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Don’t hate me for this, but I have to pass on the grossest news story of the week: “A Chinese cosmetics company is using skin harvested from the corpses of executed convicts to develop beauty products for sale in Europe”. Collagen.
662 Russian soldiers have died this year, not counting those killed in Chechnya. 182 suicides, and who knows how many of the rest “hazed” to death. That is one seriously fucked up army.
The Israelis have sort of ended their occupation of the Gaza, unless you count the borders, the airspace, water supply, power supply, and their claim to have the right to send in the IDF any time they feel like it. Still, Gazan children can bathe in the Mediterranean for the first time, which is not nothing. Synagogues and settlements are ablaze. The last thing the IDF did Sunday before leaving was to put new signs on the former saying “Holy Place” in English and Arabic but not, you’ll notice, Hebrew, allowing Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom (in Hebrew, shalom means hello, goodbye and hypocritical douchebag) to decry “This... barbaric act by people with no respect for holy places.”
Schwarzenegger, defending his $45m special election: “People say it’s a waste of money to have the election. I say it’s a waste of democracy not to have an election.” Um, does that actually mean anything?
John Roberts: “I come before the committee with no agenda.” Funny, I never heard of him working for a Democratic administration. He’s been a Republican hack lawyer from the start. Suddenly we’re supposed to ignore his entire life before he started wearing black robes to work two years ago, just like we’re supposed to ignore Shrub’s life before he turned 40. Also, “ump,” enough with the baseball metaphors. We’ve heard about all the confirmation coaches he’s been spending his time with, and I strongly doubt there was even a word of his oh-so-unthreatening opening statement that came from his own pen and hadn’t been focus-grouped, including his claim to be a mere umpire: “I will remember that it’s my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.” You’ll notice his speech writers didn’t include a mention of home runs, and it’s the home runs he’s planning to call for Chimpy that worry me. This whole “judges are umpires” line may play well in the country, but anyone who knows anything more about the Supreme Court than that there are nine of them and they wear black robes knows it to be arrant nonsense.
As I write, Orrin Hatch is giving a long speech to John Roberts, imploring him not to answer any questions.
Bush finally goes to New Orleans, the town he used to get drunk in. He does so in order to look all manly and in-controlly.
Sorry, don’t know how that got in there. The real picture:
He went armed with a set of canned responses. Like everything else from this administration lately, they arrived a week late and were totally inadequate. Asked how racial considerations affected the response to Katrina, he sidestepped the issue and responded to an absurd accusation no one actually made: “The storm didn’t discriminate, and neither will the recovery effort. When those Coast Guard choppers ... were pulling people off roofs, they didn’t check the color of a person’s skin, they wanted to save lives.”
And after a week, here’s what Karl Rove came up with as an explanation for Bush’s remarks that no one anticipated the breaching of the levees: he meant AFTER the storm had bypassed New Orleans, when it was said that it had “dodged a bullet.” That’s not what he said, that’s not what he meant, he’s fooling no one.
Asked about federal failures, he snapped that the reporter was playing the blame game. Another reporter specifically asked him to name a single thing, just one, that had gone wrong. He stood in the middle of all that wreckage and devastation (his credibility I mean, although yeah New Orleans looked pretty trashed too) and couldn’t think of even one.
(Update: Here’s his answer to that one, in its full gibberishy glory:
Oh, I think there will be plenty of time to analyze, particularly the structure of the relationship between government levels. But, again, there’s -- what I think Congress needs to do -- I know Congress needs to do -- and we’re doing this internally, as well -- is to take a sober look at the decision-making that went on. And what I want the people of this state and the state of Mississippi to understand is that we’re moving forward with relief plans. And we’re going to move forward with reconstruction plans, and we’re going to do so in a coordinated way. And it’s very important for the folks of New Orleans to understand that, at least as far as I’m concerned, this great city has got ample talent and ample genius to set the strategy and set the vision. And our role at the federal government is -- obviously, within the law -- is to help them realize that vision. And that’s what I wanted to assure the Mayor.)
And I’m sure he felt very assured indeed.)
