Lewis Black on Quail Hunting & You Know Who

Let's see if I can make this linking to YouTube thingie work. If it does, you will get some choice words on quail hunting from Lewis Black, the angriest man in the world and arguably the funniest.

Fire: A Conundrum

I've got way too much time on my hands if this is what I'm worrying about, but here goes. We're in the realm of etymology, word and phrase origins, and this has been bugging me for a while: With cannons, artillery, rifles and pistols, why do we Americans say "fire" when what we mean is "shoot?"

As far as I know, ours is the only military tradition that does this, though the phrase has caught on just through the influence of American culture. But if you watch the classic movie Sink the Bismarck, all the British officers are shouting "Shoot!!" as a command. In German it's schiessen! or schiess auf!, derived from the verb schiessen, to shoot. In Italian it's sparare, shoot, nothing derived from fuoco, meaning the stuff with flames. Again, in French it's tirer or décharger, not feu or a derivative. And that exhausts the limits of my library's translating dictionaries.

I have a theory. Our first war, the Revolution, was against the British, a foe that spoke the same language and had the same military traditions. Hell, some of our officers had trained side by side with their officers.

On a battlefield of that time, the only way to get orders to your troops was to run or ride madly around shouting them at the top of your lungs, or have your junior officers pass the orders along in the same way. I'm no soldier, but I can't imagine anything worse from a commander's viewpoint than to have your troops uncertain whether they should be shooting or not. In the smoke, chaos, and terror of battle, with enemy officers at the other end of the field shouting, "Shoot! Shoot!" at their own artillerymen, it must have been critical to come up with a command to your men that could not be confused with the British officers' commands to their own men.

So why "fire?" Think about a cannon of the period. A cast iron tube open at one end, loaded with powder and ball, and with a tiny hole primed with powder at the other, closed end. To set it off, you touched a lighted torch -- literally fire -- to the hole, which carried the spark to the main charge and boom!

Since the American military is the only one that has its origins in such a unique moment in history, ours is the only one that uses "fire!" instead of "shoot!", and of course it's been generalized to all firearms, long past the time of cannons discharged with torches. It's interesting that with archery even we never talk about "firing" an arrow. We always shoot it. Bringing gunpowder into the equation seems to be where everything changes.

But, aha!, you say. What about the German military in the movies? What about, say, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, with the big fight inside, outside, and around that outrageous tank, and the Nazi officer screaming "Feuer!!"

If there's one German word every American teenage boy knows, it's scheiss. It's a slightly different spelling from schiess, and a different pronunciation, rhyming with "shine" instead of "sheet," but it's too close for comfort. I think Spielberg must have known how disastrous it would be, how easy to change thrilling excitement into derisive laughter, if his target audience even suspected that that officer was, in effect, ordering, "Ready! Aim!! SHIT!!!" So it wasn't realistic or true to German tradition, but the change just had to be made.

Well, there's the theory, anyway. It's logical, and it holds together, but is it true? I'm well aware of the dangers of folk etymology. I've tried researching this on the web, but gotten nowhere. So if you're into military history, or, maybe, have a brother who is (you know who you are), maybe we can find out.

The Whistleblower

Via Andrew Sullivan, here's a story. Joe Darby was a military police officer stationed at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in January, 2004 when another soldier gave him a CD with the infamous photos on it. After some serious thought he turned them in to the Criminal Investigation Division, and the rest is history. Literally. He's kept quiet about it since, but in the current issue of GQ, he finally speaks out.

What he says is both fascinating and disturbing. He says there was no conspiracy to keep what was going on from higher officers. They didn't know because they just didn't care. Couldn't be bothered to keep track of things, to actually supervise the soldiers and facilities they were responsible for. He tells how government agents -- obviously the CIA, but he's unwilling to actually say that -- could come in in the middle of the night, "interrogate" a prisoner to death, and leave it to the Army to deal with the body, clean up the mess, and take the blame, if any.

There's something else that's very clear, though Darby doesn't harp on it. Sullivan often says that SecDef Donald Rumsfeld is a bungling fool and should have been fired years ago. When Darby blew the whistle, CID went to great pains to keep his identity secret, especially after Abu Ghraib blew up into a global scandal. They promised him he would remain anonymous, but he was scared to death nevertheless. Awful lot of weapons around in a war zone, awfully easy to arrange a fatal accident. He was literally sleeping with a 9mm pistol in his hand.

