The shame of Bush

The false story manufactured by the Bush administration continues to unravel. Now George Tenant has a book out confirming what others have reported.

Bush & Co. intended to invade Iraq before 9-11.

There was no serious debate about the invasion.

I do think there are ample grounds for impeachment but would not want to see it happen. There isn't enough time now and Chaney would just be worse. I like the idea of impeaching Chaney. Would that make Nancy Pelosi V.P.? She's next in line. Now that would be delicious!

We are stuck with Bush, his poor performance, and his weak ethical standards. I was outraged again when I read this morning that the Bush people didn't collect on major offers of help for Katrina. I personally pay a price for the Bush bungling of the federal Katrina response.

Bush's approval rating hovers around 30% What are those people thinking? I'd love to know why they continue to approve of this disastrous president.

Hits, runs and errors

Did you watch the Democratic candidates debate? I found it helpful and interesting.

I was impressed with Hillary and disappointed with Barak and Gov. Richardson. I did not like Hillary before the debate. She seemed to act too much on political calculation and not enough on principle. For instance, she voted in favor of a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning. That is a pet project of the far right wing. In the debate she seemed reasonable, logical, and, well........presidential. I gained a lot of comfort with her during the debate. I could see her as president.

Barak couldn't get to the point in his answers. I think if he had longer to speak, he would have done better. Some of his answers just wandered. He did not loose any ground, but he did not gain any either.

Richardson has the best resume but his answers were almost bumbling. Biden looked better than he has in the past and he may come up in the polls now. If Biden gains, it may well be at Edwards expense. Edwards was flat and looked tired. Mike Gravel, former Senator from Alaska was a flame thrower, critical of his fellow Democrats. His comment that the other Democrats scared him will give Fox lots of material to work with.

Nobody struck out and nobody hit a home run.

The tip of the ice burg

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D.RI). Senator Whitehouse is the former Attorney General of Rhode Island, and a former U.S. Attorney. He thus understands well how the Justice Department should operate, and how it actually is operating.

In a premise to a question for Gonzales, Senator Whitehouse said he had found correspondence in the files of the Senate Judiciary Committee from the days when Orrin Hatch was chairman relating to an investigation of the relationship between the Clinton White House and the Justice Department (under Attorney General Janet Reno). Hatch was concerned about the independence of the Department of Justice, so he wanted to know who in the White House could speak with whom in the Justice Department. The correspondence showed that four people in the White House (the President, Vice President, chief of staff, and White House counsel) could speak with three people in the Justice Department (the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney and the Associate Attorney General)—period.

Senator Whitehouse discovered—and created a chart to make the point—that in the Bush White House, a shocking 417 people could speak with 30 different people in the Justice Department. It was a jaw-dropper. As Chairman Leahy said, when he asked Senator Whitehouse to continue when his time expired, in his thirty years on the Judiciary Committee, he had never seen anything like the open contacts from the White House to the Justice Department that had occurred in the Bush Administration.

Gonzales really had no response when asked about this subject. But this information shows that, in this Administration, the Department of Justice has become a mere political appendage of the White House.

The firing of the US Attorneys is only the tip of the ice burg. The bigger scandal is the conduct of the daily affairs of that department and of other parts of the federal government as well.

The vast right wing sleeze machine

Rahm Emanuel, a senior Democratic leader, in a speech this week at the Brookings Institution, will tie together a long series of Bush administration scandals, controversies and missteps into what he argues is a campaign to turn the government into an appendage of the Republican Party.

"The U.S. Attorney scandal will be to public corruption what Hurricane Katrina was to incompetence in the Bush Administration," he plans to say Wednesday.

We cannot go back and undo the damage that has been done but we are entitled to the truth. It seems that investigations are everywhere now. Dennis J. Kucinich has prepared articles of impeachment against Cheney. The only problem with that is if he were gone Bush would have to run the show alone and it could be even worse.

A lot of what Bush has done was done in the past on a smaller scale. What sets Bush apart is that he has vastly expanded the role of partisan politics and corruption. It has become a way of life for his administration. They constantly alleged wrong doing by Clinton but none of it was true except for the Monica affair. The knew their allegations were not true but made them anyway. How stunningly hypocritical it is for them to defend the deeply corrupt Bush administration.

