Not only did Tom Delay get indicted for criminal conspiracy and had to step down as Majority Leader, but Bill Frist is officially under investigation by the SEC for insider trading.
And you’ll feel something akin to the electric thrill I once enjoyed when Gilmore, Pat Conway, The Great Creatore, W.C. Handy and John Philip Sousa all came to town on the very same historic day!
Senate leader Bill Frist is in some trouble regarding stock sales. He and other insiders apparently sold off stock in a company that he partially owns, just before the stock price went down, ala Martha Stewart.
The Associated Press has the basic story.
And ABC News exposes Frist’s lies that he didn’t know anything about the state of the stock before he sold.
Wow, I wonder what Stephanie’s classmate Nick Smith, who works for Senator Frist, thinks. Hee.
A New York Times opinion piece:
There’s nothing like a touch of real-world experience to inject some reason into the inflammatory national debate over gay marriages. Take Massachusetts, where the state’s highest court held in late 2003 that under the State Constitution, same-sex couples have a right to marry. The State Legislature moved to undo that decision last year by approving a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriages and create civil unions as an alternative. But this year, when precisely the same measure came up for a required second vote, it was defeated by a thumping margin of 157 to 39.
The main reason for the flip-flop is that some 6,600 same-sex couples have married over the past year with nary a sign of adverse effects. The sanctity of heterosexual marriages has not been destroyed. Public morals have not gone into a tailspin. Legislators who supported gay marriage in last year’s vote have been re-elected. Gay couples, many of whom had been living together monogamously for years, have rejoiced at official recognition of their commitment.
As a Republican leader explained in justifying his vote switch: “Gay marriage has begun, and life has not changed for the citizens of the commonwealth, with the exception of those who can now marry who could not before.” A Democrat attributed his change of heart to the beneficial effects he saw “when I looked in the eyes of the children living with these couples.” Gay marriage, it turned out, is good for family values.
Some legislators who strongly oppose gay marriages also switched their votes this year for tactical reasons. They realized that the original measure was headed for defeat, and they had never really liked the part that created civil unions anyway. They are now pinning their hopes on an even harsher proposal, endorsed by Gov. Mitt Romney, that would ban gay marriages without allowing civil unions.
We can only hope that this new appeal to fear and bigotry will stumble over the reality, already apparent, that gay marriage is no threat to the larger community. States that rushed to ban same-sex marriages after the Massachusetts court ruling were succumbing to misplaced hysteria.
Conservative pundits have been hammering the idea that there were “2000 school buses” that New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin could have commandeered to get the poor people of the city evacuated. According to Media Matters, this falsehood has been repeated over and over again.
In fact, the city of New Orleans has 364 school buses, of which 70 were in the shop for repairs and were not driveable. There were not drivers available for the remaining school buses to take people out of town, or personnel to gas them up, etc. Or a way to round up residents and get them to a single meeting point. The logistics of it would have been impossible.
03/12/2022 Update: I had to edit this today to fix the broken links to the 35(!) images that came with this email. I took them out rather than trying to replace the images; too much work for something this malevolent. Also, why is this person still in my friend list?
This is the other racist e-mail that was sent to me by someone I thought was a friend. I got this a week and a half ago, I believe. I’m putting the entire text of the e-mail below the fold because I want to be sure that my friends know, before they see it, that it doesn’t come from me, that I didn’t write it, and that I don’t endorse anything that it says.
I went back and forth about putting this e-mail up, but I think it’s important that people see it and know this kind of stuff is out there being passed around by white supremacists.
If you want to really understand how the welfare system works in America after the welfare reform that happened in the 1990s, read this book:
American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation’s Drive to End Welfare by Jason DeParle
A friend forwarded the following diatribe to me. She sent me another one earlier in the week that was equally bad and which originated with the KKK. This is apparently the kind of crap that’s getting passed around by right-wing nut jobs though e-mail.
I know I keep saying this, but it needs to be repeated: thousands of people just DIED. An entire American city is GONE. There has never been a disaster like this in the history of our country. Blaming the victims because they’re black is the most hideous behavior imaginable. And it’s not surprising that the true colors of the Republican party are showing.
If you want to really understand how the welfare system works in America after the welfare reform that happened in the 1990s, read this book:
American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation’s Drive to End Welfare by Jason DeParle
Update: This forwarded racist diatribe was written by Robert Tracinski
It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can’t blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.
If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city’s infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.
Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists–myself included–did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.
But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.
The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.
The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.
The man-made disaster is the welfare state.
For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency–indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.
When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?
To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:
“Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.“The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire….
“Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.
” ‘These troops are…under my orders to restore order in the streets,’ she said. ‘They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.’ ”
The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.
