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

Saturday, September 10, 2005

Sleeze In a Time of Need 

...Americans have been schooled by the professional politicians who run things. We've learned through hard experience that our concerns about the great issues of the day will be subsumed to their need to engage in winner-take-all political battles and - having grown accustomed to the uncomfortable fact that their own little petty political battles usually end up trumping the ideal of doing what is best for the people - we have reduced ourselves to hoping that they would at least do the right thing when big harsh deals were going down and bone was showing through the skin. This current administration, however, has driven us away from some solid ground offering that particular hope for protection that it's beginning to look like there isn't a prayer of getting our hands on a map that will lead us back to a place that has some semblance of protection or respite. From what should have been the embarrassing support of Enron's criminal assault on electricity rate-payers on the West Coast in 2001 through a host of legislation throwing our lives open to corporate predation to the remarkably cozy no-bid contracts for providing troop support and infrastructure reconstruction in Iraq, there has been a shamelessness that almost brazenly challenges us to find comparisions in all of American history. It's almost a comforting thing, therefore, that we are seeing the same sort of insider favoritism displaying itself in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The Bush Monkeys haven't up to this point displayed any particular interest beyond the enrichment of themselves and their kind, and their reponse to this particular dire human tragedy shows that nothing in particular has changed...

...speaking from an experienced, knoweledgeable standpoint when it comes to contracts, there are sufficiently serious performance questions by both Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR in the execution of their sweetheart-deal contracts in Iraq to suggest that they should on principle be barred from even competing for further federal contract work in the Katrina recovery. That doesn't appear to be the reality that we are living, however. In a further example of the Bush Administration concept that there isn't any disaster or dire American need so dramatic that good friends can't make a couple of bucks off of it, the inside track for contracts dealing with the recovery from the massive damage from Katrina is being offered primarily to the Friends of Bush and Cheney, the very same folks who have made a few billion dollars simply disappear without a trace and managed to leave numerous troops stuck in the Iraqi desert without the kind of support that we were supposedly paying for...

...there is a simple, fundamental sleasiness about this adminstration that struggles to find a rival comparison. There may have been other administrations that have struggled with incompentency; there may be other presidencies that had to address issues from Teapot Dome to Watergate; but there has never been an administration so bold in its rewarding of political buddies with the largess of federal contracts as this particular group. There just simply isn't a war or a disaster so pressing or compelling that these fixers and handlers can't see their way clear to shove their own good buddies into the cash stream, regardless of the compentency of those beneficiaries in performing the task at hand. The whole world and all of its issues and situations is simply a cash cow for Bushco, and actual performance in exchange for that reward isn't a part of the deal. Now they've sunk their meathooks into the Katrina recovery and we can all rest assured that any actual efforts to assist American citizens from the disaster that they have just endured will become secondary to the profit-making of Gee Dub's closest corporate friends. When you think about the recovery of the Gulf Coast from Hurricane Katrina, think about all of our successes in Iraq...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:40 PM 0 comments

Simple Vicious Crimes 

...I'm a cynical guy, I'll admit. It's not always a fun way to live, robbing one as it does of pure enjoyment of some of life's simple treasures and pleasures, but over the last half century I've certainly earned the right to be cynical; curmudgeon is just around the corner, I suspect. A degree of cynicism is not a bad thing, I submit; I would get far fewer e-mails telling me that I have problems with my Pay-Pay account (which I don't have) or my EBay account is about to expire (ditto) if there was a little more cynicism in the world. I believe that a person should have some degree of exposure to cynicism-building episodes before embarking down the path to adulthood. On the other hand, this is not what I'm talking about...

