Rowhouse Logic - Breathtaking Inanity

I had the misfortune of watching a little more of the Katrina coverage on television than I otherwise might have cared to. I woke up around 3:00 AM after having gone to bed at about 1:00 AM and didn’t sleep a wink thereafter. I tried to read myself back to sleep, but I couldn’t find anything that didn’t bother and agitate me. Stress from various projects I’m working on has probably caught up with me, so I did what I always do in these sleepless situations; worry about deadlines, drive myself crazy, watch cable news and, if I’m lucky, NFL films on ESPN Classic.

Getting back to Katrina, I don’t really want to critique the coverage as I’m sure anybody with half a brain knows how silly it is to send blow dried debutantes out into a hurricane in their slickers, emblazoned with the corporate logo, to look brave. Whatever.

The thing that really bothers me, and I know bothers a lot of people, was the knowledge that some 100,000 people were not able to evacuate from a city which quite reasonably could have been sunk beneath a toxic brew of petrochemicals, sewage and corpses right now. Fortunately, today’s storm was not as bad for New Orleans as it could have been, though that’s little consolation to the dead, the wounded and the people who have lost every worldly possession.

The people left behind were those who do not own cars and could not afford to leave. They were provided with a football stadium located beneath sea-level which began to crumble mid-hurricane. Had catastrophic flooding occurred with the ensuing petrochemical water pollution, one struggles to imagine how these people could have been saved. Surely we cannot allow for anything like this to ever happen again. While the very worst did not happen today, a very realistic scenario would have involved the deaths of a large portion of an entire class of people in one American city.

For whatever reason, Americans continue to inhabit parts of our nation which are prone to catastrophic natural disaster, and will continue to do so. As we learned today, decent insurance policies with government backing simply isn’t sufficient. Will Bunch points out some areas where the Federal government could and should have done better to prevent catastrophe, but it needs to be pointed out that it is also the responsibility of municipal and state governments to create realistic plans to evacuate those people who cannot, for whatever reason, evacuate themselves. Anything less is inexcusable. Twenty thousand people don’t need to die in order for us, as a nation, to say never again.

Susie shares a classic CNN viewing moment when she recounts Soledad O’Brien questioning Sen. Mary Landrieu about why so many people remained in New Orleans after it was evacuated. Her exact words were “Are they just complacent?� A not so stunning display of what strikes me as upper class indifference towards and ignorance of people of more meager means. More likely, it was just an example crass stupidity uttered mid-blather by and middling broadcast talent. I should mention that she asked the question in the context of the discovery that the roof of the Superdome was being ripped off and collapsing in sections. The superdome was, and is still, housing over 20,000 people who had no way out of town.

Back to the sleepless night; sometime around 4:30 AM, ESPN Classic broadcast Superbowl 13 between the Cowboys and the Steelers in its entirety. One pleasant thing on a night I’d rather forget.

I don’t mean to seem callus by talking about sleeplessness and football at the begining and end of this post. I’m simply not gifted or experienced enough a writer to articulate the absolute horror that needs to be expressed over something that could have been so very much more awful. Natural disasters will continue unabated for as long as any of us will live, but the shameful planning for such disasters needs to come to an end starting today. Storing people in what strikes me as a concrete death trap located below sea level is not a solution; it’s careless disregard for human life and we can do better.

Update: Sadly, it looks as though I may have spoken too soon:

The sense of relief that residents felt Monday morning when the city was not immediately inundated by a storm surge overflowing its protective levees was replaced late Monday night and Tuesday morning with dread because of a levee that was damaged by the hurricane.

Water flowing from the damaged levee near Lake Pontchartrain could have equally catastrophic effects, only unfolding more slowly.

I made a mistake tonight. Truth be told I made a number, but that’s none of your business, so let’s focus on just one. I have to admit that I’m not as up on my who’s who of hack punditry as I ought to be, so when I saw this diagram of Donald Luskin oil price predictions I became curious about this Luskin fellow and Googled him. When I first glanced at his personal website I thought I had come across a very cruel parody of some delusional, misguided freak. Even now, I’m not entirely convinced that it isn’t a parody, but I’m always willing to play the fool.

I won’t link to it, but I’d like you bastards to have a look just for giggles. Click on this link and then click on the very first link listed in the search results (the crap about the conspiracy)..

Now what on earth prompted The Associated Press to interview somebody from the Conservative Cato Institution for a story on obesity? As you might imagine, the Cato hack promptly loses control of his ability to restrain himself and calls for “private accounts.”

