Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

They Are Invisible

Maybe this will show Michael Chertoff that evacuating wasn’t a matter of people stubbornly refusing to obey a mandatory order. These people are rich and white:

BLITZER: The disaster, what’s unfolding in New Orleans, elsewhere in the Gulf as well, the situation, especially, especially worrisome in downtown New Orleans. We have on the line now Phyllis Petrich. She’s stranded in one of the hotels in New Orleans. Phyllis, where exactly are you?

PHYLISS PETRICH, STRANDED IN NEW ORLEANS: I’m at the Ritz Carlton on Canal Street in the French Quarter.

BLITZER: How long have you been there?

PETRICH: We arrived here actually for holiday on Thursday evening and we were evacuated to the Grand Ballroom by the middle of the night Sunday. We have been on rations since then. They have evacuated some of the hotel. There are about 300 people left. The Ritz is trying to get buses in here. FEMA will not let them in. They got a group out last night. And of the three buses that got out, FEMA commandeered one of them. We have no idea where they’ve taken those people. We’re in dire straits here. There is no electricity. The sewage is backing up. As I said, the water supply is running low.

We do have a team here of infection diseases doctors that were here for a conference who have set up a small infirmary to care for the cases of dysentery and vomiting that have come up, as well as other people who have had some illnesses. But all of those medications are now being depleted, and I don’t know that anyone is aware that we’re here. I realize we’re not top priority on anyone’s list, but we are here and we are in dire straits, and we need someone to know that we’re here, to come in and help to get us out of here.

BLITZER: Do you have enough food and water right now, Phyllis?

PETRICH: Well I don’t believe we have very much food left at all. I know that we didn’t have any lunch today. We had just a little biscuit or a cookie for breakfast and all we’re each being given is a glass of water.

BLITZER: And it’s impossible for you simply to leave the hotel and walk out. Not only are there floodwaters there, but it’s dangerous, the violence, the looting, the snipers. It’s a very dangerous situation.

PETRICH: It is a very dangerous situation. Fortunately, the Ritz has been wonderful. Apparently they have a lot of off-duty policemen that they have access to, that are guarding the hotel with shotguns. They themselves are afraid to go outside, because policemen are being shot at. And it is very, very difficult situation here. And I just don’t know how we can impress upon people what is really going on here. I think people just don’t have a concept, and it’s being glossed over, it’s being handled so poorly, it just amazes us to hear what’s going on outside. That people just don’t understand just the seriousness of the situation.

BLITZER: Where are you from, Phyllis?

PETRICH: I’m from Maryland right now. I actually live in Wisconsin, but I’m a long-term job assignment in Maryland.

BLITZER: If your family if your friends are watching, what would you like to say to them? PETRICH: That I am alive and well at this moment. I don’t know what will happen in the future, but I am alive and safe for the time being, and I just want to get home to them.

BLITZER: Are you traveling by yourself or do you have children with you?

PETRICH: With my husband. We came here to celebrate our anniversary. And it’s one we will not forgot for many years to come.

BLITZER: Well, Phyllis, good luck to you. We’ll certainly pass on your concerns to authorities and try to make sure that people don’t forgot that these hotels, including the Ritz Carlton Hotel in the French Quarter, are endangered right now.

PETRICH: I know, and it would be a different situation if we had made the choice of our own volition to stay here. We could not get out. Once the storm started to hit the airlines shut down immediately. And none of us could get flights out. We would have left if we could have, but we could not and that’s why we’re in the situation that we’re in.

BLITZER: One final question, Phyllis, before I let you go. Are there any law enforcement authorities, National Guard, police, first responders, FEMA officials, anyone at the Ritz Carlton Hotel trying to help any of you.

PETRICH: Not that we have seen. No. Not at all.

BLITZER: They’re invisible right now.

PETRICH: They are invisible. We have no idea where they are. We hear bits and pieces who can get information in that the National Guard is around, but where? We have not seen them. We have not seen FEMA officials. We have seen no one.

BLITZER: Well, if it makes you feel any better, we’re told that they’re on the way. We don’t know how long it will take to get there. They’re deploying thousands of troops. But it clearly will take some time for them to get to the scene where you are. Phyllis, we’ll talk with you. And good luck to you, your husband and all your friends. I’m sure you’ve become friendly with a lot of these people at the Ritz Carlton Hotel.

PETRICH: … absolutely wonderful people. There is a group of British nationals that have gotten to BBC. And we’re hoping that with us, trying to get to as much people as we can, they will understand just how dangerous and, you know, difficult the situation is for everyone here.

