No Direction Home

Washington Post reviews new documentary on Dylan by Martin Scorsese airing on PBS this week. We just got the DVD over the weekend and it's great. Don't miss! The vintage rare footage from the raucous 1966 UK tour with the Hawks is a revelation.

System breakdown revisited

You're in the middle of a 100 mile traffic jam. You're running out of gas. You're inching up the interstate in 101 degree heat. Across the median strip are two, three, four lanes completely empty. The police won't let you cross over. You know a lot of the panicky people in these clogged lanes have no business being there: they watch too much TV. You start counting the empty passenger seats inside each vehicle as you proceed at one mile per hour, sweat plummeting off your jowls. You wonder what will be left of the gulf coast refineries after all this, but you don't have to wonder about the price of gas next week, the lonestar mystery being how high the price might go. The radio news informs you that the levees haven't held in New Orleans again, and the waters keep rising. At the last station you pulled into, the shelves were empty. No more bread. No more ding dongs. No more chewing gum or pretzels -- they've tied mini bodybags to the pump handles. It's starting to make you wonder.

Just part of the daily routine

New York Times: "Three former members of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division say soldiers in their battalion in Iraq routinely beat and abused prisoners in 2003 and 2004 to help gather intelligence on the insurgency and to amuse themselves." To amuse themselves?

I am not amused.

Friday random ten: 9/23/05

How Do You Sleep? - John Lennon

We're Gonna Rock Around the Clock - Bill Haley and the Comets

Our Car Club - The Beach Boys

Flowers - Cibo Matto

Sweet Little Rock & Roller - Chuck Berry

The Pitfall / The Excursion - Richard Thompson

A Man Needs a Maid - Neil Young

How Can You Be So Mean To Me - Dale Vaughn

Tusk - Fleetwood Mac

Heartache for Everyone - Indigo Girls

City of Misery

All Over the Place revamps Steve Goodman's "City of New Orleans".

t r u t h o u t - Senator John Kerry

John Kerry is acting like the campaign never ended. Good for him. His speech at Brown U. is smoking hot. Pull quote: " Katrina is a symbol of all this administration does and doesn't do. Michael Brown - or Brownie as the President so famously thanked him for doing a heck of a job - Brownie is to Katrina what Paul Bremer is to peace in Iraq; what George Tenet is to slam dunk intelligence; what Paul Wolfowitz is to parades paved with flowers in Baghdad; what Dick Cheney is to visionary energy policy; what Donald Rumsfeld is to basic war planning; what Tom Delay is to ethics; and what George Bush is to "Mission Accomplished" and "Wanted Dead or Alive." The bottom line is simple: The "we'll do whatever it takes" administration doesn't have what it takes to get the job done. This is the Katrina administration."

Meanwhile, back in New Orleans

"Folks are collecting bodies". 736 and counting....

The coming horror show

Jim Kunstler's latest blistering column says we're in for a shitstorm this winter. Pull quote:

Take a good look at America around you now, because when we emerge from the winter of 2005 - 6, we're going to be another country. The reality-oblivious nation of mall hounds, bargain shoppers, happy motorists, Nascar fans, Red State war hawks, and born-again Krispy Kremers is headed into a werewolf-like transformation that will reveal to all the tragic monster we have become.

Kunstler's also sniffing out some unexploited aspects of the Katrina fallout: how the Port of New Orleans impacts Midwestern grain shipments, and how the Gulf Coast oil and gas industry can't help but drag down the national economy. No amount of Disneyland-grade floodlighting is going to wish these effects away. See the comments for more dire prophecy, such as this moneycentral column, explaining how Sarbanes-Oxley reforms have eaten away bank reserves, which could intensify the looming credit crunch.

Interview: Kim Stanley Robinson

Guardian Unlimited interviews sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson, whose new novel Fifty Degrees Below is about floods and global warming. Pull quote: "I think the US is in a terrible state of denial," he says firmly. "Worse than that, we seem to be caught in a kind of Gotterdammerung response: we'd rather have the world go down in flames than change our lifestyle or admit we're wrong. Even here in California, 50% of cars on the freeway are SUVs, and they're political statements: they say, we're going to take the rest of the world down with us because we don't give a damn. Essentially they're Republican vehicles: when you see an SUV go by, you know the driver voted for Bush. I do think the world has larger global warming problems, but if the US were actually engaged in dealing with them, there'd be a sense that the worst abuser had seen the light and the whole world was on the same page. There's a really sizeable minority here who back measures to reduce emissions, but the political process is controlled by the Republican administration, which is basically in thrall to the oil industry. So it'll come down to another election - and with the last two elections both in their different ways perhaps having been stolen, we can't even really count on democracy anymore. It's pretty scary here."

