Drug Use Up for Boomers, Down for Teens

WASHINGTON (AP) — Some moms and dads might want to take a lesson from their kids: Just say no.

The government reported Thursday that 4.4 percent of baby boomers ages 50 to 59 indicated that they had used illicit drugs in the past month. It marks the third consecutive yearly increase recorded for that age group by the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

Hey…life is stressful.

Meanwhile, illicit drug use among young teens went down for the third consecutive year – from 11.6 percent in 2002 to 9.9 percent in 2005.

You don’t say…

"Rarely have we seen a story like this where this is such an obvious contrast as one generation goes off stage right, and entering stage left is a generation that learned a lesson somehow and they’re doing something very different," said David Murray, special assistant to the director for the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

You don’t say…

Overall, drug use remained relatively unchanged among Americans age 12 and older in 2005. About 19.7 million Americans reported they had used an illicit drug in the past month, which represented a rise from 7.9 percent to 8.1 percent.

You don’t say… 

The increase was not only due to the boomers, but an increase was also seen among those 18-25, the age category that always ranks highest when it comes to illicit drug use.

You don’t say… 

While drug use went up slightly in ’05, so did alcohol use. Slightly more than half of Americans age 12 and older reported being current drinkers of alcohol. That translates to 126 million people, up from 121 million people the year before.

Uh, huh…  You don’t say…

Meanwhile, tobacco use held steady at about 29.4 percent, even though among youths 12-17, tobacco use did drop from 14.4 percent to 13.1 percent.

So…to recap.  8.1 percent of Americans are using drugs.  Not counting the 30 percent of us who are smoking tobacco, and the more then half of us 12 and older who are drinking alcohol.  The only places in this survey where drug use is down is that 12 to 18 age group.  Which is good…they shouldn’t be doing any of that.  But the rest of us are doing it more.  That includes pot and it isn’t just boomers.  The increase was not only due to the boomers, but an increase was also seen among those 18-25, the age category that always ranks highest when it comes to illicit drug use.  So why are they bellyaching about boomers?  Boomers don’t even rank highest in drug use anymore.

Goddamn republicans just never got over how badly my generation messed up their perfect 1950s world.  But we didn’t do that.  Just look at how their perfect George Bush world is falling apart all on its own.  We found Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, except they didn’t really exist and that’s not why we invaded Iraq, except it was, except it wasn’t, except they did, except they didn’t.  Bill Clinton wouldn’t attack al Qaeda, except when he did the republicans accused him of "wagging the dog", except he really didn’t even though he was wagging the dog when he did and George Bush really took charge, except he was reading The Pet Goat at the time except he was in control, and the Mission was Accomplished just a few weeks after we invaded Iraq which wasn’t involved in 9-11 except it was except it wasn’t and the Mission was Accomplished except we’re putting reservists in their forties back into uniform and sending them to Iraq now because we’re running out of troops, except we have all the troops we need over there and everything is going according to plan except Iraq is falling into civil war now but we’ve brought democracy to Iraq and we’re defeating the enemy we already defeated a couple years ago anyway and every day more Americans die over there and hey let’s go start a war with Iran now too because the Mission has been Accomplished and anyone who says it wasn’t is giving aid and comfort to the enemy we defeated two years ago except we didn’t and now there are more of them. 

When reality becomes a mass hallucination, getting away from it stops looking like such a bad idea.  Some people do drugs to escape reality.  Some people do them because reality has just stopped making sense.  And my generation was only following the example of our elders and all their goddamn booze and tranquilizers.  But we broke the rules by acknowledging what we were doing and that was unforgivable I guess.

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen’s "off with her head!"
Remember what the dormouse said:
"Feed your head
Feed your head
Feed your head"

-Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit.

For a change the gay channel Logo had something on that lived up to its (Logo’s) potential.  It was a history of the gay migration to Fire Island and The Pines, and it covered parts of the island’s history prior to Stonewall, as well as the changes that came after, and with the AIDS crisis.

