posted by Last Night in Little Rock

This was written by Chris Rose of the Times-Picayune:

Dear America,

I suppose we should introduce ourselves: We're South Louisiana.

We have arrived on your doorstep on short notice and we apologize for that, but we never were much for waiting around for invitations. We're not much on formalities like that.

by TChris

Has spinmeister Rove saved the president's fanny again?

White House officials must be breathing a sigh of relief about the news coverage this morning that increasingly depicts the controversy over the government's response to the Gulf Coast disaster as a largely -- or even purely -- partisan issue.

Maybe not.

by TChris

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani thinks Saddam Hussein should “be executed 20 times a day for his crimes against humanity," which seems the very definition of overkill. One execution normally suffices to achieve the desired result.

Talabani claims an investigating judge “was able to extract confessions from Saddam's mouth” about various killings during Hussein’s regime. Hussein’s lawyer, Khalil Dulaimi, contends that Hussein didn’t confess and that the judge who leaked the claimed confessions to Talabani “must resign immediately.”

Dulaimi rebuked Talabani for his remarks, saying they meant "there will be no chance of a fair and clean trial."

The trial, before a special tribunal, is scheduled to commence on October 19. Meanwhile, the regime change orchestrated by President Bush hasn’t produced an end to indiscriminate killing in Iraq.

A police spokesman on Thursday said police had located 14 unidentified bodies in civilian clothes at several sites near the town of Mahmoudiyah, about 30 kilometers south of Baghdad. He said all had been shot to death.

by Last Night in Little Rock

Twenty years ago last month, a Japan Airlines Boeing 747 crashed into a mountain and killed 520. Because of Japanese culture, without waiting for determining who was at fault, the President of Japan Airlines immediately made a point to personally visit with the survivors of all passengers that he could find and personally apologize. I remember the video of the man bowing to the person receiving him. Aside from disaster, the Japanese also apologize for inconveniencing someone else.

In times of great personal disgrace, Japanese culture also recognized "the fine art of seppuku," the ultimate in acceptance of personal responsibility.

We used to hear our government officials talk of that concept. Now, of course, they have spun it around to the "personal responsibility" of those who lacked the wherewithal to escape New Orleans instead of their own responsibility. Spin for the sake of saving face. No matter that they swept up with the poor the nursing home and hospital patients who had no ability to escape who died in their beds.

In American culture, a simple resignation for the good of the country or the President would be enough. But that requires class, style, a conscience, and a desire to do the right thing; something these people all lack.

We have a lot to learn from Japanese culture.

by Last Night in Little Rock

The NY Times today has a surreal article today about "post-apocalypse" New Orleans: Macabre Reminder: The Corpse on Union Street.

This is a view the talking heads on TV will never give us, with words with power.

by TChris

Howard Kurtz surveys (with, thankfully, little comment of his own) various reactions to the president’s decision to substitute the conservative John Roberts for the conservative William Rehnquist. The reaction most likely to stimulate severe illness comes from Pat Robertson, who is “thankful” that Hurricane Katrina may have “brought [Roberts] some good.” Perhaps Robertson was praying for a disaster that would kill thousands so that senators would be distracted from Roberts’ confirmation hearings.

Slightly less stunning is conservative Bill Kristol’s concern that by swapping a conservative Roberts for a conservative Rehnquist, the president may feel pressure to nominate a more moderate candidate for Justice O’Connor’s seat. Kristol thinks that would be a betrayal of the president’s base, and he fears that Attorney General Gonzales might be the “moderate” who would emerge from that scenario. The notion that Gonzales, who regards the Geneva Conventions as "quaint," is insufficiently conservative to satisfy the right wing is astonishing. Maybe the president should just go with his base and nominate Pat Robertson instead.

I'll be on the road today and tomorrow. Last Night in Little Rock and TChris will fill in some during my absence, and I'll try to get a post or two in, but there also will be an open thread each day, like this one, for readers to take over.

by Last Night in Little Rock

This odd piece crossed my computer yesterday, and I didn't read it until today. It is from the website Intellectual Activist, and it posits that the "welfare state" is the cause of chaos in New Orleans.

People in disasters work together, fights and gunshots are proof the "welfare state" is a failure, NOLA is Baghdad under water, etc. It represents a similar thought pattern to those who believe that the people of NOLA deserve what they got if they didn't leave, neglecting to mention that 100,000 simply had no means to leave.

The author of the piece mentions "the projects" in Chicago that were "mercifully" torn down. He also admits that Fox News is his source of information.

Despite the false name of the website and the hidden agenda of potential racism, one might want to read it to think what the Bush apologists are thinking: The good citizens of New Orleans are reaping what the "welfare state" sowed.

And so it goes....

by TChris

Expect the White House to deflect any investigation that asks the questions posed today by Harry Reid:

In a letter to the Senate's Homeland Security Committee chairwoman, Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, pressed for a wide-ranging investigation and answers to several questions, including: "How much time did the president spend dealing with this emerging crisis while he was on vacation? Did the fact that he was outside of Washington, D.C., have any effect on the federal government's response?"

by TChris

When the federal sentencing guidelines were still binding on judges, a judge would sometimes sentence apologetically, explaining that the sentence was required by law even if undeserved. Judge John E. Steele in Florida told Elizabeth Thompson that her 30 year sentence was unfair. His complaint wasn't unusual.

Steele's statement was not unlike statements made by many federal judges, both conservative and liberal, around the country who complained for years that the sentencing guidelines forced them to hand down excessively long sentences.

Thompson was fortunate that Judge Steele voiced his disapproval of the result.

by TChris

The poor always suffer first, last, and most. As New Orleans degrades into a pool of toxicity, Prof. Hari Osofsky reminds us that the burdens of enviornmental disasters are borne disproportionately by the poor.

Hurricane Katrina's aftermath demonstrates this country's crisis of environmental justice. As the endless images cruelly reveal, the effects of this hurricane were not distributed randomly. Low-income people of color lived in more vulnerable situations and had fewer options.

Update: Brian Williams of NBC:

At that same fire scene, a police officer from out of town raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media... obvious members of the media... armed only with notepads. Her actions (apparently because she thought reporters were encroaching on the scene) were over the top and she was told. There are automatic weapons and shotguns everywhere you look. It's a stance that perhaps would have been appropriate during the open lawlessness that has long since ended on most of these streets. Someone else points out on television as I post this: the fact that the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention Center and Superdome) is a kind of perverse and perfectly backward postscript to this awful chapter in American history.

Update: Blogger Bob Brigham reports by e-mail:

We are in Jefferson Parish, just outside of New Orleans. At the National Guard checkpoint, they are under orders to turn away all media. All of the reporters are turning they're TV trucks around. Things are so bad, Bush is now censoring all reporting from NOLA. The First Amendment sank with the city.