Balko said it’s not clear the government really knows how to persuade people to make better decisions. He said open-ended entitlement programs, such as Medicaid and Medicare, don’t provide much of a financial incentive for people to watch their weight. The government just picks up the cost of treating diseases for those patients, regardless of the amounts, he said.

He prefers that the government give Medicaid and Medicare recipients an incentive to open medical savings accounts, which would allow them to save money when they did not access the health care system.

Now what the hell is something like that doing in a story titled Obesity Rates Up in Most States? Are proper diet, regular exercise and privatization government services really the three keys to maintaining healthy body weight?

From one high school dropout to another, you’ll be missed Peter. Peter Jennings died today at age 67.

It’s odd the connections one makes to people you don’t know and never will, but one of the connections I made in my own life was to Peter Jennings. My mother and grandmother were both quick to remind me, at a certain point in time, that not finishing high school didn’t mean as much as I thought. They both used Jennings as an example. I’ve used that example myself, in my own mind, on a number of occasions. We’re not as large a demographic as some, but it was always nice to be so well represented. Regardless of your circumstances, it’s heartening to see people with a similar background do well.

I know his saying “bullshit” on the air and storming off in a tizzy is pretty funny, but I think this particular remark by the Novak, from the same broadcast, is just priceless:

No, but I’ve had the same experience that she did. A lot of my trouble in the world is that they’ve doctored my make-up and colorized me in a lot of newspapers on my picture. So, I sympathize with her.

Now who would dare fuck with such a pretty face?

Novak himself offers no answers. When pressed for details on the evildoers who dared despoil his visage, he only offered “Well, I don’t. I can’t tell you.”

I feel bad. I really do. I understand how hard it is to get past having one’s own beautiful image despoiled by persons of ill repute, so I fully sympathize with his reluctance to lay it all out on the table and come clean with the details. You’d be devistated too! This is trauma of the first and second order. Perhaps we should help him track down the culprits. I’m willing to offer two jelly beans to the first person who gets to the bottom of this.

(via Atrios)

As you all probably know by now, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia has passed on after having lied in a vegetative state for 10 years. The worldwide media, even generally reliably sources such as Al Jazeera, have all jumped on the lamentation wagon in honoring this man as some kind of human rights champion. What has been little talked about is his overt support for Saddam Hussein against Iran, his strenghtening of the extremist Wahhabi religious establishment within the Kingdom, working to enhance the Kingdom’s relationship with the U.S. beyond strict matters of oil, and for diverting massive oil revenues toward buying off the Arab media, as we are witnessing at this time.

Most claim they’re merely showing ‘respect’ for a deceased world leader. Well, a deceased leader world leader who is on ‘our side’ often receives such respect.

Is there a single right wing pundit who isn’t either feeding at the trough or otherwise seduced? If so, please raise your hands my darlings because I’m beginning to worry.

Did anybody else happen to catch MSNBC’s coverage of Yasser Arafat’s funeral this morning? Coverage isn’t really the right word. The right word escapes me. Let me try to explain.

Apparently MSNBC simulcasts the Don Imus radio show in the mornings (the sad things one learns while on vacation). Anyway, today’s show consisted of him chatting with Andrea Mitchell, who was posted on a rooftop in Ramallah to cover the burial. She was basically playing the straight man for a bunch of pretty tasteless, humorless jokes about Palestinian funeral customs.

Listen, I don’t really understand thousands of people shooting their guns in the air either, but that’s one of the ways they pay respect to people they consider military heroes. Most Palestinians probably wouldn’t get my family’s custom of eating too much and getting really drunk after a funeral. Such is life on a big planet.

The problem with shooting guns in the air is that all of those bullets come back down somewhere. This is actually a pretty serious problem in Philadelphia, of all places. I used to live in a neighborhood where some people (not me) go outside on holidays, like Independence Day or New Years Eve, and shoot handguns and semiautomatic weapons into the sky. Inevitably somebody, usually completely uninvolved, will be found later with a bullet lodged in their brain and a bullet hole in their ceiling. Brutal stuff.

Nevertheless, I’m fairly certain that the Palestinians are fully aware of the dangers of their custom and they still choose to attend funerals, en mass, where it takes place. That’s fine I guess. They can do as they please. What’s not fine is that MSNBC had Andrea Mitchell, and her whole off camera crew, posted on rooftop, completely exposed, while tens of thousands of people were shooting guns into the air - all so she could play Don Imus’ straight man. She was clearly scared half out of her mind - stammering and pausing and unable to finish sentences or sometimes even words. All the while, good old Imus continued his unfunny, tasteless blather.

On second thought, she has enough clout to get herself out of doing something so mindlessly stupid without hurting her career. Her crew doesn’t.

There are no words.