Bushville in DC!!!! Where can the victims of hurricane Katrina and the governments incompetence find shelter? on the Mall in DC Damn it!!!

Imagine 10,000 Katrina survivors camped on Bush’s doorstep.
Camped in the seat of power and media.
In the Government’s face.
With endless stories for the press.

quick history, during the great depression many people became unemployed and homeless, the clustered together and built homes out of whatever they could find. This self made homeless settlement was called a (WIKIPEDIA - Hooverville). it was named after president Herbert Hoover who was in office when the great depression began and who did very little to address the problems of the victims of the great depression. he was overwhelmingly voted out of office and replaced by FDR who swiftly ushered in the New Deal, which changed our nation from 'survival of the fittest' to 'we are only as strong as our weakest link'.

I find the idea extremely compelling, innovative, profound. it would be a firm step toward taking a serious look at our failings as a nation.

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

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%"

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

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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.

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.