Katrina

Are you ready for 1,000 years of rising oceans?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will publish its report, the most complete overview of climate change science, in Paris on February 2 after a final review. It will guide policy makers combating global warming.

The draft projects more droughts, rains, shrinking Arctic ice and glaciers and rising sea levels to 2100 and cautions that the effects of a build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will last far longer.

"Twenty-first century anthropogenic (human) carbon dioxide emissions will contribute to warming and sea level rise for more than a millennium, due to the timescales required for removal of this gas," the sources quoted the report as saying.

The good news? This century we should see oceans rise only a couple of feet. American coastal cities can get by like the Netherlands, with dikes and levees. Of course, neglectful Bushian attitudes about their maintenance, as evidenced in New Orleans, would have to go.

The draft projects temperatures will rise by 2 to 4.5 Celsius (3.6 to 8.1 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels with a "best estimate" of a 3C (5.4 F) rise, assuming carbon dioxide levels are stabilized at about 45 percent above current levels.

This could make el Niño seem like a little boy indeed.

There's so much to say about Katrina, King George's posing, DHS & FEMA, politically-flavored pork-barrel post-Katrina contracts, the incompetent government run by a bunch of folks who don't believe in government (unless it controls us peasants, you know)....

...but I think that during this week of remembrance, this quote of Barbara Bush seems to capture the essence of the cold heart of the right-wing. (Less Christian, more Roman in sentiment, wouldn't you say? I find it rather easy to imagine Barbara's words coming from Pontius Pilate. Traditional values indeed.)

Who's "elite"? The Hollywood actor who gets in a rowboat and tries to help people when FEMA, the New Orleans police, and the rest of the "homeland security" crowd are nowhere to be found? Or the silver-spoon crowd who claim privilege to dismiss the suffering of others?

The Bush Administration has announced that New Orleans is open for the new season of hurricane business.

Federal emergency officials claim the New Orleans levee system is ready for another major hurricane, despite the less-optimistic views of other political leaders and engineers.

"I think we're in good shape," Don Powell, the Bush administration's coordinator of Gulf Coast rebuilding, said Sunday. "There's no question in my mind, we're ready."

Yeah, they're as ready as they were last year, which is not all that comforting.

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said the levee repairs alone aren't enough. "They're back up to Category 3," she said. "We need to get them up to Category 5, and we are working to do that."

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said the city was ready — but only to evacuate.

"You will never see a replay of last year, as long as I'm the mayor of the city," he said Sunday. "It's the storm surge that's really the major concern. ... We don't expect the catastrophic failures."

Contradicting other Bush administration officials, Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the U.S. Army Corps' chief, conceded it isn't clear whether the levees could withstand a big hurricane this year.

Also undercutting a lot of the spin is the largely discredited Michael Brown, former head of FEMA, who says that the real problem is all the extra layers of bureaucracy Bush and the Republican Congress put into place when they formed, at great expense and with much disruption of federal agencies responsible for our national security, the dysfunctional amorphous blob called the Department for Homeland Security.

Bush government, you're doing a heckuva job!

Liberal Street Fighter

What else are we going to "privatize" in this country?

Storm-Wracked Parish Considers Hired Guns

ST. BERNARD PARISH, La. -- Maj. Pete Tufaro scanned the fenced lot packed with hundreds of stark white trailers soon to be inhabited by Hurricane Katrina evacuees. Shaking his head, he predicted the cramped quarters would ignite fights, hide criminals and become an incubator for crime, posing another test for his cash-strapped sheriff's department, which furloughed 206 of its 390 officers after the storm.

Tufaro thinks the parish has the solution: DynCorp International LLC, the Texas company that provided personal security to Afghan President Hamid Karzai and is one of the largest security contractors in Iraq. If the Federal Emergency Management Agency approves the sheriff's department's proposal, which would cost $70 million over three years, up to 100 DynCorp employees would be deputized to be make arrests, carry weapons, and dress in the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff's Department khaki and black uniforms.

Jordan Flaherty living and
working in New Orleans has written with remarkable clarity of the desperation of his city and her people in the wake of Katrina.

Ninth ward, New Orleans [CNN]

Ursula Price, a staff investigator for the indigent defense organization A Fighting Chance, has met with several thousand hurricane survivors who were imprisoned at the time of the hurricane, and her stories chill me.

"I grew up in small town Mississippi," she tells me. "We had the Klan marching down our main street. But still, I've never seen anything like this."

Safe Streets, Strong Communities, a New Orleans-based criminal justice reform coalition that Price also works with, has just released a report based on more than a hundred recent interviews with prisoners who have been locked up since pre-Katrina and are currently spread across thirteen prisons and hundreds of miles.

The Louisiana State Penitentiary, America's most infamous and largest maximum security prison, known as "The Farm". In the 18th and 19th centuries, Angola was a thriving slave plantation. After the turn of the century it was officially converted into a prison, yet very little changed: the free labor which was originally provided from the sweat of an entirely black and slave population was then taken over by a mostly black and convict population.

They found the average number of days people had been locked up without a trial was 385 days. One person had been locked up for 1,289 days. None of them have been convicted of any crime. [...]

According to a pre-Katrina report from the Metropolitan Crime Commission, 65% of those arrested in New Orleans are eventually released without ever having been charged with any crime.