Summer nights of my youth

The grand and legendary Arnaud's Restaurant is a classic New Orleans institution. Just before Count Arnaud died, he let it be known that his successor was not to be the sheltered Lady Irma, but his anything-but-sheltered daughter Germaine. That choice leads one to believe that he wanted to keep the semi-scandalous stories flowing freely form the restaurant.Only New Orleans could produce a Germaine Cazenave Wells. She was lusty, dramatic, loud and headstrong. Her taste and capacity for alcohol, celebration and men were extreme, even by the standards of today. She worshiped her father; the pair were certainly kindred spirits.

Late in her life, I was a young man exploring the world. I was moving in a fast crowd and I've written about at least one episode with Tennessee Williams in New Orleans. One night I went to dinner with friends at Arnaud's Restaurant. Somehow, I got separated from the group and found myself in the back bar that was open only to her guests. I sat next to her and as we chatted I realized she had slid her hand onto my thigh. I vividly remember how bony her hand was, as it slid inexorably into my crotch. I'm afraid I wasn't smooth enough to gracefully handle it. I just excused myself and left the room.

I walked from there to a now defunct bar called La Casa de los Marinos (spelling ?). It was in a part of the French Quarter that was rough in those days. The bar was a hang out for Spanish seamen, the prostitutes who followed them, and college kids like me who were slumming. I sat next to an old whore with badly dyed red hair and we drank our beers and talked. (I went from Germaine Wells in Arnaud's to an old whore in a ratty bar within an hour.) At one point a bar tender attacked a customer with a broken beer bottle. At another point, my dinner companions wandered in and then we danced until the dawn.

There were so many of those richly textured summer nights. I wish I could remember more of them.

Fewer strangers, greater courtesy

I've been to the Prytania Theater three times lately. (Fracture, Grindhouse, and 300) The Prytania is the last of the locally owned, neighborhood movie theaters in New Orleans. Going there is such a nostalgic experience.

The Prytania has only one screen. Sometimes there is only one employee, at which time you go directly into the lobby and pay for your admission and buy your popcorn from the same person. There is a real balcony and an organ down at the front. The seats don't recline and are not really all that comfortable.

There is an air of community in the lobby. Patrons walk to the theater and neighbors greet one another by name. With fewer strangers, there is greater courtesy.

When I was growing up in New Orleans there were lots of these little neighborhood movie theaters along with a few really big ones on Canal St. (The Joy, Saenger, and Lowes) The theater was near the drug store and grocery that served the neighborhood.

Now we go to multiplex theaters with many screens and vast parking lots. Its all very impersonal and there is not a scintilla of charm.

I choose the Prytania because I choose to support local businesses and traditions.

Bush's game playing

I read in this morning's New York Times about Bush's disdain for the welfare of the troops, whom the administration puts in harm’s way without first ensuring that they’ll have the necessary resources. He sent them into war without proper equipment and fails to provide proper care for the wounded when they return home.

Funding for the war has never been in the Bush budget. Its a tricky way to avoid accounting. Bush got funding by asking for supplemental money. As long as a G.O.P.-controlled Congress could be counted on to rubber-stamp the administration’s requests, you could say that this wasn’t a real problem, that the administration’s refusal to put Iraq funding in the regular budget was just part of its usual reliance on fiscal smoke and mirrors. But this time Mr. Bush decided to surge additional troops into Iraq after an election in which the public overwhelmingly rejected his war — and then dared Congress to deny him the necessary funds.

He is not bold. He is reckless.

A tangled web of deceipt

The ethical failures of the Bush administration are being revealed now. The twin implosions of Alberto Gonzales and Paul Wolfowitz are not technical transgressions. They are symptoms of an amoral White House. They are reported as being unrelated because the press still does not grasp the big picture of the Bush administration sleaze. A steady drumbeat of arrogance, cronyism, and lying is reported as individual cases and the press does not connect the dots. These instances are part of a dense and deliberate web of deceit.

Do you remember Bernard Keric? He was nominated to head the Department of Homeland Security and was vetted by Mr. Gonzales. Mr. Gonzales was privy from the get-go to a Kerik dossier ablaze with red flags pointing to “questionable financial deals, an ethics violation, allegations of mismanagement and a top deputy prosecuted for corruption,” not to mention a “friendship with a businessman who was linked to organized crime.” Bush sent him to Iraq to train their police and he failed completely. After that he nominated him to head Homeland Security!

