Lately I find myself reading the NY Times online all day. Below is another article that inspires me to keep coming back and checking for updates. the Times has just recently regained my respect. The media's job is to keep an eye on government, to ask politicians difficult questions that they'd rather not answer, to investigate what is going on behind the scenes because we average citizens don't have time or the resources to dig for the information ourselves. I don't care who's in power, Democrat, Independent, Big Business, the media should be dragging information out of them all, especially when they don't want to share, that's why freedom of the press is mentioned in our constitution, that's why the press is important. the NY Times has apparently gone back to it's roots and remembered why it became a respected paper in the first place, because it asks tough questions and publishes informed and profound stories.

anyway, below is the newest reason to read the Times.

Here is a must read from 9-1-05 "Life in the Bottom 80%"

and here's a link to some stories that I've archived recently

---

Osama and Katrina
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
September 7, 2005

On the day after 9/11, I was in Jerusalem and was interviewed by Israeli TV. The reporter asked me, "Do you think the Bush administration is up to responding to this attack?" As best I can recall, I answered: "Absolutely. One thing I can assure you about these guys is that they know how to pull the trigger."

It was just a gut reaction that George Bush and Dick Cheney were the right guys to deal with Osama. I was not alone in that feeling, and as a result, Mr. Bush got a mandate, almost a blank check, to rule from 9/11 that he never really earned at the polls. Unfortunately, he used that mandate not simply to confront the terrorists but to take a radically uncompassionate conservative agenda - on taxes, stem cells, the environment and foreign treaties - that was going nowhere before 9/11, and drive it into a post-9/11 world. In that sense, 9/11 distorted our politics and society.

Well, if 9/11 is one bookend of the Bush administration, Katrina may be the other. If 9/11 put the wind at President Bush's back, Katrina's put the wind in his face. If the Bush-Cheney team seemed to be the right guys to deal with Osama, they seem exactly the wrong guys to deal with Katrina - and all the rot and misplaced priorities it's exposed here at home.

These are people so much better at inflicting pain than feeling it, so much better at taking things apart than putting them together, so much better at defending "intelligent design" as a theology than practicing it as a policy.

For instance, it's unavoidably obvious that we need a real policy of energy conservation. But President Bush can barely choke out the word "conservation." And can you imagine Mr. Cheney, who has already denounced conservation as a "personal virtue" irrelevant to national policy, now leading such a campaign or confronting oil companies for price gouging?

And then there are the president's standard lines: "It's not the government's money; it's your money," and, "One of the last things that we need to do to this economy is to take money out of your pocket and fuel government." Maybe Mr. Bush will now also tell us: "It's not the government's hurricane - it's your hurricane."

An administration whose tax policy has been dominated by the toweringly selfish Grover Norquist - who has been quoted as saying: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub" - doesn't have the instincts for this moment. Mr. Norquist is the only person about whom I would say this: I hope he owns property around the New Orleans levee that was never properly finished because of a lack of tax dollars. I hope his basement got flooded. And I hope that he was busy drowning government in his bathtub when the levee broke and that he had to wait for a U.S. Army helicopter to get out of town.

The Bush team has engaged in a tax giveaway since 9/11 that has had one underlying assumption: There will never be another rainy day. Just spend money. You knew that sooner or later there would be a rainy day, but Karl Rove has assumed it wouldn't happen on Mr. Bush's watch - that someone else would have to clean it up. Well, it did happen on his watch.

Besides ripping away the roofs of New Orleans, Katrina ripped away the argument that we can cut taxes, properly educate our kids, compete with India and China, succeed in Iraq, keep improving the U.S. infrastructure, and take care of a catastrophic emergency - without putting ourselves totally into the debt of Beijing.

So many of the things the Bush team has ignored or distorted under the guise of fighting Osama were exposed by Katrina: its refusal to impose a gasoline tax after 9/11, which would have begun to shift our economy much sooner to more fuel-efficient cars, helped raise money for a rainy day and eased our dependence on the world's worst regimes for energy; its refusal to develop some form of national health care to cover the 40 million uninsured; and its insistence on cutting more taxes, even when that has contributed to incomplete levees and too small an Army to deal with Katrina, Osama and Saddam at the same time.

As my Democratic entrepreneur friend Joel Hyatt once remarked, the Bush team's philosophy since 9/11 has been: "We're at war. Let's party."

