Do they really expect to be taken seriously?

Wayne Studer, Ph.D, hosts an invaluable site on all things Pet Shop Boys. Besides a host of fascinating lists detailing all kinds of Neil Tennant-Chris Lowe arcana, there's a serious analysis on 10 things the PSB did to kill their American popularity (they scored a number-one hit and four Top 10 followups before disappearing completely from the Top 40 after 1988). I particularly love Reason #3: Neil Tennant yawning on the cover of 1987's Actually:

3. To summarize, Americans don’t like it when their stars yawn. At least not unless they’re not yawning at something that they themselves would think is boring or "uncool." They especially don’t like them yawning, it would appear, directly in their faces, perhaps even at them. Chris's odd expression—halfway between a vacant blank and a scowl—didn’t help matters, either. They’re even wearing tuxedos. Rock stars do not wear tuxedos, unless they’re getting an award from the President, and not always then. "Just what are these guys about, anyway?"

Alicia 'n' Amy

My review of the wonderful new Amy Rigby album (curious to know what Matos, a Rigby fan, thinks); and here's my take on the marvelous new Alicia Keys song, which no one on the Singles Going Steady staff liked much because they're ugly and stupid:

Unbreakable” is the track in which Alicia Keys finally earns those premature raves. The production’s a killer – vamping electric piano, icy muted trumpets, subterranean bass, and live (!) drums – but Ms Keys is the star. Reining in the melismatic affectations which had suggested she believed all those reviews comparing her to Dionne Warwick or something, Keys shows a relaxed command of the vernacular (dig how she sassily enunciates “technical difficulties” without technical difficulties) worthy of early ‘70s Aretha: the Aretha of “Rock Steady” and “Daydreaming.” Embodying a black middle-class dream that has room for Ike and Tina and Oprah and Steadman, she’s human enough to yield to temptation and wise enough to work it out.

The abuse continues

More reports of detainee abuse. This one comes from Captain Ian Fishback, who describes abuses by soldiers in the 82nd Airborne Division. These include: beatings of Iraqi prisoners, exposing them to extremes of hot and cold, more delightful stacking of prisoners in human pyramids, and depriving them of sleep at Camp Mercury near Falluja. It gets better:

Captain Fishback, speaking publicly on the matter for first time, said the investigators who have questioned him in the past 10 days seemed to be less interested in individuals he identified in his chain of command who allegedly committed the abuses.

"I'm convinced this is going in a direction that's not consistent with why we came forward," Captain Fishback said in a telephone interview from Fort Bragg, N.C., where he is going through Army Special Forces training. "We came forward because of the larger issue that prisoner abuse is systemic in the Army. I'm concerned this will take a new twist, and they'll try to scapegoat some of the younger soldiers. This is a leadership problem."

Fishback has sent a letter to Senators John Warner and John McCain, the two senior Republicans on the Armed Services Committee. Now will the Honorable Bill O'Reilly pipe down about how the ACLU aids and abetts terrorists?

Oh happy day

DeLay is finally indicted:

A Travis County grand jury today indicted U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay on one count of criminal conspiracy, prompting the Sugar Land Republican to give up his leadership post in Congress.

"I have notified (House Speaker Dennis Hastert) that I will temporarily step aside from my position as majority leader pursuant to rules of the House Republican Conference and the actions of the Travis County District Attorney today," DeLay said in a statement.

The charge, a state jail felony punishable by up to two years incarceration, stems from his role with his political committee, Texans for a Republican Majority, a now-defunct organization that already had been indicted on charges of illegally using corporate money during the 2002 legislative elections.

Guilty as charged

This is why I love my friend Thomas. The bastard bought and reviewed the Barbra Streisand-Barry Gibb album Guilty Pleasures. And now that he's done both, it means I'm absolved from doing either.

I believe in Meth

And so do faith-loving hostages:

Ashley Smith, the woman who says she persuaded suspected courthouse gunman Brian Nichols to release her by talking about her faith, discloses in a new book that
she gave him methamphetamine during the hostage ordeal.

Smith did not share that detail with authorities at the time. But investigators said she came clean about the drugs when they interviewed her months later. They said they have no plans to charge her with drug possession.