From WaPo, “World in Brief”:
KABUL, Afghanistan -- Soldiers who fired at the defense minister’s convoy Saturday were not trying to assassinate him, but were shooting at other troops they were angry with, a government spokesman said.
“It was not an assassination attempt on the defense minister,” Gen. Mohammed Saher Azimi, a Defense Ministry spokesman, said at a news conference. “It was just a clash between soldiers.”
So that’s ok then.
From the same section comes more evidence of the benefits of privatization: the privatized Nicaraguan electricity company, now owned by a Spanish multinational, not being allowed to increase rates, has started “rationing” electricity, blacking out the capital (this is also indirect Katrina fallout, as most of Nicaragua’s electric plants are oil-fueled; expect a lot more of this throughout the Third World).
Bush is thinking, “I was told there’d be balloon animals.”
The WaPo Saturday
on security contractors/mercenaries in Iraq is a must-read.
From the Sunday Times:
The world testicle cooking championships have fallen victim to a hoax. Kangaroo testicles were specially imported for an contestant who phoned the organiser claiming to be Australia’s top testicle chef, but he never showed up for the competition in Serbia. “We were disappointed when no Australians arrived,” says organiser Gornji Milanovac. “We even had a band ready to welcome them”. Co-organiser Ljubomir Erovic said: “We would like to compare the testicles of a kangaroo to those of wild boars and bulls.”
Another September 11 is upon us, a sort of anti-July 4th in which we celebrate our collective victimhood. It’s a sullen, unlovely form of nationalism. Bush said in his Saturday radio address, speaking of 9/11/01, “Every American has memories of that day that will never leave them.” Yeah, I remember watching it on CNN on a tv screen from 3,000 miles away. Really, I no more have “memories” of the attacks than I do of Luke destroying the Death Star (one good thing you can say about Vader’s management style: Michael Brown wouldn’t have lasted very long. “But Lord Vader, I sent you a report, ‘Skywalker determined to attack inside the Death Staaaarrrrgh.’”). Let’s not pretend it was something every American went through; most of us were just spectators.
Bush continued, “And in the days and weeks that followed, America answered history’s call to bring justice to our enemies and to ensure the survival and success of liberty. And that mission continues today.” In other words, still haven’t caught that bin Laden fella.
“Today, America is confronting another disaster that has caused destruction and loss of life.” FEMA? Michael Brown? You? “This time the devastation resulted not from the malice of evil men, but from the fury of water and wind.” Notice how he anthropomorphizes nature, attributing “fury” to it for rhetorical balance to “malice”? You know in private he refers to Hurricane Katrina as an “evildoer.” The man is a Manichean down to his toes, just could not exist without an enemy to define himself against.
The underlying message, of course, is “You guys liked me after the last disaster, really rallied around and stopped criticizing me all the time, why can’t it be like that again?” But like Fat Elvis doing a medley of his hits when he was Thin Elvis, it’s not really working anymore.
Not with the general public anyway. Joe Lieberman will still roll over for his tummy to be rubbed, and a Fourth Circuit panel just ruled that Bush can detain any American citizen “enemy combatant.” The opinion said that Jose Padilla was “associated with Al Qaeda, an entity with which the United States is at war.” How many problematic words can you find in that sentence? “Entity” is the lynchpin from which the problematicity of the other words derives, because by refusing to define what exactly Al Qaeda is (the word entity means, literally, something which exists; where words like navy or school or legislature or wife-swapping club give you some idea what those organizations do, the word entity only tells you that it exists), it’s hard to say what being at war with it means or what constitutes being “associated” with it. The Bush admin uses these calculated ambiguities to insist on being allowed the maximum discretion to define who the “enemy combatants” are and what it can do with them, and the court has given it exactly that.
And no, problematicity isn’t a real word, but you all knew what I meant.
Still refusing to admit that Brownie is an incompetent fuck-up, Chertoff spins his “reassignment” to a nice quiet office far away from where he can do damage thus: “Michael Brown has done everything he possibly could.” And the sad thing is that probably really is everything he could do. He has now been tasked to stay in his office and make paper-clip chains, which he’s been told are vitally important to the rescue work.
