I Stand With Cindy Sheehan

The Rising

Bruce Springsteen

Can't see nothin' in front of me
Can't see nothin' coming up behind
I make my way through this darkness
I can't feel nothing but this chain that binds me
Lost track of how far I've gone
How far I've gone, how high I've climbed
On my back's a sixty pound stone
On my shoulder a half mile line

Come on up for the rising
Com on up, lay your hands in mine
Come on up for the rising
Come on up for the rising tonight

Left the house this morning
Bells ringing filled the air
Wearin' the cross of my calling
On wheels of fire I come rollin' down here

Come on up for the rising
Come on up, lay your hands in mine
Come on up for the rising
Come on up for the rising tonight

Li,li, li,li,li,li, li,li,li

Spirits above and behind me
Faces gone, black eyes burnin' bright
May their precious blood forever bind me
Lord as I stand before your fiery light

Li,li, li,li,li,li, li,li,li

I see you Mary in the garden
In the garden of a thousand sighs
There's holy pictures of our children
Dancin' in a sky filled with light
May I feel your arms around me
May I feel your blood mix with mine
A dream of life comes to me
Like a catfish dancin' on the end of the line

Sky of blackness and sorrow ( a dream of life)
Sky of love, sky of tears (a dream of life)
Sky of glory and sadness ( a dream of life)
Sky of mercy, sky of fear ( a dream of life)
Sky of memory and shadow ( a dream of life)
Your burnin' wind fills my arms tonight
Sky of longing and emptiness (a dream of life)
Sky of fullness, sky of blessed life ( a dream of life)

Come on up for the rising
Come on up, lay your hands in mine
Come on up for the rising
Come on up for the rising tonight

Li,li, li,li,li,li, li,li,li

Katrina, Conservatives, Liberals, and the Poor

Scotty McClellan says we should not play the "blame game." Only God knows if Bush was 45% responsible; Blanco, 30%, or Nagin, 25%. I think it goes much deeper than that, and it's an attitude (that expresses itself in what local, state, and the Federal government spends their resources on) prevalent since at least 1980 (maybe 1968??) that government has no role in anything (to famously quote Paul Weyrich saying that government should be so small that it would drain down a tub), in this new age of robber baronry, where the poor have been demonized under the rubric of "personal responsibility," so-called. Thus, poverty is no more looked at as a societal problem but as a moral failing of the poor themselves, thus making it easier to walk away from them.

And, as a Christian, I think that the current incarnation of robber baron crony capitalism is profoundly unchristian.

Both conservatives and liberals have been failing the poor.

A man is drowning, just off the shore.

The liberal reaction--let's create a bunch of regulations, and maybe increase funding for ropes, so this doesn't happen again. Maybe if you are more of a leftist than a liberal, demand that the government subsidize ropes for every citizen.

The conservative reaction--it's the drowning man's personal responsibility--he got himself in that predicament, and it would be an offense to his freedom if we helped him now. Drowning is a multigenerational pathology. If we are to help at all, it should be to give him instruction in how to make or buy ropes, or at least to carry ropes in the future.

In both cases, the man drowns.

Sweet Neo Con

The Rolling Stones


You ride around your white castle,
On your little white horse
You lie to your people,
and blame it on your war of course
You call yourself a Christian,
I call you a hypocrite
You call yourself a patriot,
well I think you're full of sh*t

Oh, sweet Neo Con,
What path have you led them on?
Oh, sweet Neo Con,
Is it time for the atom bomb?
You parade around in costume,
Expecting to be believed
But as the body bags stack up,
We believe we've been deceived
The horror you've unleashed,
Will backfire with more grief
When will you ever learn,
Sweet Neo Con,
as the world burns?

Oh, sweet Neo Con,
What path have you led them on?
Oh, sweet Neo Con,
Is it time for the atom bomb?
Oh, sweet Neo Con,
What path have you led them on?
Oh, sweet Neo Con,
Is it time to drop the bomb?