One might wonder if the Bush practice of promoting and honoring those who bungled the war might be a form of hush money.

The back story

The ways Bush is using our government for his own partisan and ideological purposes is amazing. It may take years for the full extent of it to become known. Here's an example:

Today, Regent University, founded by the televangelist Pat Robertson to provide
"Christian leadership to change the world," boasts that it has 150 graduates
working in the Bush administration.

Unfortunately for the image of the school, where Mr. Robertson is chancellor and
president, the most famous of those graduates is Monica Goodling, a product of
the university’s law school. She’s the former top aide to Alberto Gonzales who
appears central to the scandal of the fired U.S. attorneys and has declared that
she will take the Fifth rather than testify to Congress on the matter.

The infiltration of the federal government by large numbers of people seeking to
impose a religious agenda — which is very different from simply being people of
faith — is one of the most important stories of the last six years. It’s also a
story that tends to go under reported, perhaps because journalists are afraid of
sounding like conspiracy theorists.

But this conspiracy is no theory.

Come join us

NEW ORLEANS
POLITICAL CAFÉ
MEET UP GROUP

Who's your candidate? Come sit in on an open discussion of the issues and candidates in the upcoming Presidential election.

Meet Up at Marigny Perks coffee shop at 2401 Burgundy St, corner of Mandeville. The number at the coffee shop is 948-7401.

The next Meet Up is at 7pm on Monday, May 7th. Everyone is welcome.

FEMA meets the Justice Department

Mr. Gonzales has been Bush's personal attorney for years. He continues to act as such, even though he is supposed to be the Attorney General of the United States, not of George Bush. Bush, Rove and Gonzales have sought to turn the Dept. of Justice into a political arm of the White House. The impartial administration of justice has suffered.

The following quote is from conservatives:
"Mr. Gonzales has presided over an unprecedented crippling of the Constitution's time-honored checks and balances," it declares. "He has brought rule of law into disrepute, and debased honesty as the coin of the realm." Alluding to ongoing scandal, it notes: "He has engendered the suspicion that partisan politics trumps evenhanded law enforcement in the Department of Justice."

The letter concludes by saying, "Attorney General Gonzales has proven an unsuitable steward of the law and should resign for the good of the country... The President should accept the resignation, and set a standard to which the wise and honest might repair in nominating a successor..."

The current defense of the Gonzales Justice Dept. is that their behavior is legal and due to incompetence.

Great.

Leaders follow and followers lead

Paul Krugman has some interesting observations about politicians shifting toward their party's base. Normally, politicians face a difficult tradeoff between taking positions that satisfy their party’s base and appealing to the broader public. You can see that happening right now to the Republicans: to have a chance of winning the party’s nomination, Republican presidential hopefuls have to take far-right positions on Iraq and social issues that will cost them a lot of votes in the general election.

Krugman sees the Democratic base as more in touch with the mood of the country than many of the party's leaders. The result is peculiar: on key issues, reluctant Democratic politicians are being dragged by their base into taking highly popular positions. Iraq is the most dramatic example. Strange as it may seem, Democratic strategists were initially reluctant to make Iraq a central issue in the midterm election. Even after their stunning victory, which demonstrated that the G.O.P.’s smear-and-fear tactics have stopped working, they were afraid that any attempt to rein in the Bush administration’s expansion of the war would be successfully portrayed as a betrayal of the troops and/or a treasonous undermining of the commander in chief.

Beltway insiders, who still don’t seem to realize how overwhelmingly the public has turned against President Bush, fed that fear. For example, as Democrats began, nervously, to confront the administration over Iraq war funding, David Broder declared that Mr. Bush was “poised for a political comeback.” These talking heads are empty suits.

It took an angry base to push the Democrats into taking a tough line in the midterm election. And it took further prodding from that base — which was infuriated when Barack Obama seemed to say that he would support a funding bill without a timeline — to push them into confronting Mr. Bush over war funding. (Mr. Obama says that he didn’t mean to suggest that the president be given “carte blanche.”)

