William Bennett Is A Racist Jackass

...among other things.

William "Eugenics" Bennett

Mike Davis Asks The Tough Questions About New Orleans

The Mysteries of New Orleans
Twenty-five Questions about the Murder of the Big Easy
By Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenot

We recently spent a week in New Orleans and Southern Louisiana interviewing relief workers, community activists, urban planners, artists, and neighborhood folks. Even as the latest flood waters from Hurricane Rita recede, the city remains submerged in anger and frustration.

Indeed, the most toxic debris in New Orleans isn't the sinister gray sludge that coats the streets of the historic Creole neighborhood of Treme or the Lower Ninth Ward, but all the unanswered questions that have accumulated in the wake of so much official betrayal and hypocrisy. Where outsiders see simple "incompetence" or "failure of leadership," locals are more inclined to discern deliberate design and planned neglect -- the murder, not the accidental death, of a great city.

In almost random order, here are twenty-five of the urgent questions that deeply trouble the local people we spoke with. Until a grand jury or congressional committee begins to uncover the answers, the moral (as opposed to simply physical) reconstruction of the New Orleans region will remain impossible.

1. Why did the floodwalls along the 17th Street Canal only break on the New Orleans (majority Black) side and not on the Metairie (largely white) side? Was this the result of neglect and poor maintenance by New Orleans authorities?

2. Who owned the huge barge that was catapulted through the wall of the Industrial Canal, killing hundreds in the Lower Ninth Ward -- the most deadly hit-and-run accident in U.S. history?

3. All of New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish east of the Industrial Canal were drowned, except for the Almonaster-Michoud Industrial District along Chef Menteur Highway. Why was industrial land apparently protected by stronger levees than nearby residential neighborhoods?

4. Why did Mayor Ray Nagin, in defiance of his own official disaster plan, delay twelve to twenty-four hours in ordering a mandatory evacuation of the city?

5. Why did Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff not declare Katrina an "Incident of National Significance" until August 31 -- thus preventing the full deployment of urgently needed federal resources?

6. Why wasn't the nearby U.S.S. Bataan immediately sent to the aid of New Orleans? The huge amphibious-landing ship had a state-of-the-art, 600-bed hospital, water and power plants, helicopters, food supplies, and 1,200 sailors eager to join the rescue effort.

7. Similarly, why wasn't the Baltimore-based hospital ship USS Comfort ordered to sea until August 31, or the 82nd Airborne Division deployed in New Orleans until September 5?

8. Why does Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld balk at making public his "severe weather execution order" that established the ground rules for the military response to Katrina? Did the Pentagon, as a recent report by the Congressional Research Service suggests, fail to take initiatives within already authorized powers, then attempt to transfer the blame to state and local governments?

9. Why were the more than 350 buses of the New Orleans Regional Transportation Authority -- eventually flooded where they were parked -- not mobilized to evacuate infirm, poor, and car-less residents?

10. What significance attaches to the fact that the chair of the Transportation Authority, appointed by Mayor Nagin, is Jimmy Reiss, the wealthy leader of the New Orleans Business Council which has long advocated a thorough redevelopment of (and cleanup of crime in) the city?

11. Under what authority did Mayor Nagin meet confidentially in Dallas with the "forty thieves" -- white business leaders led by Reiss -- reportedly to discuss the triaging of poorer Black areas and a corporate-led master plan for rebuilding the city?

12. Everyone knows about a famous train called "the City of New Orleans." Why was there no evacuation by rail? Was Amtrak part of the disaster planning? If not, why not?

13. Why were patients at private hospitals like Tulane evacuated by helicopter while their counterparts at the Charity Hospital were left to suffer and die?

14. Was the failure to adequately stock food, water, potable toilets, cots, and medicine at the Louisiana Superdome a deliberate decision -- as many believe -- to force poorer residents to leave the city?

15. The French Quarter has one of the highest densities of restaurants in the nation. Once the acute shortages of food and water at the Superdome and the Convention Center were known, why didn't officials requisition supplies from hotels and restaurants located just a few blocks away? (As it happened, vast quantities of food were simply left to spoil.)

16. City Hall's emergency command center had to be abandoned early in the crisis because its generator supposedly ran out of diesel fuel. Likewise many critical-care patients died from heat or equipment failure after hospital backup generators failed. Why were supplies of diesel fuel so inadequate? Why were so many hospital generators located in basements that would obviously flood?

