Bill's Big Diamond Blog

New Orleans in Black and White

It’s been a year today since the weight of incompetence, poor planning, class division, racial discrimination, the misallocation of the National Guard, and denial combined with the fury of nature to decimate the city of New Orleans.

Remember the people Hurricane Katrina, FEMA, the White House, the politicians, and Homeland Security all left floating in the water. Remember today and remember them going forward.

Today, Laura Flanders broadcasts Radio Nation live from New Orleans. Check out the last few days of her broadcasts from N.O. as well.

Tonight, HBO will broadcast all four hours of “When the Levees Broke,” Spike Lee and Sam Pollard’s document of the trauma from many of the perspectives the nation didn’t hear, before and after the drowning of the city.

As they say about 9/11, “Never Forget.”

UPDATE- Oh, and by the way… Matt at The Tattered Coat (yet another of the amazing Philly blognicentia) has an excellent post about Katrina--and links to photos of Matt Cohen’s taken in New Orleans now, after a year of perhaps not-so-benign neglect.

Via the Spin Zone.

Plamegate / Iraqgate Update

For news-starved Plamegate (I still call it part of a larger 'Iraqgate') junkies, yesterday’s PBD points to Jeralyn. In particular, Jeralyn discusses the Armitage-as-leaker angle in Isikoff and Corn’s new book, Hubris.

For a little big-picture background, I recommend reading (or listening to a WNYC podcast of) Craig Unger, who has traced the Iraqgate cabal back prior to the 2000 election. Unger outlines how the Cheney-Rummy-neocon cabal began soon after the first Iraq War and gained speed as it became possible they would have the power to gin up a long-awaited final confrontation with Saddam AND open up a new oil base in the Middeast at the same time.

Like Deep Throat always said, follow the money.

Voter Alert... Voter Alert... Must Scare Everyone... Must Hype Till Election Day!

I can’t help asking why it is that we go through countless “orange alert” scares and stories of terror suspicions in the period leading up to the 2004 elections, then go through a period of so much calm and no major US alerts...

...no major US alerts, that is, until this period, leading up to the 2006 elections.

Now, even praying on the plane gets such a hyper reaction that there’s little chance the devout person of color won’t be grounded.

I yearn for the days when the thing a civilian feared most was an armed Dick Cheney on a hunting trip.

UPDATE — While your own bullsh*t alert level is being raised, see these blogs (PBD) (Political Animal) for a preview of the Iran hype to come after Labor Day… (when all new political ‘products’ are launched!)

Katrina a Year In: A Remembrance from New York

As we come up on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, it’s more important than ever that we follow the stories of people dislocated and lost, whose lives were turned upside down and shaken out over a wide area outside a flooded city and coast. Much more so than here in New York after September 11, affected residents of New Orleans and the Gulf are left with little of what they knew to be their cities and their lives.

While the light no longer shines so bright on them, I know there are thousands, probably tens of thousands, and maybe even more people looking to put the pieces of their world back together today. I know this because I experienced a very small version of what they must be going through.

After September of 2001, many of us in New York were without jobs, clients, workplaces, and left having to reconstruct some version of what we did to get by in the world. Old patterns of social and economic life were forever altered or torn apart. The good news was, we had the nation’s support and indulgence. We had a continuing focus on making us whole again, which helped make a hard time possible to surmount.

My business was mostly gone, but I had a support network. Personally, I will always remember two volunteer marketing specialists, Keren and Richard, who spent an hour a week with two of us for a year. They spent time learning what we did producing video and how our businesses used to work. Once they understood our businesses, they started educating us. They spent endless hours going painstakingly over how to find new clients, how to make up a good brochure and a website, how to build appropriate materials for different kinds of project prospects. They laid out all the marketing nuts and bolts of starting out again in a business that I used to know and run without thinking about it much.

It was slow coming back. The Small Business Administration helped with a loan. My parents helped. Still, there were months when nothing happened but the ticking of the clock— and the disappearance of rent money. It was frightening to realize that the bottom could just fall out of your economic life and that it was no one’s major concern but your own. It was harder to go through in a time when you knew that the premise of American life had changed, that we were not bound together in a promise that FDR had made with the people seventy years ago. Our new Administration didn’t want the rich suffering alongside the rest of us, so our problems weren’t their concern. They got tax cuts.

