Month: October 2005

National Guard soldiers stood between the surging mob and the buses there to evacuate the desperate out of the abject misery of New Orleans.
The troops were processing some 25,000 refugees spilling out of the squalor of the Louisiana Superdome on Sept. 2, working to keep families intact as they worked their way up the line of thousands.

“For God’s sake, please don’t separate yourself from your children,” screamed Air Force Capt. John Pollard of the Texas Air Guard’s 149th Security Squadron into a microphone. Pollard screamed numerous times. “Keep your families together. You need one another.”

But his amplified voice only reached a few rows into the mob.

As desperation and uncertainty grew, however, parents who wanted to ensure survival for their infant children starting passing them forward. The crowd moved them ahead, hand over hand, and presented them to the Guard members at the metal barricades separating them from the buses.

Pollard said he saw “thousands” of babies passed forward that way over two days of evacuations, despite urgings not to do so.

The soldiers and airmen had no idea what to do with the babies, so they would order the crowd to pass them back to the parents. But the crowd would often respond saying that they didn’t know which direction the babies came from. Nonetheless, the infants would be passed back over the mob, eventually disappearing out of the troops’ view…

Maj. Ed Bush walked alongside the mob with a megaphone and pled, until his voice gave out, for those in line to stay with their families. But many told Bush that they had already sent children and women to the front of the line because they heard from other evacuees that that was what the military wanted.

Some said they had sent their children by themselves to the buses because they thought it more important to get their kids out of the intense heat, humidity and filth.

Bush told the evacuees that they had acted on “a very bad rumor.” But, calling it “the only solace I can offer you,” he told the civilians that they didn’t have to worry because everyone was going to the same place – the Houston Astrodome.

That changed while buses were en route….more

For a while, the missing children got a lot of media attention. CNN even devoted a third of their screen to little baseball cards of them for couple of days.

At one point, sometime near the end of Cleansing Week, the day after Shepherd Smith forgot himself, and screamed into the camera, TV feeds showed someone in a uniform megaphoning to a crowd that buses were coming, and that people should “choose one family member.” Buses did not actually come for a couple of days, but the understanding was that when they did, infants, and possibly some elders, would be allowed to board them. The rest would be empowered to continue their natural expiration process without government interference. The “bad rumor” Major Bush mentions.

Throughout history, thus has been expressed the heartbursting ferocity of parental love. Faced with death, mothers and fathers have passed their babies forward, thrust them into the arms of strangers, thrown them from moving vehicles, raging waters, exploding skies, burning buildings. It is an instinct stronger even than self-preservation – species preservation, the anthropologists tell us, and it is the reason why in certain target zones of the world, no matter how much food is witheld, bombs are dropped, and disease cultivated, birthrates are highest.

There is something in us that is determined to grasp at any chance to save our children no matter what happens to us, even when the chance of saving is slim.

there are more than 2,000 children, many of whom are Black, who remain separated from their parents, authorities said. The center, officials say, has received 17,454 calls since the hurricane, the largest effort ever to re-connect families….link

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children can only count the ones about which they have received calls. With the fate of so many of the parents, grandparents, uncles and aunties “unclear,” many more babies who were passed forward are not on a list.

We can certainly hope that the hands who received them last were good ones, that they will be fed, and loved, and cared for, but the reality of society being what it is, some are now in situations such that their parents, had they known, would have kept them in their own arms to die with them.

As the cessation of media coverage shows us, it is not a subject mainstream America cares to contemplate.

Of course, not all who were passed forward are babies. Some are old enough to be aware of what happened, and if they continue to defy America by managing to reach adulthood, they will remember.

Welcome back.
I put this series on hiatus last week rather than clutter the site during the march.  This week I have a couple of new things.      

Today I’ve posted a photo below of the frame I’ve added to my plein air painting from Sedona.  Seen below are before and after photos.  It was an inexpensive wooden photo frame from which I have removed the glass.  I think that it considerably enhances and completes the painting.  I’m actually surprised (and pleased) with the difference that an inexpensive frame has made.

I’ve mentioned a good source for reasonably priced gallery frames that is worth stating again.  http://www.pleinairframes.com/  Check out this very user-friendly site for its selection of frames.

