Home for the Holiday

At home today -- It is going to be hard work for a lot of people, no holiday. It will not be a day of rest for everyone. We will be treating is as normal day here at our home. Perhaps hot dogs and potato salad will be the extent of our minimalist celebration. And I do not feel particularly “at home” this day. I feel unsettled and watchful, carried along by outside events. There is a surreal tone to the day, as if I am in a theater watching a cheap movie. It is partly because of stuff like this on John McCain's homes: HT to Jon (8/30/08): "ABC News: Political Radar -- Cindy McCain tells Stephanopoulos that Obama Offended Her." To quote:

ABC News' George Stephanopoulos reports: Democrats' attacks on her family's wealth are unfair and offensive, Cindy McCain said today in an interview airing tomorrow on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."

For nearly two weeks, Democrats have repeatedly hit Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., for saying he is unaware of how many houses he owns, calling the presumptive Republican presidential nominee out of touch with everyday Americans. In his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention on Thursday, Democratic nominee Barack Obama turned up the heat on McCain, saying he "doesn't know" about the lives of middle-class Americans.

"I'm offended by Barack Obama saying that about my husband," said McCain's wife Cindy.

When asked if Obama went too far in his criticism of McCain, Cindy responded, "I do. I do. I really do."

Homes in the Gulf empty out – The uninvited guest, Hurricane Gustav is currently at Category 3. Three years ago about now, a bigger Hurricane, Category 5 Katrina, came ashore in New Orleans, Louisiana and a long nightmare began for the entire Gulf Coast region. It is reported that 95% of the population heeded the evacuation orders of officials this weekend. A number of them had just gotten back into their repaired homes after waiting years to do so. Many had been living in our region, the diaspora from other hurricanes. Now they are back.

Not where expected -- Many others of us around the nation will not be in our usual places today. This Labor Day was to have been the day when the Republicans convened in Minneapolis to nominate their candidates for President and Vice-President. That event will be scaled back to the minimum required under election law, because of the impending hurricane. The presumptive Republican candidates will be out and about, however, looking properly concerned and self-sacrificing for the occasion. We can assume they are relieved that our current president (OCP) and his Veep will not be attending. At the same time OCP and his officials have seen to it that a number of protesters are neither at home nor in the streets, according to Glenn Greenwald's Sunday post. This is no cheap movie (see *videos referenced below). They have been rounded up and put in the Minneapolis jail without being charged, probably until Wednesday.

Hosting the police state? -- The "question of the day" was asked by my blog friend "betmo:" How much truth can we handle? Her own personal answer is pretty gloomy. An earlier Glenn Greenwald post at Salon.com has chilling implications for the possibility of things to come. Titled, "Massive police raids on suspected protesters in Minneapolis," Saturday Aug. 30, 2008. The story begins with this:

Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets. Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff's department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than "fire code violations," and early this morning, the Sheriff's department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying.

Jane Hamsher and I were at two of those homes this morning -- one which had just been raided and one which was in the process of being raided.

Targeting citizen homes -- "BREAKING: FBI, ATF, and St. Paul Police Massing at 1162 Juliet Ave." This is the Sunday midnight headline from Lindsay Beyerstein for The Campaign Silo and Firedoglake. This same writer also has the raid story on Saturday: "Inside an RNC Raid," by Lindsay Beyerstein, August 30, 2008. It begins and ends with these mind-bending facts:

Thanks to the miracle of cellular technology, I was able to talk to a homeowner while his home was surrounded by police conducting an RNC-related raid. At approximately two-thirty this afternoon, I reached Mike Whelan, a waiter and army veteran, at his duplex at 951 Iglehart Ave. in St. Paul, Minnesota. Whelan said he'd invited independent observers from the group LegalWatch stay in one half of his side-by-side duplex while they monitored RNC protests.

Whelan described himself as a supporter of the RNC demonstrations, but said he is not affiliated with any particular group. "I want to build a country that's based on good social values," he explained. . . Whelan said it was especially perplexing that the police would target his home.

"There's nothing here," he said, "These are the "checking" people. They're not even going to be in the demonstration. Some are lawyers."

Whelan was watching a large crowd of legal observers gathering across the street, many wearing red or green hats. The police officers he could identify were from St. Paul, but he thought there might be other forces on the scene as well. The officers were wearing black uniforms. Their vehicles were "non-descript" vans, not police cruisers. TV cameras were also on the scene. Whelan couldn't be sure because a tree was blocking his view, but he thought City Council member Melvin Carter had arrived. Whelan called him when the raid started. (Talk about constituent service.)

"You figure this would be going on in South Africa, or Russia, not in St Paul," Whelan said, marveling at the incongruity of it all,"St. Paul is nice."

Is this homeland security? In May of this year I posted about the FBI and its plan to infiltrate the Minneapolis groups. Marcy Wheeler adds current perspective to this bizarre story. "This Is What Happens When You Use Terrorism Laws to Investigate Hippies." By: emptywheel Sunday August 31, 2008. To quote her conclusion:

. . . all the more reason to find out the precise role of the JTTF in these raids. If the Bush DOJ approved the use of terrorism techniques to prepare for the convention--in spite of the fact that such an approval would violate DOJ guidelines--we'd have a crystal clear example of why it is inappropriate to interpret terrorism as broadly as the Bush Administration has been pushing to do.

Two of my blog friends left home for the Veterans for Peace march in Minneapolis. "Spadoman" did not have far to go, but "Kitchen Window Woman" traveled all the way from California, saying, " Today we are on our way to the Veterans For Peace Convention in Minneapolis and are real excited." By some stroke of luck they met in person there. Spadoman tells the story:

I am currently working as a volunteer for the Veterans For Peace National Convention right here in my backyard. The turnout is great. The lineup of speakers is fantastic. I had the pleasure to meet a member of The American Patriot Institute as well, none other than Kitchen Window Woman and her husband. I am looking forward to speaking with her more.

References:

• *Dandelion Salad (8/31/08): MPLS Liberty Parade (videos) and Bruce Gagnon's piece, "Space For Democracy Declines + Live video of police raid on anti-RNC activists + stimulator #2"


• ACLU Blog (8/30/08): Scoops!! Are We Safe and Free Yet?


• ACLU Blog (8/29/08): Katrina Remembered


• South by Southwest posts labeled "civil liberties or security"

View my current slide show about the Bush years -- "Millennium" -- at the bottom of this column.

(Cross-posted at The Reaction.)

My “creativity and dreaming” post today is at Making Good Mondays.

Technorati tags: news news and politics politics 2008 election [republicans gustav minneapolis mccain hurricane

McCain Digested

The Republican Convention is scheduled to start tomorrow, unless it is postponed due to bad weather. Dems denizens of the blogosphere will have a very different experience, I dare say. This week we get to be the opposition naysayers, as equally partisan Republicans were during the Democratic Convention. On of my regular contributors, Jon, has sent me a number of good leads. It is a set that deserves its on separate post. Co-authored by Jon, let's call it --

McCain Digested:

Section One -- Puzzlement over Palin

• 8/30/08 -- "Alter: Why Sarah Palin Is Likely to Belly-Flop" at Newsweek.
• (8/30/08) -- From Politico.com, "Scholars question Palin credentials," by Fred Barbash and David Mark. To quote:

  John McCain was aiming to make history with his pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, and historians say he succeeded. Presidential scholars say she appears to be the least experienced, least credentialed person to join a major-party ticket in the modern era.
  