He was eating in the mess hall one day with a couple hundred guys, with the TV turned to congressional hearings on the Iraq war. Rumsfeld was testifying, and actually spoke Darby's name out loud, identified him as the whistleblower. Every soldier within earshot just froze and stared at him. If he was scared before, he was terrified then, and told the Army they just had to get him out of the country. They did, and he's safe, but if that fucking idiot Rumsfeld had been trying to get Darby killed, he couldn't have done it better.

What a fool.

Dishwasher

An automatic mechanical dishwasher is an incredible luxury, you have to admit. For thousands of years, ever since we invented things to eat off of, we've had to clean them or get sick from the dirt. But now in our lovely modern world, when the thing breaks and we actually have to put water in a sink with soap and wash the plates with our hands ... we feel so affronted. So put upon. It's such an imposition!! We're such weens.

Yes, my dishwasher died today.

Restoring the Balance

OK, let's relax with some politics. (Tells you where I'm coming from, doesn't it?) Here's an intriguing article by a guy named Doug Muder called Ten Ideas for 2008. Muder is a New Hampshire politics junkie and unapologetic liberal. Not the cartoon liberal that Rush Limbaugh flogs on his show, but the real kind. He's posted a lot of articles on his website, and this one gives important food for thought for liberals and Democrats (they're not the same thing), about reframing the terms of the debate.

This ties in with something that's bothered me for years. The most infuriating thing about liberals is their willingness to let themselves be defined in the public mind by their enemies. (See: Rush) Muder says it's past time to change this.

Two examples. Moral values and codes of sexual conduct are not the same thing, but conservaties routinely use "morality" as a code word for sex becuase, hey, sex sells. Liberals should not be afraid to use the word "immoral" in their arguments. For the richest country in the world to let poor people die because they can't afford healthcare is immoral. For President Bush to break the law whenever following it would be inconvenient is immoral. Why not say so?

Second, Christianity is not fundamentally a conservative religion. It is a liberal faith that has been largely hijacked by conservatives. Since when was Christianity about following the letter of the law but not its spirit? Since when was getting as rich as you possibly can a Christian virtue? The Republican brand of Christians resemble, more than any other figures from the Bible, the Pharisees who heckle Jesus throughout his ministry. They certainly don't resemble him or his disciples. So there's a slogan for you: "The Religious Right; 21st Century Pharisees."

There's one issue Muder doesn't address, but which Thomas Frank does in an op-ed column in today's New York Times. That is conservatives' unshakable view of themselves as scrappy outsiders, fighting a brave but disadvantaged battle against an all-powerful Washington liberal elite. For many years this was true, of course, but it hasn't been for a long time. In the past quarter century there have been exactly two years in which the Democrats controlled both Congress and the White House, the first two years of Clinton's presidency. Look at Washington today, and you see conservatives dominating all three branches of government, backed by incredibly rich and powerful business interests, with individuals happily gaming the system and milking it dry, becoming insanely rich in the process. And they certainly are all about excluding those who are Not Their Sort Of People. If that isn't an all-powerful conservative elite, then what the hell is it??

Both pieces are worth reading, even if you're a Republican. Because the issues raised are all valid ones, and if the Republican Party does not address them, well, it may still be able to hold on to a degree of power, but it won't deserve to.

Hitting Close to Home

A friend of mine, a very well respected photographer for the Times-Picayune, made the New York Times this morning, but not in a good way. John McCusker was pulled over not far from here in a traffic stop Tuesday evening and, despondent at his own losses and the misery he's had to witness, he tried to get the cops to kill him. He begged them to, over and over, and even pinned a cop between his car and a patrol car in an attempt to provoke them.

“He never stopped saying that, and made every attempt to hurt the police officers with his automobile because that’s the only weapon he had,” [NOPD crisis negotiator James] Arey said. “Our officers are well trained to recognize crises and attempts at ‘suicide by cop,’ and that’s what this was.”

He was eventually subdued with a Taser and is in custody under a suicide watch.

