Molly Ivins rocks! nm
Posted By: GMT on 2005-09-12
In Reply to: dont ya just love Molly Ivins? - gt
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dont ya just love Molly Ivins?
Blame Game, Race Card
By Molly Ivins
The Daily Camera (Boulder, CO)
Friday 09 September 2005
George W. Bush has come up with his worst idea since he decided to have the military investigate torture by the military at Abu Ghraib prison. He, George W. personally, plans to investigate to find out what went right and what went wrong in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
It's hard to guess where Bush will look first, but maybe he should start with the appointment of Brownie to head FEMA, the federal disaster relief agency. Brownie is Michael Brown, who was appointed by some president.
At the time, Brownie was deputy director of the agency under Joe Allbaugh - because he was Joe Allbaugh's college roommate, you see, and Allbaugh was Bush's campaign manager in 2000, you see, which made both of them qualified to manage disasters.
The FEMA press release announcing Brownie's appointment started with his other obvious qualification, From 1991 to 2001, Brown was the commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association. It's unclear whether Brownie was fired or resigned from the organization in the wake of financial mismanagement and lawsuits.
Hours after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, Brown wrote his boss, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, to ask permission to send 1,000 FEMA employees to the scene to support rescuers and to convey a positive image about the government's response. Brownie said he expected the workers to be there two days later. This apparently inspired Bush's comment, Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job.
FEMA was once considered one of our better federal agencies (those in the government-is-the-enemy camp may not believe this, but some government agencies are actually known for effective performance). Exactly why the right-wing Republicans chose to make FEMA a political football was never clear - but at any rate, going back to the Reagan administration, conservatives have been hacking away at FEMA. They mostly just under-funded it, one of their favorite tactics, unless a hurricane hit Florida just before an election. Sorry to sound boringly partisan, but that is the record, and the Clinton administration did work hard at rebuilding the agency.
So now those on the liberal side are saying: See, that's what happens when you starve government in order to give rich folks tax cuts. Government agencies can't do the jobs they were set up to do.
Silly liberals see this as vindication that they have been right all along. But the Bush administration officials are in full blame-shifting mode: First, they announced repeatedly they don't want to play the blame game. Then, they start blaming everybody else.
According to The New York Times, Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett, White House communications director, began a campaign this weekend to blame local and state officials. The woefully inadequate response, said sources close to the White House, was the fault of bureaucratic obstacles from state and local officials.
The bottom line is they're playing the race card. As many of you have noted, it IS a racial issue that poor people suffer most in any natural or economic disaster. Because Katrina hit the Deep South, a great many of the poor people affected are black, especially in New Orleans - both hit hardest and majority black to begin with.
I'm not sure what to say about a cable news station that plays a loop of black looters over and over - about 20 seconds of actual footage, replayed for four minutes, while the voiceover dwells on the looting problem. Obviously, there are some looters in New Orleans and elsewhere, and equally obviously, there are lots of people who were without food or water for days.
The exhausted and desperate black mayor of New Orleans begged for help in an interview late last week. They're feeding the public a line of bull and they're spinning, and people are dying down here, Mayor Ray Nagin said, talking about the feds. It's politics, man, and they are playing games. ...
Don't tell me 40,000 people are coming here! They're not here! It's too doggone late. Now get off your asses and do something, and let's fix the biggest goddamned crisis in the history of this country. People are dying.
The mayor was in tears. I heard two nice, white American ladies deploring this interview. Well! He should remember there might be children listening! Children still without food and water. What happens to people when they talk about race? Of course, most of us don't actually talk about race any more, we refer to it only indirectly, we talk those people.
Watch carefully, listen carefully - minority groups have always been blamed after natural disasters, since the days when the Hungarians were supposed to have cut the fingers off bodies to get the gold rings in the wake of the Johnstown Flood. Dirty Bohunks.
Good article by Molly Ivins
AUSTIN, Texas -- While it's still an open contest for Worst Legacy of the Bush Years, the destruction of goodwill for America around the world is definitely a contender.
In the days and weeks following Sept. 11, the United States enjoyed global sympathy and goodwill. All our old enemies sent regrets and offers of help. The most important newspaper in France headlined, We Are All Americans Now. The most touching gestures and offers rolled in, wave and after wave -- nations offered their teams of rescue dogs to search for bodies; special collections were taken up by D-Day survivors in Normandy; all over the world, American embassies were surrounded by long lines of people coming to offer sympathy, write notes, leave flowers.
You could make a pretty good case that one root of the Bush administration's abysmal diplomatic record is simply bad manners. We don't need any help was certainly a true response. But, Thank you would have been better.
