The one good thing that might come from all this recent misery is that America may finally wake up to the reality that oil is running out or at least going to get more difficult to come by and that we have absolutely no national leadership to help us deal with that looming disaster.

From Yahoo News:

At least 20 oil rigs and platforms are missing in the Gulf of Mexico and a ruptured gas pipeline is on fire after Hurricane Katrina tore through the region, a US Coast Guard official said.
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“We have confirmed at least 20 rigs or platforms missing, either sunk or adrift, and one confirmed fire where a rig was,” Petty Officer Robert Reed of the Louisiana Coast Guard told AFP.

All of the missing rigs were in the Gulf of Mexico, Reed said citing Coast Guard overflights of the area and information from oil companies.

From the OilDrum:

There are MANY production platforms missing (as in not visible from the air). This means they have been totally lost. I am talking about 10’s of platforms, not single digit numbers. Each platform can have from 4 to 100+ wells on it. Most larger ones have 20-30 wells in this area, with numerous caisson wells. They are on their sides, on the bottom of the gulf - they will likely be left as reef material, provided we can get permission. MMS regulations require us to plug each of the wells that were on these platforms - HUGE cost now, as the platforms are gone… Hopefully, MMS will grant `abandon in place’ status for these wiped out structures.
…

In short, the Gulf area hit by the storm is basically in about the same shape as Biloxi. The damage numbers you have gotten from the government and analysts are, in my opinion, much too low. We are looking at YEARS to return to the production levels we had prior to the storm. The eastern Gulf of Mexico is primarily oil production…

Loss of the MARS platform alone cost us 95,000 barrels a day for a year or maybe more.

YEARS, people. I know what this means - hope everyone else gets it too…

I think we’re talking about a short term clusterfuck, which happens to be the name of James Kunstler’s site. Kunstler’s a reknowned Gloomy Gus whose best advice on the energy front is to start loving the idea of living in a 19th century post-apocalypse hellscape. If you want an alternative, check out the Happy Hannahs over at the Apollo Alliance. Pick your future. The only horse I know we shouldn’t be betting on is BushCo’s.

Links via Stand Strong’s dKos diary.

A sudden hush fell on the crowd as Mr. Summers cleared his throat and looked at the list. “All ready?” he called. “Now, I’ll read the names — heads of families first — and the men come up and take a paper out of the box. Keep the paper folded in your hand without looking at it until everyone has had a turn. Everything clear?” …

A growing number of righteous blogs are turning on their master and pointedly de-linking from the Blogfather himself, the Instapundit, because he proved to be downright mushy about those Activists of Evil at the “ay-cee-ell-you” in this recent post. They’ve even begun an �€œI�€™m Not Linked To Glenn Reynolds List” for those joining their boycott, which seems to be very inclusive, since “If you have never linked to Glenn for whatever reason, we will add you to the list as well.” How could one pass up such a chance to help expose the feet of clay of the mighty? Count me in, because Insty is even worse than they think.

Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones. The pile of stones the boys had made earlier was ready; there were stones on the ground with the blowing scraps of paper that had come out of the box. Mrs. Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands and turned to Mrs. Dunbar. “Come on,” she said. “Hurry up.” …

Notice that in his post about those litigious enablers of depravity, he says he has worked with them in the past, and offers an article he wrote supporting their opposition to new federal laws against rave paraphernalia (an innovative idea heavily backed by possible Democratic Presidential sacrifice fly Joe Biden). Therein Glenn says:

Will the drug war serve as a model for the war on terrorism? Some within the federal bureaucracy seem to think it should, and it’s easy to understand why: The drug war may have been a disaster for America, but it has been a three-decade gravy train for bureaucrats. …
Not being a bureaucrat, I think the drug war is a terrible model.

There you have it; the (perhaps soon formerly) most-linked blogger on the “right” is objectively pro-terrorist.

Remember, when glow sticks are outlawed, our best inquisitors will have to intimidate captured prisoners by finding some new tool which they can threaten to convert into suppositories. Never link to Insty again, I say!

Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head. …
“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.
–Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery”, 1948

My kids went back to school today so I’m thinking like a teacher. Here’s the assignment, read BushCo’s first public statement devoted to the devestation on the Gulf Coast since it became a national concern three days ago and share your favorite part. I have two but they come from the same paragraph:

The Department of Energy is approving loans from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to limit disruptions in crude supplies for refineries. A lot of crude production has been shut down because of the storm. I instructed Secretary Bodman to work with refiners, people who need crude oil, to alleviate any shortage through loans. The Environmental Protection Agency has granted a nationwide waiver for fuel blends to make more gasoline and diesel fuel available throughout the country. This will help take some pressure off of gas price. But our citizens must understand this storm has disrupted the capacity to make gasoline and distribute gasoline.

Translation: Citizens, you must understand the gouging for it is right and good in my sight. Record profits for the oil industry are no reason to call for any sacrifice during a time of national tragedy. If I don’t expect any sacrifice during the war waged on their behalf, and I don’t, then seriously, people do you expect a catastrophic act of god to cut any ice?

Bonus points to Dear Leader for slapping nature in the face with the fuel blend thing. That’ll show her who’s boss - until the next hurricane sails off the 90-degree Gulf of Mexico and slams back into our coast.