BLITZER: All right. Thank you very much, Phyllis. Good luck. We’ll check back with you. Phyllis Petrich, like so many others, about 300 people, she said, stranded now at the Ritz Carlton Hotel, and no help in sight, at least not now, and they’re running short of food and water.

Even the Ritz-Carlton is out of food and swimming in shit.

Let’s hope these folks don’t have to go out and try to rustle up some food and water. The president said there is zero tolerance for “looters.” According to Is That Legal, fellows at the American Enterprise Institute agree with Peggy Noonan that looters should be shot:

I think shooting looters is a compassionate way to protect the safety and well-being of law-abiding citizens. Time after time it has been shown that the way to prevent deadly anarchic riots is to take firm decisive action to prevent matters from getting to a tipping point.

Yes, a little summary justice does go a long way toward “preventing matters from getting to the tipping point.” Except, of course, it doesn’t. What is needed is a large, visible police and national guard presence directing rescue activity and keeping order. Why that isn’t happening is the real question.

I seem to remember something in the recent past — a war torn city perhaps — that also dissolved into chaos and anrachy when the authorities failed to provide security. Somebody important said “stuff happens” and “freedom is untidy.” Where was that again? It’s right on the tip of my tongue…

If at first you don’t succeed, clap your hands and do exactly the same thing over and over again.

Update: Some of the “right” people are looting, too. Should they be shot, Peggy?

Five days after Susan Dewey arrived in New Orleans to celebrate her birthday, she was so desperate to get out that she banded with hundreds of other tourists to hire 10 buses for $25,000 to rescue them.

After waiting hours, they learned government officials had commandeered their buses to evacuate others.

[…]

The hurricane hit Monday. The flooding and looting began Tuesday. By Wednesday, Dewey was stealing to eat.

She said hotel staff encouraged guests to loot a nearby store for food, so that’s what Dewey and her boyfriend did.

“I had Power Bars, I had nuts because there were a couple (hotel) rooms open, and we raided their mini bars,” Dewey said.

That day, police went door-to-door to order local residents out of the hotel and to the New Orleans Convention Center, Dewey said.

The handful of managers left at the hotel told guests they had booked 10 buses for $25,000 to evacuate them and those from the Crowne Plaza Astor Downtown. Each passenger paid $45. The hotel staff began lining up elderly and ill people outside about 7:30 p.m.

“I couldn’t count how many wheelchairs you saw,” Dewey said.

The guests waited until 9:30 p.m. when a manager told them the buses were confiscated by the military.

Also planning to leave on one of the buses was Bill Hedrick, a Houston oilman, and his family, including his mother-in-law, who uses a walker.

“We kept hearing they were coming, they were coming,” he said. When the crowd learned the buses would never arrive, “everyone was totally stunned,” said Hedrick, who moved on to the convention center.

Dewey said she was ordered to head to the convention center

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It’s Time

I have to say that I’m with Wolcott on this one.

No, this is the time for politics, none better, because I can tell you just from being out of NY a few days that a lot of people in this country are shocked and sobered by New Orleans, but they’re also worried and pissed off. They’re making the connection between the money, manpower, and resources expended in Iraq and how raggedy-ass the rescue effort has been in the Gulf. If you don’t say it now when people’s nerves are raw and they’re paying full attention, it’ll be too late once the waters receded and the media-emoting “healing process” begins.

This event is emblematic of Republican governance. It encompasses every fuck-up they’ve perpetrated since they took over the entire national governament — failure to plan, embracing only the best case scenario, lagging response, ignoring the experts, slashing funds and endless, endless happy talk that we can SEE WITH OUR OWN EYES is bullshit. (They are already saying that nobody is reporting all the “good news.”)

The fact that most of these refugees (a word that I can hardly believe I’m typing) are black and poor residents who were unable to leave and were therefore, left to die, is emblematic also.

No, this is all about politics. It is about a GOP era of massive tax breaks for very rich Americans, billion dollar a week elective wars that we are losing while more and more people fall into poverty and the infrastructure of this country crumbles around our ears.

This failed experiment in free-market magical thinking can be summed up entirely by pictures of dead elderly Americans on the streets of New Orleans.

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How Could It Be Otherwise?