Retired school teacher, Arthur Davis, and NOLA cops, October 2005

Samuel Nicholas (his friends call him Nick) was imprisoned in Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) on a misdemeanor charge, and was due to be released August 31. Instead, after a harrowing journey of several months, he was released February 1. Nick told me he still shudders when he thinks of those days in OPP.

"We heard boats leaving, and one of the guys said 'hey man, all the deputies gone,' Nick relates. "We took it upon ourselves to try to survive. They left us in the gym for two days with nothing.

Some of those guys stayed in a cell for or five days. People were hollering, 'get me out, I don't want to drown, I don't want to die,' we were locked in with no ventilation, no water, nothing to eat. Its just the grace of god that a lot of us survived."

Lake Ponchartrain, July 10 2005, high water in the wake of Hurricane Dennis
[Globe and Mail]

Benny Flowers, a friend of Nick's from the same Central City neighborhood, was on a work release program, and locked in a different building in the sprawling OPP complex. In his building there were, by his count, about 30 incarcerated youth, some as young as 14 years old.

"I don't know why they left the children like that. Locked up, no food, no water.

Why would you do that?

They couldn't swim, most of them were scared to get into the water. We were on work release, so we didn't have much time left. We weren't trying to escape, we weren't worried about ourselves, we were worried about the children.

The guards abandoned us, so we had to do it for ourselves. We made sure everyone was secured and taken care of. The deputies didn't do nothing. It was inmates taking care of inmates, old inmates taking care of young inmates. We had to do it for ourselves."

Benny Hitchens, another former inmate, was imprisoned for unpaid parking tickets. "They put us in a gym, about 200 of us, and they gave us three trash bags, two for defecation and one for urination. That was all we had for 200 people for two days."

Slaves at work on the Indies Company plantation, across from New Orleans
[Lassus, 1726]

State Department of Corrections officers eventually brought them, and thousands of other inmates, to Hunts Prison, in rural Louisiana, where evacuees were kept in a field, day and night, with no shelter and little or no food and water.

"They didn't do us no kind of justice," Flowers told me. "We woke up early in the morning with the dew all over us, then in the afternoon we were burning up in the summer sun. There were about 5,000 of us in three yards."

Woodlawn Plantation, Louisiana
1941 [Edward Weston]

Abu Ghraib on the Mississippi

From reports that Price received, some prisoners had it worse than Oakdale.

"Many prisoners were sent to Jena prison, which had been previously shut down due to the abusiveness of the staff there. I have no idea why they thought it was acceptable to reopen it with the same staff.

People were beaten, an entire room of men was forced to strip and jump up and down and make sexual gestures towards one another. I cannot describe to you the terror that the young men we spoke to conveyed to us."

In 1724, Louis XV adapted the Code Noir for Louisiana. Since 1685 this code had regulated the condition of slaves in the French Islands, notably forbidding interracial marriage and sexual relations.

"We have a system that was broken before Katrina," Price tells me, "that was then torn apart, and is waiting to be rebuilt.

Four thousand people are still in prison, waiting for this to be repaired.

There's a young man, I speak to his mother every day, who has been in the hole since the storm, and is being abused daily. This boy is 19 years old, and not very big, and he has no lawyer. His mother doesn't know what to do, and without her son having council [sic], I don't know what to tell her."

September 1970 raid on Black Panther offices, across from the Desire Housing Project, est. population, 20,000. Moon Landrieu was mayor of NO at the time.
Link*

I asked Price what has to happen to fix this system.

"First, we establish who was left behind, collect their stories and substantiate them. Next, we're going to organize among the inmates and former inmates to change the system. The inmates are going to have a voice in what happens in our criminal justice system.

Untitled, from the One Big Self, Prisoners of Louisiana series, 1999, silver emulsion on aluminum
[Deborah Luster]

If you ask anyone living in New Orleans, the police, the justice system, may be the single most influential element in poor communities.

Its what beaks up families, its what keeps people poor."

Amen to that...

*Link is to online facsimile of the Black Panther newsletter of June, 1971.

This is just amazing: Bush is on videotape, being briefed before Katrina.

Video showing President George W Bush being warned on the eve of Hurricane Katrina that the storm could breach New Orleans' flood defences has emerged.

The footage, obtained by the Associated Press, also shows Mr Bush being told of the risk to evacuees in the Superdome.

It appears to contradict Mr Bush's statement four days after Katrina hit, when he said: "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

Of course, Bush being caught in yet another lie is hardly news.

The footage does the president no favours, the BBC's Justin Webb reports from Washington.

It shows plainly worried officials telling Mr Bush very clearly before the storm hit that it could breach New Orleans' flood barriers.

In the past, the president has said nobody anticipated a breach but the video shows Michael Brown, the top emergency response official who has since resigned, saying the storm would be "a bad one, a big one".

"We're going to need everything that we can possibly muster, not only in this state and in the region, but the nation, to respond to this event," Mr Brown says.

He also gives a strong, clear warning that evacuees in the Superdome in New Orleans could not be given proper assistance.

And what is the Bush Administration's response? Typically, they try to pooh-pooh the whole thing.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, shown the footage for the first time at a press conference, told Reuters he was "shocked" by what it revealed.

"It surprises me that if there was that kind of awareness, why was the response so slow?" he asked.

But Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said most transcripts of discussions had already been made available to congressional investigators examining the response to Katrina.

"There's nothing new or insightful on these tapes," he said.

Yeah, Bush has lied to the American people. That's not news. Bush knew of the dangers to New Orleans, and opted to go party instead. That's not news.

