Author: Bearpaw

Thankfully, I’ve only passing experience with some of these things, but in my limited and humble experience, John Scalzi nails it:

Being Poor

Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs.

Being poor is getting angry at your kids for asking for all the crap they see on TV.

Being poor is having to keep buying $800 cars because they’re what you can afford, and then having the cars break down on you, because there’s not an $800 car in America that’s worth a damn.

Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away.

…

There’s more.  Please go read it.  (Then email it to the next person who blames Katrina’s victims for not leaving.)

[From the diaries by susanhu. Don’t miss the stats below on % of Nat’l Guard in Iraq — I heard the same on CNN today.] I get most of my news via various net sources, but my impression is that there are various parts of the Hurricane Katrina story that aren’t being covered.

Coincidentally enough, many of those things make the Bush Administration look bad.

I’ll give the condensed version after the jump, but American Progress has a good report here.

As a couple of folks here have mentioned, rescue and recovery efforts are no doubt being hampered by the fact that many members of the National Guard are thousands of miles away from where they’re needed, fighting a war started for — to put it politely — dubious reasons.  According to an article in the Shrevesport Times:

Louisiana has 65 percent of its troops available for state missions; Mississippi, 60 percent; Alabama, 77 percent; and Florida, 74 percent, Guard officials said.

But that’s only the most blatant issue.

There an old britishism about being “penny-wise and pound-foolish”.  Given the damages of this storm, perhaps we should update it to “million-wise and billion-foolish”:

Two months ago, President Bush took an ax to budget funds that would have helped New Orleans prepare for such a disaster. The New Orleans branch of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers suffered a “record $71.2 million” reduction in federal funding, a 44.2 percent reduction from its 2001 levels.

Sometimes I miss George the Elder.  Well, not very often and not much, but compared to his kid, he seems positively wise:

The Gulf Coast wetlands form a “natural buffer that helps protect New Orleans from storms,” slowing hurricanes down as they approach from sea. When he came into office, President Bush pledged to uphold the “no net loss” wetland policy his father initiated. He didn’t keep his word. Bush rolled back tough wetland policies set by the Clinton administration, ordering federal agencies “to stop protecting as many as 20 million acres of wetlands and an untold number of waterways nationwide.”

And then there’s the whole climate change issue.  While it doesn’t make sense to point at a specific bit of weather and say that it was “caused by global warming”, most scientists who’ve studied the issues agree that (a) humans are having a significant effect on the atmosphere, (b) global temperatures seemed to be slowly rising, (c) it’s very likely that (a) is causally related to (b), and (d) those rising temperatures will likely contribute to more dramatic (read: more destructive) weather.

AP reported recently on a Massachusetts Institute of Technology analysis that shows that “major storms spinning in both the Atlantic and the Pacific … have increased in duration and intensity by about 50 percent” since the 1970s, trends that are “closely linked to increases in the average temperatures of the ocean surface and also correspond to increases in global average atmospheric temperatures during the same period.” Yet just last week, as Katrina was gathering steam and looming over the Gulf, the Bush administration released new CAFE standards that actually encourage automakers to produce bigger, less fuel-efficient vehicles, while preventing states from taking strong, progressive action to reverse global warming.

As a side note, I hesitated before writing this diary, as I was reluctant to “politicize” the tragedy.  But unfortunately, the tragedy was politicized even before it occurred.  Thanks to the triumph of power over reason, everyone’s future has been politicized.

Cintra Wilson shares an excellent reporter’s-eye-view of Scott McClellan’s sweaty days in July, when the Whitehouse Press Corps actually kinda sorta did their jobs.

In her Salon article “I invaded the White House press corps”, Wilson gives a day-by-day account of the Press Corps’ “minor mutiny” …

On July 11, the story of Karl Rove’s involvement in the Valerie Plame case broke, and the hounds got loose in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House and whomped on the press secretary. It was the Great McClellan Mauling of ’05: Thirty-five questions about Karl Rove by a suddenly unified and frothy White House press corps that had quickened into a minor mutiny.

July 11, the Day the Press Corps Attacked, was just the kickoff. I spent the next two weeks in the James S. Brady Briefing Room at the White House, witnessing the molten Rove-a-thon. By the end I felt like I’d spent a couple of weeks on one of those indoor thrill rides where seats are bolted to a moving floor while a film is shown, creating a vague sensation of G-force when nothing actually goes anywhere. Still, the mini-revolt offered hope that despite its previously persistent vegetative state, the press might not be entirely dead yet. For the first time since 9/11, the reporters got nakedly hostile and went for the throat. Pandora’s box opened — just a hairline crack, but enough bats flew out to suggest that it might not close all the way again.