The public hates this war, no longer has any trust in Mr. Bush’s leadership and doesn’t believe anything the administration says. Iraq was a big factor in the Democrats’ midterm victory. And far from being a risky political move, the confrontation over funding has overwhelming popular support: according to a new CBS News poll, only 29 percent of voters believe Congress should allow war funding without a time limit, while 67 percent either want to cut off funding or impose a time limit.

Republicans will, for a while at least, be trapped in unpopular positions by a base that’s living in the past. Rudy Giuliani’s surge into front-runner status for the Republican nomination says more about the party than about the candidate. As The Onion put it with deadly accuracy, Mr. Giuliani is running for “President of 9/11.”

Democrats don’t have the same problem. There’s no conflict between catering to the Democratic base and staking out positions that can win in the 2008 election, because the things the base wants — an end to the Iraq war, a guarantee of health insurance for all — are also things that the country as a whole supports. The only risk the party now faces is excessive caution on the part of its politicians.

The leaders are following the followers.

Random thoughts about Bush and Iraq

I'm a fan of Camille Paglia, even when I disagree with her. Her thinking is quite impressive and her language is always interesting. Below is a sample of her writing about Iraq.

"Victory"-- a word constantly on President Bush's hopeful lips -- cannot be achieved in an amorphous insurgency or in a vast land with indefensible borders that is splintered among ancient sects and tribes. There is no distinct enemy, only a welter of saboteurs hiding among the population, whose loyalties cannot be assessed by a foreign force embarrassingly lacking elementary knowledge of local culture and languages."

A conservative writer is of the opinion that Bush could have been recruited by Democrats. His view is that Bush pursues policies that are not conservative and only occasionally issues bursts of conservative sounding rhetoric. He thinks that the moderate Democrats could have pulled Bush to the left but let the opportunity go by and left Bush with nowhere to go but to the right.
I think if Bush were left alone to just follow his nose, he'd lead himself to a form of smug Wall Street conservatism.

The British have stopped using the term, "war on terrorism" Here's their reasoning:

"In the U.K., we do not use the phrase 'war on terror' because we can't win by military means alone, and because this isn't us against one organized enemy with a clear identity and a coherent set of objectives," Benn told a meeting in New York organized by the Center on International Cooperation think tank. Many officials in Britain, the United States' closest ally, feel the phrase is vague and simplistic, encouraging people to think that only military means are needed to overcome extremism. A spokesman said Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett did not use the phrase "war on terror," preferring to emphasize that the fight against extremists is "not a clash or a war of civilizations."

Intellectually, Bush is isolated in the world. Now his last ally, Britain, has left him.

When the saints come marching in

Someone said to me yesterday that he feared that in a few years he'd finally give up on New Orleans and move. He didn't want to move and then look back and realize he could have been living in a functional city all along. At the same time, he didn't want to leave. He said, "I love New Orleans" and then bitterly complained about it.

A lot of us are like that. It is as if we have been spurned by our lover and we are angry. The city hasn't worked well for decades but its seductive charms made up for it. Since Katrina, it has thrown its dysfunctional turmoil in our faces and we don't like it. True, the Big Easy is neither big nor easy since Katrina. Oddly, it still looks and feels the same in many places. Its fine for tourists. It takes a while for it to sink in........to realize how deeply dysfunctional and divided this city is.

It is terrible that the Bush administration is so incompetent because our own governance is so weak. I'm convinced that the solution to our problems is strong and wise leadership. It looks like there is enough grass roots progress to return some level of livability to the Big Uneasy. Now if we just had political leadership worthy of the citizenry the city could march forward with flags flying and bands playing.

And then the saints would truly come marching in.

What I've learned from TV news

Sanjaya Malakar.

Its ridiculous that I know who he is. I've never seen American Idol and I don't care about who wins. So, why do I know this guy's name? I know who he is because he's a big part of the pollution of popular culture. He's ubiquitous on TV. Even the New York Times has written about him. And to think, their motto is: "All the News that's fit to Print".

Here is a 17 year old kid who is now almost unavoidable. Before Sanjaya, Anna Nicole Smith was almost unavoidable. Neither has much talent and neither has made any real contribution to society. Both have been given hours and hours of prime time television coverage. "The News" has skidded from journalism into supermarket tabloid coverage. Now we have the firing of Don Imus for saying something he's been saying for years.