I’ve been thinking of my next project and am considering the scene seen below.  It is in Sedona from my recent trip.  My son is seen frolicking along Oak creek with the famous red rocks in the background.  It is a very famous site and was the scene of a beer Japanese beer commercial the morning of that day.  Unfortunately we came too late to see the filming taking place.

We enjoyed walking in the shallows along the many large rocks across the stream.  Some of these rocks are seen in the photo.  The contrast of the desert country red buttes with the creek is striking.  I’ve been all over the southwest and have seen nothing like it.  Go there if you are in the area.  

I’m also considering a painting of the wonderful scenery from northwestern New Mexico with its green rolling hills and many junipers.  I’ll show a photo of that next week.  It’s the same scenery that inspired the painting below seen in volume 3 of this series.  

See you next week.

I read RenaRF’s reply to Senator Obama’s diary.

Her diary clarified for me one of the problems I have dealt with in trying to reconcile my liberal views with reality.

What does Ms. RF want the Senate to do with the SCOTUS noiminations? Stonewall them all until the day the Democrats regain the White House and Senate majority?

Her tears aside, and the tears of frustration at another loss are understandable, the Senate Democrats had no choice but to confirm Roberts. In the absence of any skeletons found hanging in Mr. Roberts walk in closet, a rejection of his candidacy by Senate Democrats would only serve to alienate a voting majority of this nation (republicans and centrist independents)at a time when the future of progressive politics clearly seems to be trending to the positive.

Since Mr. Obama is a politician by trade and not a blogger, his post should be read in that context. The disappointment and the tears by the blogging left over yet another Republican political victory are a supreme waste of emotion for no gain in reality.

I am a Democrat. I see the signs of coming change in the nation’s perception of its conservative led government. Basically, the people know the conservatives are failed and failing in most areas under their responsibility.

The hurricanes are the powerful metaphors of this failure. So is Iraq. So is Delay. So is Rove.

John Roberts is not a metaphor of failure.

Bush himself has been a failed leader, time and again throughout his vacuous life. Clearly, he could not successfully run a small oil company, even with the “genetic” advantages he inherited from his aristocrastic family. His Texas Rangers are forever mired in the second division (and he didnt really run them anyway)and his Dept of Homeland Security the biggest bungled example of government bureaucracy since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

John Roberts is not a metaphor of Bush’s failure.

John Roberts is a metaphor of the failure of progressive Democrats in this country to win the White House and a Senate majority often enough to pack the Supreme Court with a majority of progressive jurists.

My advice to Ms. RF and others like her: hang the tears out to dry and join with Senator Obama to change the future.

More government waste. More outrage. You decide.

Quick fixes.

Sheesh- Even I could do this and I sure could use the money. Maybe we should use the Katrina- Rita opportunity to make a quick buck and get some of our taxes back the FEMA way.
Waste not. Want not. Where did I read the duct tape suggestion? Wasn’t that after 9/11? I hope these tarps have a silver lining.

Amy Goodman and her crew at Democracy Now! (www.democracynow.org) who produce the best alternative news coverage I know of, are seeking donations in cash or kind that will help them acquire needed equipment: video cameras and flat-screen monitors.

There’s an ad about the video cameras on their web site, and Amy mentioned the need for monitors at the very end of her Wednesday broadcast (which I only now have listened to via podcast).

If any of you can help, please email them at mail@democracy.org, or go via the website.

These are great people, doing fabulous and important work. Please support them if you can.

Cross-posted at dailyKos (where it will vanish in a heartbeat)

with a bow to RubDMC

I’ve been thinking about this tone all day. In my view, there is very little truth in it, especially when one is mindful of the photos and words RubDMC has been posting for the past 269 days.

Maybe America does think the way Senator Obama says they do. But if that is true, I’m just as ashamed of that thinking as I am of Abu Ghraib.
Some more snippets of tone and truth. I report. You decide.

U.S. arms sales go to dictators

 Washington, DC, May. 25 (UPI) — President George W. Bush may have pledged to promote democracy around the world, but most U.S. arms sales to the developing world still go to prop up dictatorial regimes, according to a new report.