Friday random ten: 9/16/05

Satin Sheets - Shawn Colvin

Fancy Dancer - Bread

Little Island - Elton John (on Randy Newman's Faust album)

Resolution - John Coltrane

Ice Cream Man - Tom Waits

Aint Too Proud to Beg - The Temptations

Higher Ground - Stevie Wonder

Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby - Carl Perkins

It Won't Be Long - The Beatles

The Bus - Billy Jonas

One Minute of the Hearing

All Over the Place's play-by-play of Roberts nomination hearing....

Brown out

BBC NEWS: Mike Brown resigns. "Oh brownie, my brownie, our fearful trip is done..."

Comments on "Goon Squad"

Song of the day: Elvis Costello's "Goon Squad". Why? Don't know. I was listening to Armed forces in the car today and it just jumped out and grabbed me by the throat. Blogcritics.org has a quality song reivew by Al Barger. What he said....

Closing time

Baltimore Sun [via t r u t h o u t] editorial calls for the end of the Bush administration. Pull quote:

We have a president who is apparently ill-informed, lackadaisical and narrow-minded, surrounded by oil baron cronies, religious fundamentalist crazies and right-wing extremists and ideologues. He has appointed officials who give incompetence new meaning, who replace the positive role of government with expensive baloney.

They rode into office in a highly contested election, spouting a message of bipartisanship but determined to undermine the federal government in every way but defense (and, after 9/11, one presumed, homeland security). One with Grover Norquist, they were determined to shrink Washington until it was "small enough to drown in a bathtub." Katrina has stripped the veil from this mean-spirited strategy, exposing the greed, mindlessness and sheer profiteering behind it.

It is time to hold them accountable - this ugly, troglodyte crowd of Capital Beltway insiders, rich lawyers, ideologues, incompetents and their strap-hangers should be tarred, feathered and ridden gracefully and mindfully out of Washington and returned to their caves, clubs in hand."

Wow.

Meanwhile at the UN...

...John Bolton is still an asshole: Guardian Unlimited: World summit on UN's future heads for chaos. Pullquote: "The Guardian has learned that Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, has made a personal plea to his American counterpart, Condoleezza Rice, for the US to withdraw opposition to plans for wholesale reform of the UN. He has asked Ms Rice to rein in John Bolton, the US ambassador to the world body."

The Uses of Disaster

Rebecca Solnit has an interesting piece on disasters and government, with a postscript about hurricane Katrina at Harpers.org.

Brownie, we hardly knew thee

Old cronies never die, they just return to work. And so Michael Brown returns to the bureacratic canyons of Washington DC where the pudgy faced, Dockers-attired, jargon-tongued bean counters keep on keepin' on: managing those budgets , setting agendas, and reserving conference rooms. What will Brownie do now? Not sure. Will he be FEMA's backoffice bag man, chief funneler of billions to his fellow cronies? Would not shock or awe me. Will he soothe his bruised ego by listening to John Tesh albums late at night? Within the realm of possibility. Can or does he comprehend the aggravation and suffering his incompetent, line-item crazed underlings have wrought on the people who most needed help? I am doubtful.

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle points out how you must cultivate virtuous habits in order to become a good and thereby a happy person. You must do good things, recognize your weaknesses and compensate for your character flaws. You must steer your course through life the best you can. To live a flourishing life is to aspire to moral virtue, to reach the mean between the extremes of deficiency and excess. It's about character and practical activity, working with people to do good things.

The TV montages of Brownie in the limelight don't flatter; they show a pencil-pushing man "with a clipboard in his hand" (cf. Randy Newman's "Louisiana"), a man standing with his hands awkwardly resting on his hips, trying so desparately to look like he belongs there -- a man looking down, looking for cover, a face overwhelmed, defensive, unprepared. A mushy potato adrift in the details, who talks about thinking outside of the box, and talks...and talks. The box gets soggy and sinks. He never gets around to doing anything.

No golden mean was striven for in Brownieland. No self awareness. Sometimes the desire to make your best effort, wishing you were doing the best, talking earnestly about doing the best, making plans to do the best, to be implementing the doing-best agenda, isn't good enough. At some point, and in disasters this point needs to come ultra-fast, the present progressive "we are doing x,y,z" and future tense "we will do x, y, z" must resolve to past tense forms: "we did x, we fed y, and saved z". At those times, self-honesty can result in saved lives, and the noblest thing to do once you recognize your ineptitude is to cut yourself out of the situation. The paradox is the inept aren't capable of recognizing their ineptitude. That's what makes them inept. The cancer grows.