MSNBC has 3 one hour news shows that run consecutively and breathlessly announce, "Breaking News!" to tell us what we'd just been told. How long can a story be "breaking"? For that matter, how long can it be "news"? At some point it is no longer new.

There are a finite number of hours devoted to informing us about current events. The more of these hours that are squandered on Anna Nicole and Sanjaya; the fewer hours are available to spend on things that matter. Given the choice between meaningless chatter and things that matter they too often choose meaningless chatter.

Sanjaya, baby.

Morality and war

I've written in the past about the duplicitous language of the Bush people. Bush is very clever at misleading us. This morning, I want to look at a trick of his I haven't written about yet. This device pulls one element out of a concept and ignores all others. Here's what I mean:

In defending our attack on Iraq, conservatives argue that our intentions of removing a mass murderer and promoting democracy were highly moral. But if we have learned anything from this war, it should alert us to be wary of such oversimplified claims of moral clarity.

Even if we grant purity of intentions, this is shallow moral reasoning. We should judge morality in three dimensions -- intentions, means and consequences -- and this war fails on the last two counts. Imagine that I offer to drive your child home after a party. I ignore the slick road conditions, drive too fast, skid off the road and your child is killed. I can plead good intentions of trying to get your child home quickly, but by my neglect of appropriate means and the full range of possible consequences produces a catastrophe that is not excusable even if I had good intentions.

To defend this (or any future war) on the basis of the moral clarity of our intentions is impoverished one-dimensional moral reasoning. Whatever the president's motives, his inadequate attention to means and the full range possible consequences makes this an unjust war. Can the man who wages an immoral war be a moral man? Not in this case. He was warned that it would turn out as it has and he went forward with no plan for the slippery roads of Iraq.

We should constantly challenge and question his assertions.

These are the same people who lecture us on moral behavior in our private lives. Now isn't that amazing.

Bagdad on the Bayou?

New Orleans. Baghdad.

Which world city is more corrupt, dangerous and damaged?

Both cities are victims of Bush administration "assistance". We are sad sister cities linked by the disaster of Bush administration incompetence and arrogance.

The Bush policy toward Baghdad is to flood it with military in an effort to being civil order. The Bush policy towards New Orleans is to ignore the flood caused by the Army Corps of Engineers. Bush doesn't want to waive the 10% local government co pay required for FEMA money. It was waived for New York after 9-11 and it was waived for Florida after hurricane Andrew. But Bush won't agree to waive it for New Orleans.

Maybe he needs that money to pay for the surge in Baghdad.

Conditions in New Orleans are improving and I have more hope for the future. If we get a Democrat in the White House then maybe some of the promised money will make its way here. In the meantime; people aren't waiting and there are a lot of local initiatives. Neighborhood associations are getting results and the neighborhoods are on the mend. The latest city plan for recovery has been well received. It looks like more money is on the way.

Poor Baghdad. That city suffers from a multitude of problems. It lacks the tradition of citizen involvement that New Orleans and all American cities have. We are pulling ourselves out of the morass of destruction. They are sinking in it.

Of course, Baghdad is more corrupt, dangerous and damaged.

Who's in charge here?

Mr. Bush is out looking for a War Czar but is being turned down by his candidates. The job is to coordinate and direct the war efforts of the departments of defense and state, along with other agencies. It sounds to me a lot like the job of Commander in Chief. I suspect one reason he can't find a capable person to do the job is that none of them agree with his policy. Past presidents acted as Commander in Chief, but we are probably better off with him looking for someone else to do it. Someday I'm going to research and publish the number of days Bush spends on vacation and compare it with other presidents.

In case there was any doubt, now an Iraqi government insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation's "shocking" mismanagement of his country - a performance so bad, he writes, that by 2007 Iraqis had "turned their backs on their would-be liberators."

"The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order," Ali A. Allawi concludes in "The Occupation of Iraq," newly published by Yale University Press. Allawi writes with authority as a member of that "new order," having served as Iraq's trade, defense and finance minister at various times since 2003. As a former academic, at Oxford University before the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, he also writes with unusual detachment. The U.S.- and British-educated engineer and financier is the first senior Iraqi official to look back at book length on his country's four-year ordeal. It's an unsparing look at failures both American and Iraqi, an account in which the word "ignorance" crops up repeatedly.