More damning evidence of leadership malpractice:

Here’s a piece from March 7, 2002 from the Clarion-Ledger on the circumstances of Parker’s firing. Here are the first several grafs …

The assistant secretary of the Army, Mississippi’s former U.S. Rep. Mike Parker, was forced out Wednesday after he criticized the Bush administration’s proposed spending cuts on Army Corps of Engineers’ water projects, members of Congress said.

“Apparently he was asked to resign,” said U.S. Rep. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., a member of the House Appropriations Committee’s energy and water development subcommittee that oversees the corps’ budget.

Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, also said Parker was dismissed.

Parker’s nomination to head the corps drew heavy criticism last year from environmental groups pushing to downsize the agency, calling its flood control projects too costly and destructive.

Parker earned the ire of administration officials when he questioned Bush’s planned budget cuts for the corps, including two controversial Mississippi projects.

“I think he was fired for being too honest and not loyal enough to the president,” said lobbyist Colin Bell, who represents communities with corps-funded projects.

Bell said Parker resigned about noon after being given about 30 minutes to choose between resigning or being fired.

As Josh Marshall says, this is the Bush administration in a nutshell. It has happened over and over again with disasterous results from General Shinseki to Bunnatine Greenhouse just the other day. They listen to no one who knows what they are doing.

This is banana republic shit. They funnel money to their supporters and reward their contributors and run inexplicable wars that make no sense — at the expense of the citizens of this country. It was inevitable that this incompetent, myopic administration would fail when faced with a major disaster during this second term. They are incapable of doing anything else.

Via Media Matters, here is another perfect example of Republican thinking on this issue:

After the Storm
Hurricane Katrina: The good, the bad, the let’s-shoot-them-now.

By Peggy Noonan

As for the tragic piggism that is taking place on the streets of New Orleans, it is not unbelievable but it is unforgivable, and I hope the looters are shot. A hurricane cannot rob a great city of its spirit, but a vicious citizenry can. A bad time with Mother Nature can leave you digging out for a long time, but a bad turn in human behavior frays and tears all the ties that truly bind human being–trust, confidence, mutual regard, belief in the essential goodness of one’s fellow citizens.

[…]

We had a bad time in the 1960s, and in the New York blackout in the ’70s, and in the Los Angeles riots in the ’90s. But the whole story of our last national crisis, 9/11, was courage–among the passersby, among the firemen, among those who walked down there stairs slowly to help a less able colleague, among those who fought their way past the flames in the Pentagon to get people out. And it gave us quite a sense of who we are as a people. It gave us a lot of renewed pride.

If New Orleans damages that sense, it’s going to be painful to face. It’s going to be damaging to the national spirit. More damaging even than a hurricane, even than the worst in decades

Yes, nothing must be allowed to blemish the steely-eyed rocket man’s moment of pulsating, wet-making glory.

Here are a couple of people you won’t have to waste a bullet on, you fucking privileged asshole:

A military truck with a lone soldier onboard drives by Dorothy Divic, 89, as onlookers trying to revive Divic yell in vain for him to stop, on a street outside the New Orleans Convention Center September 1, 2005. REUTERS/Rick Wilking

A man holding a baby uncovers the body of a dead man, suspected to have been sitting there for two days, outside the New Orleans Convention Center September 1, 2005.

Sigh. Give money if you can — click on the ad at left. The liberal blogosphere is setting the goal of raising a million dollars for the relief effort.

Moveon is sponsoring www.hurricanehousing.org to help displaced people find temporary shelter. If you can help out with that, click on over and see what you can do.

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Qu’ils Mangent De La Brioche

I don’t know if all of you have seen the footage today from the convention center in New Orleans, but it is shocking. There are dead bodies lying all over the place. People are waiting for help and the only people who’ve come in there are news crews and Harry Connick Jr. (And fuck you Michele Malkin.) It’s a living hell.

The MSNNC reporter just said that he counted 82 buses lined up outside the city waiting to go in to evacuate people from the convention center but they won’t go because they’ve been told it isn’t safe.

On 9/11 we had cops and firefighters running into collapsing buildings to rescue people. Today, days after the crisis hit, I’m watching people with little babies desperate for food and water and nobody is coming in to help them.

What in the hell is going on?

Perhaps this comment by Homeland Security chief Chertoff explains the Bush administration’s slow motion response:

“The critical thing was to get people out of there before the disaster,” he said on NBC’s Today program. “Some people chose not to obey that order. That was a mistake on their part.”

For Christ’s sake the tourists couldn’t get out either. All the rental cars were booked and the airport was closed. Lucky for them, most of them were staying in high rise hotels and they rode out the storm. And now they have someplace to go — home. The locals who didn’t have cars aren’t quite so lucky, are they?