And of course he’ll continue to get a hefty paycheck for that vitally important work, as opposed to the people who actually haul away wreckage, restore electricity, etc. I’ll be interested to see how much play is given to Bush’s suspending the Davis-Bacon Act in order to let Halliburton (and other federal contractors) pay its workers in the storm-damaged areas less than the prevailing wage. My gift to the unions is a term I just made up that should be applied to this and future attempts to screw workers using the pretext of “national emergency”: storm profiteering.
Hunger-striking prisoners are being forcibly fed by tube in Guantanamo. Guantanamo spokesmodel Maj. Jeff Weir says, “No detention facility in the world will deliberately let their people commit suicide, so we can’t let that happen.” Obviously he’s never heard of Bobby Sands and the other 9 IRA men who were indeed allowed to starve themselves to death in 1980. This is a form of torture which is considered by the medical profession (and more importantly, by me) to be unethical when the hunger striker is not insane. The military seems to be unclear, or lying, about the numbers involved in the strike, and didn’t see fit to inform the outside world until the second month of the strike, and Weir claims not to know their demands.
Iraqi “president” Talabani says that US troops are needed in Iraq not only to fight insurgents, but also “to frighten our neighbours and prevent them from interfering in our internal affairs”.
Time says most of Brownie’s resumé was hash. Geddit, hash brownie? Other, competent people have now been appointed to do the job for which Brown will evidently still be getting a paycheck. Bush had his chance to fire Brown and offload some of the blame onto him, but it’s a little late in the (blame) game now, to say nothing of “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” and “What didn’t go right last week?” but possibly he’s trying to game the blame game, figuring that if he attributes all the incompetence so far to Brown and fires him but things continue to be as fubar as ever, then he might be in trouble. A good scapegoat is hard to find.
The Iraqis are still negotiating the text of the constitution, and the UN is refusing to print it for the citizens who are supposed to be voting on it, since it was never ratified by the National Assembly.
The WaPo reports on the stringent security arrangements for the DOD’s 9/11 Freedom Walk and Hootenanny, or whatever they’re calling it. There will be walls and cops to keep out people who didn’t register with the Pentagon, and the press will be restricted. “Freedom” – the thing “they” hate us for – post-9/11-style. At the Pentagon website you can still “register to walk.” Ever since I first saw that, I’ve been itching to juxtapose it to a picture of a veteran in a wheelchair who can’t, you know, walk. My regular readers may be surprised to find that there are some things too tacky even for me (I also thought it would be disrespectful to use someone’s image for my own political ends like that).
Also on the Pentagon website, “Cheney Impressed by Can-Do Attitude of Katrina Survivors.” Everyone he met, he said, “is positive and upbeat.” The International Herald Tribune not too subtly says “Standing before piles of debris, he said that ‘the progress we’re making is significant’”.
Caption contest:
Chimpy has finally leapt into action, declaring a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance, although oddly enough for next Friday. If it takes 8 whole days to prepare for prayer (try saying that ten times fast), it can only be because FEMA is making the arrangements. (Update: the Poor Man finds some irony.)
Lou Dubose article on the eerily familiar failures of FEMA under Bush the Elder and the rebuilding of the agency by Clinton, who urged Congress not to let, ahem, future presidents dump their cronies, and college roommates of their cronies, on the agency: “In any future administrations, I challenge you as members of Congress to never let a director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency be appointed and confirmed without having the background of emergency management and that experience.” Dubose doesn’t mention the contribution of Ronald Reagan, who redirected FEMA’s focus away from natural disasters and towards building bomb shelters and preparing for the Reagan myth of a survivable and indeed “winnable” nuclear war, a myth Bush Senior believed in (Robert Scheer, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, page 29). We heard a lot of dark muttering in those days about the Moscow subway system, in which Russians would huddle cozily until the radiation went away, emerging as the new Red Overlords of a world of mutated cockroaches, or something like that. FEMA was cheerily optimistic about its ability to cope with nuclear holocaust with, as Scheer’s title quote puts it, enough shovels. Here’s a FEMA report from December 1980: “With reasonable protective measures, the United States could survive nuclear attack and go on to recover within a relatively few years.” (p. 111) Not that that cockeyed optimism has completely gone away.