It’s the usual liberal double standard. Various suspects, such as this website itself earlier today, are attacking Our Noble Lame Duck for his efforts to bring entertainment to the sorrowing masses suffering from Neptune’s wrath by strumming a guitar with a lovely Presidential seal. If they think he’s such a lousy administrator and messed up every business he ever ran, then why aren’t they counting their blessings that he is leaving the real hard work to the experts who know how? Frankly, I’m always glad when our government goes on vacation because I remember what idle hands mean. As for the comparison to the mythical Roman emperor’s fiddling while Rome burned (though the violin was not invented for centuries to come), I refer you to this man, safely on much higher ground, and using a genuine fiddle, while his fellow lodge members burned crosses on lawns:

this is not about red states v. blue states…this is not about left v. right…this is not about liberal v. conservative…

the people in louisiana, mississippi and alabama are americans. this is about america. and americans have historically always rolled up their sleeves and pitched in to help out their fellow countrymen in need.

skippy has donated $100.01 to the red cross for hurricane relief. and now, skippy challenges everyone who writes a political blog, no matter what side of the spectrum they inhabit, to do the same.

but that’s not all of the challenge. skippy then dares everyone on his blogroll (who will be receiving an email with this double-dog dare), after they donate, to (a) blog about it, and (b) send an email to everyone on their blog roll.

the $100 is to make a difference. if every political blog donates $100, think of the hundreds of thousands of dollars the red cross can use to buy food and supplies for the people that need it now.
and the 1 cent is to let everyone know where that the donations came from blogtopia (yes! we coined that phrase!) and know that for once, in reality, the blogs are making a difference.

if the server is busy, call 1-800 help now .

Read the rest of this entry »

Ever trenchant, Molly Ivins draws our attention to the comedy of the rabid fox loosed in the henhouse down at the UN.

As reported Saturday in The Guardian, the British delegation to that body has taken up common cause against the US, to try to rescue a reform plan aimed at rehabilitating the UN’s reputation. Ol’ Carpets-and-Drapes has demanded 750 changes to a 36-page document. “Mr Bolton’s amendments,” observes The Guardian, “if successful, would leave the plan in tatters” and probably severely undermine a special UN Summit set for New York September 14-16.

(Seven-hundred and fifty changes to a 36-page document. Think about that. That’s better than 20 changes per page, which if my rather extensive experience with manuscript pages is anything to go by, is nothing less than a complete rewrite.)

Here’s Molly:

One of his proposals is to delete the phrase “respect for nature” from a set of core values that supposedly unites the nations of the world: respect for human rights, freedom, equality, tolerance, multilateralism and respect for nature. The phrase “respect for nature” does not commit the U.S. to any legal or financial obligation. Bolton just doesn’t like it.

Remove “respect for nature” from the core values that unite the… No “respect for nature”….

I hate to pinch Molly’s punchline, but here goes:

PS: Skippy’s Challenge already risen to by this particular goober.

George Bush is doing this for show…this photo. He’s looking at the camera, not the apocalypse beneath him. If the photo was even taken over New Orleans.

Rachel Maddow, filling in for Al Franken, is doing the best job of putting together the big picture that’s being painted by Hurricane Katrina. She’s hammering the point that while the hurricane was a natural disaster, a good case can be made that the flooding we’ve been seeing destroy the people and property that managed to escape the storm is not. Priorities and decision making in the BushCo administration - lack of preparedness, the use of our National Guard, money and personnel wasted in BushCo’s War in Iraq - these have all contributed to the devestation we’re seeing today.

The pro-war WaPo’s op-ed about BushCo’s destruction of FEMA (linked above) ends this way: (emph mine)

To be sure, America may well be hit by another major terrorist attack, and we must be prepared for such an event. But I can guarantee you that hurricanes like the one that ripped into Louisiana and Mississippi yesterday, along with tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, floods, windstorms, mudslides, power outages, fires and perhaps a pandemic flu will have to be dealt with on a weekly and daily basis throughout this country. They are coming for sure, sooner or later, even as we are, to an unconscionable degree, weakening our ability to respond to them.

After five years of the sort of gross mismanagement that BushCo and the Republicans are now so clearly and tragically guilty of, are you ready to trust them to keep you safe during a pandemic of avian flu? Not me. If you want to get ahead on informing yourself on the ins and outs of what an avian flu pandemic will mean in the United States, keep your eye on The Flu Wiki, edited by Just a Bump in the Beltway’s Melanie. The news aggregator page is especially helpful when it comes to staying updated. It’s your one-stop shop to find out how to best weather that coming storm in BushCo’s brave new Drown-the-Government-So-That-We-All-May-Drown-Along-With-It Society.

There are two images from the blog coverage of the disaster on the Gulf Coast that quickly becoming iconic. The first is the one of BushCo strumming on the soon-to-be infamous presidential guitar. I know it’s presidential because it says so.

I saw the definitive caption, “American Nero,” first at Steve Gilliard’s blog but others have also made the very astute connection. If that image doesn’t hang around his and the Republican Party’s neck throughout the remainder of his term, then the Dems don’t deserve to practice politics on a national stage. As Randi Rhodes likes to say, “When he shows you who he is, believe him.”

The other image is also from Steve’s blog, where he has captured proof of the current of racism that runs through the corporate media’s coverage of the disaster:

African Americans loot, whites find. It couldn’t be more clear and, on the other hand, it couldn’t be more subtle too because the racism masks the classism that is at the bottom of all this looting talk. Remember, there was a time when our government, at least, thought looting was no big deal:

“Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things,” Rumsfeld said. “They’re also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that’s what’s going to happen here.”

Looting, he added, was not uncommon for countries that experience significant social upheaval. “Stuff happens,” Rumsfeld said.

Significant social upheaval is certainly a good way to describe what is happening in the Gulf Coast. But Amanda looks at the current popular view of looters and she doesn’t predict the same understanding:

The victims of the flood will be portrayed via racist stereotypes as criminals and idiots. This will predispose the audience to disliking them. Then, after everything settles down, a few right wingers will start implying that the dead brought their own fate on themselves by being too stupid and/or criminal to evacuate. This focus will distract the pundits from discussing the real issue at hand, which is why the fuck we didn’t have the resources on hand to evacuate a city that has Hurricane Target written all over it.

She’s as perceptive as always, because what Amanda feared has already come to pass, first on FOX during a discussion among the descpicible Hume, Barnes, Krauthammer, and Kondracke., who find a lot to giggle about when discussing the suffering of others: (via Daou)

“FRED BARNES, EXECUTIVE EDITOR, “THE WEEKLY STANDARD”: You know, I was talking to a Republican official today who had his television on. And he was watching it. And he said, you know, every half or hour or so, you know, there’s another billion dollars, another billion dollars the federal government’s going to have to spend.

