November 2005 Archives

This article in Da Paper is two weeks old, but the news is still current:

Transit plans to be delayed More time wanted to evaluate ridership

Still unsure of Hurricane Katrina's impact on Jefferson Parish's public transit riders, the Parish Council is expected to delay votes today on increasing fares, slashing routes and possibly hiring a new manager to oversee bus routes and point-to-point van service parishwide.

The proposals had been postponed several times before the Aug. 29 storm as the council awaited estimates of how much money each option might save the cash-strapped transit department, which faces a potential $1.5 million operating loss this year because of escalating gasoline and insurance prices.

It's good to see that one Parish Councilman is thinking outside the box:

Furthermore, the proposals, due in June, do not reflect changes in public transportation needs prompted by Katrina, possibly rendering them useless, Councilman Louis Congemi said.

Congemi said he might encourage the council to request new proposals, asking firms to consider such anomalies as an influx of riders from St. Charles and St. John the Baptist parishes whose jobs have relocated to Jefferson from Orleans Parish or other hurricane-ravaged areas.

"Those additional riders might help you compensate for increased costs, because that was one of the problems that we faced in Jefferson is ridership," Congemi said. "If you increase the number of people that utilize the system, that may help the system. At this point in time, we don't know that."

While another is not:

Despite the uncertainty, Councilman Chris Roberts said he would encourage his colleagues to vote today on the fare increases, first proposed in February. They include a jump in the Base Fare from $1.10 to $1.50, exceeding the cost of a regular New Orleans Regional Transit Authority Basic Bus Line ticket by a quarter. Four other Jefferson bus ticket types would be raised under the rate proposal

I'm with Congemi. This is a time to re-evaluate. Maybe it's time to really put the "Regional" into RTA.

...the big corporations will cave in.  Of course, Blanco would never issue any sort of order similar to Blagojevich's in IL.

It's interesting that the article says that the store(s) involved here are in the "St. Louis area," but on the Illinois side.  There's no specifics in the full article cited here, but I'm guessing that means East St. Louis, IL, which is overwhelmingly black.  I don't know if race is playing a part in this, but the group providing counsel to the pharmacists, Americans United for Life (AUL), looks pretty white-bread to me.

Walgreen Disciplines 4 Pharmacists

Walgreen Co., the nation's largest drugstore chain by revenue, said it has put four Illinois pharmacists in the St. Louis area on unpaid leave for refusing to fill prescriptions for emergency contraception in violation of a state rule.

The four cited religious or moral objections to filling prescriptions for the morning-after pill and "have said they would like to maintain their right to refuse to dispense, and in Illinois that is not an option," Walgreen spokeswoman Tiffani Bruce said.

A rule imposed by Gov. Rod Blagojevich in April requires Illinois pharmacies that sell contraceptives approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to fill prescriptions for emergency birth control. Pharmacies that do not fill prescriptions for any type of contraception are not required to follow the rule.

The licenses of both a pharmacy and that store's chief pharmacist could be revoked if they don't comply with the Illinois rule, Bruce said.

[via Witchvox - RSS Feed - News from the Nest]

I'll never understand John McCain.  BushCo have been beating this man like a dog since the 2000 campaign season, and everytime he comes back with "thank you sir, may I have another?!"  They attacked him, calling him a "Manchurian Candidate."  They mocked his family, attacked his wife, yet he still accepted it and moved forward as a full-fledged Bush supporter.  They did it to him a second time, in the 2004 campaign, when he defended John Kerry's service. 

Just two weeks ago, Newsmax posted info from real news outlets that McCain was still defending George W. Bush.  Yesterday, the wingnuts at Newsmax have yet again turned on McCain, dragging his courage and service to the nation through the mud:

Sen. John McCain is leading the charge against so-called "torture" techniques allegedly used by U.S. interrogators, insisting that practices like sleep deprivation and withholding medical attention are not only brutal - they simply don't work to persuade terrorist suspects to give accurate information.

Nearly forty years ago, however - when McCain was held captive in a North Vietnamese prison camp - some of the same techniques were used on him. And - as McCain has publicly admitted at least twice - the torture worked!

What is it with this guy?  How many times can they insult him or his family before he is willing to defend himself?  If you look at his official website, the headline article is the text of a speech McCain gave entitled "Winning The War In Iraq." 

If John McCain was your neighbor's wife, you'd be calling the cops to get them to stop the husband from beating the crap out of his spouse.  But he's a US Senator in denial.  Back in the 2000 campaign, the Bushies used to call him "Chairman" McCain, in an attempt to paint him as a Washington insider, as opposed to Bush's outside-the-beltway persona.  Fearful that they'll take his perks away and expose him as being one step from the end of "The Burning Bed," McCain dutifully sucks it up and toes the line.

Last week, Nathan Newman wrote a good, cautionary tale about McCain for TPMCafe, where he says:

One of the danger signs for Democrats that a Bush collapse doesn't necessarily mean much for progressive gains in policy are the polls showing that John McCain could step up and poll almost twenty points more than either Hillary Clinton or John Kerry in 2008.

Newman goes on to point out that McCain is really a hard-right Republican, and that this needs to be communicated to the voters that make up that twenty-point difference.  He cites a Nation article by Ari Berman which outlines McCain's wide range of faults.

The blogosphere will no doubt hammer all those faults home as 2008 approaches, turning up the volume so it can be heard over the Mighty Wurlitzer.  Hell, the Wurlitzer might just turn on him again, if a better option than McCain presents itself.

Democrats should not merely rely on McCain's voting record to explain why he's not a fit resident for 1600 Pennsylvania.  They should call him what he is, a battered wife.

I'm usually careful about quoting Rude here because he's so NSFW. Still, it's worth repeating:

Newsmax Says Torture Worked On John McCain, So He Should Shut Up About Its Effectiveness:
No, really. The editorial is titled "John McCain: Torture Worked on Me," and oughta be required reading for anyone who thinks these wads of fuck on the conservative side deserve anything more than scorn and bile.

Here's the end: "That McCain broke under torture doesn't make him any less of an American hero. But it does prove he's wrong to claim that harsh interrogation techniques simply don't work." They are lower than the scum under the Rude Pundit's refrigerator. They're the dirt the scum eats to grow.

More on this tomorrow.

[via The Rude Pundit]

Mary Landrieu ain't Harry Reid. She barely got re-elected in a wishy-washy campaign, and has voted with the majority to the point where a lot of progressives in Louisiana don't see a lot of difference between her and a Republican. I don't think she's got this one in her:

Landrieu considering blocking Senate holiday recess

Louisisana Senator Mary Landrieu said yesterday that she is giving some thought to blocking the U.S. Senate's holiday recess until the government has agreed to pay for flood protection improvements along Louisiana's coast. There has already been considerable talk of a Louisiana citizen march on Washington, which might get more attention if Landrieu prevents the Senate from going home for Christmas.

Which is a shame, because this is up there with Reid's "secret session" move on pre-war intelligence. With the Alito confirmation lurking behind the Christmas holiday, it would be good to remind the majority that the minority does have ways of pointing out to the rest of the country that they have a job to do.

(xposted to YatCuisine)

The sign says:

Remember:

When the bodies from
Katrina were still being
collected.
When we needed
FAITH & HEROISM..
Ruth's Chris FLED
to Orlando:
Forgive them, Ms. Fertel. WE WON'T.

From World Class New Orleans.

Not to mention that they've never had the best steak in town, anyway. Still, those of you in cities where there are Ruth's Chris restaurant, give some thought to going somewhere else. I know someone who lost her job because she chose to rebuild her home to re-locating to Orlando. Don't give these people money.