From the BBC: “Dick Cheney has arrived on the country’s Gulf coast for a tour of the areas worst affected by Hurricane Katrina. Mr Cheney will review whether enough is being done to tackle the disaster... His visit comes as 25,000 body bags are sent to New Orleans”.
Schwarzenegger plans to veto the gay marriage bill, not because he is against gay marriage, why heaven forfend, but because the voters passed a ballot measure in March 2000 not to recognize gay marriages entered into outside California. Very respectful of “the will of the people” (it does not sound better in the original German) is the governator, except perhaps for the November 2002 re-election of Gray Davis. Der Arnold is of course trying to have it both ways, claiming to be a friend of the gays, why he’s perfectly happy to let them marry, it’s just his pesky constitutional scruples that get in the way. The LAT asks, “Schwarzenegger has also indicated that this is an issue best left to voters and the courts, not mere lawmakers. Does he not believe in the American system of representative democracy?” That’s a trick question, right? The gay marriage bill’s author, Mark Leno, says Arnie is “pandering to the far right.” He makes it sound so... dirty.
George Skelton points out that the California electorate voted in 1964 to overturn the Legislature’s recent ban on racial discrimination in housing.
Sen. John Cornyn says of the second Supreme Court vacancy, “I don’t know whether John Roberts has a twin, perhaps a sister or, uh, someone with a Hispanic last name.” So hilarious, and not racist or sexist or terminally cynical at all.
Jon Stewart says that those who don’t want to play the “blame game”... are the ones who are to blame.
Did the military really set up a recruitment drive among the refugees in the Astrodome? Fucking vultures.
More London Review of Books personals:
My ad comes in the medium of whistles: ppfffttttt, ssshhhhhhhwwwwt, peeffwt, pfftpt. Man. 36. Bad at whistling. Box no. 17/02
Employed in publishing? Me too. Stay the hell away. Man on the inside seeks woman on the outside who likes milling outside hospitals guessing illnesses of out-patients. 30-35. Leeds Box no. 17/08
Don't speak, you'll only destroy my already low opinion of you. And put your pants back on. And your wig. Terminally disappointed woman (38, Barnstaple) WLTM a man. Form a queue, then I'll negotiate the criteria. Box no. 16/03
Gynotikolobomassophile (M, 43) seeks neanimorphic F to 60 to share euneirophrenia. Must enjoy pissing off librarians (and be able to provide the correct term for same). Box no. 16/04
American man, 57. I just want a girlfriend. What the hell is going on here? Box no. 16/08
[More of my LRB favorites here.]
The interesting thing about the California Legislature’s vote in favor of legalizing gay marriage is that it was almost entirely partisan, with the support of 41 of 47 Democrats (with only 4 against and 2 abstaining) and zero Republicans (1 abstaining).
The Miami Herald notes that the US plan to “contain” Hugo Chávez isn’t working. The Herald is happy to pass along that “administration officials say they’re unwilling to reveal the most damning evidence against Chávez for fear of compromising intelligence sources.” Oo, where have we heard that one before. I’ve been trying to track for a while how serious the Bushies are about overthrowing Chavez, and the Herald isn’t that helpful, which is annoying because it is paying attention to the issue, unlike say the NYT or WaPo. But just because it’s interested doesn’t mean it can get anyone to give it the inside scoop. The article conveys echoes of strong intra-Bushie arguments about what to do about Venezuela without saying what the various sides are or what they’re advocating, giving us unhelpful hints like “There was at least one proposal that would have affected Venezuela’s oil industry.”
It’s not out of the question that the US will cut a sub rosa deal with Chavez, a quicker and less risky way of ensuring a continued flow of oil than attempting an overthrow.
Yahoo helped the Chinese government put a journalist in jail for 10 years for exposing the text of orders the gov sent to newspapers on how to report about dissidents.
Via Josh Marshall, a Salt Lake Tribune article that must be read to be believed, about firefighters who volunteered from around the country to go to Katrinaland to save lives, but on arrival found that they were to be deployed... handing out leaflets. After, of course, they sat through hours of classes on community relations, sexual harassment and so on. And for a group of 50 firefighters from Atlanta, their first task on arrival was to stand behind George Bush for his photo op.