This is terribly upsetting to me. John is a passionate fan of New Orleans jazz and a researcher specializing in Kid Ory. He's been a guest in my home, and I have talked with him about jazz many, many times. In all the years I've known him he has never been anything but a cheerful, well-balanced man. And yet what has happened to him is now commonplace.

This city is slowly going mad.

Me: Beheaded and Going to Hell

I'm afraid that will be my fate after linking to these cartoons. You remember cartoons. Those ones depicting Mohammed that appeared in a Danish newspaper, and led to murderous riots all over the place. Those.

Well, you can look at those elsewhere, but someone connected with the Freethinker magazine, "The Voice of Atheism Since 1881," apparantly decided, you want blasphemy? I'll give you blasphemy, in the form of Jesus and Mo. It's a crudely drawn cartoon whose two characters are Jesus and Mohammed. They're a bit bothered by how they're perceived by their modern followers.



They seem to be roommates and drinking buddies, and if they're not lovers they're skittering around the edges:



And when they're not playing video games, they're having arguments with the atheist barmaid at their favorite tavern:



Here's the link to the start of the series. From what I read in the papers, I can expect scimitar wielding avengers to show up here in New Orleans soon for my temerity in posting these. And once they lop my head off, well, down I go.

Mel's Meltdown

The New York Times Arts section has an article today about the fine art of celebrity damage control, focusing on Mel Gibson's attempts to recover from that infamous anti-Semitic tirade following a drunk driving arrest. The model for how to do it right is Hugh Grant, arrested in 1995 for what they discreetly call "performing lewd acts with a prostitute." He immediately went public with it all on Jay Leno's show, where his "bashful British contrition transformed the sheepish Mr. Grant from naughty to nice."

All true, but the author, Dennis McDougal, leaves out a very important difference between the two cases. I'm not surprised he left it out, as it's not a very complimentary thing to say about his readers. And that is the fact that getting a blowjob in a car from a Hollywood hooker is something millions of men secretly wish they had the nerve to do. Of course they went easy on Hugh. And I suspect that millions of women know this about their men more than their boyfriends and husbands imagine, and are willing to tolerate the fanstasy as long as it remains that, a fantasy not acted upon. So while they might be a little harder on Hugh for actually acting out the fanstasy, in the end they gave him a pass too.

But getting quoted say the "fucking Jews ... are responsible for all the wars in the world" is another matter entirely, one that inspires revulsion much more than sneaking admiration. Ol' Mel's going to have a really hard time of it, one he richly deserves.

How To Piss Off Dad

Refer him to this article.

(Well, maybe not your dad, but my dad.)

Name That Ship

Alden told a story this evening that is in the category of "too good to check," a category that journalists don't want to admit exists. But it does. I'll check this sometime, but not tonight.

We went to a party tonight at a bar on Magazine Street called Alexander's, a farewell party for a dear friend we've known for over twenty years. Though a native Orleanian, Kelley is moving back to her ancestral homeland of Ireland this week and decided to throw a bash, complete with traditional jazz band. (She literally grew up at Preservation Hall.) When we walked in, the drummer and bandleader Barry Martyn, another old friend, was remarking on how she was not flying to Ireland, but sailing. This prompted Alden to take the mic and tell this story.

During the 30s and 40s Alden's father, being a moderately successful New York corporate real estate broker, served on a number of corporate boards. Mostly you were there to accept the luxurious lunch and the c-note in an envelope, and rubber-stamp what the company wanted to do. One board he was on was of the Cunard line, which has built and run the most extraordinary Atlantic liners that ever were. (Alas, they are now owned by Carnival.) So he was told this story.

In the 30s, Cunard was planning the largest and most luxurious liner that anyone had ever seen. They had a tradition of naming their ships with names ending in "ia," like Titania or Brittania. They had planned to name this glorious new ship the Victoria, but thought it would be prudent and good form to ask the permission of the current monarch, Victoria's grandson King George V. So they sent a delegation to the Palace, describing the project and asking permission to name the new ship after "England's greatest queen."

George V promptly replied, saying that permission was of course granted, and that his wife would be honored and delighted.

So the Queen Mary it was.

