HumidCity

Via The Onion:

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

Why do all you lefty radical types hate President Bush so much? Follow the links for documentation.

Well, first of all because he spent the day talking immigration with Chertohoff (White House) and eating birthday cake with McCain (White House again)after the National Hurricane Center’s Director told him of the magnitude of the disaster in New Orleans (AP).

Who needs to even bring up the obscenity that is the Iraq situation when we have the devastated remnants of our homes as illustration. Governor Blanco requested aid, Bush didn’t bother (Newsweek). He was too busy talking Medicaire (White House).

It goes on and on. I guess to many people it does not matter becase it did not happen to anyone but those “deadbeats from New Orleans.” To others it has just faded from memory along with all the other soundbites. Well let me tell you, it does not fade out for us. We live with it every day, trying to put lives together in the face of the three worst impediments known to modern man: the local, state, and federal governments. The unholy trinity of Bush, Blanco and Nagin have done their best to finish us off with their dual pronged plan of incompetence and corruption, but we are still here.

Why do I say that he should never be allowed within our city limits again? Go read a nice, well documented timeline of the times around the Federal Flood, some excellent work by ThinkProgress. This isn’t imagination, its Politicians Gone Wild. How dare anyone tell me not be angry at the total abandonment of the social contract by those in power.

Lets just put it simply: the man is a criminal and I do NOT welcome him in my city. I am far from alone in this. Take your stink of corruption (Enron anyone?) and dereliction of duty (Gitmo, perhaps?) and leave us alone. You have done enough. FYYFF!

so according to bush and the gang, the california wildfire will not be the same as the katrina debacle (insert: “bush likes white people, he really really like rich white people”)… implied are all sorts of slams, glares, and nannie nannie boo boos at blanco et alia.

BUT i’m not going to go there… i have one bigger and better in a Malthusian (oh crap, you gotta be joking kinda way)… according to MSNBC the mosul dam is on the brink of failing… and with it a trillion gallons of water would flood Iraq… california 8 people, new orleans 1800, iraq (get this) 1/2 million… i’m sure this dam was fine until we started blowing up our enemies in order to liberate the oppressed… well b4 we can give you democracy, do you mind taking a bit of a bath? estimates….mosul 65 feet of water, baghdad 15 feet

and guess who’s in charge of making sure its fixed.., the army corps of engineers? neither army nor apparently engineers… and we know how much they know about building or rebuilding dams and levees in the sand…

so do you think the rest of the mideast would be that forgiving if bush and the gang did to iraq what they let happen to new orleans?

BLOG THIS!

ph fred (phfred@notthat.com)

Veto. Fourth one to be exact. This time applied to the SCHIP expansion passed in both the House and the Senate. Sources everywhere are critical of this decision, and you would be hard pressed to find many truly joyful reactions to it. Or would you? The funding is supposed to come from increased taxes on tobacco…
Let’s take a little trip to the Dominican Republic, a place where they heard the news and (in the fashion of Monty Python) there was “much rejoicing.” Check out this little tidbit straight from Dominican Today:

Tobacco farmers of the country’s north region (Cibao) yesterday heard with joy the news that U.S. president George Bush’s vetoed a bill passed by Congress, which threatened to decimate the Dominican and Central American tobacco industries.

The president of the Cibao Tobacco Harvesters Federation, Jorge Mercado, said the U.S. president’s decision would reactivate the north zone’s tobacco industry, mainly in Santiago province. “The veto of the law represents hope and relief for more than 300 harvesters in this region who have lived off the production of tobacco for centuries.”

Agriculture minister Salvador Jimenez, quoted by the newspaper Diario Libre, said if the bill had been signed into law the country would’ve lost some 54,000 jobs.

The legislation also threatened to shutter 60 cigarette factories in the municipalities Tamboril, Villa Gonzalez and Navarrete, and cause more than US$100 million annually in lost income for the country.

Interesting. It makes me much happier to be hitting the end of my first month without cigarettes…

-Loki

While I am no fan of Mr. “Chocolate City,” Nagin he is certainly given a run for his money by our C Student in Chief.

Austrian Troops? OPEC? Other exit?