No wonder Bush can't find anyone to do his job for him.

The little lie

Paul Krugman has some important observations about the power of the little lie. We all need to understand it but I don’t think the public generally catches on to the power of the little lie. I'm not sure its even noticed. This is the small accusation invented out of thin air, followed by another, and another, and another. Little Lies aren’t meant to have staying power. Instead, they create a sort of background hum, a sense that the person facing all these accusations must have done something wrong. I remember lots of examples of this.

For a long time, basically from 9/11 until the last remnants of President Bush’s credibility drowned in New Orleans, the Bush administration was able to go big on its deceptions. Most people found it inconceivable that an American president would, for example, assert without evidence that Saddam and Al Qaeda were allies. Mr. Bush won the 2004 election because a quorum of voters still couldn’t believe he would grossly mislead them on matters of national security.

Before 9/11, however, the right-wing noise machine mainly relied on little lies. And now it has returned to its roots. The Clinton years were a parade of fake scandals: Whitewater, Troopergate, Travelgate, Filegate, Christmas-card-gate. At the end, there were false claims that Clinton staff members trashed the White House on their way out. Each pseudo scandal got headlines, air time and finger-wagging from the talking heads. The eventual discovery in each case that there was no there there, if reported at all, received far less attention. The effect was to make an administration that was, in fact, pretty honest and well run — especially compared with its successor — seem mired in scandal.

Even in the post-9/11 environment, little lies never went away. In particular, promoting little lies seems to have been one of the main things U.S. attorneys, as loyal Bushies, were expected to do. For example, David Iglesias, the U.S. Attorney in New Mexico, appears to have been fired because he wouldn’t bring unwarranted charges of voter fraud. There’s a lot of talk now about a case in Wisconsin, where the Bush-appointed U.S. attorney prosecuted the state’s purchasing supervisor over charges that a court recently dismissed after just 26 minutes of oral testimony, with one judge calling the evidence “beyond thin.” But by then the accusations had done their job: the unjustly accused official had served almost four months in prison, and the case figured prominently in attack ads alleging corruption in the Democratic governor’s administration.

This is the context in which you need to see the wild swings Republicans have been taking at Nancy Pelosi. First, there were claims that the speaker of the House had demanded a lavish plane for her trips back to California. One Republican leader denounced her “arrogance of extravagance” — then, when it became clear that the whole story was bogus, admitted that he had never had any evidence. Now there’s Ms. Pelosi’s fact-finding trip to Syria, which Dick Cheney denounced as “bad behavior” — unlike the visit to Syria by three Republican congressmen a few days earlier, or Newt Gingrich’s trip to China when he was speaker.
Ms. Pelosi has responded coolly, dismissing the administration’s reaction as a “tantrum.” But it’s more than that: the hysterical reaction to her trip is part of a political strategy, aided and abetted by news organizations that give little lies their time in the sun.

Fox News, which is a partisan operation in all but name, plays a crucial role in the Little Lie strategy — which is why there is growing pressure on Democratic politicians not to do anything, like participating in Fox-hosted debates, that helps Fox impersonate a legitimate news organization. But Fox has had plenty of help. Even Time’s Joe Klein, a media insider if anyone is, wrote of the Pelosi trip that “the media coverage of this on CNN and elsewhere has been abysmal.” For example, CNN ran a segment about Ms. Pelosi’s trip titled “Talking to Terrorists.”

The G.O.P.’s reversion to the Little Lie technique is a symptom of political weakness, of a party reduced to trivial smears because it has nothing else to offer. But the technique will remain effective — and the U.S. political scene will remain ugly — as long as many people in the news media keep playing along.

The more of us who see the little lie for what it is, the less effective it is. Tell your friends. Spread the word.

Someone, please, manage this war

With all the Bush administration yelping and howling about Congress "micromanaging" the war against Iraq, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit the Constitutional powers of the Congress. Below is the relevant section, which speaks for itself.


ARTICLE 1, SECTION 8
The Congress shall have Power:
To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
To provide and maintain a Navy;
To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;
To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;
To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress....