17. Why didn't the Navy or Coast Guard immediately airdrop life preservers and rubber rafts in flooded districts? Why wasn't such life-saving equipment stocked in schools and hospitals?

18. Why weren't evacuee centers established in Audubon Park and other unflooded parts of Uptown, where locals could be employed as cleanup crews?

19. Is the Justice Department investigating the Jim Crow-like response of the suburban Gretna police who turned back hundreds of desperate New Orleans citizens trying to walk across the Mississippi River bridge -- an image reminiscent of Selma in 1965? New Orleans, meanwhile, abounds in eyewitness accounts of police looting and illegal shootings: Will any of this ever be investigated?

20. Who is responsible for the suspicious fires that have swept the city? Why have so many fires occurred in blue-collar areas that have long been targets of proposed gentrification, such as the Section 8 homes on Constance Street in the Lower Garden District or the wharfs along the river in Bywater?

21. Where were FEMA's several dozen vaunted urban search-and-rescue teams? Aside from some courageous work by Coast Guard helicopter crews, the early rescue effort was largely mounted by volunteers who towed their own boats into the city after hearing an appeal on television.

22. We found a massive Red Cross presence in Baton Rouge but none in some of the smaller Louisiana towns that have mounted the most impressive relief efforts. The poor Cajun community of Ville Platte, for instance, has at one time or another fed and housed more than 5,000 evacuees; but the Red Cross, along with FEMA, has refused almost daily appeals by local volunteers to send professional personnel and aid. Why then give money to the Red Cross?

23. Why isn't FEMA scrambling to create a central registry of everyone evacuated from the greater New Orleans region? Will evacuees receive absentee ballots and be allowed to vote in the crucial February municipal elections that will partly decide the fate of the city?

24. As politicians talk about "disaster czars" and elite-appointed reconstruction commissions, and as architects and developers advance utopian designs for an ethnically cleansed "new urbanism" in New Orleans, where is any plan for the substantive participation of the city's ordinary citizens in their own future?

25. Indeed, on the fortieth anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, what has happened to democracy?

Mike Davis is the author of many books including City of Quartz, Dead Cities and Other Tales, and the just published Monster at our Door, The Global Threat of Avian Flu (The New Press) as well as the forthcoming Planet of Slums (Verso).

Anthony Fontenot is a New Orleans architect and community-design activist, currently working at Princeton University.
Copyright 2005 Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenot

Etan Thomas Punishes Jackasses With His Words

The Speech Everyone Is Talking About: Etan Thomas
Electrifies Anti-War Washington
By Dave Zirin

Every generation the wide world of corporate sports
produces an athlete with the iron resolve and moral
urgency to step off their pedestal and join the fight
for social justice. A century ago, it was boxer Jack
Johnson, flaunting, as WEB DuBois put it, "his
unforgivable blackness." In the 1930s, "the Brown
Bomber" Joe Louis and track star Jesse Owens took
turns spitting in Hitler's eyes, and Mildred Babe
Didrikson continued to show that a woman could be the
equal - if not superior – of any man. In the 1940s and
50s, Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, and the Brooklyn
Dodgers advanced the cause of civil rights through the
transgressive act of the multi-racial double play. In
the 1960s, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Bill Russell,
David Meggyesy, Tommie Smith, and John Carlos showed
how mass struggle could ricochet into the world of
sports with electric results. In the 1970s, Billie
Jean King used a wicked forehand, and took to the
streets, to demand equal rights for women, and Curt
Flood showed the labor movement - and the bosses - how
to go from crumbs to a bigger piece of the pie. In the
1980’s Martina Navratilova came out of the closet and
onto centre court, with her girlfriend on her sinewy
arm in plain view of all.

Today we may just have a figure to join their ranks in
the NBA’s Etan Thomas. Regular readers of this column
will know that I have interviewed the Washington
Wizards' Power Forward on numerous occasions and
highlighted his views on everything from the death
penalty to the ravages of Hurricane Katrina. He is
also the author of a book of poems called More Than An
Athlete.

But this past weekend, Etan made a play for pantheon
status. Etan took it to that Ali level, by delivering
a blistering poetical speech as part of the weekend’s
anti-war demonstrations in Washington DC. His
contribution, which was played in its entirety on
Democracy Now!, is being hailed as “the best of the
day” in various nooks and crannies of the blogosphere.


Here is the transcript. Read and pass it along – it
has the power to topple tyrants.

