The whole idea of putting someone with no judicial experience on the Supreme Court is just fucked. Get ready, though...she's going to do the Roberts Shuffle. And there ain't a damn thing you can do about it...but refuse to confirm her, period. You cannot tell me you can't find a more qualified woman, or man, or whatever the fuck the burr is under your saddle.

Longtime Confidante of Bush Has Never Been a Judge
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

President Bush nominated Harriet E. Miers, the White House counsel, as his choice to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor this morning, his second nominee for the Supreme Court in the past two and half months.

Christopher Cooper, J.D., Ph.D. & Attorney at Law
Director, Saint Xavier University Center for Conflict Resolution

KATRINA AFTERMATH, RACE & ACADEMICS
COPYRIGHT © 2005   

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has meticulously showed the racial divide between blacks and whites in the United States. Ours is a country in which scientific poll after poll show that black American people say they experience racism routinely at the hands of many (not all) white American people; but many white people overwhelmingly assert that racism is a phenomenon of the past. In other words, Hurricane Katrina forces people who have long denied that there is great race-based interpersonal conflict between whites and blacks in the United States to accept that such a phenomenon is real. As a black man I write this essay with frustration. My frustration, directed at the field of Criminology & Criminal Justice of which I am a part.

Exiles from a city and from a nation
Cornel West
Sunday September 11, 2005
The Observer

It takes something as big as Hurricane Katrina and the misery we saw among the poor black people of New Orleans to get America to focus on race and poverty. It happens about once every 30 or 40 years.

What we saw unfold in the days after the hurricane was the most naked manifestation of conservative social policy towards the poor, where the message for decades has been: 'You are on your own'. Well, they really were on their own for five days in that Superdome, and it was Darwinism in action - the survival of the fittest. People said: 'It looks like something out of the Third World.' Well, New Orleans was Third World long before the hurricane.

I guessed they were signalling the helicopters. I was right...and if you can get through this really disturbing video, you'll see. I actually stopped about half way though.

I've had the thought they didn't pick up the bodies in the hopes they's be washed away. Not only will we never know how many died, we'll never know how many are missing.

Mark Anthony Neal at NewBlackMan has a roundup of blogs, articles, stuff like that, about the implications of Hurricane Katrina, written by Black academics.

The question. 

The answer:

Despite the disaster that has overwhelmed New Orleans, the city's monied, mostly white elite is hanging on and maneuvering to play a role in the recovery when the floodwaters of Katrina are gone. "New Orleans is ready to be rebuilt. Let's start right here," says Mr. O'Dwyer, standing in his expansive kitchen, next to a counter covered with a jumble of weaponry and electric wires.

Old-line families plot the future
Thursday, September 08, 2005
By Christopher Cooper, The Wall Street Journal

NEW ORLEANS -- On a sultry morning earlier this week, Ashton O'Dwyer stepped out of his home on this city's grandest street and made a beeline for his neighbor's pool. Wearing nothing but a pair of blue swim trunks and carrying two milk jugs, he drew enough pool water to flush the toilet in his home.

Quote of note:

"Am I the only person out here with dreadlocks?"

Uprooted and Scattered Far From the Familiar
By TIMOTHY EGAN

BLUFFDALE, Utah, Sept. 9 - Carrying the scraps of their lives in plastic trash bags, citizens of the drowned city of New Orleans landed in a strange new place a week ago and wondered where they were. The land was brown, and nearly everyone they saw was white.

"I'm still not sure where I am - what do they call this, the upper West or something?" said Shelvin Cooter, 30, one of 583 people relocated from New Orleans to a National Guard camp here on a sagebrush plateau south of Salt Lake City, 1,410 miles from home.

This, fron GlobalSecurity.org, is an example of why I will never read just the one thing I'm looking for when I find the one thing I'm looking for online.