Still, here in New York, we were missing lives, an iconic, but small part of the city’s infrastructure, and a significant, but measurable portion of the Big Apple’s economy. We had support. We had a huge area that was less affected around us. In New Orleans and parts of the Gulf Coast, people are without so much more than we lost. And for them, every day that the country has forgotten their plight is another day of searching for what makes a community whole.

Just setting aside for a moment those who lost everything, the families who will never see their kin again, there are countless people who are still without a real home. Imagine your community torn asunder and you being left someplace else, where you don’t know anyone, looking for work among people who aren’t living with your desperate reality. Imagine being a stranger among them, without a job or a community of the people you’ve come to know throughout your life. Imagine that the television doesn’t blare out your plight every day to the country, saying how hard your situation is. It’s no longer news to anyone but you that life as you knew it is gone for good. Oh yeah, and add to that the racism and class division that hits poor people of color (a huge percentage of those affected) in America every day, even when you’re not struggling to get out from under a hurricane.

These are the people who I think about when I think about a year having passed soon since Katrina hit their city and coast. These are the stories I hope my friend Sam Pollard has captured on film and video with Spike Lee in their documentary. These are the folks who need our attention and our respect. We as a country need to remember the plight of a city that didn’t get hit by terrorists, but by the weight of economic, political, and racial barriers, all pressing down on them while nature washed over them in a fury.

It’s been almost a year, but it’ll be a lot longer before many can move on. Let’s remember them this year too.

Bush-League Therapy Strategies: Let's Put Shrub on the Couch

Today is therapy post day, an opportunity to look at the wacked-out performance of the leader of the free world, like the display at his press conference the other day, to and wonder, “What the hell is wrong with this guy?”

A few therapeutic approaches come to mind:

1- The first is a sober attempt to dissect the Presidential personality, Juan Cole has a diagnosis…

2- Then there’s Bob Harris’ more Rorschachian approach. Hey, look at this guy. OK, so it’s just a gut reaction... but isn’t that why the other folks pictured in his post are under surveillance in the first place?

3- And finally, LeisureGuy spells out Narcissistic Personality Disorder for anyone lacking a DSM around the house. Oh look, they start wars, too!

Yes, I’m kidding…aren’t I?

9/11's "Grand Illusion"

Whatever they think of Rudy Giuliani, usually critics concede that he was at his best on September 11, 2001. And why not— we all needed him, especially since we were getting absolutely no assurance that day from President Bush. “New York's grim-faced mayor looked a whole lot more in charge than America's deer-in-the-headlights president,” wrote Ellis Henican in today’s Newsday.

But now, Henican points us to a new book of investigative research that shows Rudy made the kind of destruction we suffered in New York a lot worse than it had to be. According to Wayne Barrett of the Village Voice and Dan Collins of CBS.com, Rudy, “ignored repeated warnings from the experts, including his own commissioners and aides.”

After leaving the city unprepared for a terror attack, the authors of “Grand Illusion, The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11," say, Giuliani compounded matters by pulling Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik into his own personal PR orbit on the day of the attack, instead of leaving him to orchestrate the police response. "I don't know who was directing," current police Commissioner Ray Kelly told Barrett and Collins. "I literally don't."

Barrett and Collins interviewed No. 2 cop Louis Anemone about his attempt to tell the mayor he needed an anti-terror plan in 1998. "Rudy glazed over," Anemone said. "We never had any discussion about security at the World Trade Center. We never even had a drill or exercise there. ... There was just a lack of recognition of the problem at City Hall."

"The facts - depressing but unavoidable - were that Giuliani had allowed the city to meet the disaster of September 11 unprepared in a myriad of ways,” write the authors of a book that likely will figure importantly in the history of the most fearsome day in modern New York history.

(A hat tip to John Amato at C & L.)

Bush Press Conference

Rather than discussing the relative merits of another course of action, I’d prefer that someone in the White House press corps had gotten an answer to the obvious question yesterday: “What exactly is your plan for Iraq— and given how poorly the mission is going now, what will you change within it to achieve the security goals you keep suggesting are achievable?”

