1/2/2006

I'm baaaaack. Still though, I had no internet all of last week, so I'll not update until next week. Besides, the royal monkey spent his week in hiding so not a lot happened anyway. (Though the one bit of news that consistently got me to blow my top this week was the bit that there is going to be an investigation into who leaked the surveillance story to the media. They didn't seem to be as vehement about who leaked Valerie Plame's name, did they? And the media is going along with it! Where's the demand for the inquiry into the legality of the surveillance!? Arggggh.)

But I do have some thoughts about New Orleans. (For more eloquent thoughts, go here.)

First, let me just say, the go-cup should be universal. Period. For the first time, I was able to leisurely drink my libation. If I couldn't finish before I left the bar, I could just take it with me! It was AWEsome. (Otherwise, I would've gotten myself pukin' drunk.)

Second, it's a friggin' mess down there still. Entire neighborhoods are still dark. Debris is everywhere. Piles of rotting wood and drywall and appliances wherever you look. Trash, abandoned cars are everywhere, either left from the flood or added after he storm. I have no idea. I'd have to say the colour of the city is dingy brown. And the smell! It's hard to describe the smell -- wet, moldy, rotten, yuck. We were able to look in a few homes, two in Gentilly and one in New Orleans East. The one in NO East had been totally gutted. Everything -- from the floorboards to the insulation -- was part of an 8 foot pile in the front yard. Of the two in Gentilly, one had been emptied of furniture and the other still had the furniture in it. THAT one, the one with the furniture, was the saddest to see. Everything was black with mold and there was still stuff hanging on the wall. You could tell that people had lived there. The other two places we saw, it was hard to picture any life in there. But this one, life was just on the edge of it.

Third, the Quarter is fine. Almost unscathed. Underpopulated, but OK. (It didn't look like itself until New Year's Eve night. Then there were plenty of people. Lots of gutter punks. Lots of tourists. Lots of drunk girls and boys. Prior to that night though, it was eerily empty.) Which leads me to my rant:

They're literally begging for people to come down there. Yet, flights have been cut back and what's left is expensive. Once you get there, there's no place to stay. The hotels are either still damaged or filled with construction workers OR FEMA has filled them up with refugees. (Excuse me, evacuees.) Still, 4 months later. Two rooms down from the room in the hotel we stayed at on the West Bank, there was a blown out wall and the bathtub was just sorta' out there. Again. Four months later! WTF!?

The town is a much different place than it was prior to Katrina. The native I was with spent most of the week a little depressed and and quite shocked. Shocked that the projects and the areas that surround them were totally empty. (The town used to be nearly 70% african american. Now, it's a helluva lot closer to lilly white.) Depressed that his city couldn't get it together to at least make it LOOK nicer. Every house affected by the flood has FEMA markings on it. You can tell which house had a dead dog or cat or person. Flood lines can be seen on almost all the houses. Some houses are leaning dangerously to one side, their foundations soaked and unable to support the structure. There were a few pockets of hope, but not many.

Nagin may be a nice guy and all, and he may have been a perfectly fine mayor in a non-crisis city. But right now, that city needs someone who can command and demand change and cleanup. Period. Someone with balls the size of Texas needs to get down there and pound out a plan and implement that plan. Personally, I would first start by taking as much of the federal funds as necessary to rebuild ALL of the hotels in the area (For the local hotels, it would be a grant. For the chain hotels, it would be a low-interest loan with the interest being tax deductible -- if it isn't normally, I don't know.). Not just the Quarter hotels, but the West Bank too. (And for the West Bank hotels, I would provide a free shuttle service to and from the Quarter.) Move the FEMA people out of hotels that could support tourism. Put them in Slidell or FINALLY get around to setting up FEMA trailer parks and provide transportation for them. The amount of money the city would spend transporting them would probably be made up in tourism revenue. Concurrently, I would entice more airlines to add NOLA flights. A cut in landing fees or something. Also concurrently, I would use federal funds to reopen as many of the restaurants as could be opened. (Again, locals get grants.) If a restaurant was located in a neighborhood that's going to take more time to come back, I would help relocate that restaurant somewhere else. Get the food and liquor flowing. That's why people go to NOLA to begin with. (I had a hard time finding crawfish etouffee for pete's sake!)

Second, I would carve up the areas around the Quarter and zone them 1, 2, 3, etc. and begin picking up debris. Just cleaning them up. No rebuilding yet. Just picking up the debris. As zone one got finished, the crew would move to the second zone. Use the department of sanitation. Then, construction crews would descend upon zone one. Etc. and so forth. I'm not sure about this, but it seems to me that workers for this could be bussed in from nearby areas.