Restore New Orleans, Bulldoze Peoria
by Will Morgan
September 1, 2005

House Speaker Dennis Hastert's comment yesterday that much of New Orleans ought to be "bulldozed" rather than rebuilt on its below sea-level site exposes some of the ambivalence Americans have always felt towards the city of New Orleans. From the time of its acquisition it was not an "American" city. It was neither Ango-Saxon nor Protestant or White. Life in the place was basically Meditterrean and European, with long working pauses in the hot days and leisurely meals. Its politics were familial rather than democratic, its religion an almagam of Caribbrean cults and Catholcism. Its wealthest citizens were all of mixed races, Spanish and French, African and Creole, American Indian and Caribbean. But there was money to be made. The strategic importance of governing the trade at the mouth of Mississippi River outweighed all of the cultural differences between the Puritan Americans and the more relaxed attitudes of the natives of the Delta City. These differences persisted as the Americans arrived and began to build their great homes in the uptown section of town. Many Americans were seduced by the charm of this foreign culture, but others resisted, especially did they resist the notion, abroad in the city since its founding, that all races could live easily together and intermarry as they pleased. The pride and even arrogance of Louisiana Creoles was legendary. They believed themselves every bit the equal of the Americans and refused to cow-tow to any notion of "American Superiority". After Reconstruction the Americans came down even harder and passed laws which forced the segregation of the Creoles, who were thenceforth to be considered as no different from blacks. It is impossible to describe what a fissure this created in people who felt themselves to be culturally "superior" in every way to both the Americans and to the descendants of African slaves.  Pioneers and early Americans knew this much about New Orleans: Those women were beautiful and the sex they offered was wonderful, but it would never fly to have this openly admitted and spoken of back home in Tennessee... so all in all, one was obliged to treat New Orleans as some kind of chip of Paris that had somehow dislodged into the Seine and had drifted across the Atlantic and through the Caribbean, attaching itself to the underbelly of North America. The near fanatical pride of the Creoles  in the face of the American attempt to treat them no different than negroes seared these people's heart and soul. Indirectly it led to creation of jazz because music became one of the few careers open to those who had always cultivated music in their own homes as the essence of their 'Europeanization'. Yet the forced association of Creoles and Blacks also contributed to jazz since it had the ironic effect of causing the Creoles to listen more closely to early blues, to understand blues scales, to feel the power of the indivdual voice and the powerful rhythmic and dance inheritance of West Africa. Even so it was clear that no one was ever going to be able to bend the will of the Creole mongrels.

Quote of note:

Some experts warn that the crisis atmosphere and the open federal purse are a bonanza for lobbyists and private companies and are likely to lead to the contract abuses, cronyism and waste that numerous investigations have uncovered in post-war Iraq.

In Storm's Ruins, a Rush to Rebuild and Reopen for Business
By JOHN M. BRODER

BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 9 - Private contractors, guided by two former directors of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other well-connected lobbyists and consultants, are rushing to cash in on the unprecedented sums to be spent on Hurricane Katrina relief and reconstruction.

 At Crooks and Liars,:

Olbermann's Time Line

Keith put together a video time line that jumps back and forth between different days and shows the spin by Chertoff and others coupled with the reality on the ground.

...and thence to BobHarris.com

Picking up on a thought bouncing around back at TMW after a Chris Floyd post, I thought I'd find out for myself exactly which Louisiana parishes were and were not included in George W. Bush's declaration of emergency effective August 26th, which you can also reach by clicking the map itself.

When George W. Bush is asked why he doesn't fire FEMA Director Michael Brown:

"Brownie's the kind of guy that will stand up and say thousands of people starving in an overheated cesspool have been fed twice a day, and I believe him." 

Ex-Army Lt. General Joe Ballard, another Louisianan and the first Black commander of the Corps of Engineers 

Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of Gulf Coast communities is painful for Blacks to watch for obvious reasons and ones that seem not so obvious to white fellow citizens.
 
History returns to haunt.

Almost all Blacks are southerners, or descendants of southern families freed by the Civil War, lifted from peonage by the Great Migration. And almost all have relatives, friends and college classmates still in the affected states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas.

Now, with the lives of thousands jeopardized by floods, destruction of homes and businesses, and ailments spread by contaminated water, comes the disheartening news of widespread lawlessness among the hurricane’s victims.
 
This we get while watching a disaster unfold that should never have happened in the first place.
 
TV pictures keep showing lines of Black evacuees, not looting or shooting at police, but holding on as best they can, waiting for the emergency help their government has rushed to other disaster victims, in America or halfway around the world. Waiting still, even as their leaders from Washington congratulate themselves on their coping skills.
 
The image of Black looters and criminals keeps getting resurrected, while  images of Black leaders driving the recovery efforts is minimized. 
 
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, struggling to keep order after an estimated 70 percent of his police force walked off, is still working, in a city with filthy water covering 70 percent of its streets.

Lt. Gen. Russell Honoré, a graduate of historically Black Southern University, took charge as soon as he was sent, changing the dynamic on the streets as he ordered soldiers and civilian police to point their guns toward the ground: “This is not Iraq.”

Brig. Gen. Robert Crear, who actually capped oil wells in Iraq, cleared up in days a problem  armchair experts said would take weeks: blocking the gaps in two levees whose failure let Lake Pontchartrain flood the whole of the New Orleans basin, so pumping operations could begin.
 
Ex-Army Lt. General Joe Ballard, another Louisianan and the first Black commander of the Corps of Engineers, makes the most painful point of all: This disaster, predicted by “every Corps of Engineers commander since 1927,” did not have to happen.
 
What he’s talking about is New Orleans’ levees, built in the mid-1950s to withstand a Category Three storm, could not in fact stand up to that much battering. The Mississippi River, made to run straight by high levees after devastating floods in 1927, washed away barrier islands that should have protected the city from the full brunt of Nature’s fury.
With the barriers gone, Army engineers kept asking their leaders in Congress and the White House for money to build up the levees to prevent exactly the kind of flooding New Orleans has endured.
 
Gen. Ballard, for his part, put forward a plan that Congress denounced as wasteful in the extreme. He wanted to spend more than $100 million to build up the levees to withstand a “100-year storm,” but was excoriated as a would-be big spender, and retired after that.
 
