Author: rakemag

Brown: Horseshit in New Orleans

Would Bush have reacted to the disaster in New Orleans faster if someone had told him Terry Schiavo was there?

Have you considered that the New Orleans disaster may be politically good for Bush? Besides killing off thousands of Democrats, it took the news eye off a few embarrassments undeniably of Bush’s own making. Do you remember a certain little war, in which a thousand people were trampled or drowned last week while Katrina was lashing the Gulf Coast? Do you remember that Karl Rove revealed the identity of a CIA agent?

How about that empathy for the Gulf Coast victims, though? As Bush was quick to point out, Trent Lott’s mansion was destroyed, and Bush himself used to party in The Big Easy. I think he’d look good staggering down Bourbon Street, hurricane (the drink) in hand right about now.

And then there’s the quick appointment of John Roberts to Rehnquist’s spot. Distracted us for an hour or so. How come he can react to Rehnquist’s death in one day but his people don’t even know that there are people dying in the New Orleans Convention Center? Turn on CNN instead of Fox at least once in a while, guys.

Then there’s Mike Brown, head of FEMA, who was fired from his last job overseeing of horse shows. Let’s see, this guy was incompetent at cleaning up horse shit, so let’s give him a job running an agency which has the responsibility of saving thousands of human lives. Now that’s Bush leadership.

Contrast this from FEMA’s own history: “In 1993, President Clinton nominated James L. Witt as the new FEMA director. Witt became the first agency director with experience as a state emergency manager. He initiated sweeping reforms that streamlined disaster relief and recovery operations, insisted on a new emphasis regarding preparedness and mitigation, and focused agency employees on customer service. The end of the Cold War also allowed Witt to redirect more of FEMA’s limited resources from civil defense into disaster relief, recovery and mitigation programs.”

Katrina started the party a little early this year

Random musings today.

There’s a photo on the front page of the NY Times this morning of a woman pouring water into a dish for her dog as a body floats in the water not twenty feet away.

The damage to our country from this storm, and to our arrogant assertion that we have homeland security, far ourweighs the likely damage that could be caused by anything short of a nuclear bomb in a major city.

How can we transport an army to Iraq, feed and water them, and yet we can’t do the same for the trapped residents of New Orleans? Should we hire Halliburton to do it? Should we hire mercenaries, like we do in Iraq, to guard the Halliburton people?

Imagine a storm the size of Katrina hitting Manhattan. Imagine a 20-foot storm surge taking out Wall Street. Imagine the looting there with no National Guard…because they’re in Iraq.

Did you know that Italy is spending over $20 billion to protect Venice from the encroaching sea, yet we, a far bigger and wealthier nation, cut spending to a mere $20 million to protect New Orleans?

There’s a great story in Texas Monthly this month, written a month before Katrina, about the threat to the Gulf Coast from the sea. It seems, among other things, pumping huge amounts of water and oil out of the ground nearby is causing the coastal areas to sink. Go figure.

Then, of course, there’s the whole global warming thing, that everyone in the world, (except the intelligent design touting idiot in the White House and his buddies in the oil biddness) know is causing the seas to rise around the world.

We notice Bush is touring Mississippi today, but avoiding New Orleans. He’s a coward and a liar. Always has been. Always will be.

There are a few gaps in our health coverage.

I went to the dentist this morning for my semi-annual cleaning and check up. Sometimes I go 8 or 9 months between, mostly because of my schedule and his. But I always go eventually, and sooner, rather than later. I’m glad I can afford it.

I had a quack dentist when I was a kid, and he made things a lot worse for me in my middle age. Luckily, the dentist I have now is excellent, although not cheap. I estimate it’s cost me about $20,000 over the last 15 years to repair the damage wrought by too many sweet cereals and that earlier charlatan.

Just last night I was reading the latest New Yorker. Among the dearth of Target ads this week was a story by Malcolm Gladwell, one of my favorite New Yorker writers, and the author of The Tipping Point and this year’s Blink.

The story starts with a clinical, albeit horrid, description of the beginning of tooth decay, they segues into a description of our health care system in the United States. Gladwell does a particularly good job of scrubbing away the faulty logic that those who would keep things as they are use to maintain their advantage.

Read it. Then floss. Then think about the sort of country we live in where the executive of the local health care giant makes over $100 million per year, and over 40 million Americans have no chance to protect themselves from physical and financial ruin under our current system.

The brush and floss again to see if you can get the taste out of your mouth.

THIS is football

Everyone who’s got a brain, and there are damn few of us left, is not even that upset about Pat Robertson’s calling for the assasination of Hugo Chavez. That sort of boorish behavior by Americans is pretty old news, after all.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, Robertson and his ilk are all for the revival of that odd mixture of overt theocrats and covert murderers who once dominated Latin American politics.

Yup, let’s overthrow the legally elected government of Venezuela. After all, it worked so well for us in Chile. (Remember Pinochet? He’s the one now being tried for crimes against humanity.) And how about El Salvador, where our boys murdered Bishop Romero while he was saying mass, raped and murdered a van full of American nuns, and dragged 12 Jesuit priests out of their beds one morning and shot them all in the head? All that in the name of putting a stop to godless Communism (today, read godless Islam.)

Of course, most of the victims were Catholic Christians, instead of the good ol’ American Evangelical Christians, so they probably had done something to deserve it, such as speaking out against the army’s murdering of the campesinos…or, even teaching them to read.

But, I didn’t want to belabor this. What I did want to belabor is something I read about in the Sunday Strib sports section. This was a story about the assault of some American pro football players who pissed off the wrong Germans.

It seems a bunch of American football players went into a Dusseldorf club, didn’t receive the adulation they are used to getting on First Avenue, spit on a bouncer, and left. To nobody’s surprise, except the Americans’, the Germans didn’t like this much and responded with clubs and various other weapons.

Duh.

I’ve spent some time in Germany. I’ve lived in Italy and Spain. And, if there’s one thing I’ve learned for certain, it’s that 98 percent of all American tourists walk around these countries as if they owned them. Most make no attempt to speak the language at all, not even to the point of learning that beer is cerveza and wine is vino. Or that please is por favor, per favore, or bitte. Not that hard.

But, we’re used to being the big dogs with the dollars. It hasn’t sunk in yet that the Euro is galloping ahead of the dollar in value every day. This, thanks to our government’s assumption that we’re too big to actually pay our own way in the world and that everyone else will gladly lend us the money we’re too decadent to tax ourselves to pay for the Iraq war. When we act like the big shots we think we are, the home towners somehow resent that Americans don’t even seem to acknowledge that they aren’t in Kansas any more.

In contrast, I’ve never been treated rudely in a foreign country. (Well, almost never. I have been to Paris.) But I can order beer in five languages and can carry on a conversation about football (the kind you actually play with your feet) in two and a half.

Strangely, people seem to respond nicely when you are making an effort to understand them, instead of getting pissed off when they don’t undertand you.

When you call yourself football players, or call for killing their president, they somehow find that rude. Go figure.