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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Saturday, September 03, 2005

Rehnquist Passes 

...HOLY JONES!!! The only reason I cranked up this evil soul-sucking machine to begin with was to go look at some football scores, desperate to escape for a moment - because I can, because I'm not there - the ongoing tragedy of the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. I wanted today to be a chance to step away from all the madness and incompentence that has been ripping my heart out of my chest, and what am I faced with: a breaking news banner at MSNBC informing me that Chief Justice William Rehnquist has died. I almost feel worst for the people in the hurricane-ravaged areas of the Gulf Coast; this is such a huge moment in the long-term political and social life of the nation that it will threaten to sweep all the pain and real suffering that these people are suffering and are going to be suffering clear off the front page. Hopefully that won't be the case, but the opportunity for Gee Dub to nominate a second member to the SCOTUS is so weighed down with political ramifications that Chief Justice Rehnquist's sudden unexpected passing threatens to dominate insider talking head discussions and drag our attention away from the plight of the Katrina survivors whether we want to talk about it or not. I pray for William Rehnquist's loved ones, that they may find comfort in this time of loss. I also pray for our country, asking that we can address both the brutal human disaster in Louisiana, Alabama, and Missippippi and have a human conversation about the sudden unexpected need to replace Chief Justice Rehnquist without having to fall into the grim dark political battles that such a nomination issue and the right's interest in pushing outside the mainstream candidates would normally generate but which a whole hell of a bunch of us aren't even in the mood for right now. With the war in Iraq and their fundament root incompetence displayed in the response to Hurricane Katrina, this isn't the best time for the folks in the Bush Administration to try to start a confirmation fight over some favorite-son/daughter right-wing candidate. Hopefully, for the sake of people and circumstances that still require our continued attention, they're smart enough to realize this...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:04 PM 0 comments

Friday, September 02, 2005

Playing Politics on Both Sides of the Line 

...it’s Friday. Patients, doctors, and nurses are still trapped at Charity and University hospitals in New Orleans, out of food, out of water, out of drugs and electricity and other resources, and patients are dying every hour. People are still trapped on rooftops and thousands of people at the New Orleans Convention Center and the Superdome have only just this morning seen a convoy of vehicles loaded with supplies drive past; not stopping to begin distribution, mind you, but just driving past. Because of the apocalyptic nature of the situation in NOLA, we’ve only caught glimpses of what’s happening elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, where - with far less fanfare and media scrutiny, thousands of people are grappling with lack of food and water and medical services and security and an almost total absence of help from outside disaster recovery services. In the meantime Michael Chertoff, the head of the Homeland Security Agency, which oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency, praises the performance of FEMA in responding to this emergency.

The disconnect, if we can legitimately call it that, is stunning - jaw-dropping, fall to the floor, strike-me-silly stunning. At the best, this sort of defense of the Federal response is a callous disregard for the actual trauma being suffered by the trapped rat victims stuck in that grim nightmare. At it’s worst, it’s just exactly the same sort of cheap political game-playing that Bushco and some Republicans have been cautioning us to avoid. And, at the bottom line, it’s the sort of bogus clap-trap that we have grown accustom to hearing from an administration that is less capable than any in recent memory of addressing any situation from any other than a political context.

(As an aside, MSNBC right now is reporting from a shelter in Biloxi that as of today, day 5, there has not been a single federal relief official sighted; what support they have received has been provided by the Red Cross and other private organizations who simply blew on through federal intransigence to do something on their own. The residents of this shelter are - to say the least - displeased to hear that the President is stylin’ around town when none of his employees have shown up.)

...but back to one of my points: It doesn’t matter, although it does serve partisan needs, who is sitting in the White House when this sort of ugly brutality goes down. But regardless of any other consideration, it is the Bush Administration that turned FEMA away from it’s original mission; it’s the Bush gang that slapped patronage appointees into important positions based on the sole qualification of their loyalty and financial support to the Party. Gee Dub is running around the Gulf Coast this morning finally saying that the response has been inadequate, but that’s a different song offered in a key we haven’t heard over the past couple of days, and it’s an off-handed quasi-mea culpa that is as cheaply partisan as anything that the most wild-eyed anti-Bush Democrat could ever hope to crank up. Most of all, it’s too late, Scooter, because we can watch the news and we know - whether or not we have experience in the mobilization of forces at a moments notice - that what the Bush administration offered up makes a sad mockery of the phrase “too little, too late”.