Now that a 100-year storm has proved his point, Congress has targeted $68 billion for a cleanup many experts believe will cost $150 billion, and Gen. Ballard’s spending plan looks to have been the more prudent investment. Who’s the big spender now?
 
It was all so unnecessary, especially the negative characterizations of the Blacks, who are after all American citizens. So few of gave up to lawlessness, amid a catastrophe so great its police force disintegrated, that the continued focus on criminality is an affront to the dignity and nobility so many have displayed. That, sadly, magnifies the tragedy we witness.
 
Garland Thompson is Editorial Director and Tyrone D. Taborn is Editor-in-Chief of US Black Engineer magazine

When it comes down to removing folks from NOLA by force, I'm not going to have a single complaint. Not unless something TOTALLY absurd happens.

Holdouts on Dry Ground Say, 'Why Leave Now?'
By ALEX BERENSON

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 8 - Ten days ago, the water rose to the front steps of their house. Four days ago, it began falling. But only now is the city demanding that Richie Kay and Emily Harris get out.

They cannot understand why. They live on high ground in the Bywater neighborhood, and their house escaped structural damage. They are healthy and have enough food and water to last almost a year.

Campbell Donates Her Fee to Hurricane Victims

Supermodel Naomi Campbell is donating her entire earnings from upcoming New York Fashion Week to aid the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

The Brit is heartbroken by the scenes of devastation in the U.S. and has decided to donate all her catwalk fees to the American Red Cross.

Campbell is offering her services to any designer who agrees to donate her salary to the relief effort in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi.

She also is encouraging her fellow supermodels to follow her lead and donate their earnings.

...and no Libertarians in Louisiana.

The other day I said the pictures coming out of New Orleans hit the same nerve pictures out of Selma did in the 60s. There has been a couple of differences, of course.

The major emotional reaction White America had to Selma was guilt...and it's inverse, anger. I just saw Susan Collins and Joseph Lieberman interviewed on PBS' The Newshour. They say their own constituents' reaction to the government failure was anger, frustration and embarrassment....brazen dishonesty must be the inverse of embarrassment...

Another difference is these are crimes of thoughtlessness...Selma was malicious, brutal.

One thing that's the same is, white folks are responding collectively, as they always do when race is a prominent element.

On the other hand folks are actively using that fact (what did you think control of the media was about?).

RELIEF -- PERRY FUNNELS RELIEF FUNDS TO HIS OWN GROUP'S COFFERS: "Gov. Rick Perry, in hurricane relief tours around the state, in news releases and on his official state Web site, has urged Texans to contribute to three groups: the Red Cross, Salvation Army and the OneStar Foundation," the Dallas Morning News reports. Sounds admirable, except for one detail: the OneStar Foundation isn't doing any relief work in the Gulf states. In fact, it's a volunteer organization set up by Perry himself -- "birthed from the heart and vision of Governor Rick Perry," according to the group's website -- and run by Susan Weddington, a close political ally of Perry who left her political position to run the organization.

Quote of note:

In Missouri, a much wider constellation of Internet sites - with names like parishdonations.com and katrinafamilies.com - displayed pictures of the flood-ravaged South and drove traffic to a single site, InternetDonations.org, a nonprofit entity with apparent links to white separatist groups.

After the Storm, the Swindlers
By TOM ZELLER Jr.

Even as millions of Americans rally to make donations to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, the Internet is brimming with swindles, come-ons and opportunistic pandering related to the relief effort in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. And the frauds are more varied and more numerous than in past disasters, according to law enforcement officials and online watchdog groups.

Katrina bares racial gulf; experts see little change
Wed Sep 7, 2005 03:12 PM ET
By Alan Elsner

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The gaping racial divide in the United States was laid bare by Hurricane Katrina, but many social policy experts say the disaster is unlikely to prompt any sustained effort to combat black urban poverty.

In the chaotic aftermath of the hurricane that destroyed New Orleans it became obvious that the overwhelming majority of people trapped in the drowned city, waiting desperately for help or succumbing to the storm, were poor blacks.

"It was pretty stark looking at the pictures and the data. Black people in New Orleans and elsewhere live together in the most fragile neighborhoods and it's not an accident -- it's the result of decades of segregation and discrimination," said Myron Orfield, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and former state legislator.

in We’re Going West…

But a sizable minority of blacks — including police — behaved reprehensibly in the aftermath, shooting at rescue workers, raping, killing and, yes, looting (though no cannibalism).

Oh really? 

Relief efforts ground to a halt last week after reports circulated of looters shooting at helicopters, yet none of the hundreds of articles I read on the subject contained a single first-hand confirmation from a pilot or eyewitness. The suspension-triggering attack—on a military Chinook attempting to evacuate refugees from the Superdome—was contested by Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Laura Brown, who told ABC News, "We're controlling every single aircraft in that airspace and none of them reported being fired on." What's more, when asked about the attacks, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff replied: "I haven't actually received a confirmed report of someone firing on a helicopter."