Fateful Race in Connecticut

As just about everybody knows, Senator Joe Lieberman is in serious danger of losing the Democratic primary election tomorrow to a guy named Ned Lamont, who has never held office but has a lot of money and a willingness to spend it. It would be nice if he had a brain. Here's Martin Peretz of the New Republic:

Here, for instance, is [Lamont's] take on what should be done about Iran's nuclear-weapons venture: "We should work diplomatically and aggressively to give them reasons why they don't need to build a bomb, to give them incentives. We have to engage in very aggressive diplomacy. I'd like to bring in allies when we can. I'd like to use carrots as well as sticks to see if we can change the nature of the debate." Oh, I see. He thinks the problem is that they do not understand, and so we should explain things to them, and then they will do the right thing. It is a fortunate world that Mr. Lamont lives in, but it is not the real one. Anyway, this sort of plying is precisely what has been going on for years, and to no good effect.

One of the signs of the immature and unsophisticated is the belief that if someone disagrees with you it just has to be becuase he just doesn't get your point. There's just no other possible explanation. And that the proper action therefore is to repeat yourself, a little more slowly, as many times as necessary. Why do we keep electing people who think this way?

Just sick of it

I am getting so fucking sick of the lawlessness of the current administration. Look, I've never liked Bush and never expected to like his policies. But in politics you win some, you lose some, and when you lose an election you can expect to see policies you wouldn't have approved of. Fact of life. But is it too much to ask that the President at least have some respect for the law? With this bunch, apparantly it is. Sometimes they seem to go out of their way to violate the law, even when it isn't necessary.

One current story is about the War Crimes Act of 1996. (There's an article about it in Salon here, though you may have to sit through an ad to access it.) Though the U.S. signed on to the Geneva Conventions in 1949, for decades there was no law requiring universal adherance to it by Americans. The military was required to follow the Conventions through the Universal Code of Military Justice, but not civilians. The War Crimes Act closed that loophole, allowing for the prosecution of any American, including any elected official, who violates the Conventions, especially those aspects regarding decent treatment of foreign prisoners.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, ruled that the US really and truly is bound by the Geneva Conventions, even in its treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo. It's amazing the court even had to make such a ruling, as it's been agreed for, oh, a couple of centuries that any treaty ratified by the Senate has the force of law. So now some of the folks in the administration are getting nervous, because they could be prosecuted under the Act. In fact, they've been nervous for some time. From the Salon article:

Publicly released memos show that as far back as Jan. 25, 2002, [current Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales, then the White House counsel, worried that the president's policies could trigger prosecution under the act.

Gee, they were set on a course of action that might mean breaking the law, were they? You and I, in such a position, would probably consider changing our course of action. At the very least, if we didn't and we got caught, we could not expect a judge to be lenient.

So what did they do? Next sentence:

That led the White House to declare, over the objection of the State Department, that al-Qaida was not protected by the conventions.

What a nifty solution!! You're in danger of breaking the law, so just declare that the law doesn't apply to what you intend to do. I'm sure going to use that argument next time I get caught robbing a liquor store.

I just wish this sort of thing were an aberration. Unfortunately, it isn't.

7/19

This happened one year ago, but it has not stopped. These two young men were executed because they loved each other, no other reason. The following is an open letter from those who have to live with the fear of this every day. You and I, and those we love, do not. Think about it.

Homosexual Ladies and Gentlemen, transsexuals and transgender, the human right activists and peace lovers along with people who love democracy and equality, we have been informed of a creative protest of July 19th about the discrimination against homosexuals and execution of teenagers with homosexual interests.

With this letter and on behalf of the society of Iranian Homosexuals we declare our support for your act of protest on July 19 (28 of Tir) and wish you success.

Our dear Worldly Friends, 27 years passed form the Islamic revolution in Iran. It is 27 years now that the execution of homosexuals in Iran has been legal. It is 27 years now that women in Iran have been considered secondary citizens. It is 27 years now that the basic rights of students, workers, ethnic and religious minorities in Iran have been denied from them. It is 27 years now that in Iran oppositions and thinkers has been oppressed. For 27 years now the storm of censor has been affecting thinkers and intellectuals and our writers and journalists have been arrested, jailed or lost their right to publish their thoughts and ideas. Because of their ideas millions of Iranians left Iran and emigrate from their homeland. The Islamic Republic has isolated Iran and insulted our people’s intelligence, pride and honor. They have driven our country toward international crises, sanctions and war. Despite all this it has been 27 years that the struggle for peace, freedom, human rights and equality continues. It has been 27 years that we have tried to form various social and political parties and different organizations in order to recognize the rights of minority and stand against execution of children and homosexuals.