Lauren at the Center for Internet and Society notes:

Then I realized after watching the BBC piece that the technology used to perform the video briefing (while Bush was vacationing in Texas and Nat’l weather service people were getting worried in DC) also created a record of the briefing. It may have been a secure connection, but since nobody bothered to store the file securely, or encrypt it, a whistleblower (?) was able to leak it to the press.

I’m guessing they will not make this mistake again. But it is a great example of how in today’s world, few communications are ephemeral. Technology that enables new forms of communications— like video conferencing— also creates new records of communications that can be rebroadcast to parties the speakers never intended. Maybe this experience will make the Bush administration more sympathetic to privacy concerns?

I think that when it comes to governmental officials' being held to accountability, they're quite vigorous in defending "privacy." It's when it comes to the rest of us peasants that privacy is either a "quaint, old-fashioned notion" or a "tool for terrorists."

I expect much stonewalling and bluster on this one.

Since the not-at-all-surprising confirmation of Samuel Alito, there's been a lot of hand-wringing going on in the so-called "liberal" or "progressive" blogosphere.

"I'm shocked -- shocked! -- that the Democrats didn't all stand firm!" come the mealy-mouthed cries.

It's time to wake up.

Matt Stoller offers one perspective:

The netroots needs to get serious. Our culture is sick. On every conference call with elected officials, I hear preening, sycophantic questions towards elected Democrats. That time is over. They work for us, the people. Or rather, I am an American, and I am not going to bow down to someone because they are a Congressman or a Senator. I don't have to say that someone pursued 'great leadership' just because they wear a Congressional pin. I don't have to care about titles, about nobility, about respect for the office. I am an American.

It's time that we start acting like Americans again, and stop acting like we are courtiers worshipping at the throne of high officers, be they D's or R's. Be an American, not a courtier. Be skeptical of your elected. And take responsibility for your country. If they fail we fail, and that's why we will hold them accountable. That's why we need power, because without it we cannot prevent failure and drive the changes we all know we so desperately need.

So take heed, blogosphere, let's get back to being Americans again. We are the people. We have a responsibility to act like it.

The thing is that that power is earned, and right now the electorate, by and large, gets no respect from the elected. They try to play us like chumps, giving us bloviating speechifying and imperious poses while they do business as usual.

Choiceless

The Republicans in power right now are just about the worst political ruling class in our country's history. Look at the deficit and debt. Look at the wars. Look at New Orleans. Look at the regressive bills passed over the past year. These folks are dangerous!

But the Democrats have no spine. And that is largely because they do not have any sort of collective vision or cohesive purpose. The "big tent" of the Democratic Party has rendered it ineffective for over 20 years now.

And the Party itself is trying to diffuse its caucus even more by backing more regressive politicians like Bob Casey, Jr., who just had to go on the record to let us all know that he thought Samuel Alito was just a fine judge, just fine. Can a Party build strength when it continues to work against its progressive base and undermine its progressive principles?

Jeffrey Feldman couldn't help but notice the problem:

Tim Kaine's speech, last night, while well-presented, demonstrated that the Democratic Leadership is making decisions that are almost completely detached from anything I recognize as the day-to-day political condition of this country--particularly the past two election cycles, setting up the scenario whereby the Democratic party runs in 2008 virtually the exact same race it ran in 2004, using the same professionals, the same strategies, the same metrics--and resulting in the same, dire outcome.

For reasons I will elaborate in the extended post, I used to think that the netroots were working exclusively in the interests of the Democratic Party. Today--this morning, specifically--I now believe that we in the netroots need to start thinking about 'Our' gains in relation to 'Their' gains. This is a complicated step to take. It is risky and involves steps that, while I describe them, I do not fully understand how they should happen on the ground.

But I believe, this morning, as a result of this week, that the future of our country depends on our willingness to start seeing ourselves--starting right now--as a distinct political entity in U.S. politics. And that means recognizing where we are in realistic terms, defining the gains we want to make and how to measure them, and building, building, building towards larger and larger possibilities.

There seems to be no doubt about that. When it comes down to it, I think the largest political bloc in this country is the bloc that goes totally unrepresented by the elected officials of either party. The bloc that largely stays home and doesn't soil itself by endorsing the posers they're offered in the pseudo-choices offered up on election day.

The bloc that believes that the government should largely leave people's private lives private.

The bloc that believes that the government should protect people not just from crime, but from fraud, abuse, exploitation and depredations by anyone so-inclined, including multinational corporations.

The bloc that believes that people should be treated equally.

Feldman's analysis has some sharp observations:

The Democratic Party has abandoned any effort at creating and defining a social experience of being a Democrat. It has given up. Instead, we have an increasingly isolated leadership that hires experts to launches plans--plans conceived in a private culture of celebrity consultants and society fundraising--in an effort to achieve their goals in our world. This will not change simply because we want it to.

The netroots, by contrast, is steeped in a new kind of liberal politics as social experience. This new experience is build of routines, ideas, and a growing diversity of long-distance and face-to-face relationships. This new culture of netroots politics is as distinct from the culture of the Democratic leadership as the Democratic elite is distinct from the rest of the nation.

What's more, the netroots -- at least the netroots that aren't just playing the DNC game -- more closely reflect the views of the people. After all, the netroots have roots.

At least that's the theory.