And talking about what is going to be a massive supplemental spending bill that will undoubtedly pass overwhelming in the House and the Senate this fall. I also predict the president, if he’s not already in New Orleans, will be there very soon. Maybe the water has to subside a little.

I mean, that’s a part of it. The president has to go there, has to promise all kinds of money. Congress passes it. And, in some cases, it’s OK.

But my problem with it is that, in some of these areas, like a below- sea-level city like New Orleans, they’re not — they want the rest of us to insure their risk. As people who live on the San Andreas Fault in California, where they know there are going to be earthquakes, people who live along the Mississippi River in these low farmland areas…

HUME: Floodplains.

BARNES: … near the river, the floodplains. They know they’re going to flood. And when these things happen, they want the taxpayers all over the country to pay, and they do.

HUME: So they can rebuild, right?

(LAUGHTER)

BARNES: Yes, right, exactly.

KONDRACKE: I mean, it’s…

HUME: How many times have you heard the guy, “Well, we got wiped out in Camille, but we rebuild. We love it here. And we’ll rebuild again.”

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Right, with your money.

With your money. Your money, which can serve no higher purpose than to be funnelled into the pockets of corrupt war profiteers, or disappear completely in the same cause, is wasted when it needs to be spent on the recontruction of a vital hub of the United States economy. Oh, no, I’m sorry, when it’s spent on helping poor people rebuild their lives or on fishing their bodies out of the flood waters.

Now Steve Gilliard (my premier information source today) is reporting that the narrative is filling out even further:

This is a partial transcript from “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” August 30, 2005, that was edited for clarity.

NEIL CAVUTO, HOST: Forget insurance. My next guest says not one taxpayer dollar should go toward rebuilding the city of New Orleans (search).

Joining us now is Jack Chambless. He is the economics professor of Valencia Community College in Orlando.

Professor, why do you say that?

JACK CHAMBLESS, ECONOMICS PROFESSOR, VALENCIA COMMUNITY COLLEGE: Well, if we look at Article One, Section Eight of the United States Constitution and I encourage all Americans to look at that before we start opening up our tax coffers to pay for all of this we have every obligation to provide for New Orleans in terms of charity, private charity from one person to the other.

But the founding fathers never intended, Article One, section Eight of the Constitution, never intended to provide one dollar of taxpayer dollars to pay for any disaster or anything that we might call charity. What we now have is the law of unintended consequences taking place, where FEMA (search) has come into New Orleans, a place where, ecologically, it makes no sense to have levees keeping the Mississippi River (search) from flooding into New Orleans, like it naturally should.

Now with FEMA bailing out Louisiana, bailing out Florida and lowering the overall cost of living in these places, we have people with no incentive to leave. And the law of unintended consequences means that more people are dying with every one of these storms. They’re becoming more and more expensive, more and more property loss, just because the federal government has violated the Constitution to provide for these funds.

CAVUTO: Yes, but, Professor, if you have your way, then, these areas will just be the domain of the well-to-do, right?

CHAMBLESS: No, no, not at all.

I mean, people of modest means lived in the Bayou, they lived along the coast of Florida long before the government got involved. But they assumed personal responsibility for their decisions. They paid for insurance. They paid the market premium for insurance.

CAVUTO: Yes, but those insurance companies, Jack, have left. They’re not insuring these people anymore, right?

CHAMBLESS: Some of them have left. I’m a resident of Florida. We still have insurance in the state of Florida. It’s become more expensive.

CAVUTO: No, wait. To be clear, I know your state well, and there are some areas where that is simply not offered.

CHAMBLESS: Right. But that’s part of the cost.

You shouldn’t have to compel the insurance companies or force them. They are a private for-profit business. If they believe the risks are too high and the probability of incurring losses are too great, nobody should force them to underwrite policies there. But, if we look at what the insurance companies are also doing, in a way, they’re able to free ride off of the taxpayers, because they’re not responsible for flood insurance.

It’s all about the people who refuse to pay their fair share. Be sure to read this article, Nature’s Revenge: Louisana’s Vanishing Wetlands, not only for an astounding look at some of the environmental problems that have led us to this disaster but also to find out who else doesn’t like to pay to play:

And there’s another touchy issue: Louisiana’s leaders want the nation’s taxpayers to pay to fix the wetlands, but they’re not demanding money from the industry that helped destroy them.

“It’s ludicrous and it’s unjust, ” says Oliver Houck, who runs the environment program at Tulane University’s law school. Houck says major studies show that the wetlands are crumbling partly because the oil and gas companies tore them up. Over the last fifty years, the companies dredged thousands of canals across the wetlands to make it easier to drill wells and lay pipelines.

“Everybody knows the oil and gas industry is a huge actor in all of this, but nobody goes the next step and says since they’re big part of the problem, why don’t they help clean it up?” Houck explains, “It’s unjust�€” because they happen to be the richest kid on the block�€” they happen to be walking away from a scene of destruction they have caused. And they should be paying their bill.”

The leaders of the campaign to save the wetlands say it’s true, the oil and gas companies have played a big role in destroying them. But King Milling says it’s not fair to punish the companies today, for something they did decades ago, especially since government officials encouraged the industry to tear up the wetlands. Everybody wanted their oil and gas.

Which brings us back full circle to the reason why leadership matters and the sad fact that we aren’t getting any from the Traveling Wilbury of a president with whom we are currently saddled. So set your time machines for the 19th century, kids, because that’s where that community college professor is suggesting we go. There’s nothing like a disaster to loosen all those Big Ideas that have been knocking around in the conservative think tanks and the halls of power -a disaster, a leadership void on both sides of the aisle and a SCOTUS nominee who happens to think that those ideas are right on track.

Ernie got out and is fine, though he seems a bit in shock.

Vaughn, too, is stunned.

As I read the reports, I feel stunned, too, though not just about the Big Easy. It’s the poor in Louisiana and Mississippi I feel especially bad for. These were already the only states I’ve ever visited that already struck me as third-world countries. Many folks there live on the edge and disasters like this add to their afflictions most of all.