To: letters@usnews.com

From: YatPundit

Subject: Mr. Zuckerman's column in your 05-December-2005 issue

Mr. Mortimer Zuckerman should have exhibited some of that "trusteeship" he says is missing in blogs on his own column. By not disclosing that bloggers joined other journalists in exposing the untruths in his column from 2003 on frivilous lawsuits, Zuckerman demonstrates that he is quite incapable of being a responsible "gatekeeper."

Perhaps if Mr. Zuckerman made better use of the Internet, such as fact-checking his own writing, the percentage of people who have confidence in the media's accuracy would be more than 44%. Assuming he got that number right in the first place. Given his track record, one can't be so sure.

(Credit the inspiration to write this goofball to Wampum.)

MSNBC and WaPo report this morning that Mayor Nagin is pushing a plan to set up a city-sponsored wireless community network in New Orleans. I like Chief Technology Officer Greg Meffert's cut-through-the-crap attitude:

"My number-one job is to restimulate the economy," said Greg Meffert, a deputy mayor, the city's chief technology officer and a former tech company entrepreneur. The system, he said, "is going to be the backbone of a brand new, never fully tried set of technology visions" to help distinguish New Orleans from other large cities.

The political animal in me says, pass the popcorn, this is going to be a fun fight to watch.

The liberal in me is concerned.

I remember when one of the local bloggers who is a librarian, I think it was Jeffrey from Library Chronicles, once said that he always knew when a local supermarket was hiring because the kids would come into the library with their parents to help them do the on-line employment applications. We're talking about a city where a significant percentage of the population can't use a computer, much less afford one. The notion of a community network is exciting for me, for residents with computers that have WiFi capability, but it's still not going to get housing for folks from the 9th Ward. Nor is it going to get Entergy to run electric and gas hookups to Lakeview so those folks can at least get FEMA trailers.

My concerns aside, there are a couple of aspects of this story that intrigue me. The first is Nagin's willingness to simply tell the state legislature "fuck you." When Lafayette considered a community network earlier this year, the corporate interests stepped in immediately to ban any community efforts at a bandwith faster than 144-kilobit. Nagin and Meffert are using a "state of emergency" argument to work around the pols who have been heavily lobbied by the HellSouth, Cox, and AOL/Time-Warner.

The other aspect of this I find neat is the willingness of Intel and other companies to put up equipment to kick-start this project. This is an attitude that the city needs to expand and exploit. You can see the commercials now "Intel - Helping re-Build New Orleans..." If we're going to have to whore out the city to corporate interests, I'd much rather see us bend over for Intel than for Harrah's. That's the difference between the callgirl who works out of the Monteleone Hotel and the streetwalker who works out of the Texas Motel on Airline.

Still, we can't lose focus here. The mobile, wireless worker that this network will attract didn't live here before the storm. The more the city does to attract new residents, the more difficult it makes it for the old residents to return. That's a debate that goes beyond the technophiles, and needs to be on-going throughout the re-building process.

 

Recently, the Family Research Council, a powerful conservative Christian organization, was invited by Leon Kass, the former chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, to submit suggestions for new IVF rules. The Christian group demanded that "the practice of creating more embryos than can be safely implanted and brought to birth, the practice of freezing spare embryos and the practice of 'selective reduction' or selective abortion of 'defective' fetuses or of fetuses in excess of those that can be safely delivered, should all be condemned."

Further: "All biotechnologies which aid in the treatment of infertility should be restricted to use by married couples."

In effect, the Family Research Council was advocating something like a law that took effect in Italy last year.

There, all embryos created during fertility treatments must be implanted, not stored (even when there's a good chance one of them carries a fatal genetic disease); IVF is limited to heterosexual couples in "stable relationships;" and donor eggs and sperm are outlawed. As a result, success rates have declined, women have had to undergo more procedures because they cannot skip steps and use their own stored embryos, and many patients have gone to other countries.

An attempt to overturn the Italian law failed this year after the Catholic Church mounted a campaign to urge people to avoid the polls and the vote failed to garner enough turnout.

Going after IVF closes a moral gap for pro-lifers, but at a very serious cost.  When the radical clerics attack reproductive rights, they're going after what is essentially a Democratic constituency.  Taking on the IVF industry means they'll have to attack three groups:  the physicians who perform the procedures, the clinics who provide the docs with an infrastructure, and childless couples with $10K-$20K in discretionary income.  Now, doctors are overwhelmingly Republican, both personally and as a profession.  The medical industry that owns the fertility clinics and hospitals pumps a lot of money into Congressional campaign coffers.  And the odds are pretty high that a couple who would spend $20k rather than adopting a brown or black baby is going to align themselves with the principles of the GOP over the Democrats.

Not only are the radical clerics attacking fellow Republicans on IVF, they're going after people, particularly the medical industry, with the money to push back.  The FRC makes a lot of noise in the right-wing echo chamber, but groups like this don't put the same amount of cash that healthcare corporations do.  To those hospitals and clinics, IVF is like plastic surgery, cash-rich and essentially unregulated.  No insurance, no medicare/medicaid, just desparate people willing to write checks.  Take that away and bottom lines are going to shrink.  In Martha Stewart terms, that's a Bad Thing.

The Congressional response to the push-back will be a no-brainer.  Most critters don't bite the hand that feeds them, and Congresscritters are no exception.  They'll publicly decry the potential abuses of IVF while allowing any legislation to regulate the business remain bottled up in committees (if it even gets that far). 

After a while, the radical clerics will see their agenda going nowhere.  That's not going to make them happy; they're used to their pet critters taking their calls and doing what they want.  They've developed a level of hubris and arrogance in dealing with politicians that is going to make it difficult to accept a defeat.  We've seen this already with SCOTUS nominees, the anti-abortion crowd are the most vocal.  But the Congresscritters aren't going to take the calls.  They're going to follow the money, and that means leaving the docs alone. 

Even if Alito's nomination to the Court is confirmed by the Senate (no sure thing there), abortion isn't going away overnight.  The run-up to the midterm elections is going to include a lot of yelling and screaming from the radical clerics.  The pound of flesh they want from their critters goes beyond SCOTUS.  But just like Shylock, the clerics may well find that their bargain will backfire.  The GOP critters know their base won't desert them, no matter how much the clerics scream.  The Republicans in Congress keep Bubba and his family safe from the Evil Coloreds and the Godless Homos.  They're willing to give on abortion-related issues. 

Will this be enough for the radical clerics to take their ball and go play someplace else?  It's possible.  Many of them are moral absolutists.  The volume of the complaint that GOP pols "aren't conservative enough" has increased in the last year, as the hubris of the clerics increases.  Emboldened by their defeat of Harriet Miers for the Court, they're not going to tone down the rhetoric.  In spite of this, however, they have no money to fight the healthcare industry.  Watch this one, it could be the issue that tips them over the edge.

Given the extent to which "Duke" used to wear his status as a Vietnam vet on his sleeve during the Clinton years, it would be more than a bit ironic to see him handed over to the Navy:

Court Martial Cunningham

I'm still seething over the idea of "Duke" Cunningham giving special favors to contractors supplying services and/or equipment to our troops, so I think that, once his plea agreement with the DoJ has been completed, he needs to be handed over to the military for trial.

You see, the Uniform Code of Military Justice applies not only to active duty service members, but also to "retired members of a regular component of the armed forces who are entitled to pay." Duke retired from the Navy, which clearly puts him in that category.

While it is the DoJ's responsibility to conduct fraud investigations involving government contractors (according to the Army's Field Manual on criminal investigations), it is not within the DoJ's purview to restore the honor of the Navy. Justice did not include in its plea agreement a violation of Title 18, USC, Section 207, which states that retirees that can be punished by up to a year in jail for scamming the government for their own gain.
...
Is this harsh? Damn straight.