  So unconventional was McCain’s choice that it left students of the presidency literally “stunned,” in the words of Joel Goldstein, a St. Louis University law professor and scholar of the vice presidency. “Being governor of a small state for less than two years is not consistent with the normal criteria for determining who’s of presidential caliber,” said Goldstein.

• I got this link recently from both Jon and my blog friend "betmo," (good minds run in the same directions) -- Think Progress: "Top Alaska Republicans puzzled by Palin pick." To quote:
  
  

  The Anchorage Daily News reports that the state’s leading Republicans are expressing shock and bewilderment over John McCain’s selection of their governor as his running mate. . .
  

• Jon said, "This looks like typical doublespeak or is this just flat out lying?" 8/30/08 -- The story is from Think Progress, "Palin Repeatedly Professed Desire To Renew Federal Funding For Bridge To Nowhere." To quote:
  
  

  It appears, however, that Palin is lying. As Bradford Plumer first noted, the Anchorage Daily News interviewed Palin during her 2006 campaign for governor. At the time, federal funding for the bridge had been stripped by Congress. They asked if she was in favor of continuing state funding for the project. “Yes,” she responded, noting specifically her desire to renew Congressional support:

  Yes. I would like to see Alaska’s infrastructure projects built sooner rather than later. The window is now–while our congressional delegation is in a strong position to assist.

  That assistance never materialized. When she finally canceled the $400 million project, Palin lamented the fact that Congress was not more forthcoming with federal funding.

• Jon said, "Hey, I just saw this article over at RawStory.com I thought you might like. Check it out! Can you believe this? It must be that compassionate tough love conservatism." (8/29/08) -- To quote:
  
  

  On January 15, 2008, McCain VP nominee Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin called into a radio talk show and laughed as the host questioned Alaska Senate President Lyda Green's parenting, and then further attacked the cancer survivor calling her a "bitch" and a "cancer."
  
  At 7:11 in the audio of the program, the host says "Governor, you can't say this, but we can. She is a cancer and she is nothing but a very jealous woman."
  

Section Two -- Veep Intrigue

• This link "Rove tried to kill Lieberman VP pick" (8/28/08) at Politico.com., is from Jon, who says about it:
  
  

  The nickname of puppetmaster still fits! On another note, what are your thoughts on the fact that polls do not call cell phones for polling. Landlines are somewhat foreign to a whole generation, so I think that the polling results we are fed may be somewhat skewed. I hope I'm correct. As you and I know, the excitement and participation shown by the under 30 crowd was historical. I think that the college age group will be the ace in the hole for Obama. They have no connection with grandpaw mccain, and until grandpaw mccain learns from senator stevens how to use the internets tubes, they never will.
  

• Jon said, "Hey, I just saw this article over at RawStory.com." (8/23/08) -- "Buchanan accuses 'McCain's neocon warmonger' of treason." To quote:
  
  

  According to conservative commentator and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, Sen. John McCain's chief foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann is a dual loyalist,' 'neocon warmonger' involved in activities that 'none dare call treason.'
  
  Scheunemann's former employer, Orion Strategies, is a lobbying firm with strong ties to Mikheil Saakashvili's administration in Georgia. Since Georgia attempted to retake South Ossetia by force, triggering a sharp, violent rebuke by Russian forces, Sen. McCain has been by far the most strident advocate of US support for the former Soviet state.

Section Three -- Pursuing Poor Policies

• Jon said, "This is a brilliant plan!" (8/28/08) -- "McCain’s Health Care Architect: There Are No Uninsured Americans," by "satyam" @ Think Progress: To quote from the post and its own quote:
  
  

  In an interview with the Dallas Morning News yesterday, John Goodman, the “Father of Health Savings Accounts” and architect of Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) health care plan, said the term “uninsured” is a misnomer because Americans have ER access. According to Goodman, “only people who are denied care are truly uninsured – everyone who gets care is effectively insured by some mechanism,” the paper states:

  Mr. Goodman, who helped craft Sen. John McCain’s health care policy, said anyone with access to an emergency room effectively has insurance, albeit the government acts as the payer of last resort. (Hospital emergency rooms by law cannot turn away a patient in need of immediate care.)

  “So I have a solution. And it will cost not one thin dime,” Mr. Goodman said. “The next president of the United States should sign an executive order requiring the Census Bureau to cease and desist from describing any American – even illegal aliens – as uninsured. Instead, the bureau should categorize people according to the likely source of payment should they need care. “So, there you have it. Voila! Problem solved.”

• (8/27/08) -- "Rep. Schakowsky On McCain’s Women’s Rights Record: ‘He’s Not With Us’ @ Think Progress, by Amanda. The author interviewed Rep. Schakowsky for the post. To quote:
  
  

  . . . the SeaChange Ideas Forum. One of the speakers at the event was Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Democratic Vice Chair of the bipartisan Women’s Caucus.
  
  Schakowsky blasted the Bush administration’s record on women’s issues, calling his tenure “anti-women” from day one. In particular, she criticized a recent Bush administration memo that “defines several widely used contraception methods as abortion and protects the right of medical providers to refuse to offer them.

• About Fox-fair-and-balanced, (8/26/08) -- "Fox makes stunning attack on Jon Stewart, citing Oscars' A ratings after he criticizes political coverage: Stunning attack defends network's 'balanced' label" To quote:
  
  

  After Jon Stewart called Fox News is as "an appendage of the Republican Party" Monday in Denver, Rupert Murdoch's 24-hour cable news broadcast returned fire with flames.
  
  "Wearing a gray T-shirt, khaki pants and a healthy stubble, the 'Daily Show' host told reporters at a University of Denver breakfast that Fox's 'fair and balanced' slogan is an insult 'to people with brains' and
  that only 'Fox News Sunday' host Chris Wallace "saves that network from slapping on a bumper sticker. . . . Barack Obama could cure cancer and they'd figure ..

Puzzlement over Palin, Veep Intrigue, Pursuing Poor Policies -- all Fair and Balanced -- Today's post is a collaborative advocacy effort between a regular reader and me, as we try to digest what the McCain candidacy may hold out for the nation. From here it does not look promising. By the end of next week we will know much more.

View my current slide show about the Bush years -- "Millennium" -- at the bottom of this column.

My “creativity and dreaming” post today is at Making Good Mondays.

Technorati tags: news news and politics politics mccain republicans palin 2008 election

Of swords and plowshares

If the 2008 presidential election goes as many of us would prefer the power and influence of the military will be rebalanced with the forces of peace by the next U.S. President. Even though the military currently inspires more respect than other institutions, according to a recent leadership survey, it is not always the armed forces that need to be taking care of our most urgent non-military matters.