Come on. The President actually manages to attack a straw man of withdrawal, which isn’t responsible for the current disaster, by comparing the current situation to one that might be worse? This is unbelievable gall. American soldiers are dying in droves, Baghdad residents are leaving the city, sectarian violence is the rule of the day and we get a huffy attack on the loyal opposition in this country, instead of an accounting?

He’s an embarrassment and so is a press corps that lets him get away with a staged rant about defending the country by running our military headlong into the sands of Iraq, with no achievable goal and no plan for an exit.

The Rove Plan to Elect CT House Republicans

Sidney Blumenthal points out the subterranean importance of the Lieberman campaign to the White House. It’s the congressional seats that matter most. By pulling as many Republican voters to the polls as possible (which Joe’s Connecticut for Lieberman campaign is doing so far), the Lieberman campaign helps 3 ‘at risk’ Republican Congressional candidates. That’s 1/5 of the national total that Democrats need to swing in order to take the House.

The President is a pathetic draw this year, even for relatively partisan GOP voters. Going to the polls to shore up Bush’s backside isn’t an argument that even Karl Rove plans on using to motivate swing voters in November. But if the Republicans can draw their base to the polls to save Connecticut from a local PR catastrophe, like losing native son Joe, then the voters will be in the booth to pull the lever for their House candidates too.

Blumenthal’s point illustrates another reason why Lieberman’s offer to caucus with Democrats, should he beat Democratic nominee Ned Lamont, is falling on deaf Democratic ears nationally. It’s not going to be a happy caucus in January if Joe brings enough Republican Congressmen with him to make House Democrats a minority again.

A hat tip to PBD and mcjoan.

Reeling in the Years— PF Sloan and "Eve of Destruction"

I got a lesson this morning in the nature of justice, art, and history. The radio was on in the apartment. and NPR’s Liane Hansen began to introduce the 1965 hit ballad, “Eve of Destruction.” Ms. Hansen was interviewing the song’s long-forgotten writer, PF Sloan.

The lyrics of “Eve of Destruction” ring true with people of a certain age— and I have to admit to being old enough to feel their power. So does my partner, who welled up with tears, “I can’t believe it’s been all these years and we’re going through this again. It’s so sad,” she said.

Sloan’s youthful lyrics— meant as “a child of America singing to its love of country,” were a powerful condemnation of the hypocrisy of war and its trappings, wrapped thinly around injustice and lies.

The eastern world, it is exploding
Violence flarin’, bullets loadin’
You’re old enough to kill, but not for votin’
You don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun you’re totin’
And even the Jordan River has bodies floatin’

But you tell me
Over and over and over again, my friend
Ah, you don’t believe
We’re on the eve
of destruction.

It’s no accident that Sloan has come back now with a reprise of his hit of forty years ago. His song has continuing relevance in far too many ways. His personal story also has power. Sloan’s comeback is to record again, asserting his own talent to issue a piece that a better-known artist made famous the first time around (Barry McGuire). Sloan’s own journey to recording a fine CD, “Sailover,” (which contains more personal songs as well) required him to overcome depression and his own alienation to reclaim his art. After thirty years away, he found the balance to again make music and the public appearances a new album requires.

While the interview with Sloan is worth a listen (link), it’s the lessons he inspires the second time around that linger with me after the music fades. “Eve of Destruction” still digs at our psyche, of course, because we find ourselves again trapped in a war of aggression in a foreign land, again (aging) children of America, calling our country home. We are once more fighting against power that bends away from the arc of justice.

There were lessons in the 60’s that we probably thought we wouldn’t have to remember half a lifetime later. Some were cruel ones: about the nature of the powerful to protect their turf from the people and about the twisted uses patriotism can be put to. There were the ways we thought we wouldn’t again see employed to silence people whose only crime was to speak out against injustice.

Now there are new lessons to learn as well. One is about the continuous nature of the struggle to create a better world.