You recall that George W. went on to make a series of unpleasant statements. You're either with us or with the terrorists may have sounded like a great macho moment, but no one likes to be verbally shoved against a wall and given no choice. There was the whole world asking, What can we do to help? and our response was, Our side or else. Why? Why coercion, rather than invitation?
Bush's State of the Union speech in January 2002 remains a monument to gracelessness. None of the language is worth remembering, but it contained a great deal of crowing about our defeat of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. As Barry Bearak of The New York Times observed before that war, if you wanted to bomb Afghanistan back to the Stone Age, you didn't have far to go.
The trouble with Bush's graceless provincialism on that occasion is that the invasion of Afghanistan was an international effort -- NATO, for the first time in its history, responded under its an attack on one is an attack on all clause. French, Germans and Canadians not only served in Afghanistan, but continue to do so. And, as we noticed increasingly is important, they shared the cost, as well.
You see, one beauty of building an international coalition is that you don't have to pay for the whole thing by yourself. Bush the Elder built a coalition for the Gulf War in 1990 that covered about 90 percent of the cost. By contrast, the financial burden of the Iraq War continues to be almost entirely ours -- with special thanks again to the British.
The colossal ineptitude of Bush's diplomacy, if it can be called that, leading up to the Iraq war was somewhere between ludicrous and nuts. Bullying, bribing, threatening -- and these were our allies. The insanity of our approach to Turkey, one of America's oldest democratic allies in the Middle East, is textbook -- to be studied in international relations schools for years. In the name of bringing democracy to Iraq (actually, at the time we never mentioned that as a reason), we threatened to end it in Turkey. Good grief.
The administration's open contempt for the United Nations did us incalculable damage. It wasn't just the ugly, clumsy pre-war diplomacy, but the petty, vindictive attempts at revenge afterward against those who were right all along. Trying to get Mohammad ElBaradei fired as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency -- how small and wrong. Making John Bolton ambassador to the United Nations -- oh, please.
So, a lot of cleanup is needed. Cards and letters (well, OK, e-mails) have rolled in from the Beloved Readers. We are getting gems daily. People are full of dandy ideas about how to fix this mess -- any and all parts of this mess -- but the foreign policy suggestions are especially interesting.
What the people seem to grasp that the Bush administration doesn't is the link between the Middle East, energy policy, defense policy, the environment and the economy. Again and again, readers point out that oil is at the root of the knot of problems and we can give ourselves much more flexibility to deal with the Middle East if we are not so dependent on it for oil. Ergo, we need an energy policy that emphasizes conservation and alternative energy sources.
The geopolitical problems that stem from our dependence on fossil fuel are the most difficult part of our relations with the rest of the world right now, and they look ever more ominous in the future. Reader Jim Schmitz observes that oil is a limited resource -- if you accept the idea that we've already hit peak production and have nowhere to go but down -- and we're addicted to it. If we kick the oil habit, we not only solve huge chunks of our biggest national security problem, we are also positioned to take part in the incredible boom in the alternate energy industry.
The beauty of thinking long-term is that when you look at a problem like illegal immigration, your first thought is not building a fence on the border, it's helping economic development in Central and South America. This not only makes us more friends, it's a much better solution to the problem. Lots of folks have dandy ideas on how to have more friends and fewer enemies -- for example, convert the money we spend in this hemisphere on the drug war to economic development. We should set up clean drinking water systems in all Third World countries -- that suggestion comes from a reader who thinks the total cost would be less than we spend in Iraq in a month.
More ideas on How to Fix This Mess coming soon.
To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2005 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Originally Published on Thursday November 3, 2005
Another good Molly Ivins article.
Posted on Thu, Dec. 29, 2005
Undermining our country to save it
By Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate
AUSTIN - The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
Thirty-five years ago, Richard Milhous Nixon, who was crazy as a bullbat, and J. Edgar Hoover, who wore women's underwear, decided that some Americans had unacceptable political opinions. So they set our government to spying on its own citizens, basically those who were deemed insufficiently like Crazy Richard Milhous.
For those of you who have forgotten just what a stonewall paranoid Nixon was, the poor man used to stalk around the White House demanding that his political enemies be killed. Many still believe there was a certain Richard III grandeur to Nixon's collapse because he was also a man of notable talents.
There is neither grandeur nor tragedy in watching this president, the Testy Kid, violate his oath to uphold the laws and Constitution.
The Testy Kid wants to do what he wants to do when he wants to do it because he is the president, and he considers that sufficient justification for whatever he wants. He even finds lawyers like John Yoo who tell him that whatever he wants to do is legal.