We are an odd nation when our values are reflected after events like these. A tsunami-like event? Hardly. Hundreds of thousands died last December in one of those. Here we have several hundred at most. The worst natural disaster in US history? By what measure? Billions of dollars.

Not only does no-one ever calculate inflation in such comparisons, but I prefer to think the hurricane in Galveston, which took thousands of lives, counts as the worst. Money can be remade; people cannot.

And now we see and feel the outpouring of sympathy for the victims of this disaster, most of whom did not leave their homes because they were too poor to. Where was our sympathy then?

The latest report on poverty in America paints a grim reminder of where our real sympathies lie. The author downplays the impact, using percentages, which overlooks the fact that a million more people fell into poverty. A million is not a small number. Sympathy? More likely, we’re prone to say”hey buddy, get a job.”

And now we feel sorry for these victims. An ounce of concern yesterday could have prevented a pound of sadness today.

For now, you can help by going here. But in the long run, you can help by remembering what compassionate conservatism has wrought and globalization of trade. The free market hardly addresses everything, not even demand. Instead of delivering sympathy on cue, why can’t we simply care enough every day to make life less burdensome for our poorest?

Compassion is not an ideology. It’s a commitment, one that too many don’t make.

And by the way, that constitution for which Reuel Marc Gerecht and his neo-con brethren sold the women of Iraq down the river so blithely…that’s working out real well for them, isn’t it?

And when you read something like this, you just have to laugh:

“Yesterday the 275-seat interim assembly proposed a law to sack members who repeatedly failed to turn up. The decision was deferred because too many were absent.”

Juan Cole has more.

Cindy’s coming to Pennsylvania in September, as part of her Bring Them Home Now Tour.

If you’re in Pittsburgh, Philly, or the Alabama in between, get more info at PA For Democracy.

Reuel Marc Gerecht, sufragette:

“PAUL GIGOT: Reuel, you’ve written that,Americans of a feminist disposition should realize that equal rights between the sexes is not a pre-condition for the growth of democracy.”

REUEL MARC GERECHT: Well, historically, it should be easy to see that in the west. If it were a precondition, then western democracy certainly wouldn’t have started — wouldn’t have succeeded — because we didn’t give women the right to vote until 1920. It’s important to remember in Iraq — you are not going to have democracy take root, and have the traditional communities — the Shiite and the Sunni communities — support it. And there is definitely a greater Islamic identify in those communities.

However, I have heard no one in Iraq say that women shouldn’t have the right to vote. I think people have to realize is what you want is to begin a public debate. You want the democratic process to move forward. Then, later then can start having these debates about where the red lines are, where in fact women’s rights begin. It’s a moving line, but the most important thing is to get the traditional communities on board so they support the democratic process, and then let the great debates begin.

PAUL GIGOT: Of course, women played a very prominent role in the elections in January, turning out in really big numbers. Was that a one-time event, they’re likely to say, “From now on, we won’t vote,” or “We won’t participate?”

REUEL MARC GERECHT: No, I suspect you will see it over and over and over again, and I suspect many of those women who actually turned out to vote are not necessarily incredibly hostile to the notion of having Islamic law have some part to play in family law.”

Or there’s this, from his book, The Islamic Paradox:

“Advancing democracy and women�€™s rights may actually be at odds in much of the Muslim world, especially in Egypt where Islamic fundamentalists and religiously oriented associations dominate social life…

But democracy can obviously start and survive in societies where women are second-class political citizens and in their personal relationships with men, to brutalize Balzac a bit, are instruments de plaisir et l�€™honneur et la vertu de la maison. If this were not the case, Anglo-American, German, French, and Japanese democracies could never have developed.”

So if they want to institute Islamic laws allowing slavery into their constitution, that’s jake with us, too, eh, Marc? Here he is on Russert’s Beat the Meat, with more of that hard-nosed realpolitik:

“I mean, one hopes that the Iraqis protect women’s social rights as much as possible. It certainly seems clear that in protecting the political rights, there’s no discussion of women not having the right to vote. I think it’s important to remember that in the year 1900, for example, in the United States, it was a democracy then. In 1900, women did not have the right to vote. If Iraqis could develop a democracy that resembled America in the 1900s, I think we’d all be thrilled. I mean, women’s social rights are not critical to the evolution of democracy. We hope they’re there. I think they will be there. But I think we need to put this into perspective.”

Gerecht is a former CIA somethingorother, one of those people who so easily wave their hands and pronounce godlike verities about the lives of people he will never know and whose lives are nothing more real to him than movie scripts. Today he was in yet another sideshow, this time on NPR, blatting the same rehash about how the founding fathers blah blah blah until I wanted to pick up the nearest hard object and put it through the radio. I’ll bet he has some trenchant analysis on abortion and birth control, too.

How dare he sit there on his multiple media toilets and shit out this bloated, self-important scat about how half the human beings in a country really don’t need rights, they can wait, it will all work out in the long run, but right now they are expendable because they’re powerless and can’t do much about it anyway, and we won’t let their inconvenient needs get in the way of some neo-con jerk-off fantasy.

Fuck you.

Originally ranted at It’s My Country, Too.

The Gulf Coast hurricane relief efforts are quickly gearing up.

If you have a couple bucks to spare, please consider making a donation.

Red Cross
Salvation Army
Catholic Charities
Episcopal Relief and Development
United Methodist Committee on Relief

Money, supplies, prayers…whatever you can give, I’m sure they’ll be happy to take.

But no, Tucker Carlson has gone and given me yet another reason to despise him.

Did anyone else watch his coverage of the hurricane on MSNBC last night?

I was watching the coverage at work, with a co-worker who is not really a news-hound. I think he summed it up best when he said “Wow. That guy’s a prick. What’s with the bow-tie?”

Yes, indeed.

For those of you who missed it, Tucker spent the evening anchoring the discussion of the potential tragedy that could strike the Gulf Coast and the city of New Orleans.

Which would be fine. Except that he was discussing the tragedy with the same smug, snide, affect that he uses to discuss things like hamster-powered cell-phone chargers. It just rubbed me the wrong way.