A new look

Check out the new template! This look is less cluttered and, I hope, easier to read. When I have the time and inclination I'm going to add new elements to the page.

Paul Krugman's column in today's New York Times is about lies, both large and small. I"m going to write a separate post to discuss that subject and his views.

Control of the agenda

Back on March 29th my post was titled, Alternative Reality. There is another aspect of this phenomenon. Its the false framework of our debate about the firing of US Attorneys. Here's what I mean:

In the current controversy about Alberto Gonzales' performance; the focus is on the reason for firing those US Attorneys. That framework excludes examination of the performance of those considered sufficiently "loyal" to stay in their jobs. I worry about how much the US Justice Dept. has been used for partisan political purposes. If some were fired for not doing the political will of Mr. Rove then we may assume that those who kept their jobs must have been doing the political will of Mr. Rove. It is now clear that at least some, if not all, were fired because they were not using the law for political purposes. Were those not fired operating as an arm of the Republican Party? That is the larger story and the Bush people consistently point away from it and the media follows along.

The Bush people are expert at narrowing the focus and aiming it away from themselves. Another technique is to present, and insist on, a set of false choices. An example is Mr. Bush's oft repeated claim that we have to attack them in Iraq so they won't attack us in America. Of course those are not the only two choices. Another false choice is to make the perfect the enemy of the good - so that good isn't sufficient or acceptable because it isn't perfect.

Can you think of an example of this?

Easter in New Orleans

Yesterday afternoon Marigny Perks was a stop on the 5th annual Marigny Bunny Hop and Easter Bonnet Bar Crawl. There are seven bars plus my coffee shop that participate. The day turned out chilly and wet and they all crowded in the shop for warmth and hot espresso drinks. I've put up a couple of pictures from the day.

The Bunny Hop is strictly a neighborhood event. At each stop a trophy is given for the category assigned to that location. My category was "Best Spring Garden Hat". The winner was a doctor who constructed a very tall hat with a girl on a swing at the top.

It's a lot of fun and some of the hats are quite impressive. There was a good crowd and I mixed taking pictures with acting as "bar back" for the Barista on duty. Now its Easter morning and its wet and cold. There are a couple of parades today so I hope it clears up.

New Orleans loves parades, costumes and masks. Its not for just Mardi Gras. For Easter, society ladies in horse drawn carriages parade to St. Louis Cathedral for Easter Mass. Strippers in all their finery parade behind the legendary Chris Owens in the French Quarter and drag queens in impossibly big hats parade in their own raucous/ladylike way.

Its Easter in New Orleans.

......and the band played on

I just heard a piece on NPR about New Orleans music. Its worth repeating. The music we hear cascading from open doors in the French Quarter has its origins in the neighborhoods of the city. For over a century, generations of music students have been nurtured and developed by the unique culture of New Orleans. Young people learned the music from a tradition of neighborhood marching bands, school music programs and informal mentoring. Kids on their way to the bus stop played their instruments as they walked. Impromptu bands formed and dissolved and formed again. Musicians were (and are) respected and valued. Miles of homes housed young musicians. Now those homes are empty and the school buses are mostly parked.

There is a great effort to rebuild the music culture of New Orleans. There is a keen awareness of this loss of our culture. We thought the long and honored tradition of passing our music down from one generation to the next was a sturdy rope of behaviors and beliefs. Katrina showed us it was a thread, not a rope. Life is more fragile than we knew.

We do indeed "know what it means to miss New Orleans".

The money game

The big bucks are flowing like a mighty river into the campaigns of presidential candidates. Public financing seems all but dead. (Reporting requirements are still valuable as they let us know where the money is coming from, more or less.) If you give $100 to candidate A and you do it in person at a small private dinner and all his other contributions are under $50 - then you can reasonably expect to be remembered. Money comes with strings.

This year, the political industry is spinning the money before it is spent, ordaining mega-fund-raising as the sine qua non of a credible candidacy. It is not the strength of character or power of ideas that matters in this race. It is the ability to beg.

This is a terrible system and Congress should repair the Campaign Financing law.

Sending me email

I appreciate emails and would like to answer when that's called for. However, I can't answer emails sent to the blog. If you want to write to me directly, you can do that at marignyperks@yahoo.com.