"Swords to plowshares,"at Wikipedia refers to the phrase's biblical origins. The Free Dictionary defines the title of this post as an idiom that refers to, quote:

"beat/turn swords into ploughshares(formal)

to stop preparing for war and to start using the money you previously spent on weapons to improve people's lives.
" It would have been unrealistic to expect a country like the United States to turn swords into ploughshares the moment the Cold War ended."

During the current administration the nation became acclimated to the military taking care of us, particularly during domestic disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. It is no accident that NOLA hero, Admiral Thad W. Allen, Commandant of the United States Coast Guard, was recently chosen as one of our most admired leaders. He is very deserving of the honor. If memory serves me, he was the man who demanded that guns be put away as he walked down the soggy New Orleans streets upon his arrival there. Interestingly enough the U.S. Coast Guard had dual missions. The service is part of the military as well as having a major civilian law enforcement role and rescue along our coasts.

Controversy has raged for the past few months over the current administration's blurring of military and civilian functions. Military intelligence gobbles up a huge portion of the national intelligence budget. The CIA was tasked with torture duties because they were not bound by the same strictures as the military. The head of the CIA wears a uniform. It was proposed at one point that U.S. military spy satellites be trained on our own citizens. The State Department turned most of its work over to the military in Iraq.

The military-industrial complex is ubiquitous. I have often posted about the issue here at S/SW. But the idea does have a lighter side. National Guard soldiers eventually get back to their civilian jobs, if they live long enough. Generals retire and find their voices in order to speak out about the wrongs.

The perfect metaphor for turning swords into plowshares -- "Missile base on sale as ideal home," trumpets this BBC News September headline. To quote:

A former US intercontinental ballistic missile base - with a network of underground tunnels and silos, but no nuclear warheads - is on sale on eBay for $1.5m (£750,000, 1.06m euros).

Located in a remote corner of Washington state and still ringed by its original barbed-wire-topped fence, the 56-acre site is being marketed as a "gorgeous" property and potential resort.

Bari Hotchkiss bought the former base 10 years ago from owners who obtained the property in the 1970s, after the US government deemed obsolete the Titan missiles it was built to launch.

A number of other former US missile bases are also on the market. The website missilebases.com describes the buildings as "castles of the 20th century". Designed to withstand nuclear attack, these unique properties "bring new meaning to the word 'shelter'," it says.

And we can be very thankful that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is civilian run in the pursuit of the peaceful and international use of space.Take a minute to send the astronauts your holiday good wishes: NASA - NASA Invites Public ...to send personal greetings to the crew of the International Space Station. I quote their news release:

News Releases

Katherine Trinidad
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-3749
katherine.trinidad@nasa.gov

Nicole Cloutier-Lemasters
Johnson Space Center, Houston
281-483-5111
nicole.cloutier-1@nasa.gov

Dec. 13, 2007

MEDIA ADVISORY : M07-185

NASA Invites Public to Send Holiday Greetings to Space Station

HOUSTON - Many people will travel for the holidays, but no one will be farther from home than the astronauts aboard the International Space Station. With that in mind, NASA invites the public to send personal holiday greetings to the orbiting crew.

NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, the first female to command the station, and her crewmates are circling Earth at 17,500 mph, orbiting 16 times each day. Whitson and Flight Engineer Yuri Malenchenko, a Russian cosmonaut, have been on the station since Oct. 12. Flight Engineer Dan Tani, a U.S. astronaut, joined them Oct. 25. Together, they make up the 16th resident crew of the orbiting outpost.

The crew members share their thoughts about the holidays and provide a peek at some of their orbital decorations in a special video message airing on NASA Television beginning at 1 p.m. CST Friday and available on the NASA Web site. The crew will have some off-duty time for the holidays and share a special meal. On Dec. 26, a Russian Progress cargo ship will arrive with a special holiday delivery, including fresh food, supplies and gifts.

To send a personalized message to the crew, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov

Once your message is submitted, visitors also may select a NASA-themed e-postcard to send to a friend. For more about the Expedition 16 mission and crew, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/station

For NASA TV streaming video, scheduling and downlink information, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

My reference links:

1. "A DOE Program Is Turning Swords Into Plowshares" (8/21/00) Re: Russia
   
2. "China and the United States Turn Swords into Plowshares in Africa" (1/31/07)
3. THE FIN PROJECT: FROM SWORDS INTO PLOWSHARES - A Sculpture by John T. Young. (Seattle, Washington, 1998; Miami, Florida, 2002)

View my current slide show about the Bush years, "Millennium," at the bottom of this column.

(Cross-posted at The Reaction.)

My “creativity and dreaming” post today at Making Good Mondays is about homeless veterans.

Technorati tags: news news and politics politics military

NOLA revisited

Today is the 2nd anniversary of Hurricane Katrina coming ashore in New Orleans, Louisiana. I dreaded writing this post and have avoided it for days. Why is it so hard to write about this? I am safe and dry, having been in my current home for years. I have no painful memories of living in Louisiana, I personally know no one who is now a member of the New Orleans Diaspora, nor do I plan to visit New Orleans any time soon. I feel ashamed that I complain about this simple difficulty. And my shame is perhaps the collective shame of a nation associated with what happened to our neighbors in New Orleans. I feel as if I know some of the people personally because KERA, our PBS station, broadcast a powerful story at 8:00 PM last night, that is still with me this morning. (See link. For scheduled rebroadcast times, click on last night's 8:00 program box.) The title is,

"Still Waiting: Life After Katrina - The story of a large New Orleans family's struggle to return home in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Today the President visits NOLA again - Our current president (OCP) will be making his predictable in-person visit. OCP has visited before. People are not impressed, because he has said lots of things about this in the past, according to Free Republic. They remain skeptical with good reason. To quote,

YOU SAID: "Out of New Orleans is going to come that great city again."

WHAT HAPPENED: Before Katrina, New Orleans had 128 public schools, only 83 have reopened. Before Katrina, the city had 13 public libraries, today it has nine. Fewer than two-thirds of pre-storm hospital beds are available. Just 98 out of the 276 child-care facilities have reopened. Only 60 percent of its pre-Katrina population of 455,000 reside in New Orleans today.

Local musicians -- the city's heart and soul -- are barely making it. Once numbering 3,000, musicians have dropped to 1,800 -- with many begging to be paid minimum wage. So desperate, a few dozen took to the streets Sunday protesting the cut-throat wages.

What remains in parts of New Orleans is a ghost of what was. Many homes are still in disrepair and unoccupied, their front stoops leading to piles of splintered two-by-fours and dangling wires.

What we're asking, Mr. President: How can New Orleans achieve greatness, when so many residents can't go home?