“Giving all honor, thanks and praises to God for
courage and wisdom, this is a very important rally.
I'd like to thank you for allowing me to share my
thoughts, feelings and concerns regarding a tremendous
problem that we are currently facing. This problem is
universal, transcending race, economic background,
religion, and culture, and this problem is none other
than the current administration which has set up shop
in the White House.

In fact, I'd like to take some of these cats on a
field trip. I want to get big yellow buses with no air
conditioner and no seatbelts and round up Bill
O'Reilly, Pat Buchanan, Trent Lott, Sean Hannity, Dick
Cheney, Jeb Bush, Bush Jr. and Bush Sr., John
Ashcroft, Giuliani, Ed Gillespie, Katherine Harris,
that little bow-tied Tucker Carlson and any other
right-wing conservative Republicans I can think of,
and take them all on a trip to the ‘hood. Not to do no
30-minute documentary. I mean, I want to drop them off
and leave them there, let them become one with the
other side of the tracks, get them four mouths to feed
and no welfare, have scare tactics run through them
like a laxative, criticizing them for needing
assistance.

I’d show them working families that make too much to
receive welfare but not enough to make ends meet. I’d
employ them with jobs with little security, let them
know how it feels to be an employee at will, able to
be fired at the drop of a hat. I’d take away their
opportunities, then try their children as adults,
sending their 13-year-old babies to life in prison.
I’d sell them dreams of hopelessness while
spoon-feeding their young with a daily dose of
inferior education. I’d tell them no child shall be
left behind, then take more money out of their
schools, tell them to show and prove themselves on
standardized exams testing their knowledge on things
that they haven’t been taught, and then I’d call them
inferior.

I’d soak into their interior notions of endless
possibilities. I’d paint pictures of assisted
productivity if they only agreed to be all they can
be, dress them up with fatigues and boots with
promises of pots of gold at the end of rainbows, free
education to waste terrain on those who finish their
bid. Then I’d close the lid on that barrel of fool’s
gold by starting a war, sending their children into
the midst of a hostile situation, and while they're
worried about their babies being murdered and slain in
foreign lands, I’d grace them with the pain of being
sick and unable to get medicine.

Give them health benefits that barely cover the common
cold. John Q. would become their reality as HMOs
introduce them to the world of inferior care, filling
their lungs with inadequate air, penny pinching at the
expense of patients, doctors practicing medicine in an
intricate web of rationing and regulations. Patients
wander the maze of managed bureaucracy, costs rise and
quality quickly deteriorates, but they say that
managed care is cheaper. They’ll say that free choice
in medicine will defeat the overall productivity, and
as co-payments are steadily rising, I'll make their
grandparents have to choose between buying their
medicine and paying their rent.

Then I'd feed them hypocritical lines of being
pro-life as the only Christian way to be. Then very
contradictingly, I’d fight for the spread of the death
penalty, as if thou shall not kill applies to babies
but not to criminals.

Then I’d introduce them to those sworn to protect and
serve, creating a curb in their trust in the law. I’d
show them the nightsticks and plungers, the pepper
spray and stun guns, the mace and magnums that they’d
soon become acquainted with, the shakedowns and
illegal search and seizures, the planted evidence,
being stopped for no reason. Harassment ain’t even the
half of it. Forty-one shots to two raised hands, cell
phones and wallets that are confused with illegal
contrabands. I’d introduce them to pigs who love
making their guns click like wine glasses. Everlasting
targets surrounded by bullets, making them a walking
bull's eye, a living piñata, held at the mercy of
police brutality, and then we’ll see if they finally
weren’t aware of the truth, if their eyes weren’t
finally open like a box of Pandora.

I’d show them how the other side of the tracks carries
the weight of the world on our shoulders and how
society seems to be holding us down with the force of
a boulder. The bird of democracy flew the coop back in
Florida. See, for some, and justice comes in packs
like wolves in sheep's clothing. T.K.O.d by the right
hooks of life, many are left staggering under the
weight of the day, leaning against the ropes of hope.
When your dreams have fallen on barren ground, it
becomes difficult to keep pushing yourself forward
like a train, administering pain like a doctor with a
needle, their sequels continue more lethal than
injections.