Not content to cheer the Press Corps on from the sidelines, Wilson decided to join the fun:

As fans of Talon News reporter Jim “Jeff” Guckert “Gannon” know, it is surprisingly easy to get into the briefing room — any no-account hosebag (myself obviously included) can mock up enough credentials to have their questions unanswered by Scott McClellan. (I met a lawyer in one of the back seats who manufactured his own press card at Kinko’s.) With a laminated press pass and a little tenacious badgering of the White House Office of Media Affairs, I was cleared to take my seat in the amphitheater and watch lions chew an unlucky Christian.

Unused to getting BS straight from a firehose, her first exposure to Scotty was a little hard to take:

McClellan kicked off the day with a batch of statements that were such an absurdly Orwellian valentine to the administration, I thought he was delivering a blatant “up yours” to his bloodthirsty audience. However, I was assured by veteran corps members that this was business as usual; even when the president is being led away in handcuffs, you can count on the press secretary to stand tall, show clean teeth, and deliver good news about how the administration is Doing Great Things for the American People.
…
Since this was my first exposure, in real time, to the administration’s spin jingo, straight from the larynx of a living person, I was so stunned I emitted an involuntarily, hysterical gasp and one of McClellan’s frozen über-blondes tried to turn me into a pillar of salt with a penetrating fish-eye.

Wilson’s report from the front lines — well, the back seat — of the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room is entertaining and educational, both for the bits of context she provides for the official transcript and for the reality-checks she gets from the other attendees:

“You get frustrated, and you think it’s like nailing mercury to a wall, and then you realize that it’s not because Scott is so masterfully evasive, but because the White House declines to provide any mercury, or a wall, ” a reporter who insisted on anonymity told me after the briefing. And this was a guy from a major conservative news outlet, one person who I thought would have some mechanism for making sense of it all, however delusional.

The biting insights she gets from Helen Thomas are unsurprisingly the most interesting:

Thomas is so candid, direct and honest that listening to her is as jarringly refreshing as sitting under a cold waterfall, after a few days in the corps.

“Reporters have not done their job,” Thomas said. “They’ve given [Bush] a free pass and they’ve let the people down. They haven’t been watchdogs, but lapdogs.

“The press officer has to wear two hats. True, he speaks for the president … [But] he also, through the press, has to give the truth back to the American people.

Hell, just go read the whole thing.  If you like it as much as I did, come back here and kick it around.

(Note: If you follow the link to read the Salon story in its entirety, you’ll either need a Salon subscription or you’ll need to watch a soul-sucking (but mercifully brief) advertisement.)

According to certain pundits with whom we are all too, too familiar, it’s evidently undignified, despicable, and possibly treasonous for relatives of those who have died in Iraq to publically voice their opinions.

There are, of course, exceptions to this rule …

War Mom vs. Peace Mom

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com

Stung by the ability of one grieving mother to inspire a growing antiwar movement, the White House has found a mom to call its own.

An obviously delighted President Bush introduced her to a boisterous invitation-only audience mostly made up of military families in Idaho yesterday — then sent her out to talk to the press.

(Emphasis added.)

Let’s get this point out of the way right now: As far as I’m concerned, Tammy Pruett is absolutely within her rights to voice her opinion, and more power to her if she can get national attention for that opinion.

It is worth noting, though, that this wasn’t exactly spontaneous …

(Dana Bash, CNN)  “Tammy’s husband and one son are just back from Iraq. Four other sons are still serving. The White House invited the Pruetts and choreographed this moment with a family CNN first profiled more than a year ago. The president’s goal: show support among military families, appeal to patriotism. . . .

“Setting aside past concerns about privacy or looking too political, the White House led reporters to Tammy Pruett.  She said this of Cindy Sheehan: ‘The way that she’s chosen to mourn, it wouldn’t be the way that we would do it. But we respect her rights.'”

Well, Ms. Pruett, I’m glad you respect her rights.  But this isn’t how Cindy Sheehan has “chosen to mourn”.  It’s how she’s chosen to act, it’s how she’s chosen to participate in democracy.  Nobody else has been able to get a coherent, non-doublespeak answer out of the President, so she figured she’d try this approach.  I doubt very much that Cindy and her opinion will get a moment in the limelight with the President, but at least her actions have made a few more people realize that the President isn’t very much interested in talking with people who might disagree with him.