Surely, the ghost of Richard Nixon is whispering tonight: "now you won't have Mike Brown to kick around anymore, " but don't feel sorry for Brownie. He'll be just fine. He's sleeping on clean sheets with a roof over his head tonight. Save a little of your empathy for the kids stranded in New Orleans, the old, infirm, the unstable, the stray dogs left behind, the emergency responders sloshing through the shit, the evacuated, the despondent and the bloated dead.

The collective fixation on Mike Brown seems to me more than just looking for somebody to blame when awful things happen. Here's the secret: people recognize something very familiar in Brownie, a lot more than any of us could ever admit. We project our inadequacies onto the girth-challenged man in the white oxford shirt and pleated pants. I see in him flecks of myself. Brownie is a representative type -- a new icon of America's complacent classes. They're all around us: in the office parks and parking lots, the freeways and fast food joints, the soccer fields and golf courses. They're sitting in the meeting rooms with drop ceilings, and they're buckled into airplanes; they're signing off on forms and pointing fingers. Their wallets are packed with plastic, their souls comfortably saved, their hearts comfortably numb.

We're living in stupified times surrounded by zombies and drones, but we can't afford to be complacent anymore. Maybe it's time to exorcise our own inner-brownie, send it packing, ask yourself to put the clipboard down, bend a couple rules, and reach out for someone's hand -- time to do something better with your life.

Friday random ten 9/9/05

Cage the Songbird - Elton John

Good Times - Aretha Franklin

Wonderful / Song for Children / Child is the Father to the Man / Surf's Up [2nd movement of Smile] - Brian Wilson

Mascara Tears - Richard Thompson

Hurricane - Bob Dylan

Peggy Sue - Buddy Holly

Devil's Haircut - Beck

White Pepper Ice Cream - Cibo Matto

America - Simon & Garfunkel

Sunflower - Glen Campbell

Fudge brownie

Looks like "brownie" has been fudging his résumé, Time magazine reports. News blog covers a stinging New Republic piece by Paul Campos about Brownie's shaky legal credentials.

Plotting the Future

Revealing piece from the Wall Street Journal via Common Dreams cuts to the chase on New Orleans' future: there will be tampering with the city's demographics. Let's put it this way...they won't exactly be rolling out the red carpet for the poor folk to come back. I expect this to turn into some kind of neocon social experiment -- New Orleans as "boutique city" for the tourist trade. Pull quote: "Calvin Fayard, a wealthy white plaintiffs' lawyer ... says the mass evacuation could turn a Democratic stronghold into a Republican one. Mr. Fayard, a prominent Democratic fund-raiser, says tampering with the city's demographics means tampering with its unique culture and shouldn't be done. 'People can't survive a year temporarily -- they'll go somewhere, get a job and never come back,' he says."
Like I said before ... FOLLOW THE MONEY.

Firsthand account

Charmaine Neville in New Orleans: How We Survived the Flood, at Counterpunch.

Gimme Shelter

(Mick Jagger / Keith Richards)

Oh, a storm is threat'ning

My very life today

If I don't get some shelter

Oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away

War, children, it's just a shot away

It's just a shot away

War, children, it's just a shot away

It's just a shot away

Ooh, see the fire is sweepin'

Our very street today

Burns like a red coal carpet

Mad bull lost its way

War, children, it's just a shot away

It's just a shot away

War, children, it's just a shot away

It's just a shot away

Rape, murder!

It's just a shot away

It's just a shot away

Rape, murder!

It's just a shot away

It's just a shot away

Rape, murder!

It's just a shot away

It's just a shot away

The floods is threat'ning

My very life today

Gimme, gimme shelter

Or I'm gonna fade away

War, children, it's just a shot away

It's just a shot away

It's just a shot away

It's just a shot away

It's just a shot away

I tell you love, sister, it's just a kiss away

It's just a kiss away

It's just a kiss away

It's just a kiss away

It's just a kiss away

Kiss away, kiss away

No Direction Home

Counterpunch's Chris Floyd doubts anything is going to change after this. I fear he's closer to right than wrong. Pull quote:

There is no political crisis whatsoever, if by "political crisis" you mean something that will cause Bush to alter his policies. The war in Iraq will go on. The war against the poor will go on. The slow destruction of middle-class security and stability will go on. The long and ferocious rightwing campaign against the very idea of a "common good" will go on, unabated ­ perhaps even strengthened as it faces a backlash from the half of the American public that actually accepts the reality of what they saw in New Orleans and all along the ravaged Gulf Coast.