But it's also supported by law. In 1987--the year Cunningham retired, incidentally--the Court of Military appeals reminded everyone of the following in their finding in Overton v. the United States of America.

[via Main and Central]

After the Rethugs took the House in 1994, their loudest and most obnoxious backbencher, Newt the Gingrich, became speaker. Duke Cunningham was more than happy to step in for Newt, however. Cunningham used to do a wicked tag-team number on CSPAN with "B-1 Bob" Dornan. After Dornan got the boot from Congress, I guess Duke didn't find Clenis^tm-bashing to be as much fun without someone to hold hands in the sewer with, so he turned to collecting bribes.

Cunningham always felt that he was on a higher plane than either Clinton or his people, because of his military service.  Let him now be held to a higher level of accountability.

I agree totally, keep Disney away from anything serious...

CS Lewis: Don't let Disney make Narnia! Live action Aslan is "blasphemy"

Cory Doctorow: CS Lewis wrote a letter insiting that Narnia should never be adapted with live actors, calling it "blasphemy" and saying that he'd consider a cartoon (but not from Disney), but never allow human actors to portray his Narniacs. Now, from the letter he's talking about human actors in animal costumes, but it's clear he's also skeptical about the whole live action thing in general.

Dear Sieveking

(Why do you 'Dr' me? Had we not dropped the honorifics?) As things worked out, I wasn't free to hear a single instalment of our serial [The Magician's Nephew] except the first. What I did hear, I approved. I shd. be glad for the series to be given abroad. But I am absolutely opposed - adamant isn't in it! - to a TV version. Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare. At least, with photography. Cartoons (if only Disney did not combine so much vulgarity with his genius!) wld. be another matter. A human, pantomime, Aslan wld. be to me blasphemy.

All the best,
yours
C. S. Lewis

[Letter to BBC producer Lance Sieveking (1896-1972), who has written at the top: 'The Magician's Nephew' and, after the address, the phone number "62963".]

Link

[via Boing Boing]

Digby has a good post from yesterday on this subject, outlining the positions and pitfalls of both parties much better than the Time article he cites. One of his comments caught my eye. Batshit Buchanan (oops, I meant Pat. That could easily apply to either him or his sister) has in the past referred to "California" as "Mexifornia." Digby says:

Mexifornia? How silly. The word "California" is spanish. So are "Los Angeles" and "San Francisco" and "Las Vegas" and "Santa Fe" and "San Antonio." This country has always been Mexamerica. Perhaps Pat doesn't know this being from Washington DC, but those of us from the border states don't find this "alien culture" alien at all. It's always been here. And, yes, there are plenty of people who have always hated it --- the same way that some white southerners are intimately familiar with black culture and hate it at the same time. But contrary to what Pat and some of the other "American culture" hysterics are trying to promote, this isn't new. It's been literally going on for centuries. And we've been having these panics about it every so often for centuries too.

In post-Katrina New Orleans, these are profound words, given how many hispanic folks are moving to the city.

Was reading a post from Democratic Veteran on domestic spying and he reminded me of this little gem:

"Naturally, the common people don't want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country." Hermann Goering, Hitler's Reich-Marshall at the Nuremberg Trials

I claim an exemption to Godwin's Law here because I'm starting this discussion with a Nazi reference, not blurting one out in the heat of a flame-war. Look at what the fat man is saying:

1. Tell them they are being attacked.
Most reasonable people will concede that going into Afghanistan made sense as a response to 9/11. But Big Dick has never been able to make the connection between AQ and Iraq, no matter how many times he's said it.

2. Denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.
OK, let's forget for a moment the foaming-at-the-mouth of the batshit-crazies like Coulter. This is the tactic used by Saxby Chambliss against Max Cleland in when Cleland stood for re-election to the Senate from GA in 2002. Of course, it's not fair to blame it all on Chambliss, because Cleland was too chicken to go out and defend himself. Still, it's interesting that Chambliss' consultants read Goering and the Dem consultants who worked for Cleland (and also almost cost Mary Landrieu her job in 2002) read "I'm OK, You're OK."

Of course, Nazi references like this rarely have any traction in the context of a Congressional campaign. We're fortunate that the Republicans are handing us treason in the White House and massive corruption in Congress to work with in 2006.

I'm no fan of the insurance industry. They manipulate the system worse than just about any industry in corporate America. Healthcare companies are often the worst. Property/casualty companies aren't a lot better, but they are our main line of defense in the face of hurricanes. Unlike the healthcare companies, the P&C folks have taken legitimate hits to their reserves in the last twenty years. This isn't surprising:

Insurance hinders New Orleans recovery

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Nervous insurers are steering clear of hurricane-hit New Orleans, posing new problems as people here try to rebuild or relocate.

Almost three months after Hurricane Katrina damaged tens of thousands of homes, insurance companies worry about safety, regulations and future risk. Existing homeowners argue about payouts, and would-be buyers struggle to find any insurance at all.

We pay insurance companies premium, they maintain cash reserves to pay out claims. Most of them have savvy investment departments who make the most of their reserves. When the claims are more than the reserves, the company needs to raise premium. Government help in this case makes sense, so long as the profits being taken in by the companies aren't obscene.

OK, here's the one I don't quite get, though:

"We were ready to sign a contract on a house, but we can't get insurance," said Steve, whose company is moving him to New Orleans and who asked Reuters not to use his second name. "I'm baffled why the real estate companies still show houses."

huh? Moving TO the New Orleans area? The reason "Steve" didn't want his name used is because he works for a storm profiteer. Let his company front the rent on a place that already has insurance, poor baby. They can afford it.

OK, that show was too stupid to even bother trying to refute. Next time Ed Bradley comes to town and tries to be a New Orleanian, every club in town should show him the door.

...albeit a bit late on Monday:

Perley A. Thomas streetcars 910 and 928, waiting to depart on the outbound leg of their current run on the Canal Street line, one afternoon in the early 1950s. These two cars have circled around Liberty Place and are now queued up in the 100 block of Canal. The billboard clock dominating the background reads 4:35. It's peak time for streetcar operation, as you can see three additional streetcars waiting behind these two. Canal Street had four-track operation. Streetcar 910 is on the outside, outbound track, which was normally used by the various lines that terminated their runs on Canal. Lines such as Desire, St. Charles and Magazine would run inbound to Canal Street via a one-way street. They would discharge passengers, turn onto Canal, run for a block or two on Canal, then turn back onto a side street to pick up passengers and begin their outbound run. 910 will merge onto the same track as 928 for the trip to the Cemeteries.

Four of the Union Metal Company light poles that line Canal Street in the CBD are visible behind the streetcars. These poles and their distinctive three lamps are still on Canal Street today, having survived a number of hurricanes since their installation in 1931. The long covered walkway in the right background of the photo is the pedestrian walkway that leads to the ferry landing. The railroad tracks of the New Orleans Public Belt RR Co. are right under that walkway, and it wasn't safe for pedestrians hurrying to catch the ferry across the river to be running across them.

The numbers on the right-hand side of the route sign indicate the order in which the streetcars left the barn that day. Streetcar 910 was the sixteenth that day, and 928 was the fifteenth. The streetcars used two-man operation at this time, employing both a motorman and a conductor. Passengers boarded at the rear and paid their fare to the conductor, exiting at the front. Since the conductor handled the money and could make change, exact change was not required. The fare at this time to ride a NOPSI bus or streetcar was seven cents.