Well, the party is over. If Mr. Bush learns the lessons of Katrina, he has a chance to replace his 9/11 mandate with something new and relevant. If that happens, Katrina will have destroyed New Orleans, but helped to restore America. If Mr. Bush goes back to his politics as usual, he'll be thwarted at every turn. Katrina will have destroyed a city and a presidency.

Thankfully the cats have adjusted to each other very well, just in time to be left alone for the day. Dar, the older cat is now acting like a big sister. When I got home they were both sleeping but Dar came out to greet me at the door. when she heard the little one jump down from the bed in the other room, she pranced over to her and licked her tiny head a couple times. I could tell that they had been playing together all day, and at this point they are comfortable together. The new kitten has some goo coming from her brown eye and we have to wash it a few times a day with a cotton ball and salene. I think that seeing us care for the kitten like that has kicked in some of Dar's maternal instincts, and replaced the the confrontational, alpha-kitty instincts. here's some pictures,




Being cute again


Rev Playing with Dar

We got a new Kitten, her name is Revolution, she is realy small she's only 2 1/2 months old. Molly's mom lives in the country and one of her barn cats had 3 kittens. Our cat Dar seemed a little bored and lazy so we figured she might like a playmate. At this point Dar is still very jealous and unfriendly but they just met yesterday.



I told you she was small.




This isn't a very good photo but you can see that she has 2 different colored eyes.




This one cracks me up, she should be saying "tastes like home cookin'" or something.

The BBC sums it up pretty well, sometimes you need to be slightly removed from a culture to see it best.

"The uneasy paradox which so many live with in this country - of being first-and-foremost rugged individuals, out to plunder what they can and paying as little tax as they can get away with, while at the same time believing that America is a robust, model society - has reached a crisis point this week."

In other words we Americans value the go it alone rugged, take care of things on your own, never ask for a handout idea very highly. We value individual responsibility so highly that when we see people living in poverty and without health insurance the first thing we do is blame them for their own misfortune. We assume that the poor are lazy, they should be able to help themselves and live the American rags to riches dream. And when they don't live that dream we call them lazy, and when they finally go through the effort to ask for a 'handout' to help them improve their own lives we get upset and say that they are taking advantage of our government. The current Neo-Conservative administration takes this argument to its extreme, while at the same time believing with fierce conviction that America is a robust, model society. The current crisis in Louisiana shines light on the inherent fallacy of this way of thinking.

America as a whole is used to fending for itself, not looking toward the community in times of need. We can see that in New Orleans the federal government expected the affected cities and states to fend for themselves. We can also see that many of the stranded people of the city expected that they had to fend for themselves and use violence to get what they needed to survive. But what shines through all these examples is that expecting people to simply fend for themselves is a terrible policy that leaves an incredible number of people stranded and without hope. This flood simply allows us to see the people, and see that they are victims, rather than debating whether the people exist and whether or not the plight they face is their own fault. Here we can see that the fault lies with our broken system.


PS
The NY Times also wrote a great piece about people being stranded in poverty and how things have changed since 2001. I have archived it here "Life in the Bottom 80%"

I'm very tired, but I'd like to say some things about the disaster in New Orleans, I appologize if my writing is a little mangled but I think I've learned some things about the situation that people may not know, and I think it is important.

The Iraq War has made the situation FAR worse than it needed to be. the first reason for this is that nearly 40% of Louisianna and Mississippi's National Guard is in Iraq . that means 40% fewer of the best equipped first responders.
The second reason is that money that should have gone to the Army Corps of Engineers went to tha war effort. I know some people will call this a conspiricy theory or something but I research things before I go spreading them around as fact, here's a quote from the Times-Picayune.
"Army Corps of Engineers construction projects in the state, including levee and drainage projects in the New Orleans area, will see significant cuts.
The corps' New Orleans District, which stretches across the state's coastline, will get $290 million, a $34 million reduction from the dollars allocated for fiscal year 2005 by Congress, and almost $300 million less than the district says it needs to complete proposed and ongoing construction projects. (the same article said that they needed $63 million just to repair the Levees, they got almost half of that for the whole Louisianna coastline)(2-8-2005 "Bush budget cuts levee, drainage funds")