According to Jesse Jackson, the US has refused Venezuela’s offer of assistance. Well, it’s not like Venezuelans are even properly trained. I mean, do they even have sexual harassment classes in Venezuela?
From today’s Gaggle:
Q Is “Brownie” still doing a “heck of a job,” according to the President?
McCLELLAN: We’ve got to continue to do everything we can in support of those who are involved in the operational aspects of this response effort. And that’s what we’re going to do. There will be plenty of time –
Yes, just as anyone pointing out the failures of Bush’s prosecution of the war in Iraq was “attacking the troops,” now anyone criticizing Arabian Horse Boy is attacking the brave and heroic rescue workers, who are even now attending sexual harassment classes over there so we don’t have to attend them over here. How dare they.
George “Inspector Clouseau” Bush will “lead,” personally mind you, “an investigation to find out what went right and what went wrong.”
“I’ve gathered all the suspects together. One of you is the killer,” he said, not knowing it was a Murder on the Orient Express scenario
“And I’ll tell you why. It’s very important for us to understand the relationship between the federal government, the state government and the local government when it comes to a major catastrophe. And the reason it’s important is, is that we still live in an unsettled world. We want to make sure that we can respond properly if there’s a WMD attack or another major storm. And so I’m going to find out over time what went right and what went wrong. ... There will be ample time for people to figure out what went right and what went wrong.”
I mean, O.J.’s still looking for the real killer, right? Ample time.”
Until then, “We’ve got to solve problems. We’re problem-solvers.”
Speaking of inept, how about the reporter who asked the question that led to this announcement of the establishment of CSI: Crawford. He or she asked whether Bush would be replacing anyone, rather than asking a specific question requiring a specific response about, say, Michael “Fuck you and the Arabian horse you rode in on” Brown.
Bush went on, “[A]nd we want to see Biloxi rise again.” Uh, right.
Asked about the Supreme Court: “I want the Senate to focus not on who the next nominee is going to be, but the nominee I’ve got up there now.” Which I take to mean he’s refusing to name his second nominee until after the Senate has acted on Roberts. Which is not a good sign.
Later, he oh so articulately suggested Americans give to NGOs trying to “save the life who had been affected by Hurricane Katrina.”
Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation: “Yet as scenes of horror that seemed to be coming from some Third World country flashed before us, official Washington was like a dog watching television. It saw the lights and images, but did not seem to comprehend their meaning or see any link to reality.”
Barbara “Rhymes with Socksucker” Bush, after hanging out with some of the storm refugees: “Almost everyone I’ve talked to says we’re going to move to Houston. ... What I’m hearing which is sort of scary is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this (she chuckles slightly)--this is working very well for them.” Looking for a picture, I ran across the fact that just two weeks ago, Albion College gave her an honorary doctor of humane letters degree. Her letters may be humane, but she forms them into some quite inhumane words.
Bush says that “Mississippi is a part of the future of this country.” Just in case you were wondering.
Bush, at the Bethany World Church in Baton Rouge: “Listen, Laura and I have come back down to Louisiana and then we’re going over to Mississippi to let the good people of this region know there’s a lot of work to be done”. Oh I think they can figure that out for themselves. And later he reminded everyone, “And -- but remember, this is a project that not only deals with the immediate, we’re going to have to deal with the long term, as well.” It’s because of just that sort of high-level sophisticated understanding of complex problems that he’s the president and you’re just a lowly peon.
He went on, “[W]e can help save lives once a person finds a shelter such as this. That means getting people food, and water, and medicine, and help, and in a place like this, love.” I say, steady on, we’ve only just met.
He uses that creepy phrase “armies of compassion” again. Who knew that some day we’d miss his father’s “thousand points of light”? He says, “So long as anybody’s life is in danger, we’ve got work to do”. Yeah yeah, as long as a cop’s beatin’ up a guy, he’ll be there, wherever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, he’ll be... well maybe not right there, possibly at a fundraising dinner, but those can be pretty grueling too, you know.
As much as I shudder at the thought of a Roberts Court, I can’t help giggling when I imagine the look on Scalia’s face when he found he wasn’t inheriting Rehnquist’s Gilbert & Sullivan-striped robe.