What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?
Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?
My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. “The projects,” as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)
What Sherri was getting from last night’s television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of “the projects.” Then the “crawl”–the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels–gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city’s public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city’s jails–so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations–that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.
There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit–but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals–and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep–on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.
All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters–not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.
No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American “individualism.” But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.
What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider “normal” behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don’t sit around and complain that the government hasn’t taken care of them. They don’t use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.
But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don’t, because they don’t own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.
The welfare state–and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages–is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.
Why do I say this is racist?
Because it’s blaming the victims of the tragedy.
It ignores the fact that there’s no evidence whatsoever that any of the people you saw on your TV news are on welfare at all. They’re assuming because the people they saw were black, that they’re automatically on welfare.
The totally lie about criminals being let out of jails, and the implication that those black people you saw on your TV were criminals and convicts — utter untruths. Criminals were moved out and locked down before the storm hit; there have been numerous stories about this — I saw it on CNN of course, where people get real news, not fake spin from the White House.
It ignores the fact that thousands of ordinary (black) people DID work hard to save lives, to help their fellow man, to get everyone to safety. It cites totally unsubstantiated rumors of violence and chaos. It ignores the fact that many people were told by police “it’s every man for himself.”
And it’s COMPLETELY, IGNORANTLY WRONG about how welfare works in America. There’s no such thing as a fucking “welfare state” except in the deluded minds of racist people. People don’t get rich from welfare. People don’t “live off stolen wealth” at all. The people who are on welfare (who are overwhelmingly white, BTW) are struggling to survive, not kicking back eating feasts on your dime.
The taxes that you’re paying are going to Iraq, and into the pockets of Halliburton executives through corrupt corporate contracts, not to poor black people.
The trailer for ‘Good Night, And Good Luck.’ George Clooney directs and co-stars in this story of legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow.
I will definitely be seeing this movie in the theater.
In case you hadn’t heard, Bush is throwing a 9/11 party in Washington D.C. on Sunday, to celebrate the tragedy that brought him the political capital to play toy soldier in the middle east. But he’s taking some pretty extraordinary steps to make sure that no one gets to crash his celebration, according to the Washington Post:
Organizers of the Pentagon’s 9/11 memorial Freedom Walk on Sunday are taking extraordinary measures to control participation in the march and concert, with the route fenced off and lined with police and the event closed to anyone who does not register online by 4:30 p.m. today.
The march, sponsored by the Department of Defense, will wend its way from the Pentagon to the Mall along a route that has not been specified but will be lined with four-foot-high snow fencing to keep it closed and “sterile,” said Allison Barber, deputy assistant secretary of defense.
The U.S. Park Police will have its entire Washington force of several hundred on duty and along the route, on foot, horseback and motorcycles and monitoring from above by helicopter. Officers are prepared to arrest anyone who joins the march or concert without a credential and refuses to leave, said Park Police Chief Dwight E. Pettiford.
…
One restricted group will be the media, whose members will not be allowed to walk along the march route. Reporters and cameras are restricted to three enclosed areas along the route but are not permitted to walk alongside participants walking from the Pentagon, across the Memorial Bridge to the Mall.
It’s an old business myth that the Chinese character for “crisis” combines the characters for “danger” and “opportunity.” It doesn’t. But I’m not sure anyone’s told the Bush administration, judging from this little tidbit in CongressDaily today: “[White House spokesman Trent] Duffy asserted that the vast spending that would be required to address the hurricane’s impact adds to the need to change Social Security, which threatens to strain the budget in coming years.” Ah yes, despite the fact that privatization that would add trillions to the deficit in the short term, at a time when Katrina will already add $100 billion or more to the deficit this year, the time for privatization is now, obviously, in the wake of disaster. Um, no.
Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard said:
“Whoever is at the top of this totem pole, that totem pole needs to be chainsawed off and we’ve got to start with some new leadership. It’s not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now.”
I think the White House doesn’t realize it’s at the top of the totem pole — the part we’ll be cutting off.
Apparently, the will of the people won’t prevail after all. Governor Schwarzenegger is promising to veto the equal marriage rights bill that was just passed in the California legislature.
So let me get this straight… we can’t take our civil rights issues to court, because when the courts make a ruling, they’re called “activist judges” and we’re told that we have to refer to the legislatures to make the laws.
When we go through the legislatures to make the laws, we’re vetoed by activist governors who defy the will of the people.
So basically, there’s no civil rights justice for gay people in America, at all.
I was saying last night that I don’t want to live in America anymore. I don’t feel safe here, either from natural or man-made disaster, or anti-gay attack.