We are always told by disaster-preparedness experts that, in order to be adequately equipped to survive a natural disaster, we should have three days of supplies and medical supplies to hold us until help arrives. It appears that as long as the current crowd is in charge of such things, three days of supplies isn’t going to cut it...
Posted by: Jack K. / 11:43 AM 0 comments

Thursday, September 01, 2005

Dispatches From Hell 

...there have been two distinctly different stories playing out today. One has been the calm, serene, "everything's under control" fable that has been spinning itself out in Washington, D.C. The other has been reality. In DC, the so-called President and his so-called 'men' have been trying to spin a tale of a robust, aggressive rescue and recovery effort that was "ongoing" to deliver food, water, and other supplies to the desperate but grateful losers who all made that personal choice to not leave the path of Hurricane Katrina, especially those rapists and vandals and gang-bangers and looters in New Orleans. The one most troubling aspect about this heart-warming story of a caring government reaching out to its struggling citizens - no matter how morally repulsive those citizens might be - was that it didn't really have any particular relationship to the actual facts on the ground. Perhaps without even realizing it, the reporters from the broadcast and cable news networks and Associated Press and Reuters and others for this one moment in time cast off the fearful obsequiousness with which they have favored the Bush administration and actually got down to reporting just exactly what the hell was going on, documenting in words and pictures the utter brutality of circumstance in the disaster area - with an understandable focus on New Orleans, and by doing so ripped all the pretty cover stories away from the ugly reality that Bushco was so desperately trying to hide. "A day late and a dollar short" is just some cruelly simplistic characterization of the performance of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other components of Gee Dub's so-called Homeland Security Agency...

...what is it with Republicans? Why aren't they able to develop and constitute a federal emergency response agency that actually functions. GHW Bush can look back on his '92 loss and hopefully understand that his ignorance of that agency and the intentional population of it's control and leadership level with half-wit patronage-appointment hacks played some role in his defeat. It was with Clinton and his appointment of James Lee Witt, a homey who actually had real live transferable skills, that FEMA began to turn it's helpless hapless reputation around and began to actually function like a federal agency capable of providing oversight and management of any natural disaster. With the advent of not only another Republican, but one with little personal administrative experience (Texas not being the sort of state that produces a wealth of strong executives), FEMA was hammered after 9/11 with the double-whammy of losing its primary responsibility for managing the sorts of issues its name suggests and also of being flooded at both the strategic and tactical level with people whose only qualifications were an inexplicable loyalty to Gee Dub and a history of handsome campaign contributions. The last six periods of daylight along the Gulf Coast have demonstrated the level of abject ruin to which this once-promising agency has been reduced as a result of this particular bit of partisan hackery. The response of FEMA to the circumstances of Hurrican Katrina stands as some strange sort of dark monument to the perverse talent of Republican administrations to take something positive and - through some twisted alchemy only they understand - twist that positive thing around into a dismal failure that can threaten to drag uncountable numbers of otherwise innocent citizens down with it when it sinks, like those unfortunates too close to the hull of a great ship that finally sinks beneath the waves who are captured by the powerful suction that drags them into the depths along with that vast mass...

...during the White House press gaggle today, Gee Dub's personal meat puppet Scotty insisted that "This is not a time to get into any finger pointing or politics or anything of that nature". As is the case with virtually every other of his waking moments, McClellen is sadly, tragically, definitively wrong. However you want to play this, it is a perfect time to ask just exactly the sorts of questions that most wingers would consider "finger pointing" and "politics". This isn't some mundane intellectual exercise or some issue of larger global philosophical differences we are witnessing right now. What we are seeing is a total and abject failure to adequately plan for a preannounced disaster. We're not talking here about an earthquake, or a tsunami or some other even that sneaks up on the populace. This is about a storm that we knew a couple of days before landfall was going to be a bad thing. Even beyond that, this is an example of an absolute failure to have even preliminary plans in place for a region that had 48 hours warning that it was facing a huge and powerful cyclonic event. It never was a game or some exercise; it was always about a whole bunch of people who - in large part - did not inhabit circumstances that would allow them to flee an incredibly powerful hurricane and then had to face the loss of everything they knew and all of their belongings and homes and jobs in some designated "last chance" location without adequate food or water or sanitary services or medical help. The circumstances at the New Orleans Convention Center have been - quite simply - a blatant and unforgivable embarrassment that, in an otherwise perfect world, would lead to the orderly removal of whatever existing government that would allow such readily fixable circumstances to be fixed. Yeah, we can play politics with this, because Gee Dub and Karl Rove and all the rest of the Bush Monkeys have, over the last five years, granted us permission through their own actions to behave that way. Playing politics won't fix things, but there comes a time when a group of hacks who had no aspirations greater that hijacking the government for their own personal benefit need to have their faces rubbed in what they have created. They demonstrated to us with Gee Dub's Grand Iraqi Nation-Building Adventure that they had no gift for actual planning in that venue; now the victims of Hurricane Katrina - and all of us - are learning that this lack of compentency and capability isn't just confined to foreign policy. It's just simply the way they are...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:59 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Discovering Fellow Vandals 