How come you're so wrong?
My sweet neo-con,
where's the money gone,
in the Pentagon.
It's liberty for all,
democracy's our style,
unless you are against us,
then it's prison without trial.

Good Morning America How Are You?

The City of New Orleans

Riding on the City of New Orleans,
Illinois Central Monday morning rail
Fifteen cars and fifteen restless riders,
Three conductors and twenty-five sacks of mail.
All along the southbound odyssey
The train pulls out at Kankakee
Rolls along past houses, farms and fields.
Passin' trains that have no names,
Freight yards full of old black men
And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles.

CHORUS:
Good morning America how are you?
Don't you know me I'm your native son,
I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.

Dealin' card games with the old men in the club car.
Penny a point ain't no one keepin' score.
Pass the paper bag that holds the bottle
Feel the wheels rumblin' 'neath the floor.
And the sons of pullman porters
And the sons of engineers
Ride their father's magic carpets made of steel.
Mothers with their babes asleep,
Are rockin' to the gentle beat
And the rhythm of the rails is all they feel.

CHORUS

Nighttime on The City of New Orleans,
Changing cars in Memphis, Tennessee.
Half way home, we'll be there by morning
Through the Mississippi darkness
Rolling down to the sea.
And all the towns and people seem
To fade into a bad dream
And the steel rails still ain't heard the news.
The conductor sings his song again,
The passengers will please refrain
This train's got the disappearing railroad blues.

Good night, America, how are you?
Don't you know me I'm your native son,
I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.

©1970, 1971 EMI U Catalogue, Inc and Turnpike Tom Music (ASCAP)

Olbermann (Thanks, MSNBC)

The "city" of Louisiana (Keith Olbermann)

SECAUCUS — Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said it all, starting his news briefing Saturday afternoon: "Louisiana is a city that is largely underwater..."

Well there's your problem right there.

If ever a slip-of-the-tongue defined a government's response to a crisis, this was it.

The seeming definition of our time and our leaders had been their insistence on slashing federal budgets for projects that might’ve saved New Orleans. The seeming characterization of our government that it was on vacation when the city was lost, and could barely tear itself away from commemorating V.J. Day and watching Monty Python's Flying Circus, to at least pretend to get back to work. The seeming identification of these hapless bureaucrats: their pathetic use of the future tense in terms of relief they could’ve brought last Monday and Tuesday — like the President, whose statements have looked like they’re being transmitted to us by some kind of four-day tape-delay.

But no. The incompetence and the ludicrous prioritization will forever be symbolized by one gaffe by of the head of what is ironically called “The Department of Homeland Security”: “Louisiana is a city…”

Politician after politician — Republican and Democrat alike — has paraded before us, unwilling or unable to shut off the "I-Me" switch in their heads, condescendingly telling us about how moved they were or how devastated they were — congenitally incapable of telling the difference between the destruction of a city and the opening of a supermarket.

And as that sorry recital of self-absorption dragged on, I have resisted editorial comment. The focus needed to be on the efforts to save the stranded — even the internet's meager powers were correctly devoted to telling the stories of the twin disasters, natural... and government-made.

But now, at least, it is has stopped getting exponentially worse in Mississippi and Alabama and New Orleans and Louisiana (the state, not the city). And, having given our leaders what we know now is the week or so they need to get their act together, that period of editorial silence I mentioned, should come to an end.

No one is suggesting that mayors or governors in the afflicted areas, nor the federal government, should be able to stop hurricanes. Lord knows, no one is suggesting that we should ever prioritize levee improvement for a below-sea-level city, ahead of $454 million worth of trophy bridges for the politicians of Alaska.

But, nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe. These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn't even keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure collapse in New Orleans — even though the government had heard all the "chatter" from the scientists and city planners and hurricane centers and some group whose purposes the government couldn't quite discern... a group called The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

And most chillingly of all, this is the Law and Order and Terror government. It promised protection — or at least amelioration — against all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological.