As many of you probibly already know New Orleans thought they had made it through the storm ok on Monday, then overnight the 2 of 4 levees broke, then everything went to shit. The levees should have been fixed. if our president wasn't parading around the middle east inciting terrorism, while at the same time pushing through tax cuts for multi millionares, the levees would not have broken. the Army Corps of Engineers is in charge of fixing the Levees but unfortunately that branch of the army got its budget cut. The city and state were begging the federal government for funding and instead it got cut, and now the whole fucking city is under water. This is why we have the National Guard, they're a state malittia whose commander in chief is the governor, right now 3,000 of Louisianna's National Guardsmen are watching this disaster on TV from fucking Baghdad when they should be at home helping people survive. so not only is this war costing billions of dollars, the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Civillians, and thousands of military personell, NOW it is costing the lives of thousands of American Civillians on the gulf coast.

And where is the fucking president? he came back to Washington today, how generous, he took 2 days off his vacation and flew back to the capital 3 days after the storm. and now he's on TV and everywhere else trying to make it look like he cares. let's think about it for a second, before today the president spent a whopping 1 minute and 25 seconds talking to the people of America about the Hurricane, and he did so at 9am, at the beginning of a 40 minute speach that was focussed on selling the war in Iraq and comparing it to WWII . The Hurricane happened on Monday, that's 3 days before he got back to Washington, and in that time he spent a pathetic 1.25 minutes talking about what may be the worst Natural Disaster to strike America in a century. I have bad news for any gullible Republicans who think this asshole actually gives a shit about America. He doesent care, he got back to washington today and his PR people ar like "Um, Mr President, you look like a real fucking asshole right now for ignoring this tragedy, we got some speaches and plans ready for your lazy ass and unless you want Americans to catch on to the fact that you don't realy give a shit about them you better move fast." so I looked at the Witehouse website yesterday and it only mentioned the Hurricane in the sidebar, today the 4 top stories are about the Hurricane and there's a big glossy picture of the president standing with his father and clinton looking important.

that's all for now, if anyone finds something about how the bush administration refused to fund Levee construction in the news please let me know I want to know if anyone is covering this story.

I stumbled upon this quote from George Orwell

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity."

"When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."

so next time you hear Byron Brown speak, remember that one, and vote for someone who's trying to rock the boat.

There is a vary interesting display downtown today and tomorrow that adresses the Human cost of the Iraq War. it's called Eyes Wide Open and it was created by the American Friends Service Committee. it feartures a pair of boots for every soldier killed in Iraq. the one that is in Buffalo today and tomorrow represents the number of National Guardsmen killed, some 280 people. it's striking to see, it helps give us perspective on the number of people that those "casualty figures" actually represent.

I urge everyone to go see it tomorrow, it will be in Lafayette Square in Downtown Buffalo from about 9:00am - Dusk.

Here are some pictures that my girlfriend Molly took at the one today.









More Images in My Flickr Blog

Just some recent pictures of mine.

I'm testing how I can post pictures on this site. so don't mind me, :)

Some people had mentioned how dissatisfied they are with our government and the war in Iraq, and mentioned they'd like to become more involved. Well... I'm here to help. I've been traveling to Washington for protests, finding alternative sources of news, and helping organize events locally since before the war in Afghanistan. if you have any questions I'd be happy to answer them.
For starters here's some info about an upcoming protest in Washington DC. If you've never been to DC for a protest you should do whatever you need to to get you ass on the bus. It's extremely empowering to be around so many likeminded and determined people. Though it won't make president Bush immediately realize how stupid this whole thing is, it'll do a lot for you and the others that care about what is happening in the world, including those around the world who are losing faith in american Democracy.

Here's the info:
[size=m]
Massive Demonstration to End the War in Iraq[/size]
September 24th in Washington, DC
Buses from Buffalo -- $40 per seat (Extremely Cheap)

Reserve Your Seat on the Bus -- Call 894-2013 Today!

After years of sustained effort by our movement, decision makers in
Congress and elsewhere have finally realized that something must be
done to end the Bush administration's disastrous war against Iraq. With
the recent introduction of the bipartisan "Homeward Bound" resolution, it's
clear that opposition to the war has begun to move from the streets into
the halls of Congress.

It's more important than ever that the peace movement continue to
demand an end to the war. United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), the
nation's largest antiwar coalition, has called for a massive demonstration
in Washington on September 24th to demand that our representatives
stand up to George Bush and do what it takes to bring our troops home.
As a member of UFPJ, the Peace Center will be sending buses from
Buffalo to the rally in Washington.