The cynicism of Dick Chaney

Vice President Dick Cheney has been so wrong so often that the standard for his credibility is in the basement. (Do you remember his saying that the insurgency was "in the last throws" or that Iraqi people would "welcome us" or that the Iraqui oil revenues would pay for the war, which would be over in a couple of months?)

He recently made a speech in Alabama in which he repeated the party line. Lets take a look at his logic and reasoning.

"It's time," he said, "the self-appointed strategists on Capitol Hill understood a very simple concept: You cannot win a war if you tell the enemy when you're going to quit."

Three things are wrong this with surefire applause line. First, the congressional Democrats are raising issues of policy, not strategy. In other words, they're acting not like "self-appointed strategists" but rather like popularly elected lawmakers.

Second, who is this "enemy" that Cheney says the timetable would be tipping off? If it's al-Qaida and the other terrorist groups in Iraq, he and Bush know very well that the House and Senate proposals allow U.S. troops involved in counterterrorism to stay in Iraq indefinitely. (The bills also exempt from withdrawal those troops involved in training Iraqi security forces, as well as those protecting and supplying U.S. workers, officials, and military personnel.)

Third, what is this business about winning the war? Does Cheney think we can win? And how is he defining the term? Even General Petraeus says we cannot win militarily.

Mr. Chaney is, at best, a cynical old fool.

The end of John McCain

I just completely wrote off John McCain. He was on TV claiming that the surge is working and Baghdad streets are safe to walk again. Below is a news account of his walk on a Baghdad street:


“What are they talking about?” Ali Jassim Faiyad, the owner of an electrical appliances shop in the market, said Monday. “The security procedures were abnormal!”
The delegation arrived at the market, which is called Shorja, on Sunday with more than 100 soldiers in armored Humvees — the equivalent of an entire company — and attack helicopters circled overhead, a senior American military official in Baghdad said. The soldiers redirected traffic from the area and restricted access to the Americans, witnesses said, and sharpshooters were posted on the roofs. The congressmen wore bulletproof vests throughout their hourlong visit.
“They paralyzed the market when they came,” Mr. Faiyad said during an interview in his shop on Monday. “This was only for the media.”

Of course McCain knew of all this security. He deliberately mislead us about a matter that is factually verifiable. Thank goodness the press is doing its job again. We are able to read what the truth is - and it isn't what Mr McCain told us.

You may say, "Oh well, all politicians lie." I don't agree. They will exaggerate and spin, but few will outright lie about a factual matter.

I was already disappointed with his pandering to far right and his betrayal of his principles.

Now I've just given up on him.

Growing up in the Big Easy

Driving through the French Quarter yesterday I thought about growing up here in New Orleans. Cafe du Monde was traditional after a dance or late party. We used to drive up to the curb and boys would run out to attach a tray to the car window. We could get service without ever leaving the car.

New Orleans was a great city to grow up in. It was bigger, safer and more prosperous. Politicians were corrupt but there was enough money floating around for them to steal and still leave enough for the rest for the city. It wasn't until I went away to school that I learned the truth about traffic tickets. Mine were always fixed by one of my dad's friends, which I thought was normal. I didn't know that narrow streets full of music was unusual. For all I knew, kids in every town danced in the street. Good food, plenty of liquor and music everywhere was the norm for my growing up. Life was good in the Big Easy.

New Pictures

I've put up a couple of new pictures. Two are of places I visited in China. In the third you can see the vast scale of an Alaskan glacier in comparison to a cruise ship sitting in front of it. I spent a year (2004) living in Alaska and it was a year full of adventure.

Its about time

The candidates first reporting period ended with Clinton leading the Dems in collecting cash. It looks like Obama is close behind her and she would have to have swamped him to declare her fund raising a victory. She has been at it for years and has lots of fundraising advantages.

Nancy Pelosi is off on a foreign tour, over Bush's objections. She's establishing herself as a world figure at his expense. Much of what happens these days seems to be at his expense. The contrast between his first term and now is staggering. In the past, whenever someone revealed administration incompetence or corruption, the person doing the revealing was blamed. How many books were written and passed off by Bush as "by a former disgruntled employee" or as "partisan"? Now the rush of events has overwhelmed Bush and his practice of killing the messenger while ignoring the message. Now his chickens have come home to roost.

Its about time.