Maybe I was being too sensitive. I admit it was a little strange to see many Louisiana locations I’m so familiar with, featured on cable news, as the backdrop to discussion of massive potential loss of life. I had listened to a series of voicemails left for me by a friend during her tedious and traffic-jammed evacuation process (”I’ve been on the road for 5 hours and have gone 14.1 miles. 14.1 miles!”) And I’m worry-sort of person to begin with….so I was a little tetchy, I’ll admit.

But even at that, I think Tucker was crossing the line, just a bit.

My personal un-favorites:

re: the evacuation traffic dissipating:

�€œNothing clears a traffic jam like an impending category 5 hurricane i guess.�€�

re: the danger of large restaurant and hotel signs being knocked over in Biloxi, MS:

�€œOut of all the ways to go, getting crushed by an Outback Steakhouse sign�€�.�€�

And there were a couple more anti-zingers, but I can’t remember them off the top of my head. And MSNBC has conveniently NOT made that transcript available. But trust me when I say that they were all delivered with that signature smirk of his.

Now, I’m one who can crack a joke about just about anything. I enjoy tasteless, but funny, humor as much as the next girl. Probably more so. But this just seemed weird.

A hurricane?

Jimmy Huck will blog it… afterwards.

Simple descriptions: Apocalyptic. Biblical.

Floating balls of fire ants!

Ian McGibboney gives the skinny on how to prepare.

But the reality is there’s just been three Category 5 hurricanes to hit the US mainland in the 20th Century. 423 died, mostly in the Florida Keys, in the Labor Day hurricane of 1935. In August 1969, Hurricane Camille struck the north Gulf Coast, killing 143 people there and another 113 due to flooding in Virginia. And Hurricane Andrew, the worst of the three, struck south Florida in September 1992. Though it only killed 23, its damage was awesome, taking down some concrete block condos I’d helped build at Naranja Lakes just 18 years earlier.

With category 5, it’s the tornadoes spawned that add to the destruction. Andrew made landfall with sustained winds of 165 MPH. Katrina’s max sustained winds have dropped from 175 MPH to 160 MPH, so it’s gonna raise some serious hell for residents, and for gas prices all over the country.

The winds should be htiting the Big Easy in about two hours. But Ernie the Attorney is going to ride it out!

So that’s the New Orleans bloggers to be watching that I’m aware of. And that’s where it’s gonna hit. It’s one bad mutha.

We at the American Street wish all the residents safety and hope the worst forms of property damage are averted.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the murder of Emmett Louis Till, the 14-year-old boy who was lynched in Money, Mississippi for whistling at a white woman. Emmett’s death and the subsequent miscarriages of justice in his case were catalysts for the modern civil rights movement. Ironically, several of the original suspects are still alive and untried for their crimes.

The Justice Department recently reopened the Till investigation, thanks in part to Keith A. Beauchamp, activist and director of The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till.

The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till is now playing in selected cities. I encourage New York readers to attend tonight’s special screening Film Forum. Beachamp and several of the original witnesses to the crime will host a question and answer session after the film. I attended a similar event on Friday night and I was thoroughly impressed by both the film and the Q&A.

Late Sunday night at the Cumberland Farms in Cornwall, NY, just south of here. Moira Betz, 20 years old, assistant manager, working the register. Her mother, Jacqueline, beside her behind the counter, helping out.

Customer comes to the register, man with what turns out to be about a hundred dollars worth of groceries. Moira and her mom start ringing him up.

Moira doesn’t like his looks. Doesn’t like it that he’d been in the store shopping aimlessly for 30 minutes and now he’s the only customer left in the place. Like that’s what he’d been waiting for.

He’d bothered her so much, hanging around like that, that she’d become afraid he was there to rob them. She even thought of pushing the button, the Panic Button, behind the counter that would have brought the cops in a hurry.

She didn’t do it.

She told the newspaper reporter later she’d been afraid the guy might have had a gun and he’d have panicked and used it if he suddenly saw all those red lights flashing outside the store windows.

Situations like that, you tell yourself you’re being paranoid, letting your imagination run away you. You go on as if nothing’s the matter, hoping for the best. More often than not, things work out fine and you were wrong to be worried.

Moira wasn’t.

Still she was shocked when the guy pulled out a knife.

Waved it at her and her mother. Gimme all your money!

They gave it to him. Everything that was in the drawer. Got away with $257.

$182 more than Cumberland Farms thought he should have been able to get away with.

Thursday an executive from the company fired Moira and her mother.

Company has a policy. No more than $75 in the register drawer at any time. Moment the count goes a penny over, you’re supposed to pop it in the safe, I guess. Seems impractical and unworkable. Store gets busy, you get a line of customers, even if you can keep track of how much you’ve got in the drawer, you can’t stop ringing people up to count up and count out and drop it it into the safe every it looks to you like there might be more than 75 bucks in the till.

In practice the policy has to be “Every time you got a free moment and you see there’s a lot of money in the drawer, take out everything but 75 dollars and put it in the safe.” Which means that from time to time during the day there’s going to more than 75 dollars in the register and it’s going to happen that during one of those times something bad might happen that’s going to make you wish you’d had the chance to empty the register before. Like a robbery.

So maybe what it was was Moria had gone too long without doing a transfer. There’s a log. Maybe the extra cash had been piling up in the drawer all night long. She had plenty of chances to put the money in the safe.

Maybe.

But you’d think. You’ve got a 20 year old girl working at eleven o’clock at night in your store, your convenience store—it’s not unheard of, convenience store getting robbed late at night; in fact, that’s why you have the no more than 75 dollars in the register rule—a thug wanders in, quite possibly a thug high on something makes him stupid enough and desperate enough to risk serious jail time for even in his wildest dreams he can’t believe is going to be more than a few hundred bucks, threatens the girl with a knife, this girl who even though she’s assistant manager you’re not paying a royal salary, she’s lucky she takes home in a week as much as is in that drawer at the moment, she could have been hurt, she could have been killed, she could have died protecting your money—suppose she had followed the rules, suppose there was only 75 dollars in the drawer, and suppose the thug with the jones and the knife wanted more than that and didn’t believe her she couldn’t open the safe?