The report, issued by the New York-based World Policy Institute, found that a majority of U.S. arms sales to the developing world go to regimes defined as undemocratic by the State Department. It also says that U.S.-supplied arms are involved in a majority of the world’s active conflicts.

The Arithmetic of America’s Military Bases Abroad: What Does It All Add Up to?

According to the Defense Department’s annual “Base Structure Report” for fiscal year 2003, which itemizes foreign and domestic U.S. military real estate, the Pentagon currently owns or rents 702 overseas bases in about 130 countries and has another 6,000 bases in the United States and its territories. Pentagon bureaucrats calculate that it would require at least $113.2 billion to replace just the foreign bases — surely far too low a figure but still larger than the gross domestic product of most countries…

My added noise to the Senator’s diary here. Since there are only 771 previous comments (not to mention RenaRF’s excellent missive), I’m sure he’ll be able to give mine the time it deserves.

——————
Senator Obama,

I read your diary with great interest; thank you for paying the courtesy of acknowledging the blog world. I wish I could agree with what you have written, but on the critical points, I don’t.

It’s a matter of actually having faith in the American people’s ability to hear a real and authentic debate about the issues that matter.

I don’t have this faith, and there are many, many facts to back me up. The American people won’t ever get to hear this debate or even know about it, because every single way they could is owned by the self-interested wealthy. There is no authenticity possible because the media’s reportage is based solely on money. My voice — maybe even yours — just doesn’t count in the warped lens of our current media. That’s the reality. Like everyone else here, I’ve had arguments with friends and family about what is happening to our country. During the few times I’ve tried to talk politics with my Colorado relatives, I’ve been struck by the realization that we can’t even agree about basic facts, let alone partisan issues or matters of policy. Nothing is new about this kind of distortion except its now-monstrous scale, so large that the average citizen is less aware of it than an ant on a chessboard.

Let me be clear: I am not arguing that the Democrats should trim their sails and be more “centrist.” […] it will require us to innovate and experiment with whatever ideas hold promise (including market- or faith-based ideas that originate from Republicans).

This Republican Congress has given us “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests.” They gave us “No Child Left Behind” and the Social Security “reform.” Every major majority initiative over the last five years has come booby-trapped and wrapped in Orwellian misnomers. Every single one. They have set about dismantling the departments they didn’t want, and when they couldn’t get away with that, stuffing them full of incompetent cronies. While John Bolton lies his way into the U.N., a dozen more as-yet unheralded Michael Browns are waiting to stumble into their own spotlights. Even putting the Iraq war aside, our country is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and is largely beholden to foreign interests. Maybe the collegial atmosphere of the Senate means you are obligated to extend your hands to your distinguished colleagues’ “ideas,” but those of us who’ve warily and wearily followed these endless charades know nothing good will come from this majority as it is now constituted.

A large part of your diary is a plea for harmony and tolerance. No one here disputes that need, and we’re willing to spend all day bashing each other on the head in an effort to achieve it. But harmony isn’t enough right now. We’re starving for leadership that the Democrats apparently have no will or incentive to offer. You say our disagreements are hamstringing our ability to hold a majority, but no one will give a majority to the Democrats without knowing what it is, least of all us. In the absence of any unified vision from you and other congressional leaders, what options do we have? When you can’t get on the same page, why should we?

The Republican leadership is crumbling before our eyes, leaving Democrats an absurd number of gifts (or weapons) if you have the knowledge and/or will to use them. Katrina is the perfect distillation of 30+ years of Republican policies. You could talk about that horrible epic for a decade and not exhaust it. Democrats will occasionally remember the common good, but they seem to have completely forgotten its rhetorical adjunct, selfishness. The American people have seen a tidal wave of selfishness from this administration without consequences. Tell the American people there are consequences to selfishness, and list them. And then give me a real set of reasons to point to you as a positive and active choice for my wavering relatives. We are waiting for your Democratic charter and leadership.

cross-posted from dembloggers.com

At this point in our history, “what did he know and when did he know it?” is almost a cliché; it’s also rather naive. That is to say, how much (or truthful) of an answer can we really expect in response, especially when asking the person in question directly?