In her book, "Unlikely Angel," released Tuesday, Smith says Nichols had her bound on her bed with masking tape and an extension cord. She says he asked for marijuana, but she did not have any, and she dug into her illegal stash of crystal meth instead.

Smith, a 27-year-old widowed mother who gained widespread praise for her level-headedness, says the seven-hour hostage ordeal in March led to the realization that she was a drug addict, and she says she has not used drugs since the night before she was taken captive.

Unanimous = fun

In spite of my genuine encouragement of dissent, I'm churlish enough to feel vindicated when people agree with me. In this case it's Robert Christgau in his latest Consumer Guide, who loves the new Amy Rigby and especially Stones albums as much as I do.

A nation kneels before Zod

I know where my vote is going:

Vote for your ruler
When I first came to your planet and demanded your homes, property and very lives, I didn't know you were already doing so, willingly, with your own government. I can win no tribute from a bankrupted nation populated by feeble flag-waving plebians. In 2008 I shall restore your dignity and make you servants worthy of my rule. This new government shall become a tool of my oppression. Instead of hidden agendas and waffling policies, I offer you direct candor and brutal certainty. I only ask for your tribute, your lives, and your vote.
-- General Zod
Your Future President and Eternal Ruler

Originally posted at The Great Curve.

Kennedy Agonistes

I hate the Kennedys. It's got a lot to do with hagiography like this, which court pages like Theodore Sorenson and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. served to a suppliant press and a public willing to believe in golden gods. This review of JFK nephew Christopher Lawford does perform an essential task: revealing that the Kennedy clan/junta is the house of Atreus and Thebes, with Hamlet, King Lear, and Hotspur all rolled int one:

Their legacy still means something, even now, after all the humiliations and conservative counterassaults. They were not really even a dynasty, like the Bushes – their enemies made short work of that ambition. But at least for those of us in blue-precinct America, the Kennedy name is a distant trumpet that still sounds out the best of what our country stands for. When white-maned Teddy again takes the lead in confronting a Manchurian Supreme Court nominee, when Caroline Kennedy invokes her father's legacy in her books, when Bobby Jr. rallies a crowd to stand up against the poisonous pillaging of corporate polluters, we're reminded once more of why principled progressive leadership matters.

If you need quick Pepto-Bismol, consult Gore Vidal's "The Holy Family" (found in his superb collection United States: Essays: 1952-1992) and Seymour Hersh's The Dark Side of Camelot.

Don't follow leaders - watch your parking meters

David Greenberg explains why hippies must die. Also: why Bob Dylan is smarter -- and dumber -- than hippies.

On Dylan

From a review of Martin Scorsese's new documentary, Bob Dylan - No Direction Home:

The only analogy that makes the slightest sense to me, is William Shakespeare. In the recent book, Will in the World , by Stephen Greenblatt, Greenblatt tries to explain how a rural boy from Lancashire, son of a drunken glove-maker, without a literary education or the sophistication of the court, could go to London and become the world's greatest playwright within a couple of years. Scorsese is doing the same thing for Dylan. Again, there's just no rational explanation. Shakespeare too, borrowed from the tradition plots, bits of text, lines that he heard in the street, other playwright's characters. He consumed the tradition and then took it to a higher place of integration, and that's what Bob Dylan did too.

Nostalgia...

Neil Gaiman in a recent Time Magazine interview:

I always loved, most of all with doing comics, the fact that I knew I was in the gutter. I kind of miss that, even these days, whenever people come up and inform me, oh, you do graphic novels. No. I wrote comic books, for heaven's sake. They're creepy and I was down in the gutter and you despised me.

I miss the old days when people who were into comic books were gutterfolk and creeps. With the advent of much Hollywood sound and fury, comics have attained a modicum, albeit minor, of respectability. It's just not the same, anymore...