It has been obvious that Iranian government does not recognize homosexuals’ rights in Iran. They publicly declare that there are no legal limits for transsexuals and legally they can have a transgender surgery (which is very expensive). They use this as an excuse to deny existence of homosexuals and believe that every one should be a heterosexual man or woman. According to this belief every one that has a “problem” should have an operation and “transform” her/himself. In other words the government does not recognize the sexual diversity.

Let along that even for transsexuals no social prospect is provided after the operation and many of them have to fall into prostitution in order to make a living. Denial of homosexuals in the country, their oppression and complete ignorance of their rights has caused many homosexuals to live in the worst psychological and social condition which results in frequent suicides, depression and seeking asylum to other countries.

Today’s world is more like a village and unlike in the past, the governments cannot hide the oppression and refusal of the civil rights. When people’s battle to achieve democracy and freedom faces government’s oppression and resistance, they have the right to reach out to the rest of the world and reveal their government’s wrongdoings.

We, a group of homosexuals inside Iran, are glad and welcome the fact that the lack of democracy and human rights especially in treating homosexuals has come to your attention. Using this letter we express our appreciation and admiration for the united efforts of all the organizations, which support human rights and rights of the homosexuals around the world, in opposing the execution and the increase of pressure on sexual minorities in Iran. Together with you all we also ask the Iranian regime to put a stop to all executions, especially juvenile executions, change the regulations designed to punish homosexuals, guarantee equal rights for the citizens, stop censorship and accept rights of different groups and NGOs to create independent organizations.

Together with you all we also express our opposition to any military offensive against our motherland and believe that any such action will turn Iran into another Balkan will destroy the current dynamic movement for human rights and democracy in Iran.

To our friends all over the world once more we send our support and appreciation for your protest on July 19th and we believe that freedom and democracy in Iran is achievable throughout efforts and struggles of the Iranian public and actions of different social groups. The Persian Gay and Lesbian Organization attempts to join its efforts with other social movements of the country in order to create a strong social right movement. We need your support and the support of all other groups and countries and we highly value all international supports.

We are honored by your attention to the human rights situation and the issues around ignorance of homosexuals by Iranian government. We will try our best to publish your message widely and we will join you by all means on July 19th even if it is only a symbolic act of lighting a candle next to our window. The hope for the better world will be always in our hearts.

We hope for the day that we meet face to face in the first Gay Pride Festival in free and democratic Iran.


Delkade: The E-Magazine of Social and Literal of Iranian Homosexuals
A Group of Homosexual Bloggers in Iran
The Commission of Iranian Homosexual Rights and Gender Minorities
Cheragh: The Media for Persian Gay and Lesbian Organization
Raha Radio: The Radio for Persian Gay and Lesbian Organization
PGLO: Persian Gay and Lesbian Organization

Who really needs to get married?

New York state's highest court ruled this week that state laws preventing gays from getting married are not unconstitutional, and may stand. Whether the ruling is a setback for the gay marriage cause or not is debatable -- Andrew Sullivan thinks it's high time to move the emphasis from courts to legislatures -- but what strikes me as both pathetic and hysterically funny is the reason the court gave for its ruling: We're too responsible.

With stunning insight the court observed that a boy and girl vigorously going at it can wind up starting a pregnancy without intending to. (Amazing! Who knew?) They also noted that it's much better for children to grow up with a mother and father than in a single parent household. Therefore, they reasoned, the state has a compelling interest in promoting marriage between straights, an interest that doesn't exist with gay couples.

In contrast with these reckless and irresponsible heteros (we don't call them "breeders" for nothing), gay folks boinking away cannot start a pregnancy, intentionally or not, no matter how enthusiastically we try. Gays who really want to raise a child can do so of course, through adoption or artificial insemination, but it takes quite a bit of effort to do it. Gays can be presumed therefore to take parenthood seriously, as something we have to choose and pursue, unlike those straights who just sort of tumble into it. So we have no need of the encouragement towards responsible behavior that society bestows on straights by allowing them to get married. (See analysis by Yale Law prof Kenjio Yoshino.)