Unprogressive

There are self-proclaimed "netroots" who have been bellowing at everyone who has dared express skepticism that culture-of-death Democrats like Bob Casey, Jr. and Tim Kaine deserve our support.

And this leads to an area where I believe Feldman misses the mark:

The Democratic Party currently competes with no other party in the marketplace of Liberal politics in the United States. This must change and the only way to change this is to create an entity--a branded entity--thereby allowing for mass identification with and support of the netroots. What form this will take remains to be seen, but it will need to be capable of circulating at economic, social and political levels. The netroots will not be a 'party' in the conventional sense, but also not a 'club' in the conventional sense. It will be somewhere in between, with the brand affixed to ideas, media as well as activities and places.

I would submit that the Democrats are not competing in the marketplace of Liberal politics at all. In fact, they're still running from the "liberal" label, following in the frantic footsteps left by Michael Dukakis 18 years ago.

And as long as the largest political blog continues its repeated attacks on liberal values and progressive politics and fails to get over its phobia of standing for something, I don't see much hope for any sort of truly progressive netroots gains in the 2006 elections.

Unrepresented

Like many people holding progressive views, I feel that I have no party representing me. There's no party that fights for the people -- or even talks about how we're doing as a country in terms of how the people are doing as people. There's no party that fiercely defends the civil and human rights of American citizens across the board.

There's no party even talking the talk, let alone walking the walk.

Feldman says:

A few words about what I am not advocating, here. I am not calling for the netroots to leave the Democratic Party or to work for its downfall. I believe a party, as an institution, has valuable aspects that far outweight its component parts. I am not calling for an end to working with and for the Democratic Party, neither at the level of campaigns or broader efforts to strengthen the party. All those efforts most continue. I am not calling for increased hostility towards the Democratic Party. In fact, I am calling for the exact opposite. I am not calling for a departure from the 'people-powered politics' outlined in Jerome and Markos' new book. That vision is important and it is within every aspect of what I describe above.

While I would agree with the first part -- if it's possible, it would be much better to reclaim the Democratic Party than to ditch it for an untested, unmonied, unknown third party -- I do not think that Jerome and Markos' anti-progressive, conservative-Dems-or-bust agenda is the way to pursue it.

Roots required

The Democratic Party is not working because it no longer stands for traditionally Democratic ideals. It no longer defends liberal values. It no longer advocates progressive policies. The Democratic Party has been the "go along to get along" party. And that is not going to change as long as Democratic voters are attacked by Kos and others for caring about their civil and human rights, or wanting to breathe clean air, or demanding fair and open elections.

If there's going to be a real netroots resurgence -- and make no mistake, it will be a resurgence -- then it will take roots. The netroots are about the people, and if there's no room for what the people believe, then the "netroots" is nothing but astroturf.

...all you need do is look at Right Wing News' list of "The Twenty Most Annoying Liberals In The United States" to cast aside any doubts. Let's go down the list:

20) Sean Penn Spicoli scores again! This is the first time Madonna's former life partner made the list since 2002, but his publicity trip to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was just too good to pass up. Just think about it: Here we have a very liberal, very pompous actor whose first thought after seeing mega-disaster on TV is, "I bet I could get a lot of press out of this if I went to New Orleans."

You can laugh at Sean Penn for coming across like an overly-serious Spicoli, but I don't laugh at him for dropping everything and going to New Orleans to help people who were suffering and stranded. Maybe John Hawkins prefers bloviating Brownie -- or anyone who cheers for the gubmint.

19) The Huffington Post What do you get when you take a bunch of C-List celebrities, irritating politicians, and liberal hacks, almost none of whom are talented writers, and put them all together in one place? Why, you get the Huffington Post where "enormous talents" like Deepak Chopra, Cindy Sheehan, and Larry David write the same drivel that appears on other left-wing blogs, only with 50% less zing, pop, and entertainment value.

Proper role model: Ann Coulter, who spouts right-wing drivel with pizzazz and an abundance of spittle. (Don't forget the throbbing vein in the forehead.)

18) Helen Thomas Despite the fact that Helen Thomas is no longer even a reporter, she is still allowed to haunt White House press conferences like some sort of ghost of biased journalists' past. This is despite her nasty attitude and the anti-war sloganeering that she likes to disguise as questions for White House Press Secretary Scott McCellan.

Damn those hard questions! She must be a ghost! You can't run a proper power-grab with these old crusties sticking their noses into gubmint business!

17) The Daily Kos Markos Moulitsas Z˙niga and his merry band of moonbat diarists over at the Daily Kos make great, although still annoying, copy. In fact, they're so entertaining that you really don't have to do much more than quote them.

Actually, I find it quite amusing to see Daily Kos labeled "liberal" given the anti-progressivism that seems to pervade discussion there. But then, to the right wing, anyone left of Franco is a "moonbat." (Hmmm....that makes these folks "Franco Americans"! Uh oh! Spaghetti-Os!)

16) Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton The peanut farmer and the pervert almost always make the list for breaking tradition and criticizing the current POTUS. However, Republicans are fortunate that they stay in the public eye because it continuously reminds the American people of what lousy Presidents they were.

Never mind that they're out of office, Clinton and Carter are perennial whipping boys for the wingnuts.
Given that these wingnuts love Bush and his massive deficit spending almost as much as they loved Reagan and his massive deficit spending, I suppose it would only be consistent of them to hate and despise the only two presidents who actually reduced the national debt during their terms.