...there's crime, and then there's crime; knocking over the liquor store is one thing, but taking off with hundreds of formal dresses intended for use by Central Oregon girls who can't afford to buy them is the sort of thing that occupies a special little place in the annals of crime. This is like robbing the Salvation Army; it's stealing the Red Cross Bloodmobile or carjacking the dude who has the iced kidneys in the back seat headed for the transplant patient at the cross-town hospital. There's an almost mindless savagery that goes beyond the ability of mere cynicism to explain or cope with, a crime seemingly more intended to punish and brutalize rather than to acheive some personal gain, given that there aren't enough outlets in all of Oregon to fence all these gowns and shoes and purses. There needs to be a special category of punishment for crimes like this committed against a young woman who is just trying to engage in an act of simple decency and charity in this all-too-frequently ugly world that we've allowed to be constructed around us. Sadly, I'm informed that chopping these swine up and feeding them to the residents of the hog barn at the Deschutes County Fair would stand a fair chance of being construed as "cruel and unusual". Shucks...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:39 PM 0 comments

Thursday, September 08, 2005

Emergency? What Emergency? 

…Jillian, otherwise known as the lovely and talented Cookie Jill, a gifted and perceptive member of that powerful conglomerate skippyco (formerly known as skippy the bush kangaroo) pointed out in comments in my previous post this amazing item from Bryan over at Why Now?, and it’s just simply stunning. Now, if I was a better person, I would struggle gamely to be generous of spirit about this. Lord knows I stand as a living monument to the principle that mistakes can be made, although I don’t recall any quite so spectacular as this. And, again were I a better, more generous person, it would be important to note that this Declaration and this other declaration are, in some respects, two different animals, with the first (the emergency) authorizing FEMA to engage in emergency disaster recovery activities and the second (the disaster) actually authorizing direct financial assistance to individuals and businesses to aid in their personal efforts to recover from the effects of the event. But it’s hard to be generous; it’s hard work. The governor’s request for federal emergency declaration makes clear that it includes both the southeastern parishes (including New Orleans), as well as those others absorbing the impact of arriving evacuees. Why the federal declaration fails to include the likely impact area, seemingly ignoring a portion of the Governor’s request, is hard to fathom, but one can almost sense that somewhere down the road we’ll hear about this again, as the Bush Monkeys explain that the federal delay in response was because of the affected parishes not being listed, which was the Governor’s fault because she didn’t assign someone with the task of proofreading the federal declaration for grammar, punctuation, and inclusiveness….

…the roots to the reason so many of us are so amped up about this whole Katrina mess can be found in the third paragraph of the federal Declaration of Emergency:

Specifically, FEMA is authorized to identify, mobilize, and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency. Debris removal and emergency protective measures, including direct Federal assistance, will be provided at 75 percent Federal funding.

...this is the place where just about everybody except those who have a direct stake in Gee Dub’s presidency is pretty certain FEMA was a direct, unmitigated, and extremely deadly failure. Nobody needed to wait for requests or permission from the state to begin moving on rescue and recovery operations as of Saturday, Aug. 27, unless, of course, one wanted to be muleish about the exact geographic distribution of the emergency area described in the first federal declaration. That would be negligence, bone-deep “show-‘em-the-door” stupid negligence if it was the result of just plain sloppy work and criminal negligence if there was anything more to it than that. This is why it’s vitally important to keep the larger issue alive and make people play straight with it. Gee Dub’s personal investigation, which could be held in an abandoned phone booth for all the value it will generate, and the Republican-led joint House-Senate inquiry have the foul stench of whitewash about them, and the mainstream media seems to be threatening to slip back into its old tired habit of printing any damned thing these clowns say without even exploring the most base degree of due diligence in seeing whether their statements are true. An initial federal emergency declaration that omitted the area most likely to be hit by the hurricane, despite the specific request for such a declaration, is possibly an interesting glimpse into the fundamental incompentence of Bushco when it comes to anything more complicated than destroying political opponents (in fact, had they responded with the same alacrity to the disaster itself as they did to the criticism, a lot of people would have been far better off). But that's not the core point: They weren't ready, they weren't prepared, and they didn't seem in all that big a hurry to "provide...equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency". And people died...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:58 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

Fundamental FEMA Failings 

…desperate as they are to spin this whole Katrina mess into some basic failing on the part of one Democratic Governor and one Democratic Mayor, the beleaguered Bush Monkeys cannot be happy over this information. It doesn’t even take much counterspin to raise some powerful questions about the remarkably casual response to a building disaster, and it doesn’t require any sort of expertise in mobilizing emergency forces to formulate those questions most damaging to the Bush Administration management of its federal emergency management responsibility…