You fire her?

Of course you do. Who is she anyway? Peon? Working a shit job at shit wages? She was worth anything to anybody she’d have a real job, she’d work in an office, she’d be like me.

She’s lucky we kept her on this long.

Maybe it didn’t happen that way. Maybe there’s more to it. Trouble is the company won’t explain itself. Their spokeswoman couldn’t, or wouldn’t, confirm or refute Moira’s version of why she and her mother were fired.

Me, I’m inclined to believe Moira. I’ve worked my share of shit jobs for shit wages and I’ve known a few managers and regional managers who cared far more for company rules than for the people they paid minimum wage to follow those rules.

One time, back in college, when I was working as an usher at a movie theater, friend of mine was behind the candy counter during a rush when all of sudden a girl on the other side of the counter, boosted herself up on the glass, reached over, and put her hand in the cash drawer.

My friend saw it. She lunged for the girl’s hand. My friend was five feet nothing. The girl had about 8 inches on her and 50 pounds. My friend pulled the girl over the counter. They fell to the floor together and wrestled around. The girl socked my friend in the nose, pulled herself away, hopped back over the counter, and ran from the theater with a fist full of bills but not as much as she’d have gotten if my friend hadn’t fought her for it.

My friend’s uniform was torn. Her nose was bloody. She was all over sticky from the spilled popcorn butter and soda on the floor behind the counter. She was crying. Our manager, who was a good guy, took her in his arms. He helped wipe her off, calm her down. “Go in my office and get yourself together, ok?” He reached in his pocket and pulled out a 20 dollar bill, “Then you go out, buy yourself some dinner, have a nice glass of wine, on me.”

Nice story. Except it happened that the district manager was there at the time.

“Make sure she makes a count of the drawer first,” the district manager said. “We need to know how much was taken.”

“I’ll do it,” one of the other cashiers volunteered.

The manager said fine and told my friend once more to go clean up, relax, a bit, and go have dinner.

The district manager chimed in, “Clock out first.”

Company policy. No paid dinner breaks. My friend, she didn’t clock out, spent a whole hour eating her meal, might have taken the company for $3.25 she hadn’t earned.

Fighting off a thug trying to rob the company? All in a day’s work. That’s how she earned the $3.25 she made this past hour. What more does she want?

For crying out loud.

She’s lucky she had the job.

(Cross-posted at my place.)

Despite the quagmire Bush and his oil cronies have created in Iraq, and an ongoing situation fraught with potential and past disasters galore, there’s something I want every Iraq citizen to understand.

I want you and your families to obtain peace, reconciliation, healing and fresh opportunities for a better life. That far exceeds my desire to say “we told you so” to rub Bush’s nose in his failures.

There are certainly myths about the benefits of living in a democracy. Class divisions, exploitation and usurped rights will still occur. It’s not a panacea. But it does present great potential well above the past abuses you’ve endured as a result of Saddam, Bush, previous US presidents and the shadowy efforts of our CIA.

Your budding democracy, at this stage, appears to be largely a puppet show. The fingerprints of corrupt men like Ahmad Chalabi are everywhere, and that has to be disheartening.

I can’t weigh what you and your family has experienced to judge whether you ever can forgive any leader there or here for the pain. But I do feel the rise of a successful democracy in your country can lead you to a life of greater opportunities. It takes a capacity to look within yourself and past all the bullshit that the powerful in your country still wield.

I hope you get and keep a democracy. I hope the powerful who claim they act out of pure religious interest speak from a spirit of compassion instead of the desires to control, as the greatest impediment to your democracy’s success are likely to be those proclaiming God’s blessing while acting with selfish intent.

Will you and your neighbors rise above the rumor mongers and the pleas for sectarian responses? Will you forget the appeals of power brokers and vote with an understanding of history, to achieve the best common interests of all, setting aside revenge for the sake of the greatest possibilities available?

When the apartheid regime fell in South Africa, fears abounded that the black majority would exact revenge from the whites. Nelson Mandela led his country around that, pursuing the justice of truth instead of the weak human need for payback. Such mercy and wisdom are needed in Iraq, as well.

All governments are a yoke, to some degree, even in a democracy. But some yokes can strangle while some aim to harness people in tandem, to work as a team. Will your democracy seek to subjugate women or outlaw Ba’athists? Or will it find a way to allow each to co-exist and to achieve a greater common destiny? I don’t know the answers - nobody does - but I know this is the challenge for you, as an individual.

Will you choose the best Iraq can be? Or will you succumb to the appeals of nearsighted men putting self interest above that which will serve you, your family and neighbors best? You will have the power in the voting you do. Aim as high as you dare to dream. I regret what my government has done over many years to add to your woes. But I remind you, the time has come when you can vote to make the very best of a terrible past and present. The time to aim higher than that is the power in your hands.

Big Guns For Iraq? Not So Fast.

By CRAIG S. SMITH
Published: August 28, 2005

EVEN though President Bush keeps saying American forces won’t leave Iraq until its forces can fight on their own, the United States isn’t rushing to give the Iraqi military heavy weapons.

There is an official explanation for that - that such things take time.

But there is also another reason to go slow, one that illustrates how tightly American military success is intertwined with the political prospects of Iraq itself. This reason is little discussed in public by military officers, but it was evident last week on the explosion-scarred streets of Baghdad, in the skirmishes between rival Shiite forces in Najaf, and in the confusion of Iraq’s struggle to complete a new constitution.

Simply put, Iraq remains too fragile for any planner to know what shape the country will be in six months or a year from now - whether it will reach compromises and hold together or split apart in a civil war.

And that presents a conundrum for American military planners. With those questions up in the air, they have to fear that any heavy arms distributed now could end up aimed at American forces or feeding a growing civil conflict. And the longer Iraq’s army has to wait for sophisticated weapons, the longer American forces are likely to be needed in Iraq as a bulwark against chaos.