15) Mary Mapes

Last year, Dan Rather made the most obnoxious liberals list for his relentless promotion and defense of the fake National Guard Memos CBS was flogging. Given that Dan Rather was widely panned for his involvement in "Memogate" and that he no longer has a job at CBS, you'd think everyone else tied into those fake memos would be content to let the whole episode drift into the memory hole.

But, no, bizarrely, disgraced producer Mary Mapes, who was unceremoniously fired by CBS for the part she played in Memogate, decided to permanently tie herself to the story by writing a book that defended the memos as real and attacking the bloggers who proved it was a forgery.

Geez, if all you have to do to piss off the right wing is write a book, it's a wonder they don't dehydrate from all their sputtering. I didn't even know who Mary Mapes was until reading this blurb. Of course, not being a dittohead, I'll probably forget about her all over again.

14) Maureen Dowd

Maureen Dowd, the ranting New York Times columnist whom Democratic Senator Zell Miller once famously referred to as a, "high brow hussy," wrote a book this year moaning how relationships between men and women in America are all screwed up because she hasn't gotten married yet. Hmmmm, Dowd is well paid, famous, and not bad looking for her age. So, what's left that could explain why she hasn't gotten married?

Yes, display your chauvinistic patriarchal attitudes in dismissing a woman. That's classy.

13) The Pro-Tookie Williams Protestors

Tookie Williams, who happily has now been executed, was never actually a very sympathetic character. He was a cold blooded killer who snuffed out 4 lives and never admitted his guilt or apologized to the families of his victims. Moreover, he co-founded the Crips, one of the biggest human scum piles ever to exist in North America and even after he had supposedly reformed, he never gave the police any help in clearing up the numerous Crip related crimes he must have known about.

Yet, because Tookie wrote a few lousy children's books that about 12 people read, there were celebrities coming out of the woodwork to plead for his life.

Again with celebrities. I'm beginning to suspect that this guy's real beef is that he's not a movie star. Too bad. He sure has the ego for it. Of course, who has the time when there are libruls out there being critical of the gubmint? Someone has to do all the hating -- even hating the people you never saw except maybe on a 30-second tv news report. The Hawkins moral: protesting is evil, execution is beautiful.

12) Harry Reid

Did Harry Reid have to shut down the Senate with a ridiculous publicity stunt? Did he have to break Senate tradition by threatening to filibuster the judges Bush selects for the Supreme Court? Did he have to lie and claim Social Security is in great shape and doesn't need to be reformed?

And when did Hawkins stop beating his wife?

11) Randi Rhodes

Randi Rhodes is Air America's flakiest liberal host, which is sort of like being the dirtiest pig at a hog farm. Maybe it's nothing to be proud of, but it sure takes some doing. In Rhodes case, not only is she a trench harpy with a nasty disposition, she's also a conspiracy theorist with a peculiar sense of humor.

Careful, John. Your misogyny is showing again. Nice to know you're an Air America listener. It must be so terrible becoming so enamored with her that you can't just change the station.

10) Ted Rall

What would a most annoying liberals list be without Ted Rall, a man who showed up somewhere on the list every year and actually took top honors back in 2003? Unfortunately for Ted, he has been so distasteful, disagreeable, and just plain nails-on-the-chalkboard annoying for so long that it's almost impossible for him to top himself.

Still, Ted has been busy this year being ... well ... Ted, and he has really had it in for America's soldiers.

Not only did he urge liberals to "drop the 'support the troops' shtick now," he put together a grotesque cartoon that essentially accused Iraqi war vets of being rapists and torturers.

Here's someone else I'd never have heard of, if it weren't for the good ol' right-wing "news." Of course, we know that American military and intelligence personnel have been torturing prisoners in a policy that has been staunchly defended by Bush and especially Cheney. But this Rall guy is really evil -- not because he tortures people, but because he drew a cartoon about it!

9) The Mainstream Media's Katrina Coverage

When it comes to the coverage of Katrina by the mainstream media, the question isn't what did they get wrong, it's what did they get right? It's bad enough that the media shamelessly blamed FEMA for almost every single problem that happened while ignoring the culpability of the locals because they were Democrats, but the press was about as careful with the facts as the Weekly World News is in one of their stories about Batboy. The press wildly exaggerated the overall number of deaths (They were more than 9000 high), the number of deaths in the Superdome, the racial make-up of the people who died, you name it.

Yeah, Brownie really was doing a heckuva job, CNN used CGI to make the stranded white people just look black, and only 1300+ people died! I mean, Jesus, how much attention and sympathy should we direct at an un-American city like New Orleans, anyway? Didn't you see the fetus shape in the hurricane clouds?

8) Newsweek's Quran Down the Toilet Story

You ever made a mistake at work? Maybe you've shown up 30 minutes late or didn't finish an assignment your boss gave you on time? Well, the guys over at Newsweek can top it.

They mistakenly claimed that US soldiers flushed a Quran down the toilet and as a result, Muslims across the world became angry at the US and there were riots "throughout much of the Muslim world" (that) "cost at least 15 lives.".

Yeah. The Quran was only pissed on, kicked and ripped apart, and if Newsweek had only made that perfectly clear, Muslims would have danced in the street instead.

