Still Fighting

Activism

Find Your Local American Red Cross Chapter. Of course, we still encourage you to donate money to the Red Cross, but we realize that not everyone is in a position to do so. However, if you can't donate money, there are a lot of other things that the Red Cross needs to help with the relief effort. In particular, the Red Cross always needs blood, which fortunately, is free to almost all of us! Use the link above to find your local chapter, and visit their website. In addition to blood, many local chapters can use other items as well. You might have something sitting around your house that the Red Cross can put to good use - it certainly doesn't hurt to check!

News

Police in Suburbs Blocked Evacuees, Witnesses Report. Last week, an obvious President Bush asked Nancy Pelosi "What didn't go right?" with the Katrina response. Well, it's tough to know where to start, as story after story of miscues and ineptness come to the surface. But, maybe, just maybe, a complete lack of leadership played a big part. Take this story, in which police actually blocked escape routes from New Orleans, and reportedly confiscated their food and water, because they feared massive crowds heading into the suburbs. Can you imagine such a situation? What if someone had coordinated an evacuation plan? What if someone had given reasonable instructions to the police force? When fear of "crowds" overwhelms public safety, you're dealing with a massively misguided police force. We wonder if the overblown reports of roving gangs and looters had anything to do with this reaction by the police. Regardless, it's completely unwarranted, and these officers should be ashamed and removed from duty.

G.O.P. Sees Opportunities Arising From Storm. "What opportunities?", you may ask. Opportunities to help people recover from Katrina? Opportunities to improve disaster relief programs? Maybe opportunities to prevent people from living in such poor conditions that they are unable to evacuate a city ahead of a deadly flood? No, of course not. Rather, they see opportunities to enact their conservative policial agenda. In the article, Treasury Secretary John Snow says "There are a lot of opportunities to experiment." Of course, he's talking about removing minimum wage standards for federal workers, which they've already done. And they're talking about supporting faith-based programs and implementing more tax breaks. One might think that when a region of the country has been devastated, it might be prudent to implement safer programs to get a wounded economy back on track. But not when there's political hay to be made. Remember, there's no tragedy you can imagine that Republicans won't exploit for political gain. There's gonna be a whole lot of collateral damage.

Verbatim: Noodle This, Kansas. After a lot of heavy, Katrina-related articles, it's time for something a bit lighter. Have you heard of the Flying Spaghetti Monster? If not, you can go here to learn more about this crucial creation theory. The FSM was proposed as an alternative theory to Intelligent Design, and centers around the concept that the universe was created by, what else by a Flying Spaghetti Monster, who manipulates the world with His Noodly Appendage. It may sound ridiculous, but when you stop and think about it, it's no less arbitary, and has just as much supporting evidence as the world's most popular religion. And so, fundamentally, we agree with Bobby Henderson, the founder of Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, who wrote to the Kansas school board insisting that his religion be taught alongside Intelligent Design. Can you really justify teaching one and not the other? How about we stick with facts?

Editorials

Iraq's fig leaf constitution. We harp on the Iraq invasion a lot, mostly because we now know that it was completely unjustified. But, let's assume for a second that it was justified, and for whatever reason you can make up, we needed to overthrow Saddam to insure our safety. We know, it's a hard exercise, but bear with us. Even if you accept that impossible-to-swallow pill, the war is still a failure. Why? Not because of the poor planning on the ground which has resulted in many more deaths than necessary, although that's a good argument. No, rather, the end result is going to be a pro-Iran state. Robert Scheer puts it best in his editorial, explaining why "No amount of crowing over a fig leaf Iraqi constitution by President Bush can hide the fact that the hand of the region's autocrats, theocrats and terrorists is stronger than ever." We can't undo the invasion. We can't resurrect the thousands of dead. But we still could try to set things right, and make sure that Iraq is more stable than when we left it. Of course, we won't.

Lowering Profiling's Profile. A Justice Department study of racial profiling revealed some good news and some bad news. The good news is that a driver's race seems to have little bearing on whether or not he or she gets pulled over. The bad news is that once drivers are pulled over, what happens afterwards is race-dependent: Hispanics and blacks are significant more likely than whites to get arrested, handcuffed, or to have their vehicles searched. This is disturbing data, and clear evidence that our law enforcement system has some problems that need to be fixed. Of course, in order to fix the problem, people need to know about it. But the really disturbing part is that a Justice Department official who refused to suppress the unfortunate data in a news release was himself released a few weeks later. This is data that doesn't necessarily even reflect poorly on the Bush Administration; it makes no reference to whether this phenomenon has increased or decreased since Bush too office. How can we begin to fix a problem if we're not even willing to call attention to it publicly?

Blogger Commentary

Dusting Off the Manual. These days, if you talk to a conservative about Bush, you can usually get him or her to at least concede that Bush has made a few big screw-ups recently. However, start talking about the racist implications of how he's handled Katrina, and you might be accused to flying off the rails, and being a knee-jerk liberal, throwing around wild accusations. These days, calling someone a racist seems to be almost as bad as calling someone the "n word". Digby dissects exactly how and why the Republican party is still racist after all these years, and how they continually use race to divide America apart. Think we're crazy? Does that make you uncomfortable? Digby's got some news for you: "For those who think that we are in a post racist world because George W. Bush appointed blacks to his cabinet, think again. The modern Republican Party was built on the back of an enduring national divide on the issue of race. George Bush may not personally be racist (or more likely not know he's racist) but the party he leads has depended on it for many years."

More Bucks for the Bang Gang. We're tired of hearing how well the economy is doing by people who continually quote GDP statistics. Yes, our GDP may be growing (even though the poorest Americans are being left in the dust), but where's that money coming from? More and more, it's looking like war profiteering. And who's funding it? You guessed it: John and Jane Q. Taxpayer. Charlie Cray quotes some infuriating data: "...total pay for the nation's big war contract CEOs rocketed upwards by 200 percent -- a huge increase compared to the 7 percent pay hike received by most big-company CEOs between 2001 and 2004." Where's the oversight? Shouldn't true conservatives be outraged that taxpayer money is being wasted on overcharges and no-bid contracts? Not as long as that money keeps coming back to their war chests.