The private sector will not by itself be able to save New Orleans, though they were there early and have stayed long. An upbeat LA Times story was atypical of most of the big newspapers' articles. It optimistically headlined, "Old city revels in a new spirit of innovation." And according to the Boston Globe, Citizens are still trying hard to make it better. The quote from the Boston Globe story is about the Gentilly neighborhood,

Two years after their city was nearly annihilated by a massive levee failure, the residents of this New Orleans neighborhood acknowledged that their surroundings still look pretty bad. But they also insisted that things slowly are getting better. Just 31 percent of Gentilly's 16,000 addresses were reoccupied or renovated as of March, according to a survey by a Dartmouth College professor. But another 57 percent finally were being fixed up.

Private citizens, not the government, deserved the credit, they said -- a source of grim humor among those laboring to mend the neighborhood.

"Of course, we should also thank [President] George Bush, [Governor] Kathleen Blanco, and [Mayor C.] Ray Nagin," resident Robert Counce said sarcastically as the meeting wrapped up.

The renaissance in America's most beleaguered city, such that it is, is a complex, dynamic, and messy affair. Progress lives alongside stagnation; hope alongside despair.

"Where's the money?" CNN asks the question. Congress appropriated billions for hurricane relief and rebuilding. USA Today says that the pace of rebuilding depends on who pays. Much of New Orleans still resembles an abandoned war zone. And thousands of people living in other parts of the nation are still waiting for help to come home. To quote CNN,

Domestic Marshall Plan

Nobody expected the private sector to rebuild New Orleans by itself. It was assumed the federal government would step up, especially given that the worst of the damage was caused not by the hurricane but by flooding attributed to shoddy levee construction and maintenance by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

What seemed to make the most sense was a kind of domestic Marshall Plan, or at least the appointment of a politician with disaster experience who would be as empowered as Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover was when river flooding destroyed Greenville, Miss., in 1927.

What New Orleans got instead is Donald Powell, the former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Powell's title is federal coordinator of Gulf Coast rebuilding. His role is to be President Bush's ambassador to the disaster-stricken region, meaning his job is to deflect the considerable flak local residents send the feds' way.

Unlike Hoover in the 1920s, Powell has no real power, only a bully pulpit and an ability to play referee when local governments have a beef.

Hat tip to Wounded Bird for planning to attend this meeting: Rising Tide 2 Conference August 24-26, 2007. But, like many of us, she is having a lot of trouble writing about this Katrina Anniversary thing: "It's what happened to New Orleans that I can't write about," she laments. Read further at her blog.
My links:
Cross posted at The Reaction.
Technorati tags: loss culture current affairs news news and politics politics nola hurricane katrina

A very mixed Monday

Today's post is a mix of "Good News and Bad News" -- which, if we think about it, is the way of every day. The hard thing is to keep a decent perspective, and to regularly stay connected to the subjects in which I have a continuing writing interest. As a result Mondays for South by Southwest are labeled "SW-Space-Travel-Mon." Here are my thoughts about today's mixed bag:

We celebrate a hero - Today is a national holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This will be the first year that the King children are now the oldest generation in that family. The USA Today carried the story, headlined, "King's daughter honors parents in Ga." School children all over the nation are out of school; many workers have the day off. And where I live most of us will be at home because it is too bad to get out. It is a shame because our city had a number of events planned for "MLK Day," a day that reminds us of activism, of progress and of peace.

We try to keep warm - The regional news is about a very big ice storm that has knocked out power, brought out the sand trucks, and turned plans on their heads. And it set many of us to worrying. For those of us whose children and grandchildren no longer live with us, worrying about their safety and well-being is not unusual. My 90-year-old mom still worries about me, and that is not a bad thing, as far as I am concerned.

We worry about Iraq - The Iraq situation , in my mind and with Michael J.W. Stickings at The Reaction, is just awful. To add to the sense of impending failure, today we read the headline, "Saddam aides executed" in the Financial Times. The U.S. House and Senate are out today, but they still need our help to deal with the awful situation in Iraq. Tomorrow I will post some ideas of others, and links for citizens to use, as we let them know how we need to be represented regarding these issues.

We check in on NOLA - Every now and then we see a headline about the Gulf states. One recent one reported a huge award to hurricane home owners from an insurance company. We see the streets full of people protesting crime in New Orleans. And we get great fun as we see the New Orleans Saints professional football team be successful. I quote from the deseretnews:

"We've got a lot of hard work that needs to be done. The Saints coming in and winning the way they have has just lifted all of us," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said Sunday. "It's lifted us emotionally, and it's energized us. "It's given us hope."
The Saints will play the Bears in Chicago next Sunday for the NFC championship, another chapter in the most unlikely and heartwarming story of the NFL season.
. . . When Hurricane Katrina stormed through Aug. 29, 2005, it looked as if the Saints might break New Orleans' heart once again. Dislocated like so many residents, the Saints moved to San Antonio, and many feared that's where they would stay.
But the team returned and has been the one thing that's held the city together when everything else conspires to pull it apart.

Following are a couple of links that provide more current news about what is happening in New Orleans. A group of bloggers post at Metroblogging New Orleans. And here is a "Hurricane news" summary of what is currently happening in New Orleans: CrankyCronos.com.
We check in on NASA
The current International Space Station Status Report is from a NASA news release. And here you can vote on your favorite space images. It is good to close with NASA news; "space" always helps me regain my perspective.

Technorati tags: current-events war events miscellaneous news news and politics sports New Orleans MLK

Congress' grade

What kind of rating does the recent Congress deserve?
Someone whose judgement I trust recently sent me this link to a very extensive article in Rolling Stone entitled, "The Worst Congress Ever." To quote a couple of paragraphs that just about sum it up,

These past six years were more than just the most shameful, corrupt and incompetent period in the history of the American legislative branch. These were the years when the U.S. parliament became a historical punch line, a political obscenity on par with the court of Nero or Caligula -- a stable of thieves and perverts who committed crimes rolling out of bed in the morning and did their very best to turn the mighty American empire into a debt-laden, despotic backwater, a Burkina Faso with cable. . .
One could go on and on about the scandals and failures of the past six years; to document them all would take . . . well, it would take more than ninety-three (expleteve deleted) days, that's for sure. But you can boil the whole sordid mess down to a few basic concepts. Sloth. Greed. Abuse of power. Hatred of democracy. Government as a cheap backroom deal, finished in time for thirty-six holes of the world's best golf. And brains too stupid to be ashamed of any of it. If we have learned nothing else in the Bush years, it's that this Congress cannot be reformed. The only way to change it is to get rid of it.

Fortunately, we still get that chance once in a while.

The author, Matt Taibbi, wrote under 5 searing categories pertaining to the 109th Congress. I paraphrase, "Rule by cabal. . . Work as little as possible. . . Let the President do whatever he wants. . . Spend, spend, spend. . . Line your own pockets."
I have to admit that I had no idea what a "Burkina Faso" is, so I "googled" it. It turns out that it is a West African country, according to the IRIN News Organization. Perhaps that nation should be insulted by the comparison.

A grade from me would be a D-. The reason it is not an F is because they did meet and transact business. Second, the Democrats were in the minority, systematically shut out of the entire process by the Republican majority. And I have several favorite Senators, including Republicans, who perhaps did the best they could under the circumstances.