My my. We've come a long way since Pat Buchanan said we had "declared war on Nature," and that AIDS was Nature's terrible revenge. (Did no one tell Pat that, globally, most AIDS sufferers are straight?) Now it seems that Nature has endowed us with innate virtues of probity and restraint, reproductively speaking. Ol' Ma N. must think pretty highly of us. Never mind that while this argument may be a reason for encouraging marriage between straights, it gives no reason for dis-couraging marriage between gays, especially since having kids has never been a prerequisite for getting or staying married anyway. Never mind that while gay men used to be sneered at for our presumed promiscuity, the court now says that straight relationships are “all too often casual or temporary," and therefore need marital shoring up.

No, what's truly ludicrous is that this argument relies on what can only be called a demonstrably failed policy. While the numbers have declined in recent years, nearly half of all teenagers have lost their virginity by the time they graduate from High School. (Source: U.S. government.) If marriage is supposed to counteract that, it's got a hellishly high failure rate. Which, after all, stands to reason. How often does a horny 17-year-old with a ready and willing girlfriend stop fumbling with his belt buckle to think, "Wait a minute. Are we married yet?" Yeah, yeah, that's what he's supposed to think, but in practice? To us the Puritans are the prime example of sexual restraint and repression, and the word puritanical is the ultimate symbol of it. But historical studies have shown that in Puritan New England, up to 40% of brides were pregnant on their wedding day. Move up to our present hypersexualized culture and what do you expect? Please.

Whether the kids should be carrying on like that is another topic, one I won't go into now. But such a dubious rationale is a pretty flimsy basis for keeping a whole class of Americans second-class citizens.

In Memoriam

Sometimes it seems that there is little we can do, except to remember and remind. But if that is all we can do, we must at least do that.



Two teenagers about to be hanged in Iran on July 19, 2005, almost one year ago, for the crime of being gay. Do not forget them.

Update: I originally got the date wrong, but not the point.

Video Update: Nine Months

We sometimes wonder down here how much people elsewhere assume things must be getting back to normal in New Orleans. If they do assume that, I suppose it's understandable. The various news media are set up to report on what's happening, and when the big story is on what is not happening -- as is the case in New Orleans, where the issue is all the things that should have happened by now but didn't -- well, the media just aren't that good at letting people know.

So sometimes the local folks just have to do it themselves. And thanks to the internet, you can see it. Link to here and press the play button.

Just for perspective, I used to shop at the hardware store he's walking in front of, and I liked to eat lunch in that Chinese restaurant whenever I was in Mid-City at mid-day. Not great Chinese food, as there is none in New Orleans, but nice people, a nice atmosphere, very pleasant. The loss of these places is not hypothetical to me, not at all.

Disaster Timeline

The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which has risen magnificently to the occasion ever since the storm, now has posted a fascinating animated graphic about the first few hours of the disaster. It's astonishing how rapidly everything happened. As the animation proceeds, watch the clock in the lower left corner. All of the critical levee overtoppings and breaches occurred within four hours. It took the flood waters over a day to reach their fullest extent and depth, but by 10:30 am on August 29, the city's fate was sealed. Link is here.

Note that the legend at the bottom of the page has a symbol, a jagged red dot, clearly indicating where levees were breached. Breached, not overtopped by high water, but where the structures crumbled and failed. What's striking is that there are so many of these failures, widespread throughout the area. These levees, and especially the 17th Avenue and London Avenue floodwalls, were supposed to stand up to a category three hurricane, which is what Katrina was by the time it got here, strongly suggesting system-wide failures of design and construction.

Like everyone else here, I know who I hold responsible: The Army Corps of Engineers. Since the storm, the T-P has been running a series of investigative reports about the Corpse and the levees it designed and built, and it gets worse with each story. For example, when they were designing those floodwalls in the mid-80s, they were basing their designs on elevation maps published in the 1950s, even though everyone knew there had been subsidence in the area since then, and that designs based on those land elevation figures would be faulty. Seems the Corpse didn't much care.