It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water.

Mr. Bush has now twice insisted that, "we are not satisfied," with the response to the manifold tragedies along the Gulf Coast. I wonder which "we" he thinks he's speaking for on this point. Perhaps it's the administration, although we still don't know where some of them are. Anybody seen the Vice President lately? The man whose message this time last year was, 'I'll Protect You, The Other Guy Will Let You Die'?

I don't know which 'we' Mr. Bush meant.

For many of this country's citizens, the mantra has been — as we were taught in Social Studies it should always be — whether or not I voted for this President — he is still my President. I suspect anybody who had to give him that benefit of the doubt stopped doing so last week. I suspect a lot of his supporters, looking ahead to '08, are wondering how they can distance themselves from the two words which will define his government — our government — "New Orleans."

For him, it is a shame — in all senses of the word. A few changes of pronouns in there, and he might not have looked so much like a 21st Century Marie Antoinette. All that was needed was just a quick "I'm not satisfied with my government's response." Instead of hiding behind phrases like "no one could have forseen," had he only remembered Winston Churchill's quote from the 1930's. "The responsibility," of government, Churchill told the British Parliament "for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact, the prime object for which governments come into existence."

In forgetting that, the current administration did not merely damage itself — it damaged our confidence in our ability to rely on whoever is in the White House.

As we emphasized to you here all last week, the realities of the region are such that New Orleans is going to be largely uninhabitable for a lot longer than anybody is yet willing to recognize. Lord knows when the last body will be found, or the last artifact of the levee break, dug up. Could be next March. Could be 2100. By then, in the muck and toxic mire of New Orleans, they may even find our government's credibility.

Somewhere, in the City of Louisiana.

Original.

Make Levees, Not War

From Laura Flanders on CommonDreams:

Amid the bodies that should not be dead in the putrid New Orleans water, I can only hope the conservatives backlash is buried there in that toxic pit.

Just as Mayor Ray Nagin, who let rip last week about his people’s abandonment on WWL radio, is now a mayor without a city. We Americans are a people without a government.

We are not Refugees vs. Americans, National Guard vs. Insurgents. We are one people in search of a government. A government that would serve us, not the reverse; a government that prioritizes us.

As my favorite t-shirt of the moment reads: “Make levees not war.”

More.

Katrina

I never though I would see, in my America, history's only hyperpower, scenes such as we have seen in the past week in New Orleans. I am quite fond of the city--I have been there three times, and love beignets and chicory coffee at the Cafe Du Monde, jazz brunch at Cafe Petunia's, an oyster po' boy at Johnny's, a to-go hurricane, Commander's Palace, the above-ground graveyards, so it is with some emotion that I write this post.

We are seeing the political death of the Bush administration, and deservedly so. I have been reading some Right wing blogs these past few days, and they are as pissed as I am. We are also seeing the death of that strange form of "conservatism" that mainly sees the role of government for redistribution of wealth upwards--crony capitalism and corporate looting. The "conservatism" that sees NO role for government, and honestly believes that the poor are poor, well, because they are failures and deserve it.

We are seeing the mainstream media start to ask tough questions, not about specific events that happened this week, but about issues of class and race that have always haunted this country. We have seen the insensitivity and swaggering unconcern of Bush and his fellow criminals; Condi buying thousands of dollars of shoes in Ferragamo's in New York while New Orleans descended into anarchy and chaos. And the head of FEMA, blaming those unlucky enough to be too poor to afford a ride out of New Orleans, "people who were unable or CHOSE not to evacuate."

I was going to make this a longer post, but I am too tired and disgusted. I am angry to see fellow Americans die of thirst and hunger while a President plays guitar.

It's heartening to see that the private sector response has been good, but we need more justice, and less charity.

Do what you can to help, but make sure our government does not willfully ignore anyone anymore because they are "disposable."