Where they failed me, personally, was missed potential. Think about these hypotheticals:

• What if Congress held hearings - or even a couple of weeks of real debate - before the vote about whether to go to war with Iraq or not? We might have fought only in Afghanistan, crippled al Qaeda earlier, and saved hundreds of American soldiers' lives and several trillions of our national treasure.
• What if the rule of "PayGo," pay as you go, applied to spending bills? And what if we did not pass any tax cuts in wartime? We might have a manageable budget deficit, or even a surplus.
• What if the "unitary presidency" was stopped in its tracks by bipartisan committee chairs who led the fight to protect the constitution from an assault that now leaves American civil rights at the mercy of executive whim? The nation might be far more safe from terrorists' attacks.
• What if there had been an actual domestic program? School kids might be achieving at their potential. Workers might be able to only hold one job. We might have a safe food supply. Citizens might be able to go to the doctor when they are really sick. And power might come from more sources than only fossil fuels.
• What if the Congress looked at the Gulf Coast as essential to the nation's well-being? New Orleans might have working levees and the rest of the coast might have more restored homes than FEMA trailers.
• What if Congress took pride in being the peoples' representatives, not just representing political parties or special interests? Democrats and Republicans might have lunch together again.

What if?! What if?! It was not to be. But that was then and this is now. November 7 is coming, and I hope the pendulum will begin to swing back to where it belongs.
Tags: congress bush politics news election 2006 scandal

Fall Follies

Fall - 2005
A couple of my blogs (italicized and linked here) from Fall of last year continue to be sought out again and again by some readers. Today's post compares and contrasts past and current news about these issues.

The Executive Branch ran roughshod - Libby scandal reactions, Boo! - 10/31/05: The CIA's Valerie Plame outing by the White House was in the news last Halloween, as well as talk about the false pretenses for the invasion of Iraq. Today no one in the executive branch of government has been held accountable for hardly anything.

Holiday Hunger - Some will be hungry this Thanksgiving - 11/23/05: This post seemed to have touched a chord with readers, particularly many living from abroad. The gap between rich and poor widens every year. Today marks the growth of the U.S. population to 300,000,000+, and a number of those families will be hungry again on Thanksgiving, 2006.

2006
This Fall some legislators will lose elections because they dropped the ball - Your Congress at Work - 2/28/06: In February, not long after the Abramoff scandal broke, Republicans talked about lobbying reform. Today new scandals about elected officials are breaking daily, and there has been no reform. The port security issue was red hot, our current president's ratings were slipping badly, and the news about domestic spying was just begginning to make regular news. Today our unitary executive is set to sign away core parts of citizen civil liberties protections with his torture protection law.

Gulf Folly
NOLA has bright and dark sides - I posted regularly about New Orleans last year. On the year anniversary of the hurricanes, in August of 2006, I returned to the subject with this: About what IS in New Orleans - 8/28/06

For today's visitors, searching on "New Orleans" reveals potential fun for tourists: We find lots of conference happenings at a refurbished convention center, cruise ships docking, news about visitor entertainment, music and art events, hotel promotions, environment and energy interest news, Superdome renewed for football, a wedding guide, and opportunities for water experiences.

For former residents, the picture is very different: an article about poverty from Brookings, and a wonderful essay titled, "The Long Road Home" by Naomi Ishisaka in "Colors" Magazine. To quote a bit of her opening,

When we visited the region in the month after Katrina hit Aug. 29 of last year, our focus was on emergency relief and temporary shelter for the tens of thousands displaced due to a faulty levee system and a flawed disaster response. Our assessment: dismal.
A year later, we went to chronicle how the lives of people of color, in the largest migration since the Dust Bowl, had changed or improved in one of the most significant events in modern U.S. history. Our assessment: still dismal.
There were a thousand and one stories waiting to be told and each one was haunting and heartbreaking.
While huge swaths of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast look much the same as last year, ravaged and forlorn, one striking difference is the ubiquitous FEMA trailer parks dotting the landscape. These parks, with their bright white trailers and guarded entryways, are another reminder that the Gulf Coast is unlike nearly every other place in the United States, where getting into a trailer park is seen as a desirable accomplishment.

More NOLA references:

• An earlier post - The Big Easy today - 8/22/06

Bloggers of Oct/2006 - Metroblogging New Orleans

Happenings - New Orleans Magazine, Calendar

Artists - Bedonna's New Orleans Art News

VOTE - It would be good for voters to remember the responses of elected officials as they go to the polls in November. So far, very few have been held accountable for the aftermath of the hurricane disasters.

Tags: bush history republicans security blogs news and politics travel congress poverty

The Mystery of Memory

Is it not blows to the head. Republicans seem to be plagued by memory loss. However, they sometimes practice purposeful amnesia, they conveniently forget. Too many of them leave out pertinent facts. Current news stories are rife with spin, with amazing Orwellian renderings of reality.

What really happenen or did not happen? Former President Bill Clinton and our current president (OCP) are in a battle over who best fought al Qaeda before 9/11. WaPo writer Peter Baker explores the question in a 9/27 article, from which I quote:

The election-year debate over terrorism has triggered a full-blown spat between the camps of President Bush and former president Bill Clinton as the two sides trade barbs over who was more responsible for failing to disrupt al-Qaeda before it could attack the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.
Bush complained yesterday that Clinton was engaging in "finger-pointing" by attacking the current administration's actions before the hijackings. "I don't have enough time to finger-point," Bush said. But Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did, calling Clinton's version of events "flatly false."

Meetings of minds - Reuters reports that three key presidents will sit down together for a meeting in Washington on Wednesday. Mssrs. Bush, Karzai and Musharraf will all be required to practice the highest forms of purposeful amnesia. Quoting the final paragraphs,

Bush will mediate on Wednesday in three-way talks with Musharraf and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who have accused each other of not doing enough to crack down on militants.
Tensions between the two neighbors have risen as remnants of Afghanistan's former ruling Taliban have regrouped since their overthrow by U.S.-led forces after the September 11 attacks. Afghanistan has seen its heaviest bout of fighting since 2001.

Consistently forgetting the facts - The current administration's leadership style has focused on to focus on the so-called war on terrorism as a way of obscuring failures in the economy, in helping Americans when natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrian hit, etc. Regular fact-checking helps get at more of the truth. "A Misleading Appeal to Fear" at FactCheck.org/ from which I quote, illustrates the tactic:

Pro-Bush group misstates key facts about anti-terror campaign.
September 8, 2006. Appeal to Fear
The ad is a raw appeal to fear, saying "these people want to kill us" while showing weapons-toting fighters and a huge crowd chanting "Death to America." It adds, "Many seem to have forgotten the evil that happened only five years ago," while showing an orange fireball billowing from the World Trade Center south tower as United Airlines Flight 175 slammed into it Sept. 11, 2001.
Strictly speaking, the ad is clearly false on that point. We know of nobody who has "forgotten" the events of 9/11, and we doubt that Progress for America can name a single person who has. If what PFA means by this statement is that "many" people don't see 9/11 as justification for the military campaign in Iraq or the President's domestic antiterror actions, they are correct. Many do disagree.