In public, the commanders cite many reasons for the slow pace of equipping the Iraqis: the supply chain is long, Iraq’s soldiers are barely trained and largely untested, and the rebels they face are better fought with rifles than tanks.

In private, some officers acknowledge other concerns, too. “We’re worried about civil war or a coup,” said a senior American officer in Baghdad charged with outfitting Iraq’s new army. He would not agree to be identified because the concerns he was discussing are so sensitive.

Translation: we can’t afford to turn the Iraqi Defense Force into a really effective force. It might be used on us. In other words, this is a clusterfuck of truly epic proportions.

This NYT Op-Ed is so important that I’m tossing “fair use” to the winds and giving you the whole thing.

Show Me the Science
By DANIEL C. DENNETT

Blue Hill, Me.

PRESIDENT BUSH, announcing this month that he was in favor of teaching about “intelligent design” in the schools, said, “I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought.” A couple of weeks later, Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican leader, made the same point. Teaching both intelligent design and evolution “doesn’t force any particular theory on anyone,” Mr. Frist said. “I think in a pluralistic society that is the fairest way to go about education and training people for the future.”

Is “intelligent design” a legitimate school of scientific thought? Is there something to it, or have these people been taken in by one of the most ingenious hoaxes in the history of science? Wouldn’t such a hoax be impossible? No. Here’s how it has been done.

First, imagine how easy it would be for a determined band of naysayers to shake the world’s confidence in quantum physics - how weird it is! - or Einsteinian relativity. In spite of a century of instruction and popularization by physicists, few people ever really get their heads around the concepts involved. Most people eventually cobble together a justification for accepting the assurances of the experts: “Well, they pretty much agree with one another, and they claim that it is their understanding of these strange topics that allows them to harness atomic energy, and to make transistors and lasers, which certainly do work…”

Fortunately for physicists, there is no powerful motivation for such a band of mischief-makers to form. They don’t have to spend much time persuading people that quantum physics and Einsteinian relativity really have been established beyond all reasonable doubt.

With evolution, however, it is different. The fundamental scientific idea of evolution by natural selection is not just mind-boggling; natural selection, by executing God’s traditional task of designing and creating all creatures great and small, also seems to deny one of the best reasons we have for believing in God. So there is plenty of motivation for resisting the assurances of the biologists. Nobody is immune to wishful thinking. It takes scientific discipline to protect ourselves from our own credulity, but we’ve also found ingenious ways to fool ourselves and others. Some of the methods used to exploit these urges are easy to analyze; others take a little more unpacking.

A creationist pamphlet sent to me some years ago had an amusing page in it, purporting to be part of a simple questionnaire:

Test Two

Do you know of any building that didn’t have a builder? [YES] [NO]

Do you know of any painting that didn’t have a painter? [YES] [NO]

Do you know of any car that didn’t have a maker? [YES] [NO]

If you answered YES for any of the above, give details:

Take that, you Darwinians! The presumed embarrassment of the test-taker when faced with this task perfectly expresses the incredulity many people feel when they confront Darwin’s great idea. It seems obvious, doesn’t it, that there couldn’t be any designs without designers, any such creations without a creator.

Well, yes - until you look at what contemporary biology has demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt: that natural selection - the process in which reproducing entities must compete for finite resources and thereby engage in a tournament of blind trial and error from which improvements automatically emerge - has the power to generate breathtakingly ingenious designs.

Take the development of the eye, which has been one of the favorite challenges of creationists. How on earth, they ask, could that engineering marvel be produced by a series of small, unplanned steps? Only an intelligent designer could have created such a brilliant arrangement of a shape-shifting lens, an aperture-adjusting iris, a light-sensitive image surface of exquisite sensitivity, all housed in a sphere that can shift its aim in a hundredth of a second and send megabytes of information to the visual cortex every second for years on end.

But as we learn more and more about the history of the genes involved, and how they work - all the way back to their predecessor genes in the sightless bacteria from which multicelled animals evolved more than a half-billion years ago - we can begin to tell the story of how photosensitive spots gradually turned into light-sensitive craters that could detect the rough direction from which light came, and then gradually acquired their lenses, improving their information-gathering capacities all the while.

We can’t yet say what all the details of this process were, but real eyes representative of all the intermediate stages can be found, dotted around the animal kingdom, and we have detailed computer models to demonstrate that the creative process works just as the theory says.

All it takes is a rare accident that gives one lucky animal a mutation that improves its vision over that of its siblings; if this helps it have more offspring than its rivals, this gives evolution an opportunity to raise the bar and ratchet up the design of the eye by one mindless step. And since these lucky improvements accumulate - this was Darwin’s insight - eyes can automatically get better and better and better, without any intelligent designer.

Brilliant as the design of the eye is, it betrays its origin with a tell-tale flaw: the retina is inside out. The nerve fibers that carry the signals from the eye’s rods and cones (which sense light and color) lie on top of them, and have to plunge through a large hole in the retina to get to the brain, creating the blind spot. No intelligent designer would put such a clumsy arrangement in a camcorder, and this is just one of hundreds of accidents frozen in evolutionary history that confirm the mindlessness of the historical process.

If you still find Test Two compelling, a sort of cognitive illusion that you can feel even as you discount it, you are like just about everybody else in the world; the idea that natural selection has the power to generate such sophisticated designs is deeply counterintuitive. Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of DNA, once jokingly credited his colleague Leslie Orgel with “Orgel’s Second Rule”: Evolution is cleverer than you are. Evolutionary biologists are often startled by the power of natural selection to “discover” an “ingenious” solution to a design problem posed in the lab.

This observation lets us address a slightly more sophisticated version of the cognitive illusion presented by Test Two. When evolutionists like Crick marvel at the cleverness of the process of natural selection they are not acknowledging intelligent design. The designs found in nature are nothing short of brilliant, but the process of design that generates them is utterly lacking in intelligence of its own.

