O frabjous day

Tom DeLay steps down after indictment. (Rumor: from NPR, via the comment threads at Making Light - somebody talked, presumably one of the already-indicted.)


Also:
Mark Morford on Bush and meteorologists.

From the "I told you so" files

I've been biting back the urge to say "I told you so" a good bit lately, and apparently I'm not the only one.

Molly Ivins:

Some of you may have heard me observe a time or two -- going back to when George W. was still governor of Texas -- that the trouble with the guy is that while he is good at politics, he stinks at governance. It bores him, he's not interested, he thinks government is bad to begin with and everything would be done better if it were contracted out to corporations.

We can now safely assert that W. has stacked much of the federal government with people like himself. And what you get when you put people in charge of government who don't believe in government and who are not interested in running it well is ... what happened after Hurricane Katrina.

Many a time in the past six years I have bit my tongue so I wouldn't annoy people with the always obnoxious observation, "I told you so." But, dammit it all to hell, I did tell you, and I've been telling you since 1994, and I am so sick of this man and everything he represents -- all the sleazy, smug, self-righteous graft and corruption and "Christian" moralizing and cynicism and tax cuts for all his smug, rich buddies.

Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention.

and David Brooks didn't quite say it, but I think it's implied:

Katrina means that the political culture, already sour and bloody-minded in many quarters, will shift. There will be a reaction. There will be more impatience for something new. There is going to be some sort of big bang as people respond to the cumulative blows of bad events and try to fundamentally change the way things are.

Reaganite conservatism was the response to the pessimism and feebleness of the 1970's. Maybe this time there will be a progressive resurgence. Maybe we are entering an age of hardheaded law and order. (Rudy Giuliani, an unlikely G.O.P. nominee a few months ago, could now win in a walk.) Maybe there will be call for McCainist patriotism and nonpartisan independence. All we can be sure of is that the political culture is about to undergo some big change.

We're not really at a tipping point as much as a bursting point. People are mad as hell, unwilling to take it anymore.

Scribbles

I love this Daily Scribble. It ties in with the things I've been thinking (and sometimes saying rather loudly) about the religious right.

Fucking Fundamentalists... I'm sick of all of them [rants the cartoon character].
They wanna go back to the 13th century or something.
(pauses)
Maybe if they had science they could make a time machine and all go back there and leave the rest of us the fuck alone.

Notes from the hospital

(This is literally notes written on paper in the hospital, with the TV on and nurses coming in and out, so it's a little rough, and definitely fragmented. Posted pretty much unedited.)

Miles O'Brien is on CNN talking about the "reckless rhetoric" of people talking about shooting all the looters. Since the word has obviously been used pretty much indiscriminately to refer to both the armed bands of thugs and to normal people scavenging for food and water, I think he's clearly right about that.

My dad called me last night and as soon as the conversation turned to Katrina, he started trying to make excuses for the government, without me even saying anything the least bit critical. I thought that was odd. Is this how all the conservatives are reacting?

I've decided to put whatever ranting I do about Katrina on my political weblog. My indignation is pretty politicized in the sense that I think there are very clear racial issues here, and that all of this reflects on the true nature of so-called "compassionate conservatism." Even though I realize that it's a very complex situation and there are a lot of factors that figure into it, I still firmly believe that if these people had been white, this would not have happened. Certainly not have been allowed to go on so long, at the very least. (Although I also think there are issues about the lack of any evacuation plan whatsoever for people without their own cars. I've seen accusations that they were just deliberately left to die, and I can't really believe that there was that level of malice involved. But it does seem like nobody cared very much.)

CNN: "Bush acknowledges some problems with response"

Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff: We need a new model for "ultra catastrophes" (there were two catastrophes, he says - (1) the hurricane, and (2) the collapse of 300 feet of levee)


We were just discussing the "Katrina timeline" - it wasn't until last Friday that it started looking like a major hurricane, right? I remember sending Col the link with all the projections - and in the middle of the afternoon Friday they moved west in a rather dramatic fashion, from mostly-Pensacola to mostly what turned out to be more or less the correct projection - New Orleans/Biloxi. Saturday it became a cat 5 (and hadn't turned west yet, which is when I briefly started worrying that it might be us doing the evacuating). When did FEMA start mobilizing? I'm wondering. When did serious evacuations start?

(Funny, there is now a "Katrina timeline" slide up on CNN, but then it does follow from what they've been discussing. Basically they are saying that they had a pretty good idea that NO was going to get hit by a cat 4 by Friday afternoon - 2-1/2 days out.)


It seems to me that there's an arrogance to the way that people keep saying "This is an American city?" - this isn't supposed to happen here, I guess.