The creepy part is the overlap. Damned if they aren't still here, after all these years, the old Nixon hands -- Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the whole gang whose yearning for authoritarian government rose like a stink over the Nixon years. Imperial executive. Bring back those special White House guard uniforms. Cheney, like some malignancy that cannot be cured, back at the same old stand, pushing the same old agenda.
Of course, they tell us we have to be spied on for our own safety, so they can catch the terrorists who threaten us all.
Thirty-five years ago, they nabbed a film star named Jean Seberg and a bunch of people running a free breakfast program for poor kids in Chicago. This time, they're onto the Quakers. We are not safer.
We would be safer, as the 9-11 Commission has so recently reminded us, if some obvious and necessary precautions were taken at both nuclear and chemical plants -- but that is not happening because those industries contribute to Republican candidates. Republicans do not ask their contributors to spend a lot of money on obvious and necessary steps to protect public safety. They wiretap instead.
You will be unsurprised to learn that, first, they lied. They didn't do it. Well, OK, they did it, but not very much at all. Well, OK, more than that. A lot more than that. OK, millions of private e-mail and telephone calls every hour, and all medical and financial records.
You may recall that in 2002 it was revealed that the Pentagon had started a giant data-mining program called Total Information Awareness (TIA), intended to search through vast databases to increase information coverage by an order of magnitude.
From credit cards to vet reports, Big Brother would be watching us. This dandy program was under the control of Adm. John Poindexter, convicted of five felonies during Iran-contra, all overturned on a technicality. This administration really knows where to go for good help -- it ought to bring back Brownie.
Everybody decided that TIA was a terrible idea, and the program was theoretically shut down. As often happens with this administration, it turned out that they just changed the name and made the program less visible. Data-mining was a popular buzzword at the time, and the administration was obviously hot to have it. Bush established a secret program under which the National Security Agency could bypass the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court and begin eavesdropping on Americans without warrants.
As many have patiently pointed out, the entire program was unnecessary because the FISA court is both prompt and accommodating. There is virtually no possible scenario that would make it difficult or impossible to get a FISA warrant -- it has granted 19,000 warrants and rejected only a handful.
I don't like to play scary games where we all stay awake late at night, telling each other scary stories -- but there's a reason we have never given our government this kind of power. As the late Sen. Frank Church said, That capability could at any time be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capacity to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide. And if a dictator took over, the NSA could enable it to impose total tyranny.
Then we always get that dreadful goody-two-shoes response, Well, If you aren't doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about, do you?
Folks, we know this program is being and will be misused. We know it from the past record and current reporting. The program has already targeted vegans and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals -- and if those aren't outposts of al Qaeda, what is? Could this be more pathetic?
This could scarcely be clearer. Either the president of the United States is going to have to understand and admit that he has done something very wrong, or he will have to be impeached. The first time this happened, the institutional response was magnificent. The courts, the press, the Congress all functioned superbly.
Anyone think we're up to that again? Then whom do we blame when we lose the republic?
Molly Ivins, based in Austin, writes for Creators Syndicate. 5777 W. Century Blvd., Suite 700, Los Angeles, CA 90045
Molly Ivans
Why New Orleans Is in Deep Water
By Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate
Thursday 01 September 2005
Austin, Texas - Like many of you who love New Orleans, I find myself taking short mental walks there today, turning a familiar corner, glimpsing a favorite scene, square or vista. And worrying about the beloved friends and the city, and how they are now.
To use a fine Southern word, it's tacky to start playing the blame game before the dead are even counted. It is not too soon, however, to make a point that needs to be hammered home again and again, and that is that government policies have real consequences in people's lives.
This is not just politics or blaming for political advantage. This is about the real consequences of what governments do and do not do about their responsibilities. And about who winds up paying the price for those policies.
This is a column for everyone in the path of Hurricane Katrina who ever said, I'm sorry, I'm just not interested in politics, or, There's nothing I can do about it, or, Eh, they're all crooks anyway.
Nothing to do with me, nothing to do with my life, nothing I can do about any of it. Look around you this morning. I suppose the National Rifle Association would argue, Government policies don't kill people, hurricanes kill people. Actually, hurricanes plus government policies kill people.
One of the main reasons New Orleans is so vulnerable to hurricanes is the gradual disappearance of the wetlands on the Gulf Coast that once stood as a natural buffer between the city and storms coming in from the water. The disappearance of those wetlands does not have the name of a political party or a particular administration attached to it. No one wants to play, The Democrats did it, or, It's all Reagan's fault. Many environmentalists will tell you more than a century's interference with the natural flow of the Mississippi is the root cause of the problem, cutting off the movement of alluvial soil to the river's delta.