Concurrently, I would rebuild the levies to AT LEAST where they were prior to the breeches and I would make sure that Louisiana politicos, from the Senators to the Congresscritters to the Governor, were all well aware of the fact that if they DIDN'T fight for federal funding and aid to the point were they nearly collapsed from exhaustion, that they would be replaced with someone who would.

Also, local politicos should be soliciting corporate sponsorship for the levees. Like "adopt a highway", there should be "adopt a levee". Small local businesses should be allowed to financially support the levees at a lower rate and their names should be more prominent than Exxon or Mobil when publicizing their support.

And speaking of community, that's what NOLA's all about right now. That should be exploited to maximum benefit. Each neighborhood should start a committee -- Gentilly, Mid-City, Lakeview, NO East -- and solicit as much help as they can and as many funds as they can. They should coordinate as well. Some of the areas, like NO East will need a lot more help than an area like Mid-City. The monied neighborhoods are already rebuilding. (Some of this committe forming is beginning to happen already.)

I know most of this rant is naive. I could easily be talking out my ass about all of this because I don't know everything that's going on, but honestlly, it's a mess. Something has to be done. I have ideas, I'm sure there are decent ideas out there that aren't mine. Whatever. Just DO something. I was frustrated looking at all of it and I was just a tourist for heaven's sake. I can't imagine how the natives feel when they look at the mess.

I've never seen a town move slower than NOLA. Maybe it's a southern thing. But I can't imagine New Yorkers standing around and doing as much of nothing as some of the people in NOLA do. But in their defense, there's no direction down there. Not from local, state or federal officials. Nothing. Nada. Niente. There's no leadership. I know NOLA has a laissez faire attitude, but it's getting ridiculous.

I still had a ball while I was there. How could I not? It's New Orleans. But I had to restrict myself to the Quarter and a little bit of Magazine Street. It's a national tragedy and just because we've all got donor fatigue doesn't mean it should be forgotten.

Oh, and one final thing and this will sound more like me: What the hell is the military doing down there now? Four months later? In the Quarter no less? The ruffians are gone and making trouble elsewhere. There's nothing left to loot. And they sure as hell wouldn't be looting in the Quarter anyway. So what were the Military Police doing in the Quarter? They have no civilian policing skills. The police even know that about them.

I'll tell you what they're doing there. They were there to condition the american population into accepting their presence. THAT'S what they were doing there. All those dumb tourists, they're having fun in the Quarter, drinking and laughing, and they see the MPs there (I call the MPs Gerbils, by the way) and they raise their drinks to the Gerbils and laugh and continue on their way. Then, at a later date, (or sooner) after the Bushies have totally wiped their asses with Constitution and tossed it into the sewer system, and they place Gerbils on every street corner in America, the stupid, non-thinking pubic will not find anything odd about it. In fact, they'll get it all confused with those happy, drunken moments in the Quarter.

Along with the militarizing of the police uniforms, placing Gerbils in public, happy places were there is no "real" use for them is yet another play in the book. It's all about the conditioning of the American public so that they complacently accept a militarized America.

Paranoid? I think not.

The Vidiot's weekly blog:

What pissed me off this week? 12/19/2005

(updated every Monday at some point during the day)

...'cause I'm angry and my friends are sick of listening to me...

Mirror (in case geocities is wacky or, in case of trouble in New York, check it for messages): http://129.79.148.33/vidiotcontact/

Programming note: I'll probably not be able to update this blog until the second week of January. I'm going to New Orleans for Christmas and New Year's. Might as well pump a few dollars into their economy, right? (And no, I'll not be taking the disaster tour. Jeesh.)

The domestic spying thing is what's stuck in my craw this week. (Mmmmm, crawfish....)

Oops. Sorry.

Yes, most of us expect the Bushies to spy on domestic groups. That idea has been floating around for a while. (No matter that it's been shown to be illegal over and over again.) Who the hell was he spying on that the FISA court, a court that generally gives into the administration's demands 99 times out of 100, would say "no" to?

What gets me though is the fact the New York Times held the story back for the last year! They could've released it prior to the election! They could defend themselves and say "well, we didn't want to politicize the story" but NOT reporting it did exactly that! (There are rumors that NBC asked for, and got permission, to air the report.)

On top of that, the renditions are in the news again. It's yet another example of this administration's disregard for human rights and civil liberties. And now, there's a buzz about some provisions in the new P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act that allows for a secret police!

So, when we hear rumors that Bush has called the Constitution just a "damned piece of paper", it's not hard to believe the rumors. (I don't know if the Doug Thompson guy is on the up and up. You read his defense and decide for yourself.)