It continues to this day. They kept telling us that by the start of hurricane season they would restore flood protection in critical areas, the areas affected by levee breaches, to pre-Katrina levels. Uh, well, everyone says, since that clearly wasn't enough, couldn't we maybe aim to do a little better? Nunh-unh, says the Corpse, we can't do that because we're not authorized to do that. They seem determined to hide behind that word, "authorized." When you ask why they didn't revise the plans and build higher in the 80s and 90s when subsidence indicated the need, they reply, no, we can't do that, we weren't authorized to do that. Authorized by whom? By legislation mandating better flood protection for New Orleans that was passed by Congress in the aftermath of Hurricane Betsy in 1965. They want us to believe that in thirty years they couldn't go back to Congress and ask for an update to meet changing needs? And these are the people we're counting on to save our skins this season?

By the way, the Corpse now admits that it will not make that deadline for restoring flood protection. Absolutely nobody is surprised.

Testing

This is a test post. Please indulge me and ignore.

Nukes to the Rescue

For decades the position of the environmental movement towards nuclear power has been clear: over our dead bodies. (And please recycle them.) But according to this editorial in the Washington Post, some of the leading figures in the movement may be coming to their senses.

The greens always said, nuclear power plants are too dangerous!! My thought always was, compared with what? Given that American nuclear plants have a perfect safety record, the millions of tons of CO2 that coal fired plants turn out annually is a much greater hazard. As worries mount about the danger of catastrophic climate change, many who thought differently are coming to agree.

We'll never get rid of fossil fuels entirely, of course. When you need to combine efficient power production with mobility, as with cars and planes, petrofuels are the only real choice. But the plants that supply the power grid don't have to go anywhere. If nuclear plants can do the job economically and efficiently and without doing the environmental damage that burning coal does, why not build more of them?

My Kind of Candidate

You know, we've got an election coming up, next Saturday in fact. The papers keep saying it will the most important mayoral election for the city ever, and it's certainly the weirdest. For one thing, it's the only mayoral race in any city's history that's necessarily been national in scope. It had to be, with so many voters spread God knows where. Tomorrow, for example, a candidates' debate for a merely municipal election will be carried coast to coast on MSNBC. When has that happened before?

Louisiana uses an open primary system. If one candidate gets more than 50% of the vote next Saturday, game over. But that's not going to happen, as there are three major candidates, about four more second tier candidates, and nearly a dozen fringies. So the top two vote getters will go into a runoff at the general election on May 20. It's long been assumed that Mayor Nagin will be one of the two. His two main challengers, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, scion of the most powerful political family in the city, and Ron Forman, head of the Audubon Institute that runs the zoo and aquarium, are battling each other for the other spot. It's ironic, as they used to be personal friends, and at one point each was saying that if the other ran, he would bow out. Not anymore. They seem to be getting out the knives. Ah, politics in Louisiana is the Sport of Kings.

The second tier candidates hope for a major upset, squeezing past both Forman and Landrieu. Not bloody likely. The fringies give best entertainment value, however. Kimberly Williamson Butler is the one who had to skip the first mayoral debate as she was still in jail for contempt of court, the same court for which she serves as Clerk. She recently released a campaign photo of her standing in the French Quarter. Only it turned out not to be the real Quarter, but the fake one Disneyland built in the mid-60s. There was one fringie candidate who, when asked why he was running, said he "needed a job."

Should be interesting. And I'll be watching it from a new perspective. Since they were short staffed, I decided to step forward and help out as an Election Commissioner, which is a fancy title for poll worker. I'll have to be at my post in the Quarter by 5:30 am, to get ready for the poll opening at 6, and they don't close till 8 pm. But what the hell. I went to a two-hour training session a few months ago, at which I met Ms. Butler herself, shaking hands with all the trainees, since in her job as Clerk of Court she is responsible for training them and monitoring everything on election day. Yep, that's right. One of the fringe candidates for mayor is actually reponsible for seeing that the election proceeds smoothly and fairly. You can't make this stuff up.

Oh, and we're electing a new City Council, too. The most likely ticket to win is the Throw The Bums Out ticket. Nobody thinks much of the Council's performance since Katrina. I'm still thinking hard about who to vote for for mayor, but for City Council, I know who my guy is.