...OK, so I'm an Oregonian. Not by birth, mind you, so there are plenty of folks - especially those with those little license plate-looking "Oregon Native Since" stickers with the birthdate filled in - who will dispute my fundamental right to even say such a thing, despite almost 20 years of residence, despite having sired two Oregon Natives (ok, so that wasn't a foremost goal in my mind at the time, but...you know...). Nope, if those xenophobic wackjobs actually force into "true confessions" time, I'm really an Idahonian by birth, a native of the Gem state, one of the least remarkable of the Gang of 50, ranking right up there with either Dakota for nonsignificance. It was a stark, simply shocking surprise, therefore, to be reading my latest alumni magazine issue and discover that W. Mark Grace, Mr. Deep Throat himself, is a fellow alumnus of the University of Idaho. Can't tell you how this escaped my attention before, but there it is, and now even I know it...

...every college graduate wants to be proud of his university's famous alumni. No...that, probably not exactly right. If you drank your way through four years at one of the big dogs, you probably take all of that for granted, but it still rings true for those of us who went to schools that may excel in certain subject fields in which most Americans don't place all that much value. So even though some of my professors were world-reknowned experts about cougars, grizzly bears, and fish farming, that never was really a particularly zippy entry point for a coctail party conversation. But now, however, I've discovered I'm in the big leagues. Deep Throat and I are co-alum's; both of us earned our Bachelor's Degrees hard up against the rolling wheat-covered hills of the Palouse in Northern Idaho. We're Vandals! Oh, yes, naysayers will probably try to break those strings of brotherly connection by making a futile attempt to point out that we crossed that Graduation Day stage forty-three years apart, and Mark Felt never availed himself of the opportunity to watch the Doobie Brothers live in concert in the Kibbie Dome (understandable, given that none of the designers of that domed stadium, nor most of the construction workers, nor any of the Doobie Brothers, had even been born on the day he graduated). I can easily ignore all that, however. We are both Vandals. We have, just in that, a bond that is virtually covalent and supremely resistant to the power of any particular catalyst. Like I said before, I have no idea why I missed this; perhaps the interest in the Watergate story itself was more important that any particulars about his pre-FBI biography. But everything is different now; everything has changed. Ol' Mark and I are brothers, fellow Vandals. He was one of my Watergate heroes already, but now I've really got his back...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:22 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Making It Up As You Go Along -The Nation-Building Version 

...even while the continuing gripping story of the building disaster along the Gulf Coast claws at our attention span, there are a few things out there that - no doubt gratefully for the Bush Monkeys - have slipped down below the fold or even off the front page, but that still need to be acknowledged. They may not matter as much right now from a personal standpoint as the dramatic stories of life and death coming from the landfall of Hurricane Katrina, but they will matter down the road. One of the items that is slipping by is the announcement by the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, that certain "edits" may still come to the newly crafted draft Iraqi Constitution in an effort to curry some favor with the Sunni Muslims in that country. His comments are instructive, marking as they do the second time in a week that the interim "Constitution" (wholly crafted by US policy wonks and shoved down the country's collective throat) that facts on the ground have differed in a material way from the carefully charted course that was supposed to lead to a happy, productive, representative democracy in the heart of civilization's birthplace...

...you would die of great old age waiting for such an acknowledgement, but it is high time for even the most rabid, slobbering Gee Dub supporter to face up to the issues going on in Iraq, get over the useless whining about how nobody wants to talk about all those new schools and waterlines and soccer fields, and come to terms with the raw fact that life basically sucks for anybody who put any money on an orderly progression down Bush's roadmap to Democracy in that country. The effort to produce a core governing document to guide Iraq to it's happy brave new democratic future has produced some sick, fevered, lumbering lame beast that bears no meaningful resemblance to the sleek thoroughbred that we were promised at the outset of this particular adventure. That nag is destined for the glue factory and every little tweak and recalibration and outright lie we cover as we fine-tune the Constitutional product in a vain effort to capture some Sunni support makes it clearer to the vast majority of Iraqi's that this effort to produce a Constitution isn't even remotely their process; it's all about us trying to force circumstances to mirror the happily ever after story that was the actual deep cover top secret reason that we are even in Iraq to begin with...