For more info on the rally, see unitedforpeace.org . To reserve a seat
on the bus, call the Peace Center at 894-2013.

"A campaign is being launched this week by a host of groups including
Progressive Democrats of America, Peace Action and others to demand
an exit strategy from Iraq. A central part of these efforts is a new
petition which lays out a way to get out of Iraq and will be
presented to Congress in mid-September."
(description from Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation 8/16/05)

This statement is one of the most concise and well worded arguments for why we need to get out of Iraq now. it covers so many problems in so few words. it lays out the reasons and provides the bedrock initiatives that would lead to a dignified end to the occupation. I wanted to share this with people, so I'm posting it here.
Enjoy.

[size=m]A Petition for an Iraqi Peace Process[/size]

"For Mr. Bush, questions about an exit strategy in Iraq have become
especially delicate as a crowd of anti-war protesters has expanded at
the edge of his ranch, rallying around Cindy Sheehan, the California
woman whose son Casey was killed in Iraq in 2004."--New York Times,
Aug. 12, 2005.

Like our friend Cindy Sheehan, we are tired of waiting for our troops
to come home. We are tired of the bloodshed, tired of tax dollar
waste, tired of torture cover-ups, tired of contractor scandals,
tired of deceit and fabrication. We are tired of elected officials
with profiles in compromise rather than courage.

It is dishonest to admit there were no weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq, only to invent new reasons for inflicting mass destruction on
that country.

It is dishonorable to fix the facts around the policy.

It is unacceptable to admit that going to war was a mistake, only to
claim that the mistake must be perpetuated.

Because we cannot wait for our government to lead, we shall become
leaders in ending the war ourselves. We shall propose an exit
strategy from Iraq and demand that our government listen and follow.
Because we cannot wait for our government to plan for peace, we call
on civil society to make our government pay attention.

There are simply no military solutions to this bloodshed. The
American military presence, threatening to Iraqi nationalism,
religion and culture, is the main cause of the violent response from
Iraqis. US policies are pushing Iraq toward civil war, with our
government funding and arming Shiites and Kurds against Sunnis.
Nearly half of the Iraqi national assembly has called for the
“departure of the occupation”. The State Department’s own internal
surveys show that a majority of Iraqis feel less safe in the presence
of the American occupying forces. Since the invasion and occupation,
the status and safety of women in Iraq have declined precipitously.

Iraqis themselves are calling for the end of occupation. One million
recently signed a petition demanding the withdrawal of foreign forces
from Iraq. Initial peace talks among Iraqis are already underway. Our
government is deaf to these Iraqi voices for peace.

It is time to shift from a military model to a conflict-resolution
model aimed at a peace process and negotiated political settlement.

We propose the following principles as essential to ending the
war in Iraq:

First, as a confidence-building measure, the US government must
declare that it has no interest in permanent military bases or the
control of Iraqi oil or other resources.

Second, as a further confidence-building measure, the U.S. government
must set goals for ending the occupation and bringing all our troops
home - in months, not years, beginning with an initial withdrawal of
troops by the end of this year.

Third, the US government must request that the United Nations monitor
the process of military disengagement and de-escalation, and organize
a peaceful reconstruction effort. The US must accept its obligation
to fairly compensate Iraqis for damages, assist Iraqi reconstruction,
cease the imposition of privatization schemes, and end the dominance
of US contractors in the bidding process.

Fourth, the US government should appoint a peace envoy independent of
the occupation authorities to underscore its commitment to an
entirely different mission, that of a peace process ending the
occupation and returning our soldiers home.

Fifth, the peace envoy should encourage and cooperate in talks with
Iraqi groups opposed to the occupation, including insurgents, to
explore a political settlement. The settlement must include
representation of opposition forces and parties, and power-sharing
and the protection of women's rights as core principles of governance
and economic and energy development. We believe such an initiative
will reduce, though not eliminate, violence by lessening any
rationale for Jihadist or sectarian conflict.

We send this message to all Americans in civil society, to our
elected officials, and to the global peace movement. We demand that
Congressional hearings begin to define an exit strategy now. We
demand that members of Congress, reflecting the will of the people,
adopt policy and budget initiatives that call for an exit strategy
based on the above principles. We demand a peace envoy, peace talks
with the opposition, reconstruction, the closure of US bases, and the
safe return home of all US troops.