…doesn’t even the agency spokesman have it together? The suggestion that the delay was for required training sounds like either somebody doesn’t know what he’s talking about or somebody is trying to drag a red herring across our path. The only alternative is a truly disturbing one to consider: FEMA isn’t fully capable of responding to any disaster emergency in less than 48 hours. That’s a disquieting prospect to ponder if you choose to imagine a radiological weapon detonated in downtown Dallas rather than a major hurricane on the Gulf Coast…

…it’s unfortunate that there is so much focus on the disaster and disastrous response in New Orleans. Other communities along the Gulf Coast in Alabama and Mississippi had their own problems with the slow response to the destruction Katrina visited on them. Unfortunately, a combination of substantially reduced news coverage because of the gripping drama in New Orleans and the hushed silence of a couple of Republican Governors who would drink their own bathwater before they would openly criticize their President conspired to render any delays in support reaching these communities virtually invisible. The bottom line for the entire process of responding to Katrina is that FEMA blew it, failing to even have the critical logistical forces to handle the disaster response in the area until Wednesday afternoon, even though they knew on Saturday that a major hurricane was going to make landfall on the Gulf Coast and even though disaster declarations had been issued at both the state and federal level (despite desperate efforts at revisionism we now see) by Sunday. It seems as though everybody had a sense of urgency about the looming disaster except the agency that is supposed to step in and manage its aftermath. In fairness, mayors and governors have failings and mistakes and shortcomings of their own to answer for, and voters will have ample opportunity to address those issues. We don’t get to vote on Gee Dub anymore, however, and nobody ever did have a say about the current leadership at FEMA. It wasn’t up to the task this time, obviously, and if something doesn’t change, it won’t be ready for prime time for the next big disaster, either…
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:25 AM 0 comments

Monday, September 05, 2005

Chief Justice Roberts? 

...oh, man, I coulda won some money on this one. Looking into all the various history threads, renominating John Roberts as the Chief Justice of the United States seemed like the logical route for Gee Dub to take. While there was once a time where one might have expected, under these particular circumstance for the Court, that he would jump at the chance to make a Scalia nomination to be Chief Justice and still have two associate positions to mess with, that time has passed, at least for the moment. Gee Dub isn't working from what one would consider to be a position of strength; his job approval numbers hover just above Nixon's at resignation, circumstances in Iraq are conjuring grim comparisons to Vietnam, gas prices are further hammering citizens' perceptions about the wrong track we seem, to be barreling down, and only passing days will reveal whether all this presidential runnin-around down in the Gulf Coast will help Bushco turn the corner on the perception that Bush and his people screwed up the Katrina emergency response by the numbers (early snap polls suggest that he is just barely holding even on that score). In these circumstances, with even elected Republicans running around speaking lines off of some script that the Bush administration certainly didn't authorize, sticking to two confirmation fights instead of three would seem to be the better part of discretion...

...it doesn't take many emotionally overwrought Parish Presidents to trump all the too-late huggy-feel-good trips that Gee Dub takes through the path of Katrina's devastation attempting to capture that infamous refrain of his dad, "Message; I care." All the hopes of his right-wing core supporters for a reshaped Supreme Court that would bring all of their sternly conservative dreams to fruition could come crashing down if public opinion of their boy sinks much further because of his failure to protect Americans from the human disaster unfolding in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. There are Republican Senators who almost embarrassingly hunger for the Presidency, and the suggestion that too-strong support for SCOTUS nominees that are too far outside the mainstream - the purple part of America, as it were - is to be striding the deck of a sinking ship might make them far bigger problems for the Bush Monkeys that all the Democrats or every TV or radio spot liberal advocacy groups could fling a any given nominee. In this light, the redirection of Roberts nomination makes perfect sense. There is already fairly strong Republican support in the Senate for Roberts, and there will only be one other nomination in which it would be necessary to invest that dwindling political capital that Gee Dub was so openly claiming he had and was going to spend this term...

...I was willing to bet yesterday that Roberts was going to be renominated as Chief Justice in order to get one issue off of the administration's plate. Too bad, really; I could have used the gas money...
Posted by: Jack K. / 10:47 AM 0 comments

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