I say we get them a one way ticket somewhere and let them practice their communication skills on each other where none of us have to put up with the fallout.

image courtesy of Greg Peters

You know, as I have railed on against the blatantly unAmerican way in which the people of New Orleans have been treated since the Federal Flood many have called me a radical. My well known distaste and criticism of Bush has also been consistently dismissed by many. Every once in awhile someone will approach me and say, “you know, you were right about ____” but not enough to really make a difference.

Well, ladies and gentlemen (and everybody else), this Special Report by Naomi Wolf in the UK Guardian spells out succinctly why I have been trepidatious about the the direction our society is taking. I would like to invite your comments and hope that at least some of the people who disagree with me read it as well. One of our biggest issues today is that no one listens anymore, at least not to those who disagree with them. I submit that if you do not have regular dialogue with those who differ you doom yourself to self congratulatory mental stagnation. (You know, the dialectic: Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis)

So, without further ado I will break one of my own rules and post this report in its entirety. Why? Because this is IMPORTANT! (hat tip to GentillyGirl) Here you go:
Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.

Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens’ ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don’t learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of “homeland” security - remember who else was keen on the word “homeland” - didn’t raise the alarm bells it might have.

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a “war footing”; we were in a “global war” against a “global caliphate” intending to “wipe out civilisation”. There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. “This time,” Fein says, “there will be no defined end.”

Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler’s invocation of a communist threat to the nation’s security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the “global conspiracy of world Jewry”, on myth.

It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

2. Create a gulag

Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal “outer space”) - where torture takes place.

At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, “enemies of the people” or “criminals”. Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.

This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.

With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA “black site” prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.

Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can’t investigate adequately.

But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don’t generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: “First they came for the Jews.” Most Americans don’t understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People’s Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.

3. Develop a thug caste

When leaders who seek what I call a “fascist shift” want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.

The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America’s security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution

Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration’s endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.

Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for “public order” on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station “to restore public order”.

4. Set up an internal surveillance system

In Mussolini’s Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.

In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens’ phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.

In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about “national security”; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.

5. Harass citizens’ groups

The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens’ groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.

Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 “suspicious incidents”. The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track “potential terrorist threats” as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as “terrorism”. So the definition of “terrorist” slowly expands to include the opposition.

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release

This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a “list” of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.

In 2004, America’s Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela’s government - after Venezuela’s president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.

Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, “because I was on the Terrorist Watch list”.

“Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that,” asked the airline employee.

“I explained,” said Murphy, “that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution.”

“That’ll do it,” the man said.

Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of “enemy of the people” tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.

James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.

Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.

It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can’t get off.

7. Target key individuals

Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don’t toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile’s Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.

Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not “coordinate”, in Goebbels’ term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically “coordinate” early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.

Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.

Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that “waterboarding is torture” was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.

Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were “coordinated” too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.

8. Control the press

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened “critical infrastructure” when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.

Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.

Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC’s Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN’s Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.

Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.

You won’t have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it’s not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can’t tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

9. Dissent equals treason

Cast dissent as “treason” and criticism as “espionage’. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of “spy” and “traitor”. When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times’ leaking of classified information “disgraceful”, while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the “treason” drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.

Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and “beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death”, according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.

In Stalin’s Soviet Union, dissidents were “enemies of the people”. National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy “November traitors”.

And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an “enemy combatant”. He has the power to define what “enemy combatant” means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define “enemy combatant” any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.

Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin’s gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo’s, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)

We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. “Enemy combatant” is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. “We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we’re going to hold you,” says a spokeswoman of the CCR.

Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn’t real dissent. There just isn’t freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

10. Suspend the rule of law

The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan’s militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state’s governor and its citizens.

Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears’s meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole’s baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: “A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night … Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any ‘other condition’.”

Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch’s soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias’ power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.

Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini’s march on Rome or Hitler’s roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.

Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: “dogs go on with their doggy life … How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster.”

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are “at war” in a “long war” - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the “what ifs”.

What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.

What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.

Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody’s help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.

We need to look at history and face the “what ifs”. For if we keep going down this road, the “end of America” could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands … is the definition of tyranny,” wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.

“To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.” - Theodore Roosevelt

“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly:–’Tis dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to set a proper price upon it’s goods; and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as Freedom should be highly rated.” - Thomas Paine The American Crisis

“The clergy…believe that any portion of power confided to me [as President] will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. But this is all they have to fear from me: and enough, too, in their opinion.” - Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, 1800

More dirt digging on MWI, the Bush Cronies who gave us the failing pumps, soon!