...it's been said enough by others that things are beginning to spin totally out of control, people who truly understand such things and are accorded the title of "expert", that it's almost useless to actually try to parrot their comments for any meaningful purpose. It's simply sufficient to say that the Bush Monkeys clearly understand how much trouble they are in that they should so blatantly throw away all the pretty plans they made and codified in various interim direction statements in this desperate effort to try to salvage something that looks like a ruling document supported by the broadest majority of the Iraqi population. In that effort they will throw away every seemingly iron-clad checkpoint in the time line and every stone-carved institutional requirement that was supposed to be a step on the journey, all in an effort to just get the damned thing done. Everything has gone wrong with this sad misadventure: no flower-strewn streets, no cheering masses, massively aggressive and deadly resistance, an infrastructure that was generally destroyed and has not been meaningfully rebuilt, the direct risk of our sacrifices in blood and treasure leading to a theocratic government with closer ties to our old buddy Iran than to us. With the entire Grand Nation-Building Adventure dissolving like cheap cardboard in a driving rainstorm all around them, it isn't surprising that the minions of this administration are cooking whatever books necessary to try to at least maintain a veneer that resembles the story that they keep trying to sell to increasingly uncertain Americans. This most recent example of "edits" is only the latest manifestation of their desperation; it's time for clear-thinking Bush apologists to join the rest of us out here in reality land and finally come to grips that this has long since ceased to be about Iraqi freedom but is now only about Bushie credibility and his personal hunger for favorable placement of his place in history...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:38 PM 0 comments

Monday, August 29, 2005

Monkey-Flinging at Oregon's Emission Standards 

...honestly, we really need to do something in Oregon to elevate the level of political discourse to something approximating, say, the sixth grade. The latest manifestation for this need is found no farther away than the inarticulate whining about Governor Kulongoski's line item veto by both representatives of the automotive lobby and the legislators who - in return for certain considerations - placed an item in an appropriation bill forbidding the Department of Environmental Quality from expending state funds in promulgating regulations or engaging in enforcement of new stricter vehicle emission standards congruent to those of California and Washington (Washington's being contingient on Oregon acceptance, of course). The lead lobbyist for the manufacturers had his own set of well-practiced histrionics to run before the media, covering every base from the extra cost of automobiles to the taxpayer cost to cover litigation (his) to the caution that access to biodiesel technology would be somehow mysteriously cut off to Oregonians because of the new rules. This gentleman would no doubt just simply shrivel up with hatred toward his life if he were to accidentally find himself trapped in a Volkswagon dealership without hope of rescue, because his mind would be tortured to the point of neural fusion at the sight of all those fuel mileage stickers plastered tauntingly on the sides of all those Godless Nazi German turbodiesel hatchbacks, wagons, and sedans suggesting fuel savings well beyond anything the "Big Three" can even dream of in their compact and midsized fleets...

...he's not the big problem for political discourse, though. That perverse award goes to Republican Susan Morgan of Roseburg, who may well have some passing acquaintence with the Automotive Industry lobbyist:

"Now the governor does have line item veto authority, and he does have the authority to veto entire bills. Whether he has the authority to veto clauses in bills is the question."

...sorry. I know I should have warned you to be sitting down for that one. My bad. If you can get beyond that ugly little surprise, you need to come to grips with the fact that somebody is apparently trusting Ms. Morgan to make reasonable, well-thought-out decisions on behalf of Oregonians. That is, after all, widely considered to be the reason that we have elected legislators instead of big ugly wild state-wide town meetings with thousands of individual citizens clamoring for attention at the same time. This sort of intellectual power, however, as it is applied to the whole concept of the line item veto, doesn't argue well for the representative democracy approach over the state-wide town hall meeting. It would be almost mean to bother pointing this out, but I don't have time to run for or serve in the state legislature so I'll have to do it anyway: Vetoing individual clauses in appropriation bills is what the friggin' line item VETO is all ABOUT!!

...how the actual legal rangling over whether Oregon can do what the Governor has said it will do is a separate issue. Big Auto will fight this to the best of their ability because 1) they understand how their offerings play into the desires of fundamental human behavior, and 2) they are basically lazy and profit-motivated, looking more to any opportunity to go for bigger and more consumptive and shinyier rather than responding to the pressing needs of the driving public for vehicles that they can actually afford to drive on that big American adventure to explore new places and find themselves and...well...whatever. But we really do need to get smarter monkeys in the legislature, people who actually understand the constitutionally mandated operations of state government and who understand some of the simple civic facts that they insist on their children learning, such as the way the line-item veto works....
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:55 PM 0 comments

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