The buildings on the left-hand side of the photo have all been torn down over the years, and now they are the location of One Canal Place, which is an office building, hotel, and shopping mall. Note the "JAX" sign in the left foreground, marking the entrance to a local watering hole and advertising Jax Beer. Jax Beer was made around the corner, at their brewery on Decatur Street. That building was empty for most of the 1970s, and was subsequently converted into a shopping area along the lines of Ghiradelli Square in San Francisco.

(Clicking the image takes you to a much higher-res version of the photo.)

"The most costly disruptions come when something we take for granted stops working."

Like levees.

She learned this first-hand in 2002:

TPM Reader AR responds from the other side of the aisle ... I must agree on at least one point that your Republican friend makes. There is a perception that Democratic politicians run when attacked that is rooted in a good bit of reality. My observations of the Kerry campaign (fairly up close) suggest that pusillanimous and risk averse consultants run campaigns. They rarely test how reframing the debate might change perceptions. You do not see ads attacking a messenger, attacking a message, using humor, using emotion and doing so on a sustained basis to build a brand.

[via Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall]

Landrieu got sucked into exactly that sort of campaign, and it almost cost her the election.  She got lucky that Louisiana law is goofy, and that her primary election was the same November Tuesday that was everyone else's general election.  So, while wishy-washy, cautious Dems like Max Cleland were getting their asses handed to them, Mary was able to make it to a runoff, living to fight another day.

Sometimes I look at Landrieu's votes in the Senate and scratch my head, wondering if she's learned anything from her 2002 near-miss.

Good for Boeing, obviously:

Boeing inks China and Dubai deals

China is buying seventy 737 aircraft - a $4bn deal that is said to be the largest in Chinese aviation history.

And as the Dubai air show opened on Sunday, Emirates ordered thirty-four 777 passenger and eight cargo planes.

That deal is worth $9.7bn (£5.65bn) and marks a major boost for Boeing in the Middle East, where it is competing fiercely with Airbus, analysts say.

[via BBC News | Business]

I've been mildly amused by all the flatulation surrounding the debut of Pajamas Media Open Source Media^tm. Being a middle-aged computer guy from New Orleans, I really didn't feel motivated to join the cool-kid bloggers and slam these folks. After all, if InstaCracker and his band of merry moonbats want to start a new venture, they can knock themselves out. I'm sure as hell not going to be in that number as a reader.

Now that they've tried to co-opt the moniker "Open Source," however, these moonbats have popped up on my radar. I'm a big believer in the concept of open source software, Creative Commons licensing, and the bazzar method of development. I put my money where my mouth is with my FreeBSD, Linux, and Tru64 servers in the rack in my office. I was writing articles about open-source web tools back in 1994, which was a long time before these goofs got the idea to try to co-opt a name they have no claim to.

Plus, I was a huge fan of The Connection, Chris Lydon and Mary McGrath's fantastic call-in show on WBUR in the late 1990s. Chris is now the host of "Open Source," the WGBH radio program, blog, and podcast. "Open Source" is a good show, and for Roger Simon to try to poach their name is even more reprehensible than trying to put a trademark symbol behind "open source" anything.

Not that InstaCracker and the other writers care all that much. It's not about the Clenis^tm, so they'll hardly notice the flap.

Leave it to Da Paper to make what appears to be a valuable conference/panel discussion look like a bunch of goofs because of a stupid headline:

Rebuilding should begin on high ground, group says

If that's all this group did, they could have saved a bunch of money by just calling me. My extensive training in Secondary Education and lots of years working with computers makes me eminently qualified to proclaim that we should rebuild on high ground. What is it with Da Paper, they get settled back in on Howard Avenue and they go back to pre-Katrina stupidity.

Thing is, this conference did come away with some interesting recommendations:

Firing off a collection of bold ideas, the group also proposed creating a public development corporation that would buy and sell property to speed the city's redevelopment; establishing an oversight board with broad powers over the city's finances; and engineering a secondary flood-control network inside the city that would use natural ridges, levees, water reservoirs, and green space to stop widespread flooding.

This panel had folks on it who advised Los Angeles and San Francisco after their big earthquakes. We're talking about some intelligent people, and their ideas were well-received:

When the panel concluded its hourlong presentation, members of Nagin's commission said they were extremely impressed by the detail of the draft report and the panel's wealth of ideas. Although the ULI panel stopped short of advocating a merger of Nagin's commission and Gov. Blanco's Louisiana Recovery Authority, it did stress that city and state leaders must craft a single vision -- and move more quickly in their rebuilding efforts.

"I appreciate your bluntness," said commission co-chair Barbara Major. "You have challenged us to make more difficult and controversial choices. As my aunt used to say, 'God can put a ram in a bush.' There has to be some behavioral changes across the board. I think we just have to kick a little butt and do what we have to do."

Of course, there's a flat-earther who denies the obvious in every group. In this one, it's the Councilwoman for Da East, Cynthia Willard-Lewis:

While the proposal was immediately questioned by New Orleans City Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis, who represents eastern New Orleans and the Lower 9th Ward, others attending the panel's presentation were more receptive to the idea, but questioned whether the political will exists to make it happen.

It's interesting to watch a politician's brain explode when a trap door is sprung under her feet. Willard-Lewis can't visualize representing Da East without its majority-black population. Perish the thought that she'd move forward with whomever is willing to come back now.

The grand debate over public school reform did not pass New Orleans by, but the demand for alternatives to public education, "school choice," and tax relief were not as strong as other cities in the US. Let's look at some of this by way of background to the current "charter school" debate.

Parents demand "school choice" when their public school system reaches a point where they feel like fixing or changing it is completely out of their control. Usually the trigger points are an eroding school infrastructure, an increase in school violence, and decreasing numbers of qualified teachers (which leads to higher pupil-to-teacher classroom ratios). Race also enters this equation, but those with racial motivations often are disguised and code-worded within complaints about other school deficiencies, e.g., violence would be reduced if there were fewer black or latin students in a school. Religious concerns, such as the lack of prayer in schools, also popus up from time-to-time, but the most vocal of families on the religious front are more willing to split from the public system and start their own school(s) or to home school.

There are three common ways to offer "choice" to parents of public school children. Pro status-quo forces, such as teachers unions, have so far been able to beat back most forms of "voucher" programs. The idea behind vouchers is to give a parent a coupon good for the value of a public school education. The family chooses a school for the child. It can be a public or private school, down the block or across town, if that's the family's choice. If the choice is a public school, the voucher is turned in and instruction commences. If it's a private school, the family pays the difference between the value of the voucher and the annual tuition, and they get to business.

Voucher plans have never developed any traction with New Orleanians, for two reasons. First, there's no real way to give the taxpayer his/her money back, since they put so little into the education system in the first place. With the first $75K of of the value of a home exampt from property tax, and the bulk of sales taxes being paid by tourists and convention-goers, the typical family in the city doesn't make much of a financial contribution to schools. Additionally, supplemental funding from the state government, both direct cash payments and in-kind payments such as school textbooks contributes to lowering the taxpayer's financial burden. The State of Louisiana has historically contributed a lot more money to education than many states because of mineral royalties. Prior to the oil bust of the 1980s, the state was flush in oil/gas revenue. It was determined that having the state disburse that money to parish school boards was the fairest solution.

The second reason vouchers aren't pushed very hard is that parents have a viable and competing education system in New Orleans. Catholic schools offer families a viable and relatively inexpensive alternative to public schools. With the state picking up the tab for textbooks and bus transportation even for private school students, the argument that taxpayers who pay tuition should get back some of what they pay for public schools rings pretty hollow.