Who remembers? Senator George Allen and some of his critics differ on whose memory about Allen's racial attitudes is correct, according to a recent story (9/26) by Bob Lewis of Yahoo!News.

References:

1. CNN on "How Memory Works"
2. Perfect Memory
   

   James McGaugh is one of the world's leading experts on how the human memory system works. But these days, he admits he's stumped. McGaugh's journey through an intellectual purgatory began six years ago when a woman now known only as AJ wrote him a letter detailing her astonishing ability to remember with remarkable clarity even trivial events that happened decades ago. Give her any date, she said, and she could recall the day of the week, usually what the weather was like on that day, personal details of her life at that time, and major news events that occurred on that date. . .
   His initial hypothesis, like several others, has turned out to be wrong — or at least incomplete. McGaugh has spent decades studying how such things as stress hormones and emotions affect memory, and at first he thought AJ's memories were of such emotional power that she couldn't forget them. But that hypothesis fell short of the mark when it became obvious that "the woman who can't forget" remembers trivial details as clearly as major events. . That level of recall suggests another hypothesis. Some people are able to recall past events by categorizing them. Certain events, or facts, are associated with others, and filed away together so that they may be easier to access. That's a trick that is often used by entertainers who use feats of memory to wow their audience. AJ does have "some sort of compulsive tendencies. She wants order in her life," McGaugh says. "As a child, she would get upset if her mother changed anything in her room because she had a place for everything and wanted everything in its place." So she does categorize events by the date, but that doesn't explain why she remembers it." Also, her degree of recall is so much greater than any other person's in the scientific literature that it seems unlikely to be the complete answer, McGaugh adds.

Tags: bush clinton iraq islam security terrorism war

More good news . . .

Today brings more good news to highlight. This post focuses on hopeful news because I am sad this weekend. Monday it will have been five years since the tragedy of 9/11/01.
Here are a few things about which I am happy:

• NASA's Space shuttle Atlantis was launched into orbit this morning towards a renewal of International Space Station assembly. This is a return to flight following the Columbia tragedy that illustrates the nation's gritty willingness to try again. In the face of aged equipment, schedule pressures, lightning strikes, and a hurricane, the STS-115 crew soared into the sky over Florida. The crew (including a single female astronaut) intends to put more parts onto the worlds biggest erector set, paving the way for the installation of multiple scientific modules developed by countries all over the world.
• A recent European space shot yielded extraordinarily rich data about our silver neighborly orb in the sky, the earth's moon. ESA's success is indeed something to celebrate in this truly international - and peaceful - space effort. By the way, British astrophysicist, Stephen Hawking is looking for an assistant, in case anyone is interested. The job pays $44,300.
• The New York Times published a story asserting that Vice-President Cheney is losing influence. And the neocon moon is on the wane. This news could not be better. To quote,

  . . . as the nation marks the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Mr. Cheney finds the powers he has asserted under attack and his own influence challenged. Congress and the Supreme Court have pushed back at his claim that the president alone, as commander in chief, can set the rules for detention, interrogation and domestic spying. . .
  On national security issues, Mr. Cheney, once the unchallenged adviser to a president who came to office with little experience in foreign affairs, remains a pivotal figure but now vies for influence with other powerful officials like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser. Over the past 18 months, Mr. Cheney appears to have reluctantly given ground on detention practices and, at least for now, on policy disputes involving Iran and North Korea.

• There has been a drop in K Street's hiring of lobbyists in Washington. Worried, they are preparing for a possible takeover of the House by Democrats. This news is much more concrete than poll numbers. It is beginning to sink in. The story begins,

  Growing worry in some political corners that the Republicans won't retain control of the House in the fall elections is prompting more K Street groups to delay hiring lobbying and congressional representatives. And even White House advisers are trying to figure out how they might work with a split Congress.
  
  In an interview, a former Bush administration official said that there are very preliminary talks inside the White House about which programs and initiatives would benefit or be killed with a Democratic takeover. The former official, who now advises the administration, added that the effort is more focused on how to use a House Democratic majority to push through programs such as those on healthcare and retirement.
  
  

Many of us do not relish bad news for OCP. But in his situation, our current president has only himself to blame for administration failures that can be tied to stubbornness, arrogance or failure to hire good people. I wanted the president to succeed at the beginning, but I knew I was hoping against hope. Unfortunately, it will take many years to repair the damage. That makes it even more important to begin right now, in 2006, with the fall elections.

Tags: politics Bush NASA Cheney
My "creative post" today at Southwest Blogger is about history's mysteries.

State of the Nation - Part I

Part I: Health and Wealth - Taking stock
U.S. citizen health and wealth depends on where you sit. If you are a Katrina survivor, your mental health is more at risk. And the Census Bureau's reported slight rise in median family income is deceptive. And 15.9% of our citizens have no health care insurance, an increase over the previous year. Things are not rosy for all of us.

Mental Health - A new Harvard study found that Katrina survivors have double the rate of serious mental illness than before the storm. But suicidality among them decreased. Reuters reports on the study, from which I quote,

Hurricane Katrina doubled the rate of serious mental illness in areas ravaged by the storm but the urge to commit suicide fell, partly because survivors bonded with each other, a Harvard-led study said on Monday. . . about 200,000 people from Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi face serious mental illness because of Katrina, with about a third suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome and the remainder depression, said Ronald Kessler, the study's lead researcher.
Nearly 85 percent of the survivors faced a major financial, income, or housing loss, and more than a third endured extreme physical adversity after Katrina struck a year ago and flooded 80 percent of New Orleans, the survey showed. Nearly 23 percent encountered extreme psychological adversity. . . Kessler, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School, said the number of people reporting a desire to kill themselves declined, in part because many survivors had forged stronger ties with loved ones and their community.
"We found an extraordinarily high proportion of our sample who said that despite the understandable sadness with all they lost and the understandable anxieties about the future ... that they felt closer to their loved ones, they felt connected to the community in a way they didn't before," he said.
"They felt much more religious, they felt that they had a purpose in their life and a meaning," he said, noting that 88.5 percent of the survivors in the survey said Katrina had helped them develop a deeper sense of meaning or purpose in life.
"Those are the people where these suicidal tendencies decreased," he said.

Gov't says "Get help" - SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration), through a public service campaign, is urging the survivors to seek mental health services.
The U.S. Census Bureau issues a report every year. It came out yesterday. Read it all in the Census Report (pdf-86 pgs), "Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2005." The New York Times has good coverage of the new census report. It begins,

The nation’s median household income rose slightly faster than inflation last year for the first time in six years, the Census Bureau reported yesterday.
The rise, however, had little to do with bigger paychecks — in fact, both men and women earned less in 2005 than 2004. Rather, census officials said, more family members were taking jobs to make ends meet, and some people made more money from investments and other sources beyond wages.