The race to disperse

Does it strike you as odd that those evacuated from News Orleans, those left behind, those who are primarily poor and black, are being scattered across the United States? Last night I heard a report of some ending up in Alaska of all places? What's the plan behind this plan? I'm starting to wonder whether the thought of having too many angry, dispossessed African Americans housed in one area (say for instance someplace a wee bit closer to home) is perceived by government officials as a threat to civil security. If this is the case, then it is yet another example of institutional or subconscious racism. If you spread them out, you mute the collective outrage. Call it a hunch.... Digby pursues this angle a lot more thoroughly than me. I think he's onto something. There's some kind of racist undercurrent to this that's unsettling.

On the record

Think Progress has a very telling Katrina timeline.

Right city, wrong state

CNN.com reports that FEMA sent evacuees to the wrong Charleston: West Virginia, not South Carolina. Don't any of you morons have a map?

Firemen used as Props

Righteous indignation abounds: Daily Kos comments on firemen being used as props in PR photo ops.

Timeline on castration of FEMA

Chronology at News From Underground.

FEMA: First Responders Urged Not To Respond

Read it and weep. Got this via Mark Crispin Miller's News from the Underground.

Cruise ships? Bad idea

Washington Post reports that the plan to move evacuees onto cruise ships has been postponed because (surprise, surprise) people don't want to live on cruise ships. Who on earth would want to live on a cruise ship for one to six months? Imagine...you've just survived a major flood, stranded on your roofs and bridges, surrounded by rising waters at the stench-filled Superdome, only to be relocated ... onto water again?! Please don't add to these people's misery!

Harpers weekly review

Harpers sums up a hellish week in American history.

In the Background

Clusterfuck Nation's Jim Kunstler is sounding pretty grim on the outcomes of the Katrina debacle. Can anyone deny that this is ominous stuff? Probably the worst disaster (natural + manmade) to hit the nation, dealing a staggering body punch to the energy sector, at a time when we may have already reached the peak oil summit, after which, we are likely to find the downward slope difficult and expensive to negotiate. What we need is vision and leadership, a retooling of our democratic system. We need to prioritize the things that matter and discard the rest. We need to conserve, plan ahead, save and produce real things for real people. It would take vision, leadership, and imagination to get there, but the Bush family has never made "the vision thing" its strongpoint.

Then you remind yourself that the congress, executive, and judicial branches are controlled by a class of people who've invested themselves in the very policies that have marched us into the muck and left us to bloat in the humid sun (metaphorically and literally), and you know the dauphin and his minions will never be converted or persuaded to stop believing in that strange brew of end-times prophecy and free-market profligacy. It can't continue the way it's going, and yet it continues.

As the Katrina story shifts spin cycles from disaster rescue drama to morbid body tallies and finger-pointing contests, I don't want to forget what promises to be the bigger picture: the diaspora of a city's poor people (will they ever come back?), the economic impact (on jobs and energy especially), and the inevitable hog trough of graft and insider chicanery to come. Who will profit from this human misery? Follow the money....

Into the Flood

Killing the Buddha has an eyewitness report by Philipp Meyer, who drove his EMT truck to New Orleans when the hurricane hit. Gives you a sense of the chaos on the ground in the early hours of the disaster, especially when the levees broke.

Christian Exodus

From the "not making this up" department, Christian Exodus is an organization in the process of migrating thousands of bible banging right-wing nuts to South Carolina so as to take over the state county by county.

Blah3 - The Potemkin Photo Op

Blah3 deconstructs Bush's Friday round of PR photo ops in the Gulf coast region. Utterly shameful. I'm running out of superlatives to express my contempt and disgust at what is happening.

Prior to Katrina

FEMA chief Michael Brown was none too popular in Florida. Palm Beach Post pull quote: "At the morning meeting, Commissioner Mary McCarty described FEMA Director Michael Brown as "that absolutely obnoxious, horrible guy" who "has the personality of a frog." See also this brief item about FEMA's performance during last year's Florida hurrianes.

There she blows...

Chicago Tribune reports amazingly that the USS Bataan, a Navy goodwill station, was in the Gulf of Mexico, sitting there, underused and waiting for orders.

More incompetence: rescue boats were turned back

Reportedly, 1,000 Louisianans with 500 boats got to New Orleans to assist with rescue efforts, only to be turned back.

Falluja Floods the Superdome - New York Times

Frank Rich is on his game, and David Brooks, who appears to have woken up from his neocon stupor, is batting two for two.