That leaves unhappy public school parents demanding "school choice." They're not as interested in vouchers as they are in solutions. The parish school systems recognize that and many have implemented "magnet" school programs to quiet the activists. The idea behind "magnet" schools is to establish district-wide schools that specialize and attract a particular type of student. Musicians, actors, and artists find a home at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts (NOCCA), for example. Other schools have been established for top-level students (Benjamin Franklin High), and others for non-college prep students. These programs are often quite good, they present a problem for the Orleans Parish system: the rest of the schools are so poor that parents are clamoring for more and more alternatives, to the point where the "magnet" schools would actually be in more demand than the neighborhood schools. The lack of funding means that many families are turned away at the doors, fostering accusations of favoritism, racism, and economic elitism.

But there's no more money to improve the neighborhood schools to make them more attractive than their city-wide competiton. Still, the parents demand improvements. The school board tries to raise revenue, but meets oppostion from renters and businesses. Removing the property tax homestead exemption would require an amendment to the state's constitution. Everyone thinks the school system should work smarter with the money they have, but few think the existing structure works at all.

Enter the concept of "charter" schools. The idea here is to essentially sub-contract school operations to outside entities. The holders of "charters" can be for-profit education providers or community groups. The theory is to have the entity holding the charter come to the school board with a proposal and operating budget. If the charter holder can operate the school on less money than the school system can, that money can be paid to the charter holder as profit. In the case of a not-for-profit entity, they can pump the savings back into the school and make it that much better.

Naturally, those who have the most vested in the status quo, administrators, central office employees, and union teachers, vehemently oppose charter schools. But they're not alone; many other interests opposed this level of school privatization of public schools. Many who believe in strong protection of church-state separation see charters as a threat, because some districts might grant a charter to a church. Disability activists worry that corporate-run schools will cut corners and offer less opportunities for special-ed students. The list goes on.

Of course the arguments for and against "school choice" assumed that the school system had some sort of revenue base and operating budget. Hurricane Katrina changed that dynamic dramatically.

(Tomorrow: Charters in the post-Katrina city.)

Joe makes the case for never buying another book by Woodward:

Sadly, Woodward not only served as a silent accomplice of the Bush White House in its attack on Plame and her husband, Joseph Wilson, but went much further by publicly criticizing special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of that attack -- and suggested repeatedly, up to the eve of the indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, that the investigation should be curtailed. Now, instead, his own admission of involvement may have figured in Fitzgerald's indication Friday that he plans to call a new grand jury in the case.

Read the whole article, it's worth putting up with the day pass.

Then there's this:

Ten days later, on CNN, Woodward told host (and Post colleague) Howard Kurtz that he didn't think any crime had been committed. He went on to complain about how long the leak investigation had taken. "The special prosecutor has been working 18 months. Eighteen months into Watergate we knew about the tapes. People were in jail." That kind of spin is more worthy of a Republican pundit than a Post editor (and of course Woodward never complained about the extraordinary length and expense of Kenneth Starr's Whitewater investigation, presumably because the sources in that case were leaking to the Post).

Ouch!

Conason is by far one of the best at articulating progressive positions.

I'm listening to XM-Public Radio (channel 133), to Bob Edwards' show. Many of you will remember Bob as the founding host of NPR's "Morning Edition." He was canned by NPR for being "too old," and XM jumped at the opportunity to sign him.

One of my favorite segments on the show when Edwards was host was when sports commentator and author John Feinstein was on with Bob. Their interaction was excellent. While Steve Inskeep is a good host, the chemistry isn't the same.

I was pleasantly surprised this morning, listening to Edwards' show on XM, to hear King Kaufman from Salon doing a similar sports segment. I've enjoyed Kaufman's daily sports column on Salon for years, and it was nice to put a voice with the words.

Count me in the group that used to really admire Bob Woodward. Then he became a partisan hack. Or, maybe he always a Republican operative once he saw that he'd never duplicate the career-boost of Watergate. In either case, Will Bunch says it better than I could ever say it:

I've never been very trendy, but there was one time in my life when I did find myself swept up by a trend, a big one. And so today I come here to confess: I am a charter member of that '70s show, a generation of starry-eyed idealists who became newspaper reporters all because of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

I hate when icons of my youth turn out to not be merely human, but sub-human pieces of crap.

There are usually two types of folks who run for a school board position. One is the ambitious, up-and-coming politician. school boards are often a great place to get started. The districts are often relatively small, and a big media campaign is generally not necessary. The pol will usually serve one term, stand for re-election, then run for different/higher office in their second term. The second type of school board member is the activist-parent. This is the parent who is very vocal at PTA meetings, speaks often at board meetings, is encouraged by everyone else in the neighborhood to run, and can become a quite effective board member.

Orleans Parish has had its share of both of these types over the years, but a third type began to appear in the 1980s and 1990s: the parasite.

The parasite sometimes starts out as an up-and-coming politician who loses their shot at higher office. Sometimes they start out as a community activist or even a parent. There comes a point when they realize their political career has hit its zenith at the school board, they settle in and carve a niche from themselves in the school system. They like the deference they receive from school personnel because of their position. They like to be recoginized as elected officials at public events.

They also like controlling the millions of dollars in public money that flows through the school system annually.

By the late 1980s, there were more parasites on the OPSB than any other type of politician. System business came to a complete crawl. Board meetings that started at 6pm or 7pm would extend past midnight because members were micro-managing contracts and bid procedures. With all their concern devoted to who was getting this or that contract, the board abandoned their oversight duties. School administrators had wide latitude and no supervision. With nobody minding the store, corruption trickled all the way down to school janitors and secretaries. Millions of dollars went missing from payroll accounts, employees were arrested for stealing and cashing others' checks, and timecards were forged. For all the corruption in the system, surprisingly none of it was ever traced back to members of the School Board. (Ironically, only one member of the OPSB has been indicted in the last 20 years, Dr. Dwight McKenna. He was convicted on tax-evasion charges related to his medical practice and totally unrelated to the school system.)

This leads to the obvious question: have members of the OPSB been smart enough to avoid getting caught, or are they so incompetent that they allowed this level of corruption under their noses? My money is on the latter. Some members of the OPSB in the last twenty years have barely had command of the English language, much less the ability to monitor the activities of a multi-million-dollar enterprise. In the 2004 election cycle, then-incumbent member Carolyn Green-Ford was fined $8,600 in penalties and late fees for filing campaign reports late. The job only pays $10,000 annuall. Invariably, criticism of board policies and procedures have broken along racial lines, with white members being accused of being racists, "plantation masters," and other choice labels. Clearly the problems weren't so much black-versus-white as they were the overwhelming need to remove incompetent people from the board.

It wasn't until after a string of inept superintendents were hired and fired that the white minority on the board finally took a stand in support of former Superintendent Anthony Amato. In 2004, Amato ran afoul of two of the most influential black members of the board, Gail Glapion and Ellenese Brooks-Simms. The incident ended up in federal court, with white board members obtaining an injunction against the board as a whole, to prevent Glapion and Brooks-Simms from moving to fire Amato.

Coming on the heels of indictments stemming from the US Attorney's investigation, the attempt to fire Amato backfired days before qualifying opened for elections. Of the black members of the board in 2004, Glapion and Carolyn Green-Ford did not stand for re-election, Brooks-Simms Cheryl Mills, and Elliot Willard were defeated. The two white members of the board, Una Anderson and Jimmy Fahrenholtz, were re-elected. Newcomers Heidi Lovett Daniels, Phyllis Landrieu, Cynthia Cade, Torin Sanders, and Lourdes Moran took office as well.

The board was not only shaken up by the departure of five of the seven incumbents, but also in terms of racial makeup. Where the pre-election board was 5/2 black/white, the new board now consisted of three black members (Sanders, Cade, Daniels), three white members (Anderson, Fahrenholtz, Landrieu), and one hispanic member (Moran).