A running tally

It's been a good year. Inspired by a drunken request this weekend, here they are, thus far, in no order, the best albums and singles of 2005. I could easily double the singles count, btw:

ALBUMS:

LCD Soundsystem - s/t
M.I.A. - Arular
The Hold Steady - Separation Sunday
The Go-Betweens - Oceans Apart
50 Cent - The Massacre
The Mountain Goats - The Sunset Tree
The Rolling Stones - A Bigger Bang
Bloc Party - Silent Alarm
The New Pornographers - Twin Cinema
Kanye West - Late Registration

SINGLES:

Snoop feat Justin Timberlake, "Signs"
The Killers, "Mr Brightside" (Jacques Lu Cont remix)
LCD Soundsystem, "Daft Punk is Playing in My House"
Kelly Osbourne, "One Word"
Gwen Stefani, "Hollaback Girl"
New Order, "Waiting for the Sirens' Call"
Annie, "Heartbeat"
Interpol, "Evil"
The Killers, "All The Things I've Done For You"
50 Cent, "Just a Lil Bit"
Kelly Clarkson, "Since U Been Gone"
Mariah Carey, "We Belong Together"

Click on this link (or I won't have sex tonight)

Everyone should check out the blog of my lovely girlfriend--or fiancée as she continues to demand I refer to her--Phoebe Flowers.

This is almost funny

During a jubilant militant get-together, explosives being demonstrated actually went off, killing three Hamas members. Hamas, of course, blames it on Israel.

"This is a massacre, a real carnage and we will avenge it," Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for the militant faction, said while rejecting claims by the Palestinian Authority officials who called it a "working accident." "I saw the missiles with my two own eyes and thousands of people saw these missiles coming," he said, adding "how come some PA officials deny and acquit Zionist enemy of the crime".

Sadly, the reality is that if Israel was behind this, far more than three Hamas members would be dead. And if Isreal, was quick to point out that if this is used to attack them, then Hamas would see a real Israeli attack. Oy vey.

Superman's a dick!

I know people have talked about Superdickery.com before, but they now have more server space, so fears of it crashing are gone. I hope. Anyway, Superman IS a dick.

Visit The Great Curve for more comic book fun.

Bulworth vs. the Terminator?

Would Warren Beatty dare to take on Ah-Nold in the Cali governator's race? Time Online thinks it could happen:

WARREN BEATTY is considering a challenge to Arnold Schwarzenegger for the governorship of California next year in what could be a battle of the celebrities. Speculation over Mr Beatty’s political ambitions began after he addressed a nurses’ union on Thursday. To wild applause and chants of “run, Warren, run”, Mr Beatty, a long-time liberal campaigner, promised to campaign against Mr Schwarzenegger’s “insulting and bullying” attacks on nurses, teachers and firefighters.

Mr Schwarzenegger, 58, a Republican and naturalised American who harnessed his Hollywood star appeal to win a “recall election ” victory two years ago, recently said that he would run again for the governorship. Polls show the one-time Mr Universe’s popularity’s to be dwindling, though the Austrian-born Mr Schwarzenegger still hopes to change the constitution so that he may one day be able to run for the White House.

Does that mean Madge will come visit when First Lady Benning is away?

Cross-posted from my blog

It's Friday Creature Blogging (this explains Tom Waits)

This is my new English foxhound, Oliver Wendell Holmes III.

He's a vicious killer.

I swear we didn't pick'em

What a chore to write about the sorriest group of singles I've heard this year.

I've lost my breath

At last!!

All the things we used to say

Anthony Miccio compiles the ideal Sugar Ray greatest hits. Not only do I need a copy now, but I wish like hell I'd unleashed my renditions of "Every Morning" and "When It's Over" on the denizens of the East Village last Friday night. Mike Powell rises to the challenge, even though he's totally wrong about "Waiting": the more meticulous Mark McGrath's hairtips, the hotter the music. It's the Bryan Ferry Dictum, boys and girls.

Fags: You will burn in hell

Now the Vatican has ruled that homosexuals, even celibate ones, will be barred from becoming Catholic priests. Even more disgustingly, the Church did so in part to parry accusations that it isn't doing enough to purge pedophiliacs from its seminaries. The logic is appalling. Andrew Sullivan, a devoted Catholic who in recent years has been ostracize by his own church, writes:

The fundamental point is fairness. It is fair to place restrictions on the conduct of priests and seminarians; it is even fair to take special note of gay seminarians and their unique struggles and insist on the removal of any who violate their vows; it is fair to ensure that seminaries don't become some kind of gay club, and that chastity is enforced and supported. It is not fair to discriminate against a whole group of people, regardless of their conduct. The latter is bigotry. Period. This new doctrine also stigmatizes the thousands of faithful, celibate gay priests now serving the Church: in effect, it says that they should never have been ordained, and that their "serious personality disorders" render them incapable of being priests. How are they supposed to continue?