Is the press coming to its senses? The next one to two months will be telling. Already, the White House spin machine is in high gear; will the press lap it up? Last week they couldn't, with all that reality bitch slapping them in the face. Will this week be business as usual? Will they followup the story, ask the hard questions, give voice to the now dispersed suffering masses? Or will they (and we) crawl back into the air-conditioned corporate cubicles and try to pretend it never happened.

How the Free Market Killed New Orleans

Michael Parenti at Znet observes the invisible hand of free markets at work.

Glengarry Glen Ross

What a web find: the script for David Mamet's classic play/film Glengarry Glen Ross at awesomefilm.com.

"Brownie's doin' a fantastic job"

BostonHerald.com:FEMA head Mike "Brownie" Brown was fired from his last private sector job as overseer of horse shows. He got the FEMA job because he was the college roomate of a Bush advisor Joseph Allbaugh. Before joining FEMA as deputy director, Brownie had no relevant qualifications for such a job. But President Bush on August 31 made this important (and late and ominous) decision in his statement from The White House Rose Garden: "FEMA Director Mike Brown is in charge of all federal response and recovery efforts in the field."

Open Letter from Michael Moore

Dear Mr. Bush...

A Lost Pop Symphony

The New York Review of Books reviews a new book about Brian Wilson's Smile album.

Oh my God

In news from Agape Press, we find this merciful take on the hurricane Katrina disaster from Rev. Bill Shanks, pastor of the New Covenant Fellowship of New Orleans: "New Orleans now is abortion free. New Orleans now is Mardi Gras free. New Orleans now is free of Southern Decadence and the sodomites, the witchcraft workers, false religion -- it's free of all of those things now," Shanks says. "God simply, I believe, in His mercy purged all of that stuff out of there -- and now we're going to start over again." Jesus fucking Christ.....

FEMA sucks

A few relevant headlines from WWLTV.com updates:

St. Bernard Parish officials say that FEMA has not called them yet...five days after the storm

U.S. Sen. David Vitter said FEMA's efforts to deal with the hurricane have been completely ineffective, and he called the federal government's response a failure.

Terry Ebbert, the head of emergency operations for New Orleans. "This is a national disgrace. FEMA has been here three days, yet there is no command and control. We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can't bail out the city of New Orleans."

New Orleans Homeland Security Chief Terry Ebbert calls FEMA's response to Hurricane Katrina an embarrassment.

Attytood: Pentagon: Too much sympathy for the victims

Philly Daily News Attytood transcribes exchange between Aaron Brown and Jamie McIntyre, which I watched live and was similarly left utterly speechless. Pentagon sources were upset that CNN reporters were sympathizing with the victims and not the government. Un-fucking-believable.

Nagin's at the end of his rope

Wonkette duplicates CNN transcript of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who is one desparate man.

Friday random ten

Woman - John Lennon

Autopsy - Fairport Convention

Soon This Morning - Blind Willie McTell

Uncle Bob's Midnight Blues - Randy Newman

I Never Thought I'd Live To Be a Million - The Moody Blues

Here Comes The Sun / The Bells of Rhymney / Mr. Tambourine Man / Take Me As I Am - George Harrison (acoustic bootleg medley)

2x2 - Bob Dylan

Baby, Let Me Follow You Down - Bob Dylan

You Can Leave Your Hat On - Randy Newman

Fly Me to the Moon - Diana Krall

A Can't-Do Government

Paul Krugman on the New Orleans clusterfuck. Pullquote:

"I don't think this is a simple tale of incompetence. The reason the military wasn't rushed in to help along the Gulf Coast is, I believe, the same reason nothing was done to stop looting after the fall of Baghdad. Flood control was neglected for the same reason our troops in Iraq didn't get adequate armor. At a fundamental level, I'd argue, our current leaders just aren't serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don't like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice."

Left Behind

Over at Daily Kos, "Hunter" writes eloquently on the inadequate Federal response to the disaster, and the stirrings of discontent from inside the mainstream media. Listen, we're all aware that this is a unprecedented disaster that overtaxed the system, but it is a disaster that was anticipated for years, a disaster that we saw coming, had days to prepare for, and saw unfold on our televisions, while the bureaucrats coddled one another in technobabbble and had meetings to discuss the formation of task force teams to assess the ongoing situation. To make excuses and goin into spin mode is not going to cut it this time. What a disgrace.

Connect the Dots

I've been waiting for Clusterfuck Nation's Jim Kunstler to weigh in with some commentary. This is a good start. I'm sure more will be coming in the next week or two.

The Second Battle of New Orleans

Sam Smith is asking a lot of important questions at UNDERNEWS.

The Interdictor

The Interdictor is blogging from inside New Orleans. Gripping stuff.