Years ago, many people thought change had happened when the Vietnam War was over and became more introspective and lifestyle-centered. It was too easy to miss the realization that even then, the Right was organizing anew, beginning already to rewrite the history of the time. In a moment of seeming defeat after Watergate, those who would again try to concentrate power— and use the violent instruments of the State to maintain it— were working the nuts and bolts of the political machine. They were only a few years from building their careers up under the Reagan Revolution, soon to turn aside years of liberal progress towards a more open society. It wouldn’t be long till they had more power than they’d ever enjoyed during the post WWII period.

Despite the hijacking of American democracy, there is a tendency for good people to believe that there’s an end to politics, a time to leave the public square and tend to their garden, to toast to family and friends and go about the business of everyday life. It’s hard work to constantly stare down the problems of society. It’s also imperceptibly slow work to turn around a violent culture and teach it new ways. We all would like to declare victory at the earliest opportunity and to spend our time on the things we love and enjoy. Personal goals, the comforts of home and the warmth of family are what we want to celebrate at our hearth, not usually primaries and petitions.

Today, as we realize that we must lumber again out of silence to fight the good fight, It’s heartening to remember that there is also joy in coming together to build a community and to celebrate our culture. It’s also possible to celebrate taking back our ideals and dreams. Even though they’re somewhat tarnished, they’re the ones we want to pass on to our children. So we don’t only fight the resurgence of jingoism and violent authoritarianism, but we also celebrate our continuing ability to overcome and build a new town square.

PF Sloan’s revival is a metaphor. Even while coming out of the gardens of personal experience, his music of resistance still has the power to capture our ears. An awakened America is ready to listen again.

Rove and Co Encourage Democratic Fratricide in CT

Bill Kristol, editor of the right wing Daily Standard, thinks supporting Joe Lieberman is a no-brainer for conservatives, “Foreign policy hawks and Bush doctrine believers and prowar types, we want Lieberman to win.”

Who knew sleepy little Connecticut, with all those plaid-panted suburbanites getting up to collect the paper from their doorsteps in the morning, would be the epicenter of the battle to save right wing foreign policy ideology through Holy Joe Lieberman?

So, what will the right do with Joe if they re-elect him? Well, use him as a poster child of course… to claim that the Democratic Party has no connection to the voters… that Joe Lieberman was ‘kicked out’ of his own party for the crime of supporting the President… but that the voters of Connecticut saw fit to back the Administration in the person of Senator Lieberman.

That’s the narrative that has Newt Gingrich supporting Lieberman along with Kristol. It’s also why Ken Mehlman won’t put his lips together for Alan Schlesinger, the GOP nominee for Senate in Connecticut. The narrative is a wonderful distraction from the Republicans’ troubles throughout the country, and Lieberman’s need for validation is playing right (no pun intended) into it.

Lieberman, on the other hand, strategizes that as long as he has the Republican Party’s support, that he can keep national Democrats away from Ned Lamont by promising to caucus with Senate Democrats if he wins— and thereby split the Democratic vote for Lamont. It’s a good plan, if Connecticut Democrats buy it as Democracy-lite.

But Lieberman’s support for the Democratic Party has always been running a distant second to his support for the Connecticut for Lieberman Party, even before it formally existed. His decision to split his focus while running for Vice President and to keep his name on the Connecticut ballot for Senator in 2000 was a classic example. His decision to openly break with the Gore campaign over military ballots in Florida after the election was another. His excoriation of President Clinton’s personal morals in the middle of Monicagate precedes them and established Lieberman as the non-Democrat. His alignment with Bill Frist and the fundamentalists over Terri Schiavo’s custody completed his move away from the Party, after pounding Democrats for questioning the war in Iraq throughout the Bush years.

If the Party faithful look at Joe’s promise to support the Democratic caucus with a jaundiced eye, it’s not hard to see why. His entire candidacy is based on the concept that he’s a free agent, ready to make each call entirely on the basis of his own views. He’s answerable to no one, except possibly his wife’s lobbying clients.

The next question will be whether the Democratic Party understands the power of being drawn into internal bickering over whether to treat Joe with delicate manners, in a truly Liebermanesque effort to hedge bets on the possibility of him rejoining the Senate. If Karl Rove and Co can manage to split Democrats in this manner, their strategy will have already been successful.