There’s a reason why documenting the history of our movement prior to Stonewall is so important, while there are still people alive who lived it first hand.  When I was a kid I’d heard about Fire Island…it was practically a byword for queerness.  Back then Fire Island and Greenwich Village was where all the queers were.  You didn’t go there unless you were queer yourself.  Even Mad magazine, which was aimed at teenage males mostly, would toss out Fire Island jokes from time to time in it’s pages and magazines  for teens weren’t supposed to so much as breath a word about homosexuality back then.  But in those days we all thought Mad was cool, because it was something our parents hated.  Two years after Stonewall, this is the image I was getting about gays from Mad…

Mad #145, Sept ’71, from "Greeting Cards For The
Sexual Revolution" – "To A Gay Liberationist"

This is what the pop culture was telling me about gay people when I was 17.  Three months later I came out to myself.  I have to say in all fairness that Mad Magazine isn’t hostile to gay people now, like it was back when I was a gay teen struggling to understand myself.  In fact, they’re positively amazing, even by today’s standards.  I suppose they understand now that some of their readers are dealing with their own process of coming out.  But the late 60s and early 70s were not nearly so tolerant and it’s hard to grasp now, when we’re to the point of fighting for marriage rights, how bad it was back then.  Which is why histories like the one Logo was showing tonight are so important.  There are a lot of people who would like to take us all back to those days.

And so here I am, 35 years later, watching this history of Fire Island on Logo raptly. I was too young to be part of the pre-Stonewall era, but not so young that I didn’t hear stuff about homosexuals.  And now I’m hearing from them, the people, gay and straight, who experienced that first wave of gay migrations to the island what those times were like from their point of view… 

…and I’m hearing about how a certain hotel/club got started there, called The Botel, and how it’s ownership passed into the hands of a gay man…and how the tradition of "Tea Dances" started there (late afternoon, when the dances were held, was called "low tea"…I guess it’s a New England thing…).  And I learn that back in those days it was illegal for men to dance with men.  Not illegal as in, get a ticket and pay a fine, but illegal as in get arrested and thrown in jail and have your life ruined when your name is printed in the newspapers the next day and suddenly your boss and your neighbors and everyone you know finds out you’re a faggot.  That kind of illegal…

…so the male Tea Dancers would form a kind of cabaret line and find one woman…she didn’t need to be heterosexual herself…to dance with all these guys who were really dancing with each other but had to be careful about not dancing too much like they were dancing with each other or they might get arrested.  The gay owner of the club would watch the dancers and warn them if they started being too obvious, and tell them they had to stop or leave…

…and there are several people in this Fire Island documentary explaining this as I watch and listen, and one of them explains that the police would regularly raid The Botel anyway, and another man says that sometimes the police would patrol the streets around the club and arrest random young men as they left.  On those nights, this man says, the bartenders would get the word somehow and warn people not to leave the club alone, but go out in large groups.  Another man says that the police had arrest quotas when then went on these raids.  Typically, he says, they had to arrest at least twenty gays…

…and I listen to another man explaining that there was a large telephone pole near the Botel, and that it had a chain fastened to it…and the police would randomly arrest gay men as they found them leaving the Botel and cuff them to this chain…one by one…until they had their twenty for that night…and they would put them all on the boat back to the mainland and to jail. 

This happened on Fire Island, in the 1960s, during a time when a lot of gay men and lesbians regarded Fire Island as a place they could go to get away from the oppression they felt in their daily lives.  It was a place where could be "among your own kind", the people in the documentary were telling me as I watched.  You felt like you were in a world apart, they said.  Back home was the closet, the constant fear of discovery, the need to keep your head down.  On Fire Island you felt like you were getting away from all that, they said.  But you never knew when the police might grab you off the street, handcuff you to a chain with twenty or more other homosexuals, and take you by boat to a jail on the mainland.  Because you were a homosexual.

And now you know another reason why Stonewall finally happened.

I’ve been a little busy at work lately so I haven’t posted much.  But in case you were wondering, the end of summer happened here in Baltimore sometime last Wednesday.  I noticed when I left work for the day that the swallows had suddenly left their nests in the Space Telescope parking garage.

I’d begun wondering when it was going to happen.  The new chicks were all grown, and it seemed like the flocks were getting restless.  When it happens, it happens all at once.  That morning, at least a few of them were there in the parking garage to greet me.   Then when I came back they were all gone.  The parking garage was quiet.  No crazy swallow chirping and darting around like little arrows.  Just…quiet.

So they’re on their way to their southern nesting grounds.  Sometimes I wish I could go with them.  It’s quiet now when I arrive at work.  Summer’s over.

The American Heart Association and the Chicago Lake County Health Department hosted a breakfast forum to encourage more towns to pass smoking ordinances and make the entire county smoke-free by the end of 2007.  Why asks you?  Well of course, because smoking is bad for your health.  Consider for example, the damage smoking does to your heart and circulatory system.

And the menu? 

There were piles of bacon and ham. There was a tray filled with steaming scrambled eggs. And next to that, another one bursting with thick slices of French toast slathered in fried bananas and powdered sugar.