I’ve got very good relations with President Mubarak and Crown Prince Abdallah and the King of Jordan, Gulf Coast countries.
–George W. Bush Washington, DC 5/29/03

Well, I went to the protest against Bush along with Jac and D from Defend New Orleans. We met up with still and video cameras at an intersection just off Napoleon and Freret. Dissenters, as is usual Bush policy, were kept a good two blocks from the site.

Now there is a good side and a bad side to the efforts this afternoon. The bad side was the protest itself. I have seen high school classrooms with more people in them. There were a few people from the neighborhood, a smattering of random folks, a handful of media, several Common Ground kids, and a boatload of cops. The rain couldn’t decide if it wanted to attend or not.

There was a megaphone going around (yes, adrastos, I took a turn, you missed out), and there were a couple of old ladies going to town with it. Unfortunately a number of the kids got ahold of it as well. For the most part they engaged in taunting the police and saying “fuck,” repeatedly at top volume and in varying permutations. All in all not a lot was accomplished there, which is hardly unusual for protests.The good side of all this is the incredible spreading of the meme. The prior posting was picked up, thanks to Scout Prime at First Draft, by an incredible array of sites throughout the blogosphere. I can hear search engines ratcheting upwards even now. “New Orleans Rebukes George Bush,” is a meme that is spreading far and wide. I am quite happy with that.

I am also happy to see the amount of discussion this has generated. From Schroeder’s eloquent and constructive approach to some of the pro-Bush comments suddenly turning up in the original post’s comments (quite a dialogue going on there still, feel free to join in). I know to many this is a moot argument, polarizing at best and violently stupid at worst. I just cannot let the issue go.

There are 122 levees scattered across the US that the Corps has declared unsafe. After the past eighteen months I have come to feel that no one should have to go through what we have. No one. I don’t care if it is some bonehead who rails against us and is oblivious to the facts or not. The only way to prevent this is bring accountability back into the equation at the governmental level. The only way to do that is propogation of information and opening of dialogue.

Disclosure: I have run across a few that belive me to be the author. I am not. As far as I know I posted it first but it was a press release that was circulating through many local e-lists. Author unknown. Hat tip to Editor B. for sending it my way.

EDIT: pictures are here

JOIN THE KATRINA SURVIVORS’ REBUKE OF PRESIDENT BUSH
2:00 PM THURSDAY MARCH 1
SAMUEL GREEN SCHOOL
2319 VALENCE ST.
(Near Freret and Napoleon)
NEW ORLEANS

New Orleans Needs Federal Aid, Not Presidential Photo-Ops.
Mr. President: Katrina Survivors Do Not Welcome You, We Rebuke You!

We live in a devastated city and you are a big part of the reason why it sill sits in ruins. Your administration has abandoned our children by savaging their public schools. Your administration has tortured our working class people by refusing to reopen the city’s public housing developments. And your administration is fully complicit in placing our uninsured in harms way by ruthlessly pursuing the privatization of local public healthcare in the aftermath of Katrina. And finally, your administration is guilty of sending our sons and daughters off to war for oil and empire just when we need them most to help us rebuild our community.

Mr. President, we, Katrina Survivors all, do not welcome you to our city, we rebuke you!

Sponsored by Survivors Village, United Front For Affordable Housing.
(504) 587-0080

EDIT: From the comments- I’ve heard that the area around the school is blocked off so people are meeting at LaSalle and Napolean at 2:00, expecting Shrub around 3:00.

hat tip to Brian

Grass roots activists are going to meet 7pm Wednesday at the PHRF Headquarter (1418 N. Claiborne) to orchestrate a “people’s rebuke” when President Bush visits New Orleans on Thursday. Surely, no president in the history of the U.S. is more deserving of a Bronx cheer from the people of this area than the current commander and thief.  To let Bush visit New Orleans yet again without so much as a peep of organized opposition from the local progressive community would constitute yet another slap in the face of  Katrina
survivors.

Help build the message from below that Bush needs to hear when he visits New Orleans on Thursday: GO TO HELL!

The time and place of  the protest action regarding Bush’s visit will be determined at the Wednesday meeting. The meeting is free and open to all.  Sponsors of  the meeting include the United Front For Affordable Housing, Survivors Village and C3/Hands Off Iberville.  For additional information call (504) 587-0080.  Please forward this message ASAP.