The edict awaits the signature of Pope Benedict XVI, who more than ever resembles Emperor Palpatine.

Truth and consequences

The managing editor of the University of North Florida's student newspaper hanged himself in the newsroom on the morning of 19 September. Having worked in student publications for a number of years, I sympathize with the staff. But I'm struck by the distance between the staff's tributes to Richard O'Bryant -- almost all of which note with fondness hisis wit, impatience with grammatical errors, and well-developed sense of irony -- and the sentimental rubbish they wrote about him which would, no doubt, have made him gag. Doesn't he deserve something more than the prayers of a media adviser, hoping that "all these Richard stories as a mass of rose petals swirl toward heaven"? (And check out that sentence's grammar). Someone on that staff must be pissed off by his suicide. It would have been more honest to publish less pious testimonials: vengeful dismissals, fuck-yous, and the like. Prayers and thoughts of love do nothing to assuage grief, and they certainly don't honor his memory.

Love's got the world in motion

If you're a New Order fan, you'll need Collection, a two-disc compilation on which you'll find their videos and a decent documentary from 1993 in which they're in much better moods than subsequent interviews have revealed.

Van Zandt can't dance

I Love Music has a thread devoted to the speech that "Miami" "Little" Steven Van Zandt delivered in July to the Radio & Records convention, whatever that is. All you need to know about his reactionary, tone-deaf, and stupid rant is this paragraph:

You're gonna throw one away? You're gonna replace Elvis, Little Richard, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Johnny Burnette, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Buddy Holly, Lloyd Price, and Fats Domino with, all due respect, Donna Summer and the Bee Gees? You're gonna replace primal, vital, timeless, forever cool rock and roll pioneers with disco? Disco?

It's the craven inclusion of "with all due respect" before the Summer and Bee Gees references which makes me wish a mirrorball would fall on Van Zandt's scarfed head. I suppose the last time this musical Michael Medved heard new music was in the parking lot of the disco-sucks record-burning party. Ned Raggett interjected the best line:

"I think the problem with the convenient target is how readily he sets himself up. Little Steven appears to think that his tastes are the universal and correct ones without which the world dies = he can eat shit and die from where I sit."

On gay marriage language

Ampersand at Alas, a blog -- one of the nicer looking blogs out there -- has a short post on gay marriage. He/She? thinks that "gender neutral marriage" is the best term to define what's popularly known as "gay marriage."

I'm not sure gay marriage requires that much time be spent on nomenclature. I think taking the time to dwell on an agreed upon name for gay marriage -- aside from being a little egotistical -- also is a little discriminating, and makes gay marriage some kind of subset of marriage, or even a whole different thing from it, it gives it a sense of otherness.

I think sometimes focusing too much on language -- as anti-Orwellian as that might sound -- is probably a bad thing. Some things need not be argued about linguistically because they really should be taken as given rights. Gender neutral marriage is almost a reduction to the absurd. How about just marriage? The gender of the participants should really be a nonissue.

I think what we're trying to do is redefine the meaning of marriage, but probably not by posting a decree on a blog saying "henceforth 'marriage' will include those unions with two people of the same sex."

To timidly go where we went 30 years ago

The whole notion of going back to Apollo-like spacecrafts seems more political than scientific to me. Not long ago, NASA was talking about fully reusable vehicles and now they've gone completely retrograde, and returned to the very thing the shuttle was trying to get away from. And it appears to be the result of a PR mess more than anything else.

Anyway, I'm back to AGI. I'll try to post at least once a day from now on.

Lovely Rita

Here we go again.