It’s not as though it really got anybody anywhere with Nixon and it most certainly isn’t going to net any answers from Delay.  He can’t even keep the details about being asked to testify before Ronnie Earle straight – at least that’s what his lawyers tell us.  Perhaps he was a wee too careless with the bug powder dust back in the day…

That could well explain his more outlandish musings, such as the laughable claim that there is no fat left to trim from the federal budget.  Or the time he denied knowledge of TRMPAC’s general operations but then declared, mere moments later, that everything they did was completely legal and above board, of course.

Unfortunately for Delay, he’s a much better comedian than he is a liar and his chickens of delusional grandeur are coming home to roost.  Naturally, the charge of the right brigade is busily trying to downplay the recent felony indictments from Ronnie Earle’s Travis County Grand Jury, employing the favored tactic of repeating something often and vociferously in the hopes of making it true.

This time around, the rallying cry is that Ronnie Earle is an “unabashed partisan zealot” and a “rogue prosecutor” out to exact revenge on Delay for contributing to the GOP takeover of the Texas Legislature.  “What a martyr Tommy is!  How can Earle post such baseless accusations against someone so fine and upstanding?!?!”, etc. etc.  And that Delay is completely innocent, of course.

But alas, people get email, or to be more precise, they get ahold of email.  And the Washington Post found some doozies!

In May 2001, Enron’s top lobbyists in Washington advised the company chairman that then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) was pressing for a $100,000 contribution to his political action committee…

DeLay requested that the new donation come from “a combination of corporate and personal money from Enron’s executives,” with the understanding that it would be partly spent on “the redistricting effort in Texas,” said the e-mail to Kenneth L. Lay from lobbyists Rick Shapiro and Linda Robertson.  

…Many corporate donors were explicitly told in TRMPAC letters that their donations were not “disclosable” in public records. But documents from several unrelated investigations offer an exceptional glimpse of how corporate money was able to influence state politics — and also of DeLay’s bold use of his network of corporate supporters to advance his agenda.

Ironically, these emails surfaced in an investigation of Enron that ostensibly had nothing to do with Delay.  But these tangled webs may yet land Mr. Hammer in the slammer, especially given that TRMPAC has already been found guilty of violating Texas election laws regarding the use of corporate donations.

…As the TAB case languished on appeal, new facts emerged about the involvement of Texans for a Republican Majority (TRMPAC) in the 2002 campaign. The PAC, founded by U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Sugar Land), had filed documents with the IRS that revealed more than $700,000 in corporate contributions that had not been disclosed to the Texas Ethics Commission.

…Plaintiffs alleged that the defendants were active in 21 state House races, including their own, funneling more than half a million dollars of illegal corporate expenditures into the campaigns and not reporting them. While the election code allows for corporate and union cash to be spent on administrative expenses, TRMPAC doled out the money for items that failed to meet that definition, such as polling, direct mail, research, political consultants, fundraising, and printing. Then they failed to report the expenditures with the state.

“TRMPAC held a private reception with candidates at the Republican State Convention paid for with corporate funds, gathered individual campaign plans, worked in tandem with other organizations or PACs, raised corporate money, funded political activity with corporate money and then chose not to report corporate money for political activity to the Texas Ethics Commission,” Feldman would detail at trial.

But it was an administrative reception – strictly records management, you understand.  It’s just that it gets so hard to keep track of all the corporate donations and it would simply be unseemly for the candidates to overlook anyone in writing thank-you notes!  

Not to worry; it appears Mr. Delay took pains to avoid such embarassments.  Or at least trade them for other, new embarassments, like the fact that he appears to have been much more involved in those day-to-day operations than he was admitting:

The documents, which were entered into evidence last week in a related civil trial in Austin, the state capital, suggest that Mr. DeLay personally forwarded at least one large corporate check to the committee, Texans for a Republican Majority, and that he was in direct contact with lobbyists for some of the nation’s largest companies on the committee’s behalf.

…Last September, the grand jury indicted two men close to Mr. DeLay: Mr. RoBold, a major fund-raiser for the Texas committee and for Mr. DeLay’s national political action committee, Americans for a Republican Majority; and James W. Ellis, the national committee’s director and one of Mr. DeLay’s closest political operatives. The Texas committee’s executive director, John Colyandro, was also indicted.