I think Chertoff’s comment says everything we need to know about how this government viewed this catastrophe. “We told ’em to get out; if they refused (or couldn’t) they brought this on themselves.” That’s the Republican philosophy in a nutshell. “You’re on your own, losers.”

I think Americans expect more of their government than that. That comment should be hung around the necks of these poor planning, corruption spreading, deficit spending, budget slashing, warwmongering, tax cutting assholes like a dead Louisiana pelican.

Those of you who would like to donate can click the ad on the left. At this point,however, it might be more useful to actually drive to New Orleans with some food and water.

Update: SKBubba says call your congressman. He’s got the links.

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Calling In The Leadership

Oh, this is rich. DC MediaGirl (via the Daoureport) says that Michele Malkin is having a fit because Hollywood and LiveAid hasn’t stepped into the breach in New Orleans. Apparently, Hollywood should hold fundraisers while disasters are still unfolding. They shouldn’t even have a day or two to plan them — entertainers should immediately rush to the closest TV studio and just start singing and dancing as fast as they can. I presume that Malkin feels this should be done in lieu of actual disaster relief by Big Govmint, which is the root of all evil after all.

DC media Girl also points out Dear Leader was attending birthday parties and strumming the guitar while untold numbers were dying along the gulf coast. But then, it isn’t actually his job to deal with disasters. He was waiting for Tom Hanks and Goldie Hawn to take the lead on that.

This is a really unfair rap on the entertainment community. They are a lot of things, but ungenerous in disasters, they aren’t. They always step up in times like this and I have absolutely no doubt they are planning to do it right now.

When’s the last time the wealthy media punditocrisy held a fundraiser for victims of anything, by the way?

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Game Cancelled

BagNews Notes has the most interesting take on the compelling images of New Orleans: he looks at pictures of the refugees at the Superdome and observes:

Beginning with the weekend evacuation, one unstated subtext running through much of the reporting involved the disparate prospects between rich and poor. In many accounts, for example, the more well-to-do were securing refuge by way of upper-floor hotel rooms, or escape via rental cars and long-haul taxi rides.

On the other hand, those of modest mean mostly headed for the football stadium.

In looking through the painful photos coming out of this ravaged city, I was particularly struck by the scenes shot at the New Orleans Superdome — which seemed to have transformed, almost overnight, into the world’s largest disaster shelter.

Besides people trying to adapt to the building as living quarters, what I found ironic was the fact that this was the only way the lower income evacuees — not to mention the needy or indigent — would ever get close to these field level seats.

The pictures coming out of New Orleans are all horrible. But the income disparities among the citizens are brought into stark relief by this tragedy. Everyone is affected of course, but those who had little to begin with are truly left with less than nothing now. A whole lot of people who were hanging by a thread already just dropped into total despair. That dimension of the tragedy really makes my heart ache.

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Reason #673

Bush gives new reason for Iraq war
Says US must prevent oil fields from falling into hands of terrorists

By Jennifer Loven, Associated Press | August 31, 2005

CORONADO, Calif. — President Bush answered growing antiwar protests yesterday with a fresh reason for US troops to continue fighting in Iraq: protection of the country’s vast oil fields, which he said would otherwise fall under the control of terrorist extremists.

The president, standing against a backdrop of the USS Ronald Reagan, the newest aircraft carrier in the Navy’s fleet, said terrorists would be denied their goal of making Iraq a base from which to recruit followers, train them, and finance attacks.

”We will defeat the terrorists,” Bush said. ”We will build a free Iraq that will fight terrorists instead of giving them aid and sanctuary.”

[…]

At the naval base, Bush declared, ”We will not rest until victory is America’s and our freedom is secure” from Al Qaeda and its forces in Iraq led by Abu Musab alZarqawi.

”If Zarqawi and [Osama] bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create a new training ground for future terrorist attacks,” Bush said. ”They’d seize oil fields to fund their ambitions. They could recruit more terrorists by claiming a historic victory over the United States and our coalition.”

That’s a pretty good spin on the “no blood for oil” theme, you have to admit. It brings together the boogeyman and high gas prices in one neat package.

I guess we are now fighting Osama bin Laden for control of Iraq. Considering how badly we are doing there, I don’t think this is the best way to frame it. They seem to be winning.

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The Big Easy’s Got The Blues

Commenter antifa wrote in another thread on Sunday night:

I called Mama Marisol, got her on her cell phone. She had her crystal ball in the front seat, and she was ‘leavin-leavin, cher.’