Not a single Hitch

Seixon.com has posted the infamous debate between Christopher Hitchens and George Galloway. Maybe I'm letting my biases show, but Hitchens comes off rather better than Galloway. While the latter resorts to increasingly shrill attempts at baiting ("Christopher's new best friends, Bechtel and Halliburton"), Hitchens manages to both maintain an Olympian detachment quite removed from his usual bellocosity while talking in crisp, measured sentences; his rhetorical abilities are indeed awesome. When he's wrong, he admits it; when he's accused of contradicting himself, he acknowledges it and explains why. A performance all the more impressive after his shambling essay in The Weekly Standard a few weeks ago. Look to the language, his idol George Orwell always said.

Just returned from a weekend of drinking and singing and walking with my Stylus colleagues. It was great to finally meet Ian Mathers, William S. Fields, Anthony Miccio, John Cunningham, Nate De Young, and Grand Poobah Todd Burns. A special thanks to Andrew Unterberger and Mike Powell for the use of their apartments. A special thanks to the lovely ladies at an East Vilage karaoke joint for allowing us to bellow for four hours.

Make mine Macca?

As Alfred is quick to point out, I'm a bit of a McCartney fan/apologist. While this might cast a cloud over anything else I like musically, I think guilty pleasures (which I don't think McCartney really is, if you consider that band he was in before Wings) help define your musical personality as much as the cult favorites and big bands we all know and love.

Anyway. McCartney's latest, Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, isn't the world-beater publications like The Miami Herald and Rolling Stone claim it to be. It's a fun album. Which I guess means a lot to an audience that either bailed or was forced to trudge through albums (despite AllMusic head honcho Stephen Thomas Erlewine's half-baked claim of a mini-Macca rebirth) like Driving Rain and Off The Ground in the last decade.

The new song collection is a bit on the slow side, but listeners are given a more human sounding Paul. Not the Nutrasweet-addled voice behind "Magneto and Titanium Man" or "Big Barn Bed." This is Driving Rain refined. Producer Nigel Godrich ditched McCartney's competent touring band from the studio and put Paul on the spot: forcing the Beatle to play every instrument possible in the style of previous one-man albums like McCartney and its sequel McCartney II. The only difference this time around is that Godrich is in the mix, as opposed to leaving Paul alone in the basement with his excesses. The end result is a pleasant if slightly forced song cycle that reminds you why you bother picking up McCartney solo albums in the first place. For every "Monkberry Moon Delight" or "Bip Bop," you get an unexpected treat, like "Helen Wheels" or Chaos and Creation's opening track, "Fine Line."

In short, don't buy into the cyclical hype. But for McCartney diehards and those looking for an excuse to hop back on the Macca wagon, Chaos and Creation in the Backyard comes at the perfect time.

And for those who care, I'll be seeing him tonight (Saturday) in Tampa.

A Hurricane Katrina timeline. It's pretty clear now that the most guilty of allowing the catastrophe to worsen are, in order of culpability: Kathleen Blanco, Michael Brown, Michael Chertoff, and President Bush.

The Roberts Show

The John Roberts confirmation hearings have been a hoot, not least because we get to watch a group of the most powerful men in the Senate – nine purpotedly intelligent men and women – reduced to gibbering monkeys while the nominee's robo-smile beams ever more genially and forthrightly. This article is an entertaining summary of yesterday's laughfest.

An analysis of how John Roberts might preside as Chief Justice of the United States; and, most importantly, how certain judges -- liberals and conservatives -- have confounded (if not infuriated) the presidents who nominated them.

I've never heard of James Blunt or McFly either

I am relieved to learn that the UK singles chart can give ours serious competition in the suckage sweepstakes. Me and the rest of the Stylus singles contingent give the summer's big hits a damn good whacking. The Mattafix single deserves to be a hit here.

How Bush blew it

'Nuff said. The first paragraph is the most chilling bit of journalism I've read all year:

It's a standing joke among the president's top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of the president of the United States, or, as he is known in West Wing jargon, POTUS. The bad news on this early morning, Tuesday, Aug. 30, some 24 hours after Hurricane Katrina had ripped through New Orleans, was that the president would have to cut short his five-week vacation by a couple of days and return to Washington. The president's chief of staff, Andrew Card; his deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagin; his counselor, Dan Bartlett, and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, held a conference call to discuss the question of the president's early return and the delicate task of telling him. Hagin, it was decided, as senior aide on the ground, would do the deed.