The new school board immediately indicated its willingness to try new approaches to solving problems in the system, turning financial management of the system over to an outside accounting/consulting company prior to the storm. In the post-Katrina world, OPSB reacted as slowly to the situation as did FEMA and the Bush Administration, all but stating that it would be impossible to re-open schools this year. Clearly this stance was unacceptable, so now the board has been forced to come up with new plans. So far, the cornerstone of the re-building plan is the concept of "charter schools."

Tomorrow: Charter Schools in post-Katrina New Orleans.

(crossposted on CanalStreetcar and YatPundit)

Since yesterday's article in the NYT, I've been asked two questions numerous times, enough to merit replying here rather than individually.

The first question is, why didn't RTA use more buses to evacuate people from the city?

The answer is simple: that wasn't the plan.

The city's hurricane plan has essentially two stages, voluntary evacuation and mandatory evacuation. When the Mayor calls for a voluntary evacuation, the idea is to encourage those with the ability to leave town and the means to support themselves away from town to get out. This allows municipal services to focus on those without means and ability.

When a mandatory evacuation is ordered, two things happen. First, the police and other volunteers go through the more affluent neighborhoods, announcing the mandatory evacuation. This is usually not very significant, because either people bailed voluntarily or they've decided to ride the storm out. Second, plans kick in to get anyone who can't leave the city to the Superdome, which is the "shelter of last resort." RTA buses and operators were indeed used to get people to Da Dome, per the plan.

There's never been a plan to evacuate those in the "last resort" category, because nobody ever anticipated that there would be NO IMMEDIATE ASSISTANCE after the storm! Under normal circumstances, the LA National Guard would be staged just outside the impact area of the storm, and would roll into town right on its heels with water, ice, food, and medical assistance. The debate on who is responsible for the fact that this did not happen still rages, but the bottom line is that the city's plan worked--up to that point.

The second question was why didn't RTA move the streetcars to higher ground? The answer was simple--RTA thought that the car barn at the Randolph SIS facility on Canal Street was indeed high enough and safe enough. It's important to remember that flood planning and protection in New Orleans is based on what has to be done to protect the city from storm surge coming in from Lake Pontchartrain. Levees and floodwalls were built high enough that the surge from a Category-3 to Category-4 storm would be held off, and that a Cat-5 storm would still only push water into the subdivisions close to the lake. The Randolph SIS facility (and Mid-City as a whole) flooded as a result of the breach in the levee/floodwall on the 17th Street Canal and the subsequent failure of the pumps. The storm itself didn't damage the streetcars, a poorly designed levee/floodwall did. Had that floodwall held, Katrina's storm surge would not have reached Mid-City.

Like the issue of the delays in relief, the cause of the canal breach will be debated in public and in courtrooms for a decade. Still, RTA's decision to keep the streetcars where they are was sound, based on what they knew about the storm and the conventional wisdom about our levees.

The decision to re-open schools in Orleans Parish post-Katrina is all about money, but that wasn't the case prior to the storm. In a city that was 60% black/40% white, the public school system's racial make-up was 95% black/5% white. Every city has families who make the decision to not use public education, some for religious reasons, others because they don't view the public schools as adequate, and yes, some for racial reasons. New Orleans hit the trifecta in the Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans. The Catholic school system in New Orleans is one of the most extensive in the country, with over 70 elementary schools four high schools in their direct control (the other Catholic high schools in the area are owned/operated by various religious orders), Catholics in New Orleans, through their priests, bishops and archbishops, are the one groups most responsible for the decay of public education in New Orleans.

In spite of the fact that Archbishop Joseph F. Rummel excommunicated Judge Leander Perez of Plaquemines Parish for encouraging Catholics to resist desegregation of Catholic schools in 1962, the Archdiocese was the local leader in encouraging de facto segration of local schools. The neighborhood parish school was just the alternative white residents of the city needed. White residents of the city could enroll their children in neighborhood Catholic schools rather than join in white-flight to the suburbs.

As the Catholic school system grew through the 1960s and 1970s, white homeowners were less and less motivated to provide financial support for public education. While no city has an easy time levying property taxes, New Orleans faced a number of obstacles. The state's "homestead exemption" assured that residents whose houses were valued at $50,000 (later $75,000) or less paid no property tax at all. White voters with children enrolled in Catholic schools were not interested in taxing themselves because they were already paying tuition. That left the burden of financing public education on renters (rental property was not covered by the homestead exemption) and businesses.

Of course, landlords and business owners pass their tax burdens onto their customers. This created the ironic situation where those who made the most use of public education (low-income families who rent) were forced to provide the bulk of the system's financial support. Attempts to use other revenue sources, such as the sales tax, were also problematic. Sales tax is one of the most regressive revenue sources a municipality can use, but the school board had the power to levy sales taxes approved by the voters.

By the 1980s and 1990s, the combination of suburban expansion, white flight and institutionalized de facto segregation took its toll on Orleans Parish Public Schools. The rise of the black middle class at this time wasn't enough to stop the schools' decline. Many black families in New Orleans are Catholic; continuing the tradition of the neighborhood parish school was the path of least resistance for them. Just before Hurricane Katrina turned the city into a ghost town for weeks, the Orleans Parish Public School System really only serviced that segment of the community who could find no other option for their children.

Then Katrina forced that segment of the population out of town.

(Tomorrow: Middle class interest in public education returns.)

The debate over a "right of return" to New Orleans for those who have been displaced by the storm cannot begin in earnest until we figure out what to do about the Orleans Parish Public Schools. NPR's Claudio Sanchez says it succintly: the old school system in the city is dead.

Schools in New Orleans must be re-built, but the entire system must be re-structured. The notion of returning to the status quo is just not acceptable. I've started a YatPundit category, "Metro NOLA Schools" to document the return of our schools throughout the area.

The Editors at The Poor Man Institute had some comments about Lindsey Graham, who looks like we should start calling him Sen. Nancy Boy (R-SC). But it wasn't their thoughts on this former impeachment manager and overall piece of crap that struck me, but some of the run-up to their slam on said piece of crap.

The editors quote an excerpt from Mark Ames' book Going Postal. They relate some of the story of "Anexoric Andy" Williams, who, on 5-Mar-2001, did a Columbine on his high school, killing two. The story is a re-run of Columbine, all the way down to the denials of school and community leaders, who collectively stuck their heads in the sand and denied the boy had been bullied to the point where he snapped.

OK, now, keep in mind that The Editors are attempting here to make fun of a piece of shit who thinks being in the Senate is a game. Still, their comments on Williams concern me:

Of course, this is no excuse for what Williams did, and many people who are subjected to this sort of treatment probably become better, stronger, more empathetic and resilient people as a result. That said, there is a lot of middle ground between quiet dignity and lashing out with overt violence, and there are a lot of ways to hurt the world that hurt you without leaving yourself quite so open to reprisals.

Williams was tortured by the kids he went to school with. When a prisoner who is being tortured lashes out against their torturers, or when we see his buddies come in and cut down those who hurt their mate, we easily excuse that behavior. Why not excuse Williams? Sorry, I don't think people become better for torture. They don't become "more empathetic and resilient." They become disturbed, dark individuals who are ticking time bombs.

When society creates these sorts of people, from either extensive torture in a high school, a military prison, or even a home, we cannot merely dismiss what they do as an aberration. Bullying in high school is a form of torture. If we, as a society, side with those in the US Senate that feel that the US military should not torture, we must take steps to outlaw torture in other places as well. And we shouldn't be shocked and outraged when those who are tortured fight back.