So, what was Bush on TV for? To steal headlines, most likely and to reinforce the false reality they've constructed that says "we're winning Iraq". But honestly, he just looked lame. What he DID do is basically admit to the fact that he has not upheld the 4th amendment of the US Constitution, as per our agreement with him. The idiot can now be impeached.

R.I.P. Richard Pryor, Tookie Williams and Sen.Eugene McCarthy. One made us laugh, but they all made us think.

Cool Video of the Week: Water Balloon in Space

Dumbest Site of the Week: Britney, Divorce Kevin

They've Got to be Kidding of the Week: Oil for Blood. Really.

Idea of the Week: Invest in small companies, $50 at a time.

Queer Gift Idea of the Week: Scrolling Buckle

Flash of the Week: Jib Jab

Time-waster of the week: Bash.org

And I'm not being hyperbolic. If you really take a big long look at the Cunningham connections, they definitely tie into the Abramoff scandal.

Excerpt: I hope you are sitting down when you read this. The Duke Cunningham scandal goes much deeper than just the $2.4 million in bribes being reported by the media. There is a lot the media is not telling you.

I'll sum up the article for you, but read it just the same: Basically, the guys on the defense appropriations committee inserted a couple of budget lines on the Pentagon's budget that went directly to some company called ADCS, which had a component that was associated with a Wilkes character that's in the middle of the Cunningham scandal. That money then went BACK to K-Street lobbying firms as well as to select GOP (and a very few dem) campaigns. So basically, we, as taxpayers, were funding the GOP lobbying and campaign machine.

Nice, huh?

There just might something to all of those "Lieberman replacing Rumsfeld" rumors. Look who Rummy was dining with:

Excerpt: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and erstwhile Nixon Secretary of State and Vietnam War architect Henry Kissinger were caught dining together last Thursday at Washington's Bistro Bis, ROLL CALL reports Monday.

A job interview, perhaps?

Sure. Drill in ANWR 'cause nobody is there.

Excerpt: House lawmakers opened the way for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and approved $29 billion for hurricane relief during an all-night session Monday bringing their legislative year to a close.

But don't you dare mess with Martha's Vinyard, vacation spot of the rich and powerful.

Excerpt: A plan to build what could become the first large offshore wind farm in the United States would be effectively killed by a proposed amendment to a Coast Guard budget bill now making its way through Congress, people on both sides of the issue say.

Still trying to frame Syria, I see.

Excerpt: A UN report on Monday pointed to fresh evidence further implicating senior Syrian officers in the murder of Lebanese ex-premier Rafiq Hariri and raised doubts about Damascus' cooperation in the probe.

There's a reason why people riot in the streets when the WTO comes to town.

Excerpt: Hundreds of protesters wielding bamboo sticks broke through police lines Saturday and tried to storm the convention center hosting global trade talks, but security forces scattered the crowd with tear gas. Police said 41 people were injured and 900 were detained.

The WTO's policies don't benefit anyone but the US and the UK. Just look at what happens when countries don't bow to the "Free Trade" gods and what happens when they don't.

Excerpt: Take Mexico and Vietnam, he says. One has a long border with the richest country in the world and has had a free-trade agreement with its neighbour across the Rio Grande. It receives oodles of inward investment and sends its workers across the border in droves. It is fully plugged in to the global economy. The other was the subject of a US trade embargo until 1994 and suffered from trade restrictions for years after that. Unlike Mexico, Vietnam is not even a member of the WTO. So which of the two has the better recent economic record? The question should be a no-brainer if all the free-trade theories are right - Mexico should be streets ahead of Vietnam. In fact, the opposite is true.

Free trade is not free.

Excerpt: The current system is unsustainable. Family farmers from Kansas to Kenya cannot get a fair market price for their products.

Is it any wonder that Central and South America is drifting to the left.

Excerpt: In the burgeoning cities of China, India and Southeast Asia, that might sound like a hopelessly outdated dream because global capitalism seems to be delivering on its promise to transform those poor societies into richer ones. But here, the appeal of rural socialism is a powerful reminder that much of South America has become disenchanted with the poor track record of similar promises made to Latin America.

When the economies collapsed down there, mostly due to our meddling through big public works projects with big loans that came due, when the WTO and the IMF swooped in, ostensibly to remedy their failing economies. In reality, they made things worse. MUCH worse.

Sometimes I have to shake my head. I just don't get it. Why on earth would Pelosi say this.

Excerpt: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said yesterday that Democrats should not seek a unified position on an exit strategy in Iraq, calling the war a matter of individual conscience and saying differing positions within the caucus are a source of strength for the party.