Like those obnoxious pharmacists who refuse to fill morning-after or birth control pill prescriptions, judges have taken to refusing to hear parental-notification-bypass cases. The most serious danger of this development is hidden deep in the NYT story: pro-lifers could target elected judges who don’t opt out or who grant exemptions.
Chertoff: “We are in control of what’s going on in the city.” Remember that. Everything that happens now is officially his fault.
Rice: “Nobody, especially the president, would have left people unattended on the basis of race.” Unattended? Of course not. That’s what all that talk about restoring law ‘n order was about, attending to people on the basis of race with extreme prejudice.
The gasoline fallout attendant on Katrina has been bringing up memories of those several-hour lines in the ‘70s, and the odd & even rationing that made those lines so much worse. Hasn’t happened here yet, but a version has appeared in Iraq, where people will only be allowed to drive their cars every other day.
Although Israel’s highest court ordered the military to stop using Palestinians as human shields, they still do, as recently as Wednesday, including a 13-year old. The IDF commander, evidently unaware that this was a no-no, freely admitted it to Ha’aretz, saying “I’m ready to do anything to protect my soldiers.” Asked what he would do if someone had done that to his family, he replied, “You’re going into politics now, and I don’t deal with politics.”
No need for a caption contest here, because the caption is so fucking obvious: Get out and help those women (81 and 62 years old, respectively).
More on the Fallujaization of New Orleans. An article in the Army Times is headlined, “Troops Begin Combat Operations in New Orleans” and quotes Brigadier General Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force, “We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.” The article refers to the “insurgency” in NO.
Condi Rice: “That Americans would somehow in a color-affected way decide who to help and who not to help, I just don’t believe it.” Condi will be traveling to Alabama tomorrow to look at storm damage, probably not wearing any of her expensive new footwear. Maybe she can lead the storm victims in a rousing chorus of Always Look On the Bright Side of Life.
Bush today: “The main priority is to restore and maintain law and order, and assist in recovery and evacuation efforts.” Wouldn’t that be three main priorities? Organize a response, fuck, the man can’t even organize a simple sentence. Also, shouldn’t food and medicine be on that list somewhere? certainly ahead of law & order.
Evidently every scene of the food distribution and levee work that Bush got himself pictured in front of yesterday, all of it, was fake, with workers, equipment and food going away again when he left. Blah3.com, a site I was unfamiliar with, does a nice job of pulling in the details from various news sources, and the site has lots of other posts about the ineptitude of the response to Katrina. Mary Landrieu today castigated this as “a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity.” Got news for you, Mary: as far as Bush is concerned, we’re all hastily prepared stage sets for him to strut around in front of. Including the people. Especially the people. Did you notice in that footage of him talking to the two black women yesterday that he had his arm draped over the shoulder of the one who looked to me to be in her teens the entire time he was talking to her sister, but never thought to make eye contact with her. And somehow he never met even one of the many people inclined to yell at him for his manifold failures. No Cindy Sheehan moments here either.
So, if you’re up for one, a caption contest (those aren’t the same black women I was just referring to).
Via DailyKos, this Grover Norquist memo, dated today, to US Senators, opposing the move to delay a vote on eliminating inheritance taxes permanently, which he says is “Proof that they are exploiting this tragedy is that they were never for repeal of the Death Tax in the first place.” The Grovester would never consider doing that, well, except for saying that repeal would produce “higher levels of economic growth is exactly what the residents of the Gulf Region need at this time to start the rebuilding process for their neighborhoods and more importantly for their lives.” Hey, why don’t you go and make that argument with the true beneficiaries of your charitable proposal in Biloxi or New Orleans or better yet the Superdome: one moron enters, no moron leaves.
Dana Milbank in the WaPo:
“I’m looking forward to my trip down there,” President Bush said in the White House driveway yesterday morning before leaving to tour the storm wreckage.
Something must have happened in flight, because when he arrived in Mobile, Ala., two hours later, he reported: “I’m not looking forward to this trip.”
And evidently all helicopters were grounded for the duration of the Clueless One’s visit.