One thing for military men, their scorn for those who did not serve is non-partisan:

A vet speaks to the Chimp

And no, Mr. President, it's not the toy-soldier, "bring-it-on" thrill that your protected, sheltered experience would lead you to believe. It is terrifying. You're scared to death, shoot at almost anything that moves and pray to whatever deity you worship that you see tomorrow. But you would have no way of knowing that - not even through the stories of the sycophants you are surrounded by, most of whom have never served a day in uniform in their lives.

...

I have nothing to add to this. Go read it.

[Link via Blondie - Cross-posted at the Brain.]

When one station drops a show, others often follow:

Denver station drops O'Reilly

Well, it's because of low ratings. But regardless, still a reason to gloat:

KHOW chooses new talk-show program

Conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck takes to the air on KHOW 630 AM on Monday, replacing Bill O'Reilly. Beck, whose show is headquartered in Philadelphia, will be on KHOW noon to 3 p.m. weekdays.

KHOW announced in September that it would drop O'Reilly's show because of poor ratings. "We had given the producers a 90-day notice and we're at the end of the 90 days," program director Jerry Bell said in announcing the change on Thursday.

Jim Wolcott was on "Morning Sedition" this morning. In response to a caller's frustration with a lack of leadership/initiative from Congressional Democrats, Wolcott didn't think it was all that big a deal. He's right, of course. The Republicans are doing such a good job of self-destruction that there's no need to make this a partisan battle. A prosecutor from the Bush DoJ is taking down the Veep's office. Senator-Doctor Frist is doing such a magnificent job of destroying not only his presidential ambitions but his current political career that there's no need for anyone to get in his way. Duke Cunningham out in San Diego is in a world of trouble, and that's another DoJ investigation.

There's no need to make any of this partisan at the moment. Sen. Reid and Rep. Pelosi are doing the right thing in avoiding the "politics of personal destruction." They just have to avoid being in range of the GOP circular firing squad. This is most important for Sen. Reid, since the issue of the "nuclear option" may come up again with the Alito nomination. The more these people lose it, the easier it is for Reid to take steps to block Alito's confirmation. Every day, something new pops up that undermines the credibility of conservatives in general and Republicans in particular. At the rate they're going, it will be easy to simply say "things have gotten so bad that we should put all Bush nominees on the back burner until the mess is cleaned up."

The partisan hack in me wants to see the Bush Administration scooping up dog crap out of the sand traps on military golf courses near their minimum-security prison facilities. But they've lied so much that we'd spend years on investigations, grand juries, and trials.

The Bush Administration has lied to the point where something extraordinary will have to be done to clean up the mess. Josh has the right idea:

What this country will end up needing is something like a Truth and Reconciliation Commission because what the country needs is not so much for particular people to go to jail but for the lies and the lies to cover up earlier lies to stop. The country can't get past what has happened or move forward until we can get the truth on the table, deal with it and move on.

The other thing that is important is for Democratic candidates for prez in 08 to pledge that they won't turn over BushCo to any international body prosecuting war crimes. The idea of Cheney in the dock at The Hague is appealing liberal-porn, but it's not going to sit well with moderates.

I probably shouldn't even comment on this subject. I've had a nice dinner, a couple of glasses of wine, and Steely Dan playing through the very nice speakers I bought to replace the ones that flooded in the YatCave. Still, the notion of relaxing standards for Metairie parades is one that really cracks me up.

The implication is that the standards in place prior to the storm meant that there were quality parades in Metairie. According to Da Paper, the current requirements are:

Under ordinances that took effect this past Carnival season, krewes must meet the following minimum requirements: 200 riders, including their court; at least 10 musical acts, five of which must be bands; and 10 krewe floats.

OK, if you can't put together ten floats, you're not a parade. Most krewes could put together 15 or so floats, when you include the king/queen and the court. What usually irks me about Metairie parades is the lack of bands. The krewes were already pushing it with the number of "boom-box" dance groups they used as opposed to getting real marching units to parade.

If Metairie parades pretty much sucked before the storm, how can the captains of these krewes make a legitimate case for the status quo post-Katrina? Easy. It's not about the parades, it's about the floats. A lot of the captains are float-builders or related to someone who builds floats. If you start talking about mergers, that means someone's going to lose money.

Councilman Roberts is right to start the discussion of standards. I hope he stands his ground.

The notion that anyone from metro New Orleans has a "right of return" is an interesting one, and is worthy of extensive debate. I'm in agreement with the basic notion that folks who lived in New Orleans should be afforded an opportunity to return to their homes. I certainly agree that tenants should be afforded every possible right under the law to recover their property and try to return to the apartments, houses, etc., that they rented prior to the storm.

That said, out-of-town activists who have no bloody idea what they're talking about really get on my nerves. Take one Judith Browne, of The Advancement Project, a "democracy and justice action group" based in Washington, D.C. Ms. Browne's take on the current situation in New Orleans, as reported by Da Paper, is simple:

"If market forces control, then (New Orleans) will be an all-white city," said Judith Browne, co-director of the Advancement Project, founded to promote a movement for racial justice, and counsel to the People's Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Coalition, formed in the immediate wake of Katrina. (emphasis mine)

You gotta love it when an activist goes out of her way to offend the very people she's supposed to be representing. For New Orleans to become "an all-white city" would require circumstances even more extraordinary than Hurricane Katrina. For starters, 60% of the city's population prior to the storm was black. While a large number of those folks evacuated, many of them have returned. The reason for their return is simple, and just the same as their white neighbors: they're homeowners who are in the process of putting their lives back together. From Lakeview to Gentilly to Pontchartrain Park, black families are ripping out drywall and floors, fighting with insurance adjustors, juggling school situations for kids, and shaking their heads at out-of-towners who have no idea what they're going through.

Like Judith Browne.

I dunno, maybe UNO didn't teach me something that Ms. Browne learned at Columbia, but living in this city has taught me that whites aren't the only property owners here. There are a lot of black families and investors who own rental property in the city. In fact, the abysmal condition of various rental properties have come back to embarass a number of black politicians and businessmen over the last twenty years. Black folks are here to stay; the notion that New Orleans would become all-white isn't just silly, it's stupid.

As I said at the outset of this entry, the debate over the "right of return" is one that should be full-on, all-out, compassionate, and positive. It needs to be led by people who are familiar with the situation, however. Clearly Ms. Browne has yet to be counted in that number.

The Botanical Garden at City Park took a pretty bad hit in the storm. They've compiled a Wish List of plants they lost and need to replace. If you're in a position to help out, please consider doing so. At the very least, you can give cash, or a gift certificate to Jackson & Perkins, Nor'East Miniature Roses, etc., and that would go a long way in terms of helping them replace the plants.

I have no idea whether or not the general contractor we hired to put walls back in the house has the proper permits, nor do I care.

Some Jefferson repairs jumping the gun

Inspectors are riding the streets in unincorporated Jefferson and in the city of Kenner and will issue citations to people without permits or make them comply after the fact, code enforcement officials in both governments said.

They ought to open up an office at Aaron Broussard's house to help ease the long permit lines, since he's responsible for the majority of flood damage in East Jefferson.

I'm trying to figure out this graf, though:

Kenner cut permit fees in half, while Jefferson Parish is charging the same price for permits as it did before Hurricane Katrina. Permits are required for repairs such as wallboard, electrical and plumbing work.

I really hope this doesn't mean that someone in parish government contemplated charging more for a permit now, as opposed to pre-storm. But then again, the parish has more expenses now, like all those ads in Da Paper Broussard took out to try to salvage his political career.

Letten probing levee breaches

"The scope of our interest is very broad," he said.

But is this the James Letten who's going after the corruption of Marc Morial, or the James Letten who found a dozen hookers on Canal Street? Let's hope the former.

