(no subject)

Seems Babs Bush sees a silver lining for all those displaced folks from Katrina:

"Almost everyone I've talked to said we're going to move to Houston. What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. (Said with concern.) Everybody is so overwhelmed by all the hospitality. And so many of the peoples in the arena here, you know, they're underprivileged anyway, so this--this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them."

- Barbara Bush

Yes, I'm sure it's working just beautifully for all those people without money, possessions or more than a cot at the Astrodome to call home. Hell, it's just like an extended vacation, right?

I begin to wonder if the press corps really has returned to the business of telling the news rather than acting as the Bush propaganda machine, I had thought so when even Fox reporters were turning on their own, but now I begin to see hints that the "rah-rah Bush!" crowd may be taking over again. I keep waiting for the Great Awakening and thinking, "This, this is it, surely people must now see what's really going on", only to be disappointed time and time again. I'm trying to remain optimistic, but I've been burned a little too often in the past 5 years.

Despite watching way too much Katrina coverage this weekend, I did manage to have a pleasant enough time. Got in close to 5 hours of dancing Saturday and Sunday, lots of chores, cat-sitting, a little shopping, and went to see "Skeleton Key". It was sad in a lot of ways, looking at what NO used to be not so long ago, as compared to the video I've been watching all weekend. It reminds me of that little pang I get every time I watch something set in NY that shows the twin towers. But it was a decent film, not terribly scary, more of a psychological thriller with a little dash of hoo-doo worked in. It would've been more fun if I hadn't figured out the plot about halfway through, but I liked the rather twisted revenge aspect, and the music was superb. I'm almost tempted to pick up the soundtrack.

Thanks to taking yesterday off from dance I now have a clean apartment and nice fresh laundry, yay! Also 4 cats currently have clean litterboxes, go me! I tried to do a mental calculation of how much litter I lugged around yesterday, then it started depressing me so I stopped. Let's just say too much and leave it at that. Also managed to grab tersa and cyranocyrano for dinner, mmmm, tofu teriyaki! I ate like a total pig, but I hadn't had much all day and I had been working pretty hard. All things considered it could've been much worse.

And now I leave you on this note, GFI Suisse Mocha (sugar free/decaf) is just about the tastiest beverage ever invented. I no longer miss my Starbucks mochas, yay!

Quote of the Day

You just cannot top this. Via Pandagon:

William Kristol:

William Kristol, the conservative publisher of The Weekly Standard, said of Mr. Bush: "I do think people think he could have showed stronger leadership." But Mr. Kristol expressed doubt that the hurricane would have much lasting effect on the president's personal and political fortunes, because "people are capable of saying, 'The president kind of screwed this one up, but I still basically agree with him.'"

Mr. Kristol added, "I think the Clinton administration would have done a better job in handling Hurricane Katrina, but I'm also glad Bush is president and not a Democrat."

And it would appear that the rising waters in NO flushed out a lot more than petroleum and sewage, it seems to have brought up a whole shitload of bigotry right along with it. Case in point:
Spreading the poison of bigotry

BATON ROUGE, La. -- They locked down the entrance doors Thursday at the Baton Rouge hotel where I'm staying alongside hundreds of New Orleans residents driven from their homes by Hurricane Katrina.

"Because of the riots," the hotel managers explained. Armed Gunmen from New Orleans were headed this way, they had heard.

"It's the blacks," whispered one white woman in the elevator. "We always worried this would happen."

You know a lot of what I've been hearing lately makes me think back to my own childhood. I was raised in part by my grandmother and great grandparents on my mom's side, all from the South, and all with more than a hint of racism. It was not surprising to hear my great granddad spout off about "n-'s" screwing up the neighborhood. He wasn't an evil man, ignorant perhaps, but also one of the most loving men I've ever known in my life. I could never quite reconcile his bigotry and conviction that all people of color were somehow lower life forms with his gentleness, kindness, and endless patience with me and my sisters while we were growing up. It caused a vague unease that grew worse and worse the older I got.

It continues to bother me.

I don't want to hate the people who react this way, because I know that many of them probably are pretty decent. They're products of the society that they grew up in, the family that raised them, and their own inability to move beyond the prejudices that both instilled in them. And yet at the same time it makes me so fucking angry that all it takes is a few stupid, greedy criminals looting, raping and killing to undermine the progress we've made since the days of the Civil Rights movement.

Read more about this issue, far more eloquently discussed on Hullabaloo:

I don't honestly think there is any racist conspiracy at work. There doesn't need to be. All it takes is a reactivation of long held racist beliefs and attitudes --- attitudes that led the president to say that they had "secured" the convention center on Friday night --- which we all saw in that amazing FoxNews footage actually meant that the desperate survivors had been locked inside the sweltering hellhole. It was the attitude that had tourists staying at the Hyatt hotel being given special dispensation to go to the head of the lines at the Superdome. It was the attitude that made my racist companions disgusted by the "animals" at the convention center because they were living in filth fail to grasp that these people had been expecting to be rescued at any moment for more than four days.

It's that attitude that led these people to talk endlessly about rape with lurid imagery and breathless, barely contained excitement. This too is part of the American lizard brain.

I have no doubt that there was criminality on the streets of New Orleans. When the law disappears, that's what happens. But when you looks closely at our history you see that whenever large numbers of african americans are featured, this is the kind of thing that is said and thought and done. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't believe it or that criminals shouldn't be brought to justice. But our history suggests that when we hear reports of cops gunning down looters, snipers and rapists in the street, we should at least maintain a normal skepticism. Far too often in our history it has been shown later that things were not as they seemed at the time.

Chock full of ranty goodness!

In case you missed it, Keith Olberman:

But, nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe. These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn't even keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure collapse in New Orleans — even though the government had heard all the "chatter" from the scientists and city planners and hurricane centers and some group whose purposes the government couldn't quite discern... a group called The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

And most chillingly of all, this is the Law and Order and Terror government. It promised protection — or at least amelioration — against all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological.

It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water.
[...]
For him, it is a shame — in all senses of the word. A few changes of pronouns in there, and he might not have looked so much like a 21st Century Marie Antoinette. All that was needed was just a quick "I'm not satisfied with my government's response." Instead of hiding behind phrases like "no one could have foreseen," had he only remembered Winston Churchill's quote from the 1930's. "The responsibility," of government, Churchill told the British Parliament "for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact, the prime object for which governments come into existence."

In forgetting that, the current administration did not merely damage itself — it damaged our confidence in our ability to rely on whoever is in the White House.

As we emphasized to you here all last week, the realities of the region are such that New Orleans is going to be largely uninhabitable for a lot longer than anybody is yet willing to recognize. Lord knows when the last body will be found, or the last artifact of the levee break, dug up. Could be next March. Could be 2100. By then, in the muck and toxic mire of New Orleans, they may even find our government's credibility.