7) Dick Durbin

Defining Quote: "...If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime--Pol Pot or others--that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners." -- Democratic Senator Dick Durbin

Yes, with one poorly thought out statement, Dick Durbin, the Democratic Whip in the Senate, managed not only to slur our troops doing interrogations by accusing them of being as bad as the torturers in some of the worst regimes in history, he also simultaneously sent a message to Al-Qaeda saying that Americans are such paper tiger wussies that we even get squeamish about making terrorists who want to kill us a little hot or cold.

Fuck yeah! Torture the muthufuckas! We be bad! We get medieval on evil! You think you've seen evil? America is #1 -- we'll out-evil anybody!

6) Blanco, Nagin, Landrieu, and Eddie Compass: Oh, my!

New Orleans was doubly unfortunate on the day that Hurricane Katrina slammed down on them. Not only was the city built below sea level, but it seems like almost everyone in a position of authority in the entire state from the governor on down were the sort of incompetent, 4th rate, clown college drop-outs you wouldn't trust to run a lemonade stand, much less a state.

But remember, Brownie was doing a heckuva job! Wingnuts love Brownie!

5) John Murtha

John "Cut and Run" Murtha is grindingly annoying not just because he wants American soldiers to tuck their tails between their legs and run from Al-Qaeda as fast as possible in Iraq, but also because of the dishonest way he's been promoted.

The fact Murtha is an ex-marine has been used time and time again as a shield against criticism, as an excuse to falsely claim he's a hawk, and to prop up his credibility when he calls for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq.

Hail the chickenhawks! They may be afraid to fight, but they'll talk tough to appeal to the right wing's fragile ego and pervasive fear of the other. And they'll send other people's kids to go fight their battles. Anyone who speaks against our chickenhawk leaders is just un-American! (Never mind al-Qaeda wasn't in Iraq, and hardly is now.)

4) Ward Churchill

How could we make it through all the most annoying liberals of 2005 without mentioning the biggest walking, talking example of what's wrong with our education system, pseudo-Indian hippy professor Ward Churchill?

Here we have a rabidly anti-American lunatic, who has endorsed fragging, compared the people who lost their lives in 9/11 to Adolf Eichman, and who has been accused of lying about being an Indian, copyright infringement, plagiarism, and simply making up research.

Another name that doesn't ring a bell. Hmmmm.... Are the wingnuts having trouble finding prominent libruls to hate? Or are they just trying to impress us with their enthusiasm and zeal? (Is this Churchill guy even a librul? If our buddy John is right, he sounds more like Ann Coulter or someone from Operation Rescue.)

3) The New York Times

The New York Times started off 2005 by calling for the January elections in Iraq to be postponed and then went from there to deliberately trying to scuttle a classified CIA program used to transport Al-Qaeda. That had to be what they were doing since they published lots of unnecessary details like plane tail numbers and the shell companies that were used. Then, in December, the NYT pointed out to Al-Qaeda and the rest of the world the existence of a classified NSA program that listened in on phone calls between the Jihadi and their American pals. This was despite the fact that President Bush personally asked them not to run the story for national security reasons.

Al-Qaeda should send them a thank-you card.

Translation: If you report on illegal gubmint spying on Americans and secret torture camps, you just take all the excitement out of dismantling the Constitution. Fucking newspapers! What do they think this is? A democracy?

2) Howard Dean

At one point or another, Dean also added that Republicans were 'Evil,' 'Corrupt,' and 'Brain-Dead.'

Gee, it's almost as if you're a Republican, Howard Dean is going out of his way to let you know that he really, really, despises you.

Earth to Hawkins: He's not the RNC chairman. He's not speaking to you, he's speaking about you.

1) Cindy Sheehan

How did an uninteresting, not particularly well informed woman, with wacky liberal views manage to become the biggest story in America this summer? By deftly wielding the corpse of her own son like a light saber to deflect criticism, gain attention, and fatten her own pockets.

Damn this woman! Who does she think she is expressing opinions?! Just because she lost a son in a war based on falsified intelligence doesn't mean she has the right to criticize the gubmint! And the gall she has to dare make money! Only pro-gubmint Republican hacks are allowed to get paid to express opinions! What does she think this place is? A democracy?

Now let's try a simpler exercise: The 20 Most Annoying Conservatives in the United States.

1. Jack Abramoff

2.- 20. The Republican Committee on the Advancement of the Culture of Corruption

21.-??? The Culture of Corruption members at-large

Geez, that's just too easy.

Since this is a long-standing tradition in news shows, magazines and papers, and naturally therefore is something people blog about, I thought I'd offer my view on what the biggest story of the year is.

A lot of people will say it's Iraq. Or the Bush Administration scandals. Or the radical right's Terri Schiavo miscalculation. And sure, those are all big, but not the biggest.

Many would probably say Katrina was the biggest story of the year, but really I think that's only a part of it. The biggest story of the year was -- and still is -- global warming.

Consider just a few of the findings published in the major scientific journals during the last three months:

—Arctic sea ice is melting fast. There was 20 percent less of it than normal this summer, and as Dr. Mark Serreze, one of the researchers from Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center, told reporters, "the feeling is we are reaching a tipping point or threshold beyond which sea ice will not recover." That is particularly bad news because it creates a potent feedback effect: instead of blinding white ice that bounces sunlight back into space, there is now open blue water that soaks up the sun's heat, amplifying the melting process.