In my previous post about the sexual obsessions of Sam Brownback, I mentioned that a woman named Jill Manning testified about masturbation. Just for grins, I googled Ms. Manning, only to learn that she's not on the BYU faculty, she's a Ph.D. candidate:

Jill C. Manning, who recently completed her second year as a PhD student in marriage and family therapy, has been selected as the Social Sciences Fellow in Domestic Policy for the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC.

So, she's an intern. Brownback's best witness against porno is a Heritage Foundation intern.

Just some of the things that the US Senate should be tackling. What does Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) hold hearings on?

Masturbation:

She [BYU Sociologist Jill Manning] went on to explain that the experience of masturbation activates about 14 neurotransmitters and hormones, causing a quick chain reaction of brain activity. "There have been some experts who have even argued that, in and of itself, overrides informed consent when encountering this material," she said, apparently suggesting that an adult's own sexual self-stimulation can lead to a loss of judgment. Pornography, she continued, had been shown to increase the risk of divorce, decrease marital intimacy and cause misunderstandings about the prevalence of less common sex practices like group sex, bestiality and sadomasochistic activity. Men are not the only victims. Women, she said, make up about 30 percent of the audience for online pornography.

What's worse is that he's holding hearings on porno and log-flogging for himself and one other Senator:

The only other senator to participate was Russ Feingold, D-Wis., who is a ranking member of the Constitution subcommittee. He told the panelists that he shared Brownback's concerns over pornography involving children and human sex trafficking. But he seemed more skeptical about the overall tone of the hearing.

Maybe Feingold thought there were going to be demonstrations.

Here's my favorite witness:

The problems caused by porn can strike at the heart of a marriage. Another panelist, Pamela Paul, who recently wrote a book about the role of explicit sexual material in American culture, spoke of a fateful decision faced by some married men every day after work: They must choose between masturbating at a computer and finding sexual satisfaction with their wives. "If they go to their wives, well, just practically speaking, they have to make sure they have done all of the chores around the house they were supposed to do. They need to have a half-an-hour conversation about what they did that day," said Paul. This courtship could take up to an hour and a half. By contrast, she said, it takes "five minutes to go online."

So, prior to when Al Gore invented the Internets, husbands talked to their wives?

Kansas is such an embarassment to the Constitution.

The closer we get to election time, the stronger the survival instincts are in CongressCritters. Like most critters, they'll do what needs to be done to survive, including chewing off a leg when caught in a trap:

US House suspends push for Alaska oil drilling

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives abandoned, at least temporarily, a drive to open Alaska's National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling after concluding on Wednesday the initiative was threatening passage of a huge bill to cut spending.

BushCo doesn't have to stand for re-election next year, or any year, for that matter. CongressCritters do, and they're starting to realize the extent to which they're trapped. It's not just that the administration's approval rating is so poor, but Republican CongressCritters just look so bad right now. DeLay's under indictment, Cunningham's in deep trouble, Sensenbrenner is batshit crazy, and Hastert walks around with his pants down, bending over for anyone who will abuse him. (That's when he's not saying stupid things like questioning whether or not to re-build New Orleans).

Here's an interesting observation:

Even without those two energy initiatives, the fate of the budget bill was uncertain, as no House Democrats were expected to vote for it and several moderate Republicans might defy their leaders.

I suspect it's more than just "several moderate Republicans." Critters from storm-ravaged areas aren't going to be happy. California critters just saw the Gropenfuhrer's ballot initiatives go down in spectacular flames. OH Critters saw an unknown Dem get five times the historic percentage for a Dem candidate in a special House election in September. VA Critters see their Dem governor-elect on the boobtoob and realize that even the best place for Bush to be is as far from their districts as possible.

The rats are smart. They still may die in the cold waters of the ocean, but they know that death is certain when the ship sinks.

Replace all female flight attendants with good lookin' strippers.
What the hell? The attendants have gotten old and haggard looking. They
don't even serve food anymore, so what's the loss?
The strippers would double, triple, perhaps quadruple the alcohol
consumption and get a "party atmosphere" going in the cabin. And they
would no doubt work for tips, eliminating overhead for the airline
companies.

Muslims would be afraid to get on the planes for fear of seeing
naked women. And, of course, every heterosexual businessman in this country would start flying again hoping to see naked women.

Hijackings would come to a screeching halt and the airline
industry would see record revenue.

Why the hell didn't Bush think of this? Why do I still have to do
everything myself?

Sincerely ,
Bill Clinton

swiped from LJ user angel68

Makes you long for the days when the worst thing we had to criticize was that the leader of the free world was a hound...

NPR's Snigdha Prakash

Intelligent, articulate, a hottie voice, and cute! *sigh*

Democrat Corzine Manages Jump from Senator to Governor

OK, admittedly, we're talking about Noo Joisey here, not Texas, where they don't want the Godless Homos to marry. Still, Corzine was anti-tax-cut, anti-Iraq, and has been very vocal in challenging the Bush Administration. The best the Rethugs could do against him was to put up his ex-wife in attack ads saying he's a turd. No better way to turn off voters than to put your candidate's bedroom out in the street like that.

Yeah, it may be just NJ, a very Dem state, but still, it's encouraging to see.

This article from Da Paper on the museum at Jackson Barracks is significant, mainly because so few museums and historic collections suffered major damage at the hands of the storm. It's no surprise that Jackson Barracks, which is in the Lower 9th Ward, was hurt pretty bad. Parts of the National Guard facility have been around since 1835, including the main buildings and officers' quarters.

It's no colsolation to say "it could have been worse," though. Every loss of items which document our city's history is a serious loss.

Via Digby comes this very informative article by Laura Rozen on Sen. Pat Roberts (Liar-KS), who chairs the Intelligence Committee. The article lays out Roberts' plan to do absolutely nothing to get to the truth of Iraq war intelligence. Rozen provides a link to the Intelligence Committee's website, and I was surprised to see Olympia Snowe's (R-ME) there. Sen. Snowe has always been one of the few sane Republicans left in that body, so I encourage everyone to contact Sen. Snowe and encourage her to make the Intelligence Committee do their job, in spite of the wishes of the committee's chariman.

Atrios is right, this is a thoughtful column. One section really sticks with me, though:

A yellow sheet of paper marked "official business" changed that.

My initial reaction was a dismissive chuckle. Surely there was a mistake. Yes, I had interviewed the suspected murderer, Shawan Daniels, in jail. She told me she committed the act that led to the death of 72-year-old Earlene Bradshaw. She claimed it was self defense. I wrote a column about it and put all the details right there in black and white.

Right there in black-and-white doesn't make it true. I don't know Mr. Messenger (the reporter), so this isn't an attack on his integrity. It makes sense to subpoena him; it would be negligent of both prosecution and defense in this case to simply accept that he wrote the truth in his article.

The problem is, reporters lie. They make things up. Sometimes they get caught at it, sometimes they don't. The only way those charged with getting to the truth of the situation can do so is to put the reporter under oath. The consequences of a reporter lying under penalty of perjury are a lot more serious than what will happen to him/her for merely making stuff up and printing it. This story is a good example of that. There's no real way an editor can fact-check what the reporter submits; the editor has to take the reporter's word for it.

While Mr. Messenger expands this murder case into a discussion of the Miller case, I find other aspects of this case disturbing. Based on his news report, the prosecutor in the Shawan Daniels can now use Mr. Messenger's testimony to corroborate a murder confession. When the defense asks about the self-defense part of the story, the prosecutor will most likely object, saying that it's hearsay. Defense would then demand that the full story come out.

Fortunately for Mr. Messenger, the judge in the case had the good sense to quash the subpoena. That way none of the story will get into the official record. If the anonymous source validating Daniels' self-defense argument is telling the truth, hopefully the defense will be able to get that testimony on the record.