Prosecutors accused them of being part of a scheme at the committee to funnel large corporate donations illegally to state Republican candidates in the months before the 2002 elections in Texas, in which Republicans took control of the State Legislature.

The 2002 elections in Texas had national significance, since they allowed Republicans to redraw the state’s Congressional districts, benefiting Mr. DeLay by solidifying Republican control of the House.

Which brings us full web circle to the recent indictments against Mr. “Federal Government” Delay, which hold that he knowingly violated Texas election law.  Given the history of indictments and civil court cases against TRMPAC and its officers, one would think Delay’s case would be indefensible.  But one would, to come full circle again, be naive. Take, for example, an editorial featured at Focus on the Family, which I will neither link nor quote.  

But I will post the rebuttal, written by Cris Feldman, which, like those emails, is a doozie. Feldman is working on the current case involving Delay and TRMPAC and was also part of the previous successful case brought before Judge Hart.  

Your May 11, 2005, posting at the Focus on the Family website entitled, “The Real Ethics Scandal,” misstates basic facts and Texas law. As I am one of the lawyers handling the civil case involving Tom Delay’s Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee (“TRMPAC”), I thought you might find it helpful for me to correct certain misunderstandings of Texas law and the facts in the TRMPAC case.

…It would seem that your posting was designed to provide political talking points, as opposed to serious legal analysis. However, if your posting was a sincere attempt at explaining Texas law and certain facts, I would welcome the opportunity to publicly debate you any time, in any place, on the subject of TRMPAC’s illegal acts. I would be happy to fly to Washington, DC to do so. At that time we could discuss Texas election law and the facts surrounding the corporate money scandal which compromised the integrity of the 2002 Texas state elections. I am sure we can arrange something for June. Let me know.

I hope he doesn’t hold his breath waiting for a response.  That would be naive.

I’m speechless…almost.

There is only one question to be asked: what are they hiding?
You can read more about the proposed cuts in defense spending here. I’m sure there’s much to be discussed. However, the addition of the use of veto power to derail investigations of torture at the hands of US soldiers is unconscionable.

The Bush administration has already set up protections for itself by refusing to participate in the International Criminal Court. The military justice system has handed out lax sentence after lax sentence to the soldiers involved. And, frankly, the timing of this threat is suspect since a judge just ruled yesterday that more photos from the Abu Ghraib torture cases can now be released – most likely a decision that will be appealed – coupled with the rumours surrounding the possible, upcoming nomination of Alberto Gonzales to the US Supreme Court.

How the president can threaten such an extreme measure, the power of the veto, to suppress the rights of all of the victims and their families is beyond the pale.

The fact that Bush is attempting to veto a Republican defense budget bill will bring a chorus of dissenters not only from the left and center but from his very allies on the right. He’s playing with fire – to a degree. It’s quite likely the Republicans will cave or compromise on the spending details but those Republicans will have a hard time defending a president who does not want to investigate one of the biggest outrages of the Iraq war at a time when Bush’s numbers are so low and the majority of Americans oppose the war. What possible justification could those Republicans have for stonewalling such an investigation? Even Pat Roberts made this assertion in May, 2004 when speaking about the Abu Ghraib torture:

I think Karl Rove has made a huge political gamble here that he and Bush will ultimately lose.

Get the word out now.

I just saw her. Even though she’s lost her cover thanks to the dastardly White House, she still wears her mask. She didn’t have the three teenagers with her. I think they’re hiding in the tree because they’re afraid of the noise from the high school football game about 10 blocks away. She snacked on some purple grapes and dog kibble and then ran off, probably to watch the teens.

Just so you know, she doesn’t like peanut butter sandwiches and — as often happens in families — her teenagers don’t like them either. All of the other coonies love peanut butter though. And they all adore those small dark Italian plums, but those are out of season now, sigh. I also feed the wild birds. We’ve been stopping at Wild Birds Unlimited on Highway 101. Their bird seed is so much nicer than what’s sold in grocery stores. We get the “Olympic Mix,” specially formulated for birds on the Olympic Peninsula. It attracts every kind of bird — from quails to blue jays. Which creatures of the wild do you feed and watch? . . .  O P E N    T H R E A D . . .