—In the tundra of Siberia, other researchers report that permafrost has begun to melt rapidly, and, as it does, formerly frozen methane—which, like the more prevalent carbon dioxide, acts as a heat-trapping "greenhouse gas"—is escaping into the atmosphere. In some places last winter, the methane bubbled up so steadily that puddles of standing water couldn't freeze even in the depths of the Russian winter.

—British researchers, examining almost six thousand soil borings across the UK, found another feedback effect. Warmer temperatures (growing seasons now last eleven days longer at that latitude) meant that microbial activity had increased dramatically in the soil. This, in turn, meant that much of the carbon long stored in the soil was now being released into the atmosphere. The quantities were large enough to negate all the work that Britain had done to switch away from coal to reduce carbon in the atmosphere. "All the consequences of global warming will occur more rapidly," said Guy Kirk, chief scientist on the study. "That's the scary thing. The amount of time we have got to do something about it is smaller than we thought."

Years later, as even nimwits like Bush and Cheney can no longer deny that some serious shit is happening, people will look back at 2005 -- at Hurricane Katrina, the storm in an extraordinarily busy season of storms that wiped out a city, the first city of what will prove to be all too many.

But the hurricanes also demonstrated another fact about global warming, this one having nothing to do with chemistry or physics but instead with politics, journalism, and the rituals of science. Climate change somehow seems unable to emerge on the world stage for what it really is: the single biggest challenge facing the planet, the equal in every way to the nuclear threat that transfixed us during the past half-century and a threat we haven't even begun to deal with. The coverage of Katrina's aftermath, for instance, was scathing in depicting the Bush administration's incompetence and cronyism; but the President —and his predecessors—were spared criticism for their far bigger sin of omission, the failure to do anything at all to stanch the flood of carbon that America, above all other nations, pours into the atmosphere and that is the prime cause of the great heating now underway. Though Bush has been egregious in his ignorance about climate change, the failure to do anything about it has been bipartisan; Bill Clinton and Al Gore were grandly rhetorical about the issue, but nonetheless presided over a 13 percent increase in America's carbon emissions.

That lack of preparation and precaution dwarfs even the failure to prepare for the September 11 attacks, and its effects will be with us far longer. It's not, of course, that America could in two decades have prevented global warming. But we could have begun taking the steps to keep it from spinning entirely out of control, steps that grow ever more difficult to take with each passing season.

That, stated so succinctly by Bill McKibben in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, is why global warming is the biggest story.

And the most alarming part of the story is that nobody seems to know it. Yet.

[photo: U.S. Antarctic Program]

This morning, in an effort "to piss-off the Deaniacs one more time," Roxanne posted a bit of a political rant that attempts to take progressives out to the woodshed for, um, losing touch with political reality. I think she does so from some mistaken assumptions, and ends up knocking down a straw man. Now Rox is one of my favorite bloggers, and she's even welcomed me as a guest blogger on her pages. But I think some of the things she claims today deserve a response. And since I have this humble little platform here, I'll give it a ramble.

There's an interesting throughline making its way around Leftopia today (and most days, these days): In order to win in '06 and '08, the Democrats must run on a unified "Progressive" anti-Iraq War platform. While I agree with you on many Progressive issues, I also wonder what country you all think you're living in. Let me remind everyone that

45% of American citizens still define themselves as moderate, compared to 34% who define themselves as conservative and 21% as liberal.

The first -- and main -- mistake here is equating "progressive" with "liberal." Now I'm one of the first to admit that there's a lot of overlap. But I feel, at least from my perspective, that there are some important distinctions between the two: progressive means having a dynamic, proactive government that actively participates in the economy and the fabric of our culture, while liberal comes with assumptions about the kinds of programs the government provides. In some ways, liberalism goes beyond progressivism in the manner and approach of such programs, while progressivism goes beyond liberalism in the scope and goals of what a proactive government can achieve. At least that's how I see it. (For the record, I consider myself a progressive who is sympathetic to the liberal cause.)

The second mistake I think Rox makes is conflating the anti-war movement with the conflated "liberal/progressive" political agenda. I think these are two separate issues.

I see no reason to assume that liberalism means pacifism, or that progressivism means isolationism, or vice versa. Rox argues that Lyndon Johnson was not a "true anti-War Liberal/Progressive," but that's because he wasn't anti-war. However, Johnson was very much a liberal, ready and willing to push forward on the war on poverty, even while he was carpet-bombing Vietnam. The schisms in the Democratic Party in 1968 were mostly over the war, not liberalism.

The third mistake is to read "progressive" as fitting into any neat category on the already-sloppy "liberal/moderate/conservative" spectrum. Let's go back to the percentages. (I won't quibble with them. I don't know their source, and could not offer an alternate, anyway.)

• 45% moderate
• 34% conservative
• 21% liberal

Here's where the distinction between progressive and liberal is important: Most people believe in an effective and efficient government that serves the people's interest. That is progressivism. When it comes down to it, only black-hearted dominionists, covetous plutocrats and dyed-in-the-wool anarchists in the conservative ranks would be hard-set opposed to progressivism. Even libertarians and progressives can find many areas to agree on. On the "liberal" side of things, authoritarian socialists would oppose the privacy values in progressivism, but would probably agree on pro-active government programs to address poverty and education and healthcare gaps.