Intelligent design advocates, however, exploit the ambiguity between process and product that is built into the word “design.” For them, the presence of a finished product (a fully evolved eye, for instance) is evidence of an intelligent design process. But this tempting conclusion is just what evolutionary biology has shown to be mistaken.

Yes, eyes are for seeing, but these and all the other purposes in the natural world can be generated by processes that are themselves without purposes and without intelligence. This is hard to understand, but so is the idea that colored objects in the world are composed of atoms that are not themselves colored, and that heat is not made of tiny hot things.

The focus on intelligent design has, paradoxically, obscured something else: genuine scientific controversies about evolution that abound. In just about every field there are challenges to one established theory or another. The legitimate way to stir up such a storm is to come up with an alternative theory that makes a prediction that is crisply denied by the reigning theory - but that turns out to be true, or that explains something that has been baffling defenders of the status quo, or that unifies two distant theories at the cost of some element of the currently accepted view.

To date, the proponents of intelligent design have not produced anything like that. No experiments with results that challenge any mainstream biological understanding. No observations from the fossil record or genomics or biogeography or comparative anatomy that undermine standard evolutionary thinking.

Instead, the proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist’s work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a “controversy” to teach.

Note that the trick is content-free. You can use it on any topic. “Smith’s work in geology supports my argument that the earth is flat,” you say, misrepresenting Smith’s work. When Smith responds with a denunciation of your misuse of her work, you respond, saying something like: “See what a controversy we have here? Professor Smith and I are locked in a titanic scientific debate. We should teach the controversy in the classrooms.” And here is the delicious part: you can often exploit the very technicality of the issues to your own advantage, counting on most of us to miss the point in all the difficult details.

William Dembski, one of the most vocal supporters of intelligent design, notes that he provoked Thomas Schneider, a biologist, into a response that Dr. Dembski characterizes as “some hair-splitting that could only look ridiculous to outsider observers.” What looks to scientists - and is - a knockout objection by Dr. Schneider is portrayed to most everyone else as ridiculous hair-splitting.

In short, no science. Indeed, no intelligent design hypothesis has even been ventured as a rival explanation of any biological phenomenon. This might seem surprising to people who think that intelligent design competes directly with the hypothesis of non-intelligent design by natural selection. But saying, as intelligent design proponents do, “You haven’t explained everything yet,” is not a competing hypothesis. Evolutionary biology certainly hasn’t explained everything that perplexes biologists. But intelligent design hasn’t yet tried to explain anything.

To formulate a competing hypothesis, you have to get down in the trenches and offer details that have testable implications. So far, intelligent design proponents have conveniently sidestepped that requirement, claiming that they have no specifics in mind about who or what the intelligent designer might be.

To see this shortcoming in relief, consider an imaginary hypothesis of intelligent design that could explain the emergence of human beings on this planet:

About six million years ago, intelligent genetic engineers from another galaxy visited Earth and decided that it would be a more interesting planet if there was a language-using, religion-forming species on it, so they sequestered some primates and genetically re-engineered them to give them the language instinct, and enlarged frontal lobes for planning and reflection. It worked.

If some version of this hypothesis were true, it could explain how and why human beings differ from their nearest relatives, and it would disconfirm the competing evolutionary hypotheses that are being pursued.

We’d still have the problem of how these intelligent genetic engineers came to exist on their home planet, but we can safely ignore that complication for the time being, since there is not the slightest shred of evidence in favor of this hypothesis.

But here is something the intelligent design community is reluctant to discuss: no other intelligent-design hypothesis has anything more going for it. In fact, my farfetched hypothesis has the advantage of being testable in principle: we could compare the human and chimpanzee genomes, looking for unmistakable signs of tampering by these genetic engineers from another galaxy. Finding some sort of user’s manual neatly embedded in the apparently functionless “junk DNA” that makes up most of the human genome would be a Nobel Prize-winning coup for the intelligent design gang, but if they are looking at all, they haven’t come up with anything to report.

It’s worth pointing out that there are plenty of substantive scientific controversies in biology that are not yet in the textbooks or the classrooms. The scientific participants in these arguments vie for acceptance among the relevant expert communities in peer-reviewed journals, and the writers and editors of textbooks grapple with judgments about which findings have risen to the level of acceptance - not yet truth - to make them worth serious consideration by undergraduates and high school students.

SO get in line, intelligent designers. Get in line behind the hypothesis that life started on Mars and was blown here by a cosmic impact. Get in line behind the aquatic ape hypothesis, the gestural origin of language hypothesis and the theory that singing came before language, to mention just a few of the enticing hypotheses that are actively defended but still insufficiently supported by hard facts.

The Discovery Institute, the conservative organization that has helped to put intelligent design on the map, complains that its members face hostility from the established scientific journals. But establishment hostility is not the real hurdle to intelligent design. If intelligent design were a scientific idea whose time had come, young scientists would be dashing around their labs, vying to win the Nobel Prizes that surely are in store for anybody who can overturn any significant proposition of contemporary evolutionary biology.

Remember cold fusion? The establishment was incredibly hostile to that hypothesis, but scientists around the world rushed to their labs in the effort to explore the idea, in hopes of sharing in the glory if it turned out to be true.

Instead of spending more than $1 million a year on publishing books and articles for non-scientists and on other public relations efforts, the Discovery Institute should finance its own peer-reviewed electronic journal. This way, the organization could live up to its self-professed image: the doughty defenders of brave iconoclasts bucking the establishment.

For now, though, the theory they are promoting is exactly what George Gilder, a long-time affiliate of the Discovery Institute, has said it is: “Intelligent design itself does not have any content.”

Since there is no content, there is no “controversy” to teach about in biology class. But here is a good topic for a high school course on current events and politics: Is intelligent design a hoax? And if so, how was it perpetrat- ed?

All articles posted under fair use rules in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, and are strictly for the educational and informative purposes of our readers.

Operation Yellow Elephant is holding a hella contest on a par with the Freeway Blogger’s sign-making.

Yes, you can win an iPod. But the even better reward is the satisfaction you’ll get knowing you’ve done your part for our national defense and gotten a personal salute from General JC Christian’s little soldier.