Uninsured rate up: Census Bureau - The Catholic Health Association, according to Medical News Today, wants more attention on the part of the report that indicates the number of uninsured persons is still on the rise. Quoting from the story,

Sr. Carol Keehan, DC, CHA's president and chief executive officer, noted that "while the annual ritual of fixating on the latest census data prompts a flash of attention or brief debate of the statistics, the exercise can leave many numb to what the data really represents -- women, men, and children, who daily live without accessible and affordable health care. This is intolerable."
While the latest estimate of nearly 47 million uninsured reflects an increase to 15.9
percent of the population, there are several discouraging factors found in the Census Bureau report. Despite ongoing initiatives to enroll children in the SCHIP program, 8.3 million (11.2 percent) of children continue to be uninsured. And a review of the Census figures shows a continuing decline in employer-sponsored coverage.

In "The State of the Nation - Part II," I will examine another malady, the state of our Nation's leadership.
Tags: Bush Hurricane Katrina current affairs health and wellness News politics census
My current "creative post" at Southwest Blogger is about precious stones.

About what IS in New Orleans

Today's pace of living can be daunting for busy people. So much happens that we are not fully able to integrate all of it into our minds. But now we are all trying to integrate Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans. Sometimes the thought flashes, "I'll just have to think about that later." And that mental processing may or may not actually happen. Like Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind, I say, "I'll think about that tomorrow." This idea came to me after blogger - with whom I sometimes exchange comments and e-mails - wrote,

"I'm settling into life after jet-lag, I hope to find the time &
mental space for post-trip processing. :-)"

Feeling mentally overwhelmed happens to me during those times when lots of changes are happening. Adjusting to change, whether positive or negative, is stressful. That is because change requires me to think in a new way. The changed realities of my own life must be integrated into my mind, along with changes in the reality of the world.
It applies to the daily news, because I am a "news junkie." I may not be directly affected by a news story, but it does affect the way I think about what IS. I am a curious analytical soul. I have always needed explanations for what it is that makes things are the way they are. I must have plagued my mom with "why's."
The perfect blogger motivation is speculating about or analyzing the news. As I write, I integrate these significant happenings into my mind. I understand. I now know why. And I could be totally wrong. (The anniversary of . . . ) initiates more mental processing and integrating realities. And the months of August and September kick me into thinking about 9/11/01 and 8/29/05.
Post-Katrina anniversary processing is my current preoccupation. The reality I see is perhaps obvious:

• New Orleans will never be the same city again as before 8/29/05. And the federal government does not intend for it to be further protected or rebuilt, despite all the rhetoric. What was, is now history.
• Local, state and federal will and capacity to help victims of flooding remains inadequate. Far too many corporations are profiting from Katrina's misery. It is still not safe to live anywhere below sea or lake level in New Orleans.
• Thousands who had homes in New Orleans will never be at home there again. Some evacuees will learn to feel at home somewhere else, some will always feel homesick for New Orleans. A different culture will emerge there.
• The nation is still plagued by racism and class distinction. America is more polarized now than in many years. And those in charge do not care that this is the way it is.

Resources:

1. National Public Radio programs: Morning Edition
2. Center for Public Integrity "Katrina Watch"

Tags: New Orleans Hurricane Katrina News and Opinion Bush politics

Uncertain future for NOLA

NOLA is not a close friend of mine; she is more like an acquaintance. Since we are neighbors, we have visited back and forth. We have traveled there, and many New Orleans residents have traveled here. Many have decided to live here permanently.
New Orleans holds very fond memories for me. We flew in there in the 1970's for a sales meeting. My job was to produce color 8x10 photos of the top salesmen. My backdrop was a lush courtyard outside of our French Quarter hotel. The shots turned out later to be hits with the winners and with their wives, too.
That night we all strolled down Bourbon Street,just as millions of other tourists have before and since. And we heard the familiar sounds of gut-bucket jazz coming through open doors, caught glimpses of skinny young women dancing on the bars, smelled the earthy and distinctive creole food, and watched others like ourselves going in the opposite direction. If I have nostalgia for those memories, just think how very bittersweet these descriptions are with readers who are intimate friends with NOLA.
She is still at risk. Yahoo!News reports that,

Despite aggressive efforts to repair the New Orleans levee system following the destruction of Hurricane Katrina, it isn't clear yet whether it could withstand a sizable hurricane this year, the head of the Army Corps of Engineers conceded Saturday.

The New Orleans levees may not hold, according to a similar CBS News article. To quote,

As Gulf Coast residents are marking the one year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, they were hit with the news that Tropical Storm Ernesto is headed toward the Gulf of Mexico and could become the first hurricane of the 2006 season. Then New Orleans residents were told Saturday that the partially repaired levee system may not hold up in a strong storm. . .
Just a few miles south of New Orleans, St. Bernard parish took a direct hit from Katrina. One year later, few of houses are habitable, and as many as 14,000 people are still in government trailers — trailers that won't withstand any real wind.
"It would be almost a death sentence if they decide to stay in those locations with the approach of a Category 2 or 3 storm," Jack Stephens, St. Bernard parish's sheriff told Bowers.
Despite aggressive efforts to repair the system following the destruction of Hurricane Katrina, the head of the Army Corps of Engineers conceded Saturday that it isn't clear yet whether it could withstand a hurricane with a heavy storm surge this year.

New Orleans stands at a cross roads now. It seems it could go either way for this unique city. The New York Times has a very good story about this written by Adam Nossiter. The author has done a very thorough piece of investigative journalism about what may be in NOLA's future. To quote,

At one edge of this city’s future are the extravagant visions of its boosters. Awash in federal cash, the New Orleans they dream of will be an arts-infused mecca for youthful risk-takers, a boomtown where entrepreneurs can repair to cool French Quarter bars in ancient buildings after a hard day of deal making.

At the other extreme are the gloomy predictions of the pessimists. New Orleans will be Detroit, they say, a sickly urban wasteland abandoned by the middle class. A moldering core will be surrounded by miles of vacant houses, with wide-open neighborhoods roamed by drug dealers and other criminals. The new New Orleans will be merely a grim amplification of its present unpromising self, the pessimists say.

Tags: NOLA New Orleans News politics

Dateline Iraq - August 2006

(photo by lowyota @ StockXCHNG)
U.S troops still fight in Iraq. And the region remains a very dangerous place. Iraq, for me will always be one of those on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand stories. For ambivalent citizens of both the United States and Iraq there are no easy answers. The war has become a political issue for both groups. And public opinion remains divided about terrorism and how to fight the war. Armed forces of both countries are stretched to the maximum. My post today is a mixture of bad news and good. It concludes with the good news that it can become easier to understand why things are the way they are in the region. Come to know Vali Nasr**.
Some Marines face "involuntary recall" says this story from Yahoo! News. And the recall for most will surely be involuntary. Many of them probably had no idea the bad news could come to this. To quote from the story,

The U.S. Marine Corps will start ordering what could be thousands of inactive service members to return to duty in the coming months to counter a steady decline in the number of such troops who volunteer, the service said on Tuesday.