[Via Mike Howell of C3]

George Bush often touts the idea of America as a Christian nation. He stresses his faith and support of faith based socail change. Maybe he should actually pay attention to what his fellow christians have to say.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The president and co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference called on President Bush to get U.S. troops out of Iraq and U.S. money into New Orleans to repair damages from Hurricane Katrina.

“We find funds for Halliburton to make millions fixing Baghdad. But we have not yet found the resources to fix the levees on the Mississippi River,” Joseph E. Lowery said Wednesday at a New Orleans news conference.

Promises were made on Jackson Square. The typical unfulfilled promises of a politician. Unfortunately these promises mean our survival, and were an order of magnitude beyond your usual election season offerings.

My advise to “The Decider,” is to adhere to the tenets of the faith he supposedly espouses. To remember the precepts of Yeshua Ben Joseph and treat others with love and care, rather than sowing dischord and watering it with blood to yeild the bitter crop we in New Orleans are harvesting.

Bush :: New Orleans
Nero :: Rome

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Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away

We better stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Stop, now, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going dow
Stop, children, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down

-Buffalo Springfield

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watch this video by ScoutPrime over at First Draft. Go ahead, you can do it…

I have been trying to come up with words to express my feelings about the Chimp In Chief and his notable non-mention of New Orleans during the State of the Union Address the other night. I cannot. It is horrific that the home of veterans like my father, who spent two years in a Viet Namese prison camp, and my grandfather, who served during WWII, is found not worthy of mention.

Of course it was government (in)actions that led us to this sorry state of affairs. We have been told for decades that the levees would protect us. The Federal levees. The ones that were built in a knowingly substandard fashion by a Federal organization, the Army Corps of Engineers. People ask why we live below sea level. The best answer I have heard was someone comparing the levees to a passenger plane. We trust that it is safe because we have been told so by people whose job is to know and certify such things. If the Corps made a plane the wings would fall off shortly after takeoff, the parachutes and oxygen masks would not work, and the surviving family would be barred from legal recourse.

Yeah, no surprise we did not get a mention. Now many have weighed in on the subject, but I think the best take on it so far is this little gem from the HUffington Post. Enjoy.

The Blog | Robert J. Elisberg: It’s Official: New Orleans Declared No Longer Part of the U.S. | The Huffington Post
Oh, sure, when he gave his State of the Union Address a mere five months later, he only devoted 85 words to the disaster. But that’s 47 more than Captain Kirk devoted to “Space, the final frontier…” And that was about exploring new worlds and new civilizations. So, 85 words for a mere hurricane is pretty darn good.

Plus, it’s 85 more words than he devoted to New Orleans on Tuesday night, in his next State of the Union Address.

Yes, that’s right. The number of words devoted to the city of New Orleans that had been wiped off the map only 17 months earlier was zippo. The same number of words as calories in Diet Coke. Seven fewer words than “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Two fewer words than what the President was telling the city to do to itself.

Now, in fairness, it’s possible that the President and his Administration gentlefolk looked around but simply weren’t able to find the words anywhere, most likely because they’re hidden in the same place as Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, which they can’t find either. (Although he still was able to come up with 16 words for that.)

On the other hand, Mr. Bush was able to come up with 166 words for the person who sold a $200 million movie company to the Walt Disney Company. Not only is that 166 more words than he found for the entire city of New Orleans that was wiped off the map - it’s twice as many as he used the year before, only five months after he had showed up on his shining light beams to proclaim his heartfelt support for the just-devastated city. The President quoted the woman, a noble soul named Julie Aigner-Clark, who has subsequently devoted effort to child protection and said, “I believe that children have the right to live in a world that is safe.” What Mr. Bush himself wanted to add was, “So keep them out of New Orleans.”

