. Amazingly, all was well at our house, just one tree branch down in the back yard, and the lights were on. Nothing bad had happened to us.

We unloaded the car and turned on the TV. Then we started to cry.

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