They keep telling us all is equal. I’d tell them that
instead of giving tax breaks to the rich, financing
corporate mergers and leading us into unnecessary wars
and under-table dealings with Enron and Halliburton,
maybe they can work on making society more peaceful.
Instead, they take more and more money out of inner
city schools, give up on the idea of rehabilitation
and build more prisons for poor people. With
unemployment continuing to rise like a deficit, it's
no wonder why so many think that crime pays.

Maybe this trip will make them see the error of their
ways. Or maybe next time, we'll just all get out and
vote. And as far as their stay in the White House,
tell them that numbered are their days.”

Edge Of Sports Weekly Column

George Galloway: Opposite Of Jackass

See him in San Francisco on September 21st!

Galloway Tour

Report From The Gulf Coast

Gulf Coast Relief And Reconstruction Blog

This is an exellent first-hand account of how reflief is progressing, or more accurately in some places not progressing. Good interveiws with grassroots organizers on the ground.

The "War On Drugs" Is The Height Of Jackassness

Senate Okays Restrictions On Cold Medicines

This is not my first posting regarding this issue. Please see my "Me & Crystal Meth" for the initial interest.

So ridiculous. So wrong. Since pharmaceutical companies make so many pieces-of-shit over-the-counter medications, it is impossible to buy just one brand or version and have it work. This just makes ordinary people's lives all the more difficult and complicated, especially those who have no health insurance and are forced to rely on nothing but over-the-counter medications.

I hate the "war on drugs." All it produces are jackass-laws like these (including three-strikes legislation that disproportionately punishes the poor and people of color) and a climate of irrational fear in the population at large.

Spammers Are Jackasses

I have a great blog here! You know how I know? Because all the stupid-fucking spammers who keep posting comments.

They are so on my short list of jackasses now.

For anyone who reads my blog, you can see that I have primarily comments from spamming idiots who want other people to visit their carpet cleaning, tax trading, or sex sites. I can't wait to see what I will get next. I am most assured that a fuckface spammer will add a comment to this entry as well.

Now, I see I can utilize a certain blogspot function that stops such spam from occuring, but I'm a glutton for punishment. So, as of this moment, there is a contest where I will pick a winner whose site or post most embodies the qualities of a jackass. I will announce the winner when I am sufficiently pissed-off enough to do so. The jackasses so far are amateurs and undeserving of anything but my scorn.

Miami Ink

Okay, let's start out by saying this show had the potential to be filled with much jackassosity. What do I have for proof? The other tattoo reality-show, Inked, is filled with jackasses. Don't take my word for it, just watch an episode.

Here are the reasons why this show is not stupid:

1) These guys are not full of themselves.

2) Did you see the episode where Yoji and his wife bring their newborn into the shop? You'd think they'd be assholes, but everyone was a big pushover. The biggest pushover: Mr. Needs-Anger-Management himself, Ami. He even offers, and makes good on his promise, to babysit so the new parents can have some much-needed alone-time.

3) In an upcoming episode, a woman will be added to the crew of tattoo artists in their man-filled shop. First of all, they refer to her as a woman in the previews. Second of all, Ami goes out of his way to point out that she is one of the best tattoo artists, period. He even says, "not for a woman, but for anybody." Now, that, dedicated blog readers, is anti-sexism I want to carry around with me wherever I go. In a world filled with poker-tournament commentators who consistently refer to players such as Annie Duke as the best female in the field, it's awesome to see some regular-old joes in the macho world of tattoo artistry set the standard for equality.

4) Every episode features the holistic process of tattoo. They show interviews with people about why they get tattoos, the meaning behind each piece of work, they show the tattoo as it is being done, and the final product. I cannot explain why, but it is enthralling.

So, you know, you should watch it.

FEMA Is A Criminal Jackass

Just when you thought the Feds couldn't prove themselves more intolerant, unresponsive and slow to act.


Denies Amtrak Help

Turns Away Firefighters

Refuses Wal-Mart Supply Trucks

Prevents Coast Guard From Delivering Diesel Fuel

Won't Let Red Cross Deliver Food

Bars Morticians From Entering New Orleans

blocks 500-boat citizen flotilla from delivering aid

Fails To Utilize Navy Ship With 600-Bed Hospital

Chicago: Send just one truck

turns away generators

FEMA: "First Responders Urged Not To Respond"

Barbara Bush's "Let Them Eat Cake" Moment

What a jackass. But what can we expect from a woman whose husband visited a grocery store while on the campaign trail in 1988 and had to ask the cashier in a flabbergasted tone what the scanner was? These people are so rich and removed from society at large, it's disgusting.