Listen. These damn democrats better get their acts together and come up with a damned unified as hell position that is antiwar, antitorture, antiimperialism and antidomestic surveillance or they will find themselves out of a frickin' job!

Period.

What's going on at Diebold?

Excerpt: The chief executive officer of electronic voting company Diebold who once famously declared that he would "deliver" Ohio for President Bush has resigned effective immediately, RAW STORY has learned.

Oh.

Excerpt: The suit was filed today in U.S. Federal District Court in Ohio and alleges the company "artificially inflated" stock prices through misleading public information designed to conceal the true nature of Diebold's financial and legal situation. The defendants are also alleged to have attempted to disguise well-known and ongoing problems with Diebold's Voting Machine equipment and software. Additionally, the suit alleges insider trading by defendants resulting in proceeds of $2.7 million. Remedies are sought under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

Of course, that's like taking down Capone on tax evasion charges.

Of course drugs open up alternate universes. That's why people take them.

Excerpt: Graham attempts to explain why, about 50,000 years ago, humans suddenly began to think creatively after having evolved anatomically millions of years before. He believes that it was due to altered states of consciousness (ASCs) triggered by experimentation with hallucinogenic plants, such as ayahuasca, datura root and the psilocybin or "magic" mushroom.

I believe this. When I'm running from them, it's as if they know who I am.

Excerpt; Don't be too proud of never forgetting a face: It turns out even a humble bumblebee can distinguish and recall different human faces, say researchers who have conducted experiments on the surprisingly canny insects.

Enjoy your holidays people.

Previous rants

At the very least, point your CNN-loving friends to my links page. Just getting started in reading alternate news sites gets people thinking. I have one friend who was very happy-go-lucky, thinking ol' Greta was telling the whole truth until I opened up his eyes a bit. Now, he's all depressed. He'll get over it. You gotta' get depressed before you get angry and you gotta' get angry before you can accomplish anything. We're all in mourning. We have to move through the steps. But we gotta' hurry it up.

Read. Inform. Spread the word. Even if it means your friends avoid you for awhile. If they really love you, they'll start to listen.

"POSSE COMITATUS ACT" (18 USC 1385): A Reconstruction Era criminal law proscribing use of Army (later, Air Force) to "execute the laws" except where expressly authorized by Constitution or Congress. Limit on use of military for civilian law enforcement also applies to Navy by regulation. Dec '81 additional laws were enacted (codified 10 USC 371-78) clarifying permissible military assistance to civilian law enforcement agencies--including the Coast Guard--especially in combating drug smuggling into the United States. Posse Comitatus clarifications emphasize supportive and technical assistance (e.g., use of facilities, vessels, aircraft, intelligence, tech aid, surveillance, etc.) while generally prohibiting direct participation of DoD personnel in law enforcement (e.g., search, seizure, and arrests). For example, Coast Guard Law Enforcement Detachments (LEDETS) serve aboard Navy vessels and perform the actual boardings of interdicted suspect drug smuggling vessels and, if needed, arrest their crews). Positive results have been realized especially from Navy ship/aircraft involvement.

{back}

Who am I?:

I am a biker chick who lives in NYC. This blog is about current events and my left-leaning, acerbic spin on those events. Nobody pays me anything to do this. Nobody tells me what to write. I will NEVER tout anything for anybody's money! EVER!

Use this instead of Google:

Clusty.com

These sites are good at culling stories from a multitude of media sites:

buzzflash.com
unknownnews.net
rawstory.com

Here are some excellent blogs:

Bartcop
Daily Kos
Atrios
Tacitus
Josh Marshall
Two Glasses
Brad DeLong
The Wonkette
Urban Survival
Greg Palast
Mark Crispin Miller
A String Theory Blog

Link exchange:

Ilia Dreams Blog
Iraq War Blog
BushVote.com
Dommecile.com
Funny Farm

media-bias exposed:

dailyhowler.com

these are good 'left-wing' journalism sites:

onlinejournal.com
counterpunch.com
thenation.com
inthesetimes.com
tompaine.com
commondreams.org
truthout.com
guerrillanews.com

a little more to the left:

wsws.org
indymedia.org

different:

whatreallyhappened.com
almartinraw.com

more different :

surfingtheapocalypse.com

really different:

goroadachi.com/etemenanki/

and for godsakes, stay away
from FOX,  MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC.
It's ALL CRAP!!!
watch the BBC news
or ITN news instead.

if you must succumb to reading a newspaper: 

www.guardian.co.uk 

or any other paper in another fucking country. All of our newspapers are owned by the same idiots that own the TV stations (and whose companies are diversified in industries that support the war machine) so all of the news is all the same CRAP.