Catch up on Iraq with this excellent Iraq status overview article from Yahoo! News. There may be room for a bit of cautions optimism about a drop in violence in Baghdad. Time will tell the full story. Quoting from the current piece,

Violence in Baghdad has declined in the past two weeks and all but ended in some formerly deadly neighborhoods, the U.S. military said in a cautiously upbeat report on Tuesday on a major security clampdown in the city.

An American public opinion poll, reported in the New York Times, reveals a positive change in people's attitudes about terrorism and the Middle East. After far too long, Americans are coming to believe what has been true all along about the war news. The Iraq war originally had nothing to do with terrorism. Now it does, of course, but only as a consequence of the U.S. invasion. Obviously it is good news that people are learning the truth; the bad news is that it took so long. To quote from the current article,

Americans increasingly see the war in Iraq as distinct from the fight against terrorism, and nearly half believe President Bush has focused too much on Iraq to the exclusion of other threats, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
The poll found that 51 percent of those surveyed saw no link between the war in Iraq and the broader antiterror effort, a jump of 10 percentage points since June. That increase comes despite the regular insistence of Mr. Bush and Congressional Republicans that the two are intertwined and should be seen as complementary elements of a strategy to prevent domestic terrorism.

Iraqi public opinion polls show an interesting mix of good-news/bad-news trends that are changing over time. The descent towards civil war may be sinking in on the Iraqis. They may realize that their nation's future cannot be assured if they remain so divided along sectarian lines. This news was reported in this fairly recent (8/17/06) article from US News and World Report.

The unrelenting violence and chaos of Iraq have taken their toll on the people there, according to a new study of Iraqi public opinion. The study, based on two surveys of over 2,300 Iraqis in 2004 and 2006, found increased feelings of powerlessness, insecurity, xenophobia, and pessimism, along with a striking level of distrust of U.S. intentions. At the same time, the surveys found a surprising rise in support for secular politics and nationalism, even as sectarian militias may be pulling the country toward all-out civil war. Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the project was done by Profs. Mansoor Moaddel of Eastern Michigan University and Ronald Inglehart and Mark Tessler of the University of Michigan. . .
One bright spot in the research: Iraqi attitudes appear to be veering away from support for a religious regime and toward support for secular politics and nationalism -- despite the lack of secular politicians and the growth of sectarian violence. Those agreeing it was "very good to have an Islamic government where religious leaders have absolute power" declined from 30 percent to 22 percent, with a major falloff in support from Sunnis (from 20 percent to 6 percent), who fear the majority Shiites will impose an Iran-like theocracy on Iraq. Even the Shiites showed a drop in support, to only about a third of those surveyed (from 39 percent to 34 percent).

Iran's power grows month by month. And the United States cannot continue forever to refuse to talk to that government. Aaccording to this story from Reuters,

Iran's standing in the Middle East has been bolstered by President George W Bush's "war on terror" and its power will continue to grow unless stability is restored to its neighbors, a top think tank said on Tuesday.
London's Royal Institute for International Affairs said wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel's conflict with the Palestinians and with Lebanon's Hizbollah had put Iran "in a position of considerable strength."
"There is little doubt that Iran has been the chief beneficiary of the war on terror in the Middle East," the RIIA said in a report on the region.

**Good Reference: Mid-east politics "101" - I recommend that you become acquainted with the outstanding work of Iranian-born, Dr. Vali Nasr, Naval Postgraduate School National Security Professor. The good news is that it is possible to come to a better understanding of these very complex issues. I have discovered someone who, for the first time for me, helped me to understand much more deeply what is behind the volatility in the region. Dr. Nasr's prominent family of origin escaped Iran (he was in high school), just before the fall of the Shah. His father was a professor and chief of staff for the Shah's wife. Here are some ways to learn more from this very rich info resource:

• Council on Foreign Relations published a ground-breaking Nasr article, "When the Shiites Rise," published in July/August Foreign Affairs. Summary -

"By toppling Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration has liberated and empowered Iraq's Shiite majority and has helped launch a broad Shiite revival that will upset the sectarian balance in Iraq and the Middle East for years to come. This development is rattling some Sunni Arab governments, but for Washington, it could be a chance to build bridges with the region's Shiites, especially in Iran."

• Nasr'sArticle (18 pg. pdf): "Regional Implications of Shia Revival in Iraq".
• **C-SPAN VIDEO: "Washington Journal" 8/14/06 interview exploring the background and history of the Middle-east region. Dr. Nasr is probably the best expert I have ever heard on Islam, including the differences between Shia and Sunni.
• Most recent publication: "The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future" (Hardcover) by Vali Nasr.
• Dogpile search "ValiNasr".

Tags: Bush Iran Iraq security terrorism war current affairs News News and politics Middle East
My "creative post" today at Southwest Blogger is about NOLA and Hurricane Katrina.

The Big Easy Today

First anniversary of Hurricane Katrina brings lots of television attention to New Orleans. Probably the best news is that C-SPAN is in New Orleans Monday and Tuesday - with wonderful coverage. Visit their website for a wide range of information resources. Take the time to watch the coverage on today's "Washington Journal," starting at 7:00 A.M. (est) or "Lessons "Learned from Hurricane Katrina" at 1:00 P.M. (est).

Photo left is of Chalmette, Louisiana - September 2005.
Under the heading of GOOD JOB DONE DURING RECOVERY:

• nola.com - website of The New Orleans Times-Picayune
• Louisiana United Disaster Response Ministry - website of a group that enables church volunteers from all over the world to help residents start to rebuild their home. The Rev. Darryl Allen Tate appeared on C-SPAN Monday.
• NOPD - Assistant Superintendent Warren Riley seems to have done a good job of trying to turn around the NOPD from its disastrous performance record at the time of Katrina.
• Metro Hurricane Katrina - the Brookings Institution study of related issues
• NOAA images of Hurricane Katrina - lots of richly detailed satellite images of the Gulf coast. These are in the public domain, but credit National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Under the heading of INTERESTING WEBSITES:

• neworleans.com - opens with a neat little video of sights and sounds of New Orleans, a rich website with 4 staff listed, in existence since 1995.
• New Orleans Calendar - lots of hotlinks to scheduled events details
• New Orleans Wiki -volunteer maintained collection of articles about NOLA and info about the Rising Tide Conference

Under the heading of a POOR JOB DONE DURING RECOVERY:

• City of New Orleans - an excellent and very modern website that does not reflect the poor job done by the city administration.
• State of Louisiana - official website of LA., the entity most responsible for administering Federal aid to New Orleans. Bureaucracy at its worst.
• U.S. Army Corps of Engineers - near the bottom of the list. It was their levees that failed and let the city drown.
• FEMA.gov - at the bottom of the list, with big grade of "F."

Tags: NOLA New Orleans Hurricane Katrina FEMA Gulf Coast recovery government
My "creative post" today at Southwest Blogger is a short essay about New Orleans.