Let New Orleaners Eat Cake

Kanye West: Not A Jackass

After performing some random internet searches, I see there is much hating of Kanye West. This hate is due entirely to his accurate political commentary made live on NBC's Hurricane Katrina fundraiser on September 2nd. He was surreptitiously cut off because he veered away from the canned dialogue and then further edited out of the West Coast broadcast.

Some people, although these people are jackasses, are under the impression that Kanye West was opportunistically promoting himself and his album, "Late Registration," by emotionally conveying his dismay for the Bush Administration's racist handling of Katrina victims, as well as racist broadcasts by the media that portrayed all those left behind and suffering as savages. These jackasses even allege that what he said makes him a "reverse racist," whatever the hell that may be.

If Jim Litke can make this astute comment for an AP editorial, we have already proved West's point: "But if a reporter can interview a man standing outside a looted drugstore, and record his reluctance at having to go inside and steal pads for incontinence, why couldn't someone get medical supplies to the people huddled at the Superdome or the convention center in time, or the buses promised to evacuate them?"

Read this eyewitness report and you tell me West is wrong. Read this report and tell me that the entire Government, from top to bottom, is not entirely to blame for every dead baby, grandmother, grandfather, child, father and mother, sister, brother. And tell me, then, the fact these folks were poor and Black had nothing to with the botched evacuation and aid effort.


Trapped in New Orleans by the flood--and martial law

John G. Roberts Is A Jackass

It's a fact, folks. And I cannot BELIEVE jackasses like Sen. Dianne Feinstein and others who want to do NOTHING MORE than ask better QUESTIONS of the man. His record is well known. What the hell else is there to know? Nothing. Here's a little taste of his grotesque record:

WOMEN'S RIGHTS
**While serving as Deputy Solicitor General, he asked
the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, saying
“[w]e continue to believe that Roe was wrongly decided
and should be overruled.... [T]he Court’s conclusion
in Roe that there is a fundamental right to an
abortion... finds no support in the text, structure,
or history of the Constitution.”

**He has urged the Court to limit the legal remedies
women could seek when their rights under Title IX were
violated.

**Also, while working as Deputy Solicitor General, he
filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of
Operation Rescue and others, who routinely blocked
access to abortion clinics, arguing it was not direct
discrimination against women!


CIVIL RIGHTS
**Roberts wrote affirmative action programs were bound
to fail because they required “recruiting of
inadequately prepared candidates”.

**He ruled in October 2004 that the civil rights of a
12-year-old African American girl were not violated
when she was handcuffed and arrested for eating a
single French Fry on the Washington, D.C. metro
subway.

**In a recently-decided case brought by a Guantanamo
Bay prisoner, Judge Roberts joined a ruling holding
that the government could try terrorism suspects
without granting them basic due process protections.


IMMIGRANTS' RIGHTS
**Roberts criticized the Supreme Court for overturning
a Texas law designed to keep undocumented immigrant
children from getting a public education.

**As a legal aide in the Reagan administration in
1983, he declared that he would support creating a
national ID card in order to combat "the real threat
to our social fabric posed by uncontrolled
immigration"...


GAY RIGHTS
**The Supreme Court's Lawrence v. Texas ruling was in
favor of legal and privacy protections for gays and
lesbians, overruling the state legislature. In
recently released memos, Roberts has referenced this
ruling while raising questions about "intrusive"
courts.


RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
**As Deputy Solicitor General, he urged the Court to
uphold school sponsored prayer at graduation
ceremonies and eliminate a key Supreme Court
protection of government neutrality toward religion.

**Roberts praised Chief Justice Rehnquist's dissent in
a Supreme Court decision that overturned an Alabama
law authorizing public school sanctioned moments of
silence for prayer or meditation, calling the ruling
"indefensible."

And that's just a TASTE!

Roberts is a threat, period.

If just hoping for a better process or more insightful questions just isn't cutting it for you, and you live in the San Francisco or Oakland Area, I invite you to protest Feinstein and her ilk for not having a backbone. She should be protesting the very hearings and whipping up support for filibuster, not spewing boldfaced lies about how it's impossible to know where he stands.

Protest Tues. 9/6 at Feinstein's Offices
In SF--gather 5pm at Post & Market (Montgomery BARTstation)
In Oakland--gather 5pm at 14th St. & Broadway (City Center/12th St. BART station)