But in addition to long-range consequences of long-term policies like letting the Corps of Engineers try to build a better river than God, there are real short-term consequences, as well. It is a fact that the Clinton administration set some tough policies on wetlands, and it is a fact that the Bush administration repealed those policies - ordering federal agencies to stop protecting as many as 20 million acres of wetlands.
Last year, four environmental groups cooperated on a joint report showing the Bush administration's policies had allowed developers to drain thousands of acres of wetlands.
Does this mean we should blame President Bush for the fact that New Orleans is underwater? No, but it means we can blame Bush when a Category 3 or Category 2 hurricane puts New Orleans under. At this point, it is a matter of making a bad situation worse, of failing to observe the First Rule of Holes (when you're in one, stop digging).
Had a storm the size of Katrina just had the grace to hold off for a while, it's quite likely no one would even remember what the Bush administration did two months ago. The national press corps has the attention span of a gnat, and trying to get anyone in Washington to remember longer than a year ago is like asking them what happened in Iznik, Turkey, in A.D. 325.
Just plain political bad luck that, in June, Bush took his little ax and chopped $71.2 million from the budget of the New Orleans Corps of Engineers, a 44 percent reduction. As was reported in New Orleans CityBusiness at the time, that meant major hurricane and flood projects will not be awarded to local engineering firms. Also, a study to determine ways to protect the region from a Category 5 hurricane has been shelved for now.
The commander of the corps' New Orleans district also immediately instituted a hiring freeze and canceled the annual corps picnic.
Our friends at the Center for American Progress note the Office of Technology Assessment used to produce forward-thinking plans such as Floods: A National Policy Concern and A Framework for Flood Hazards Management. Unfortunately, the office was targeted by Newt Gingrich and the Republican right, and gutted years ago.
In fact, there is now a governmentwide movement away from basing policy on science, expertise and professionalism, and in favor of choices based on ideology. If you're wondering what the ideological position on flood management might be, look at the pictures of New Orleans - it seems to consist of gutting the programs that do anything.
Unfortunately, the war in Iraq is directly related to the devastation left by the hurricane. About 35 percent of Louisiana's National Guard is now serving in Iraq, where four out of every 10 soldiers are guardsmen. Recruiting for the Guard is also down significantly because people are afraid of being sent to Iraq if they join, leaving the Guard even more short-handed.
The Louisiana National Guard also notes that dozens of its high-water vehicles, Humvees, refuelers and generators have also been sent abroad. (I hate to be picky, but why do they need high-water vehicles in Iraq?)
This, in turn, goes back to the original policy decision to go into Iraq without enough soldiers and the subsequent failure to admit that mistake and to rectify it by instituting a draft.
The levees of New Orleans, two of which are now broken and flooding the city, were also victims of Iraq war spending. Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, said on June 8, 2004, It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq.
This, friends, is why we need to pay attention to government policies, not political personalities, and to know whereon we vote. It is about our lives.
Well good golly Ms. Molly
must we always be doom and gloom? Or nonstop reading about the fearsome Obama. Like now he's being accused of being a "savior." Well I for one hope he is a savior of this country, something I'm sure good ole McCain is NOT.
dumber than a box of rocks?
what about this post? get a dictionary, if you have one, or bettery yet, know what it is?
Joe The Plumber Rocks
Funny how this plumber was the go-to guy until he struck a cord with "regular Americans." The drive-bys loathe him, and also have no clue how hard he works. When he dropped the "S" (socialism) card, they went totally nuts.
This is a perfect example of elitism. They just don't get it that he wants to decide how he'll spend his own money. For those of you who are too insecure to make those decisions, go ahead, but leave the rest of us alone!
Are y'all really so pathetic that you don't trust your own judgement as to how to spend your own money? Look at how well the gov't handles things already: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the mail service, etc.?
Unbelievable!
Rush rocks. He just informed us
that President Bush's applauses & Fred Thompson's speech were apparently edited out or ignored from MSLSD (NBC) and CBS. If that's the case, how responsible is that? That's as bad as MQ being the only MTSO out there, period.
Fred Thompson was incredible last PM. I suppose I'll have to dig that one out for those who think the news is on the drive-by channels like these.
That's certainly not to diminish Joe Lieberman's speech. Even when he was running for VP, the GOP wouldn't go "after him," only challenge the issues. He's a perfect example of a liberal who puts country before party. Frankly, it's impossible to dislike the man, regardless of what side he's on.
Right on! Let's uncover the slim under the rocks....sm
and prosecute whether dem or republican. Maybe this is one thing we can all agree on.
O rocks. When THATreality sinks in, what WILL
x
Haha! American Woman rocks.
So jealous, in denial and wrong again OBAMA ROCKS BABY!!!! WE WON YAY!!!! nm
sour grapes
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