EDIT: Another extremely important read, this one speaks to the attitude of many of our “fellow Americans,” about New Orleans. Just as thrilling as the Hour of the Chimp.

as i drove home from another therapeutic tete a tete, the radio mumbled with the latest presidential prescription for the best medicine. phrases stuck in my head: “our safety here at home, the consequences of failure, conducting patrols and setting up checkpoints, economic assistance, defending its territorial integrity and stabilizing the region, intention to destroy our way of life… ”

i imagined a war torn state with military convoys, secret missions, sirens, flashing lights, gunfire, danger… as i exited the interstate i saw several police cars, a few hummers, military and police officers, a young criminal in handcuffs… i wondered if the radio was talking about there or here… or was i just dreaming again … imagine that and BLOG THIS!

p.h. fred
notthat.com

When I was being interviewed the other night for the newspaper in Dobbs Ferry, NY the reporter was shocked by my description of the government response as viewed down here. My thoughts and reasoning are easily available by searching this site. It is a fact that we have been treated horrifically by those whose solemn duty is to ensure domestic tanquility, provide for the common defense and promote the genereal welfare (at least the last time I checked).

The President’s recent return threw this into sharp relief. The latest phot-op being the latest in an ignoble tradition begining with the staged speech in Jackson Square. You know, the one with the gorious promises counterpointed by the feeding stations (people were still starving) that were immediately broken down after the shoot.  Now, like a late night B-Movie we are treated (?) to Bush Speech III: The Emperor’s New Clothes. An eloquent and impassioned, as well as erudite and sucinct treatment of this is located over at the Wet Bank Guide. I am excerpting a paragraph here but highly enourage you to visit his site and read the whole thing. I rarely say this, but I agree 100% with it. It is addressed to G. Bush directly.

Wet Bank Guide: You Lying Sack of Shit
Too bad you didn’t share some of your real world experience of civics and free enterprise with the students at Warren Easton High School. It’s good you picked a school for your little speech, somewhere where the students are required to sit respectfully and quietly while you shovel it up. I know you didn’t want to venture out where my daughter’s friend and her mother were caught in a traffic jam for your motorcade, an instant mob in which people of every race, creed, income and age stood out of their cars or leaned out their windows and unleashed a torrent of insult and profanity and interesting gestures as you went by. If you had stopped there to shake hands, as your predecessor might have, I wonder if you could find one not balled into a fist.

As expected, it is getting deep now that the Anniversary weekend is here, on top of which I have been physically ill lately. A nurse friend tells me its probably stress related. Big surprise. Anyway, since I am behind on posting (as well as everything else) I am going to collate everything into one post now. Please pardon the abbreviated format.

• Rising Tide - this is a must do! Go take a look at the guests and attendees, that should crystallize your decision. If not read Adrastos’ list of Ten Reasons To Go
• Mayor Wonka has exceeded the stupidity of his, “chocolate city,” remarks by making some pretty inflamatory statements about 9-11 Stybbie over at Nation of Morons will have to supply the vitriol, I am too worn out.
• As the Anniversary looms so does another probable hurricane in the Gulf. Joy. I miss the days when an oncoming hurricane meant having to stock the bar and buy extra candles….
• The Geek Dinner II- man it was a success, but I fear it was also what pushed my health over the edge. Many of the usual suspects were there along with a wonderful array of new faces. It was brilliant finally meeting Ernie the Attorney, who it seems knows some of my family. Likewise GBitch was a grea new face to add to our rogues galley. A majority of the NOLABloggers were there although we did miss Maitri who was having fun flying to Toronto at the time (Don’t worry she did not bring any toothpaste and as a result made it through without being incarcerated).The list of pissed off and motivated bloggers continues to grow. My pics from the dinner are here.
• The BBC did interviews with Alan from ThinkNOLA, Kalypso, and myself. To listen to the broadcast you’ll either need to listen live between 8 and 9pm Central Time on Monday OR the archive goes up the next day - click on listen link in the sidebar at http://blogs.bbc.co.uk/podsandblogs
• Rocky Vaccarella is a traitor to New Orleans. His FEMA trialer visit to DC and comments about wanting four more years of Bush we elegantly staged, but he has GOP roots and questionable motives. Gee, a photo-op as spin control from the Bush Administration? No….. See the Carpetbagger Report for more disturbing details.
• Midsummer Mardi Gras looms Saturday night. Last year we missed it because we had just crystallized our decision to flee Katrina. This year we will not miss it, bad health or not.
• On the Anniversay I will be doing radio interviews for the Mike Malloy Show on Air America as well as on Channel 4 Radio News for the UK. Details will go up as soon as they are worked out.

That is all I have the energy for this morning. I had meant to expand upon each of these points, but I am wiped out. I’m off to write some websites for a gig I have and then get some rest so I can be ready for Rising Tide (did I mention that you should go?).