Let’s hear it for tobacco prohibition.  Fried bananas?  Were they deep fried by any chance?  Swear to god I hear one more thing about how bad for you cigarette smoking is this week and I’m going to go out and buy a pack and give it another try. 

So ABC is doing a documentary on The Road To 9-11, is it…?

On September 10 and 11, ABC will air a “docudrama” called “The Path to 9/11.” It was written by Cyrus Nowrasteh, who describes himself as “more of a libertarian than a strict conservative,” and is giving interviews to hard-right sites like FrontPageMag to promote the film.

What will it say about President Clinton? Here’s Rush Limbaugh with a preview:

A friend of mine [Cyrus Nowrasteh] out in California has produced and filmed — I think it’s a two-part mini-series on 9/11 that ABC is going to run in prime-time over two nights, close to or on 9/11. It’s sort of surprising that ABC’s picked it up, to me. I’ve had a lot of people tell me about it, my friends told me about it…And from what I have been told, the film really zeros in on the shortcomings of the Clinton administration in doing anything about militant Islamofascism or terrorism during its administration. It cites failures of Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright and Sandy Burglar.

How does it deal with President Bush? Salon has a review:

Condoleezza Rice gets that fated memo about planes flying into buildings, and makes it very clear to anyone who’ll listen just how concerned President Bush is about these terrorist threats — despite the fact that we’re given little concrete evidence of the president’s concern or interest in taking action. Maybe my memory fails me, but the only person I remember talking about Osama bin Laden back in 1998 was President Clinton, while the current anti-terrorist stalwarts worked the country into a frenzy over what? Blow jobs. In the end, “The Path to 9/11″ feels like an excruciatingly long, winding and deceptive path, indeed.

The director of the film, David Cunningham, is already backtracking about its accuracy, saying “this is not a documentary.” OK, fair enough. But the movie is being billed as “based on The 9/11 Commission Report.

KOS diarist stephdrey writes…

ABC’s drama will purportedly conflate separate incidents into a single fictional account that gives the impression that U.S. operatives were literally standing outside Bin Ladin’s compound ready to go and Clinton refused to give the order. Allegedly, the television program will even depict a make-believe phone call in which Sandy Berger tells field agents that if they go after Bin Ladin, they’ll have to do it without the support of the U.S. Government.

This warped account is pure wing-nut fantasy. It’s both fictional and irresponsibly untrue. But is it even truthy?

Richard Clarke, a terrorism expert who served under Presidents Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, and George W. Bush, refutes this claim utterly. Clarke does describe an incident in which Clinton hesitates on a question of international law until Al Gore persuades him to be more aggressive. But Clarke maintains that at no time was Clinton ever given an opportunity to capture Osama Bin Ladin that he failed to give the go order.

And if Richard Clarke’s testimony isn’t good enough for you, the 9/11 Commission itself discredits the claim that Clinton ever refused an offer of Osama bin Ladin on a silver platter.

So much for being based on the 9-11 commission report…

What we do know is that after Osama Bin Ladin bombed our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Bill Clinton personally ordered simultaneous military strike camps in Afghanistan, and was roundly criticized by Republicans for "Wagging the Dog" to distract from his Monica Lewinsky scandal.

We also know that President Clinton sent strong Memoranda to the CIA reiterating that they were authorized to use tribal assets or other means to hunt down Osama Bin Ladin, and kill him if necessary. And we know that President Clinton personally negotiated with the leader of Pakistan and secured a joint plan to capture Bin Ladin – plans that evaporated when Mr. Sharif was violently overthrown by General Pervez Musharraf.

We also know that President Clinton demanded daily intelligence reports about Bin Ladin after 1998 and that his administration successfully thwarted a Millenium Attack – with connections to what we would eventually understand to be Al Qaeda – by arresting an Algerian Jihadist smuggling a load of explosives into the U.S.

And finally, we also know that when the Bush Administration transitioned into power, they did not agree with Clinton officials that terrorism should be the major priority of their administration until after September 11, 2001.

Bear in mind, ABC is the same network that tried its level best to whitewash the murder of Matthew Shepard back in November of 2004. it deliberately and despicably planted in the national discourse on gay bashing, calculated anti-gay propaganda that Shepard was a meth addict and his murder was the result of a drug deal gone bad.  The religious right had been yapping since before the poor kid’s body was cold that he must have brought it on himself somehow, in some way, because after all he was a homosexual.  Whenever anyone made the obvious link between religious right hate mongering and Shepard’s murder, they fell over themselves trying to smear that poor kid even more.  He was a sexual predator they said.  He was a prostitute they said.  He was a drug addict who liked dangerous sex they said.  Until ABC News gave their smears the respectability of a mainstream news network, nobody beyond the kook pews took them seriously. 