Heading up Basin Street past St. Louis 1, she saw all the skeletons sitting on top of their tombs, rolling their bones and readin’ em, shakin’ their heads at her.

This won’t end well.

Mama marisol was right, cher. This is terrible.

If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break
And the water gonna come in, have no place to stay

Well all last night I sat on the levee and moan
Thinkin’ ’bout my baby and my happy home

If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break
And all these people have no place to stay

Now look here mama what am I to do
I ain’t got nobody to tell my troubles to

I works on the levee mama both night and day
I ain’t got nobody, keep the water away

Oh cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do no good
When the levee breaks, mama, you got to lose

I works on the levee, mama both night and day
I works so hard, to keep the water away

I had a woman, she wouldn’t do for me
I’m goin’ back to my used to be

I’s a mean old levee, cause me to weep and moan
Gonna leave my baby, and my happy home

*by Kansas Joe McCoy and famously covered by Led Zeppelin.

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Comic Designer

I haven’t weighed in on the recent Bell Curve wars (although Atrios reprised some of my former comments this week-end) because it just gets so tiring. But as I read some of the recent discussion of Intelligent Design, it struck me that we are seeing a clash of the psuedo-sciences coming on the right that could be very fun to watch.

You see, the racist Bell Curve people are ardent adherants of evolution; one of their primary wingnut funded institutions is called The Charles Darwin Research Institute. When you go to the site, you will see that it opens with a stirring defense of the theory of evolution and natural selection. As you read down you see its true agenda:

Based on his readings and his personal experiences of exploring Southwest Africa, Galton concluded that the average mental ability of Africans was low, whether they were observed in Africa or in the Americas. In Descent, Darwin acknowledged Galton’s work and also accepted the importance of the brain-size differences reported between Africans and Europeans by Paul Broca and other nineteenth- century scientists.

Modern studies confirm Darwin and Galton. The races do differ in average brain size and intelligence. The racial gradient in average intelligence and brain size increases from Africans to Europeans to East Asians.

This institute is run by J. Philippe Rushton, who is best known for his hypothesis that men with bigger penises and women with big breasts and buttocks have smaller brains and are therefore biologically inferior. He is famous for saying in an interview: “It’s a trade-off: More brain or more penis. You can’t have everything.”

In 2003, he became head of the nazi-founded Pioneer Fund which also supports such racist and sexist luminaries as Richard Lynn of the recent “women are dumber than men” study. Both of these alleged scientists’ work are positively referenced in The Bell Curve.

Unsurprisingly, Bell Curve authors Murray and Hernstein (and contributor Lynn) all pretty much agree with Rushton that large black dicks are a very serious threat to western civilization. Because of their large dicks and big tits, you see, blacks are more promiscuous and therefore have a different “reproductive strategy” that undermines our culture by overpopulating it with more big dicks and more big tits rather than the small dicks of white men like Murray, Hernstein, Rushton and Lynn.

They fail to explain why such a reproductive strategy would actually be inferior in their Disney version of Darwin’s big adventure, but they do set forth a very novel explanation as to why having a very small dick is a good thing. (I wonder if any woman (or man) has ever bought that line.)

Anyway, none of these dummies for Darwin, many of whom have followers in the white supremecist creationist crowd (as well as the long standing approbation of such cultural icons of dick as Andrew Sullivan) can sign on to the new fundamentalist chic of the moment — ID. Without evolution, a tiny tiparillo is just a tiny tiparillo.

So what happens when the Bell Curve meets up with the Discovery Institute? Will the racist Darwinians have the nerve to ask why the “Intelligent Designer” came up with the really, really fucked up idea that the big brained white guys like them got the tiny penises and the small brained, big dicked blacks got all the big-titted, hot assed women? Will the Discovery Institute fellows feel compelled to drop their pants to prove that the IDer in chief knew what he was doing?

I sense a monumental crack-up among the racist wingnuts. It’s either god or monkeys — with their inferior manhoods hanging (ever so slightly) in the balance.

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Awesome Chutzpah

It looks as though the Republicans are trying out a new play. If it works in this out of town try-out, will it be long until we see it on the national stage? From Josh Marshall:

Gov. Ernie Fletcher(R) of Kentucky and a slew of people from his adminsitration have been embroiled for some time now in a big government personnel scandal. And he just called a press conference and basically pardoned everybody.

I think this is what Republicans call decisive leadership.

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