With hundreds dead and a city disintegrating into anarchy, White House aides were feeling craven about suggesting to the President of the United States that he cut his vacation short??

Paul's Barbara Bush moment

Paul McCartney is no doubt a fantastic bass player, a great songwriter, and probably a very nice man; but in every interview he turns into an unrepentant simp. This ran in today's Miami Herald:

''I generally tend towards the optimistic,'' McCartney says. 'But sometimes when you're looking around for something to write about, you say, `I've just done a few optimistic songs. Now, is there anything else going on in my life, or has there ever been anything else other than optimism?' And you cast around and you think, yeah of course there has, there's been rejected friendships, there's been times when you're not getting on with people, things like that. I've had plenty of those in my life.''

Barbara Bush anyone?

We are all on drugs

From TalkLeft:

Seems like recently-deceased Chief Justice Rehnquist found time to knock back an unhealthy dose of pills while cracking down on drug abusers:

And for the nine years between 1972 and the end of 1981, William Rehnquist consumed great quantities of the potent sedative-hypnotic Placidyl. So great was Rehnquist's Placidyl habit, dependency, or addiction—depending on how you regard long-term drug use—that by the last quarter of 1981 he began slurring his speech in public, became tongue-tied while pronouncing long words, and sometimes had trouble finishing his thoughts.

Cross-posted from my blog.

A Bigger Bang

My review of the new Stones album is up. It's not Their Best Album Since Tattoo You or Some Girls, but who the fuck cares? It's damn good.

You can't make this stuff up

From the front page of the Wall Street Journal. That old cliche regarding Nero playing his violin while Rome burned also describes the behavior of some of New Orleans' most privileged citizens:

"The green expanse of Audubon Park, in the city's Uptown area, has doubled in recent days as a heliport for the city's rich -- and a terminus for the small armies of private security guards who have been dispatched to keep the homes there safe and habitable. Mr. O'Dwyer has cellphone service and ice cubes to cool off his highballs in the evening. By yesterday, the city water service even sprang to life, making the daily trips to his neighbor's pool unnecessary. A pair of oil-company engineers, dispatched by his son-in-law, delivered four cases of water, a box of delicacies including herring with mustard sauce and 15 gallons of generator gasoline."

And commentators say there's no such thing as class warfare in America.

I thought I'd turn into a cow before I'd agree with anything Robert Novak ever wrote. Moo.

Hello, Dolly

Thomas and I give Dolly Parton a thorough going-over. This compilation belongs in your permanent collection.

No, he isn't just the guy who made Mike Meyers look like a tool

Robert Christgau's review of one of the year's best albums, which despite the hype you really need to hear. Best paragraph:

Mammon in practice, Christ in spirit—that's neat. RZA over Puffy because RZA subsumes Puffy as West subsumes them both. Arrogant for sure, only that's not why he always samples. Anyway, he's as good as he thinks he is—a backpacker at heart who, like many brilliant nerds before him, has accrued precious metal by following his dream. He wants everybody to buy this record. So do I.

The smoking gun?

FEMA Chief Waited Until After Storm Hit

By TED BRIDIS, Associated Press Writer

The government's disaster chief waited until hours after Hurricane Katrina had already struck the Gulf Coast before asking his boss to dispatch 1,000 Homeland Security employees to the region — and gave them two days to arrive, according to internal documents.

Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, sought the approval from Homeland Security Secretary Mike Chertoff roughly five hours after Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29. Brown said that among duties of these employees was to "convey a positive image" about the government's response for victims.

Before then, FEMA had positioned smaller rescue and communications teams across the Gulf Coast. But officials acknowledged Tuesday the first department-wide appeal for help came only as the storm raged.

Brown's memo to Chertoff described Katrina as "this near catastrophic event" but otherwise lacked any urgent language. The memo politely ended, "Thank you for your consideration in helping us to meet our responsibilities."

The initial responses of the government and Brown came under escalating criticism as the breadth of destruction and death grew. President Bush and Congress on Tuesday pledged separate investigations into the federal response to Katrina. "Governments at all levels failed," said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine.

Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said Brown had positioned front-line rescue teams and Coast Guard helicopters before the storm. Brown's memo on Aug. 29 aimed to assemble the necessary federal work force to support the rescues, establish communications and coordinate with victims and community groups, Knocke said.

Instead of rescuing people or recovering bodies, these employees would focus on helping victims find the help they needed, he said.

"There will be plenty of time to assess what worked and what didn't work," Knocke said. "Clearly there will be time for blame to be assigned and to learn from some of the successful efforts."

Brown's memo told employees that among their duties, they would be expected to "convey a positive image of disaster operations to government officials, community organizations and the general public."

"FEMA response and recovery operations are a top priority of the department and as we know, one of yours," Brown wrote Chertoff. He proposed sending 1,000 Homeland Security Department employees within 48 hours and 2,000 within seven days.

Knocke said the 48-hour period suggested for the Homeland employees was to ensure they had adequate training. "They were training to help the life-savers," Knocke said.

Employees required a supervisor's approval and at least 24 hours of disaster training in Maryland, Florida or Georgia. "You must be physically able to work in a disaster area without refrigeration for medications and have the ability to work in the outdoors all day," Brown wrote.

The same day Brown wrote Chertoff, Brown also urged local fire and rescue departments outside Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi not to send trucks or emergency workers into disaster areas without an explicit request for help from state or local governments. Brown said it was vital to coordinate fire and rescue efforts.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., said Tuesday that Brown should step down.

After a senators-only briefing by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and other Cabinet members, Sen. Charles E. Schumer said lawmakers weren't getting their questions answered.

"What people up there want to know, Democrats and Republicans, is what is the challenge ahead, how are you handling that and what did you do wrong in the past," said Schumer, D-N.Y.

Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, said the administration is "getting a bad rap" for the emergency response.

"This is the largest disaster in the history of the United States, over an area twice the size of Europe," Stevens said. "People have to understand this is a big, big problem."

Meanwhile, the airline industry said the government's request for help evacuating storm victims didn't come until late Thursday afternoon. The president of the Air Transport Association, James May, said the Homeland Security Department called then to ask if the group could participate in an airlift for refugees.

New Orleans: a tone poem

Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou Temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades -- thirty-foot columns, gloriously beautiful -- double-pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move. All that and a town square where public executions took place. In New Orleans you could almost see other dimensions. There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again. Chronic melancholia hanging from the trees. You never get tired of it. After a while you start to feel like a ghost from one of the tombs, like you're in a wax museum below crimson clouds....The devil comes here and sighs. New Orleans. Exquisite, old-fashioned. A great place to live vicariously. Nothing makes any difference and you never feel hurt, a great place to really hit on things. Somebody puts something in front of you here and you might as well drink it. Great place to be intimate or do nothing. A place to come and hope you'll get smart -- to feed pigeons looking for handouts.

--Bob Dylan, Chronicles

William Rehnquist, RIP

A fair review of William Rehnquist's term as chief justice. This wonderful story which ran in The Atlantic Monthly's April 2005 issue analyzes his legacy. The person who posted on a friend's Livejournal entry that with John Roberts' confirmation a near certainty, "we can say goodbye to our civil liberties anyway" needs to do more research.

Open letter to the President

The Times-Picayune ran an open letter to Dubya. Here are some choice excerpts:

Dear Mr. President:

We heard you loud and clear Friday when you visited our devastated city and the Gulf Coast and said, "What is not working, we’re going to make it right."

Please forgive us if we wait to see proof of your promise before believing you. But we have good reason for our skepticism.

Bienville built New Orleans where he built it for one main reason: It’s accessible. The city between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain was easy to reach in 1718.

How much easier it is to access in 2005 now that there are interstates and bridges, airports and helipads, cruise ships, barges, buses and diesel-powered trucks.

Despite the city’s multiple points of entry, our nation’s bureaucrats spent days after last week’s hurricane wringing their hands, lamenting the fact that they could neither rescue the city’s stranded victims nor bring them food, water and medical supplies.

Read the rest.

Labor Day

Blogging will be light this weekend. Take care of each other.