The fourth mistake is to take people's self-identified political labels at face value. How are these labels used and perceived? Since Michael Dukakis ran away from the "liberal" label Bush the elder threw at him back in 1988, the Democrats have been in full retreat from that word (and, many would argue, what it stands for). For the most part, nobody has stood up for any liberal values for fear of drawing the wrath of the Atwater/Rove/Republican spin machine and their corporate media attack dogs. Since the 1980s, what suffices for political discourse in this country has been entirely within the frames and vocabulary of conservative ideology. (Don't even look for "progressive": it's not there.)

In other words, few people self-identify as "liberal" because the political and media leaders have given it a bad name. Nobody has been speaking up for liberal values, and so nobody else talks about them, either. It's a self-reinforcing loop that locks liberal values out of the discussion.

In the aftermath of Katrina, what's become bloody obvious for nearly all Americans is that we need effective government -- progressive government. The conservative ideology has proven its own bankruptcy. And political leaders who hold a philosophy based on vilifying government have no business running government.

The fifth mistake is labeling the peace movement as progressivism. To me, the anti-war movement crosses the political spectrum.

What's clear to most of us now is that, to this administration, the military is the answer to everything. Have a hurricane? Send in the military! Have a flu epidemic? Send in the military! Need to win the hearts and minds of people traditionally mistrustful of the West? Send in the military!

It's fucked-up logic. Small wonder people are skeptical! Especially when we have nearly 2000 dead men and women who had signed up as willing to put their lives on the line to defend our country. Are they defending us by killing people in Iraq? Are we safer as a nation by continuing to cultivate al-Qaeda recruitment in Iraq?

Our strongest weapons are our ideals of freedom and justice and democracy. They are so powerful that they worked throughout Eastern Europe, where our armies never went -- perhaps because our armies never went there. Yet our administration -- conservatives all (which is more evidence that war-making is not a partisan characteristic) -- tries to use bullets and bombs, which have no friends. The "accomplishment" of some 100,000 dead in Iraq does not win friends.

This is what the anti-war sentiments are about.

My own progressivism

I suspect Roxanne and I are of much the same mind when it comes to the peace movement. I am not in favor of "knee-jerk" withdrawal in an all-out retreat. But I am in favor of getting the hell out of there quickly, and getting our foreign policy back onto the footing of making friends rather than bullying neighbors. And that's not a progressive view. That's not a liberal view. That's what I consider an American view, a way of conducting international relations advanced by Democratic and Republican administrations in the past.

But where Rox and I differ is in her mislabeling "liberal" and "progressive." Calling Clinton one of "the most Liberal/Progressive Presidents during my lifetime" is almost funny. He was smart, and he was good at the talking game -- and, compared with either Bush the elder or Bush the lesser, his presidency looks pretty damn good right now -- but aside from getting the budget under control, he was not progressive or liberal. Too many corporatist policies were enacted under his watch to call him a progressive or liberal. Too much aggregation of federal government police power over individuals, and too many attacks on privacy rights, took place under his leadership to call him a progressive or liberal. Too many social programs were mangled without making them more effective or more efficient under his leadership to call him a progressive or liberal.

In fact, the last president who was anything like a progressive was Jimmy Carter, who, in spite of the oil crisis, recession and inflation, cut taxes and cut the federal deficit while establishing FEMA -- which Bush killed with cronyism -- and alternative energy programs using, among other things, tax credits -- which "tax cutter" Ronald Reagan killed in his first year in office. (What would our world look like now if Carter's alternative energy efforts were continued and expanded upon all this time? Would we be fretting so much about peak oil? Would gas be topping 3 bucks a gallon, and rising?) And while Carter was not at all charismatic, and had the Iran hostages and oil-crunch-inspired inflation around his neck, his programs and policies are the ones we value (and miss) today, after 25 years of conservatism.

I don't know why Roxanne and so many others on "the left" seem to be on the warpath against progressivism. But I suspect that part of it is in this fundamental misunderstanding of what progressivism is, and what the anti-war movement isn't.

There does seem to be a dearth of anti-war voices in mainstream politics. Senator Paul Wellstone was shooting up in the polls for his speaking out against the Iraq war run-up, before his plane mysteriously went down, taking him permanently out of the debate. And since then, precious few politicos have been willing to stand up against the jingoism of militarist-branded patriotism. Perhaps, with yesterday's stunning 90-9 vote in the Senate for clear-cut regulations on the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo and elsewhere, we're starting to see a shift.

And that shift is bipartisan. And that's because the public resistance to a bloody, costly and foolhardy war, as well as to authoritarian police state tactics at home, is bipartisan -- not "Liberal/Progressive."

It's time to speak out. Cindy Sheehan has helped give a voice to the anti-war sentiments that are widely and deeply held in this country.

But that has nothing to do with progressivism or liberalism. We have yet to hear strong progressive and liberal voices speak out in the public square in front of the cameras of the mainstream media. We have yet to see the mainstream media pay them any mind. While the anti-war movement is progressing in civil protest, progressivism remains largely unheard, a faith in a better future with effective government as a tool for positive change held by many of us in the blogosphere, a minority caucus within the Democratic Party, and in the majority of hearts and minds of mainstream Americans.

Let's not forget: While party politics have battled on like gang war for decades, the largest voting bloc has been that of the non-voter. They are still waiting for someone to speak for them. And so are many, if not most, of the rest of us.

It's time to change the frame of the debate. And that's not going to happen by running scared of Republican rhetoric or buying into Republican frames of what they claim "liberal" and "progressive" mean. We either stand up for what we believe, or we can continue to sit for all that we don't. It's up to us.