I first saw this story this morning in the Boston Metro, front page and above the fold.  The Christian Science Monitor has the full story online.  (Don’t let their name fool you.  The Christian Science Monitor is a solid, respectable newspaper — well, at least as much as any mainstream US paper is these days …)

I’m not sure this is what the Bush League had in mind when they said — again — that we were “turning the corner” in Iraq.

BAGHDAD – Finding a way to head off civil war is at the heart of all the major initiatives – including the talks over a new constitution – in Iraq. But by most common political-science definitions of the term, “civil war” is already here.

“It’s not a threat. It’s not a potential. Civil war is a fact of life there now,” says Pavel Baev, head of the Center for the Study of Civil War at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Norway.

Baev’s simple declaration is based partly on a “academic thumbnail definition of a civil war”.  I’m not sure where they get this, but the article defines a civil war as “a conflict with at least 1,000 battlefield casualties, involving a national government and one or more nonstate actors fighting for power.”

The body count in Iraq is tough to estimate, but …

According to www.iraqbodycount.net, a website run by academics and peace activists, 24,865 Iraqi civilians were killed between March 2003 and March 2005. The report said that US-led forces killed 37 percent of the total.

The spreadsheets in Dr. Faad Ameen Bakr’s computer shed some light on the casualty rate. Baghdad’s chief pathologist pulls down the death toll for Iraq’s capital in July: 1,083 murders, a new record.

Note that the definition of civil war is not 1,000 per month, but 1,000 total.  If we were just counting July and we were only counting Baghdad, the situation in Iraq would still qualify as a civil war.  (Oh, and to put a final ugly emphasis on the numbers … they do not include the deaths from car-bombings.)

As to whether or not the situation in Iraq involves “a national government and one or more nonstate actors” …

A year ago it was common to hear Iraqi politicians say most of the fighting was resistance to US occupation, and would subside with a US military withdrawal. Today, few voice that view.

“We are living in an undeclared civil war among Iraq’s political groups,” says Nabil Yunos, the head of political affairs for the Dignity Party, a Sunni party. “It’s not just Sunnis that are the problem. It’s the Shiites, the Kurds, it’s everyone. The violence has gotten worse, and we’re entering a very dangerous period.”

Go read the rest of the article for a good primer on the situation, but the short version is grim but unsurprising to anyone in the reality-based world … it’s a fuckin’ mess and there’s no easy way to clean it up.

John Prados has a very interesting bit over at TomPaine.com on John Bolton’s role in making sure the fix was in for the Bush League to invade Iraq.

But the truly important issue remains the one few have focused upon: Bolton’s role in making sure that the “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,” as British intelligence chief Sir Richard Dearlove told Tony Blair at a July 2002 meeting of the British Cabinet. Contrary to the mainstream narrative, Bolton’s was no private war with U.S. intelligence. Rather, his actions were crucial in creating the highly charged atmosphere in which the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies bit the bullet, ignored the gaps in their data and told Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the warhawks what they wanted to hear.

To a considerable extent, Bolton was one of Bush’s primary fixers.

[Emphasis added.]

More juicy bits below …

Cutting through the palaver about how that unit was intended merely to find bits of data overlooked in conventional intelligence reporting, in fact the staff explicitly crafted a frontal attack on CIA’s terrorism data, rearranging it so as to maximize the impression there existed some alliance between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. That exercise came to a head at a meeting at CIA headquarters in August 2002.

Which brings us to John Bolton. Over the months culminating in July 2002 Bolton tried to have two different analysts fired for refusing to accede to intelligence claims he wanted to make in behalf of the administration.

…

It is no longer possible to argue that the Iraqi intelligence estimates of 2002 were not affected by politicization. And John Bolton helped create the chilling climate in which that Iraq NIE had to be written. This was no mere intelligence failure. Sir Richard Dearlove had that exactly right, at the time. The intelligence was fixed and Bolton was a prime fixer.

This is the guy President Bush wants to represent the US at the United Nations: a man who not only lied but demanded lies from others, and did his best to get them — including a UN official — fired when they wouldn’t back his story. Read John Prados’ whole story at TomPaine.com.

(A tip o’ the hat to diane101, for the link.)