The wages of empire

Two films worthy of studying side by side: William Wyler's The Letter (1940) and Fernando Meirelles' adaptation of John Le Carre's The Constant Gardener. Far from a great film, The Constant Gardener is nevertheless a gripping one, suggesting the ways in which bureaucracy and a crumbling sense of entitlement become indistinguishable from totalitarianism at its most invisible and omnipotent. Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes) finds himself fighting a pharmaceutical company which treats AIDS-stricken Kenyans as laboratory rats -- a fight he was reluctant to pursue until his activist pain-in-the-ass wife Tessa (Rachel Weisz) is murdered by local thugs hired by said company.

Meirelles suggests that Quayle's relentlessness is in part due to his wife's considerable sexual magnetism (Weisz gives the film's best performance: fierce, sly, ironic) and not at all related to a repressed sense of justice. An unintended effect, I wager. The film's major flaw is that we never see Fiennes at work. He's supposed to be a diplomat but we get no sense of why he chose this profession (other than he's feeble and passive; not a complimentary view of the diplomatic corp, this) or what drives him other than he loved his wife. This doesn't detract from Fiennes' work. A pallid, wispy actor when called upon to project sincerity, he is entirely convincing as a man who accepts the fact that his life has changed inexorably, which makes Quayle kissing cousins with other Fiennes characters (his deformed count in The English Patient for starters).

In The Letter, Bette Davis' rubber plantation's wife offs her lover after he spurns her. She's so respectable that she can prepare breakfast for her lawyer, husband, and arresting officer minutes before being arrested (in Singapore the English ruling class stuck together). Like The Constant Gardener, Wyler's film shows the savagery into which hegemony sinks when it avoids accepting responsibility for its actions, as well as the effect on the natives hegemony's civil servants are purportedly educating. All these subtleties are apparent in Davis' performance. Pauline Kael was correct when she noted that Davis "gives what is very likely the best study of female sexual hypocrisy in film history."

When you got nuthin', you got nuthin' to lose

From Jonah Goldeberg's The Corner comes this letter:

As far as I can tell, the vast majority of the physical suffering in New Orleans is of those who remained in the city notwithstanding what I understand to have been a mandatory evacuation order. Now, some stayed on purpose - that's one thing. But I'm willing to bet that the majority of those who stayed stayed because they had no way to get out of New Orleans - they didn't have a car or couldn't afford to drive it anywhere far enough out of town. (Also, although this isn't entirely predictable from a planning standpoint, poor people don't have money at the end of the month.)[emphasis mine]

So why didn't New Orleans (or any city) have a plan to use whatever transportation facilities (like, uh, buses) it had available to transport those who couldn't get out of town but who wanted to? That's something that can't be discounted as "armchair quarterbacking" or under the "we had no idea it would be this bad" excuse. If you are going to tell people to evacuate a place, you need to help those who can't evacuate get the hell out - and unlike the post-hurricane issues, the required resources are almost entirely predictable ahead of time - every city knows how many cars it has, how many residents are on welfare, etc.

Imagine how different the picture would be today if the only ones still in N.O. were those who had chosen to ride out the storm.

As I've told many people over the last few years, the racial subtext to much of the criticism of looters is disquieting. The implication is, "Those poor, dirty, smelly darkies didn't have much anyway; it's only natural that they'd revert to barbarism eventually."

Here's a bit of the foreign reaction to Hurricane Katrina's devastating impact on Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. In an editorial entitled "The Humbling of a Superpower" (yikes), The Daily Mail writes:

Here is a superpower that can crush at will a tinpot dictatorship - but then becomes so bogged down in the grisly aftermath of war that it finds itself unable to respond to anything like adequately to the plight of tens of thousands of its own citizens engulfed by a natural calamity.

This horrifying account of the conditions inside the New Orleans Superdome. Excerpt:

"This is mass chaos," said Sgt. Jason Defess, 27, a National Guard military policeman who had been stationed on a ramp outside the Superdome since Monday. "To tell you the truth, I'd rather be in Iraq," where he was deployed for 14 months, until January. "You got your constant danger, but I had something to protect myself. [And] three meals a day. Communications. A plan. Here, they had no plan."

This is the United States?