But ABC News knew that calling Matthew Shepard a meth addict who may even have had a sexual relationship with one of his killers wasn’t merely a right wing obscenity.  It was…controversial.  And that meant ratings.  So they did it.  Less then four months later, in Santa Fe New Mexico, a young gay man, James Maestas was beaten so badly by his three attackers, his lungs were burned by his own stomach acid.

Now ABC News will, in a few days, give another bitter America hating right wing fantasy wings.  And its of a piece with little they care anymore about the lives of common average everyday Americans.  Instead of holding the Bush gang accountable for how badly they’ve damaged America’s ability to defend itself, they’re going to help it pass the buck, and never mind that isn’t going to make Americans one whit safer from terrorism. They didn’t smear a dead gay college student to draw attention to anti-gay violence.  They did it for the money.  And that’s where the fascist right, and the network executives shake hands.

[Edited a tad…] 

The usual retort by gay bashers is that the victim made a pass at them, or something akin to a pass.  This is the essence of the "gay panic" defense, that the victim provoked them by in some way attacking their masculinity or their heterosexuality.  What heterosexuals don’t realize, is that they get to play too, by merely being thought to be gay by their assailants, or by having gay friends, and now, apparently, just going to a concert given by a gay performer …

(London) Two men who beat a man and his young nephew as they left an Elton John concert were convicted Wednesday of assault causing bodily harm.

Graham Brydon had taken his nephew John to the concert at Watford football stadium in June last year.  Walking home Brydon put an official T-shirt he bought at the concert over his shirt.

Henry Peters, 31, and Neil Wattley, 30, spotted the T-shirt and began harassing Brydon and his nephew, yelling "Elton John is fucking gay."

Then without provocation the assailants began beating them.

Brydon, in his 50s, required hospitalization for a suspected broken cheekbone.

Peters and Wattley pleaded not guilty, and claimed that Brydon and his nephew had provoked the attack. 

But at trial police showed tape from a CCTV camera which had recorded the entire encounter.

The tape showed Wattley yelling the homophobic slur and then punching Brydon in the face.  Peters then joined in the attack.

Notice the reflex.  They provoked us!  Yes.  Because "Elton John is fucking gay."  It was provocation enough.  Were it not for the video tape, they might just have gotten away with it.  People would think to themselves, there must have been Some kind of provocation after all…nobody just walks up to complete strangers and starts beating them up without Some kind of provocation…  And so there was.  "Elton John is fucking gay."   That was the provocation.  Luckily for the victims in this case, there was a video tape to prove that was all there was to it.

Without a doubt this is the way it goes in nearly all gay bashings.  If you could watch a tape of the entire time Matthew Shepard was in the company of his killers the night he was tortured and murdered, you would, never doubt it, see something very similar to this.  Two adult thugs suddenly turning on a young five foot two 112 pound gay college student who had done absolutely nothing to them, beating him bloody, tying him to a fence, putting cigarettes put out on his skin, and then bashing his skull with a handgun, and then later telling the police, and then the world, that Shepard had provoked them.

So…here’s the scenario…  A man who was hired by a city police department to psychologically screen prospective new hires is discovered to be a member of an antisemitic group that distributes copies of Protocols of the Elders of Zion, pamphlets denying the holocaust really happened, and asserting that Jews are anti-Christian Christ killers. It develops that this man was conducting psychological tests against prospective employees which he developed on a grant from the Bush Department of Justice.  Some say his membership in the antisemitic group is suggestive of why he’s disqualified many Jewish applicants, and they complain to the police community relations council, which orders an investigation.  The police department stops using his services while the investigation is underway. 

The head of the antisemitic group is suitably outraged.  "Does this mean that any person with a Christian or moral belief system cannot work for the city?" he asks. "This case has all the markings of blatant anti-Christian discrimination and bigotry. People of faith should follow it carefully, because they could be next."  Everyone writes him and the former police department screener off as a couple of bigoted crackpots.

Hahahaha!  No…  

Minneapolis interim police chief Tim Dolan has ordered an inquiry into the use by his force of a psychologist tied to a group that opposes LGBT civil rights, gay marriage and endorses the so-called ex-gay movement.

Michael A. Campion has been used by the police department for more than a year to screen prospective police officers.  Campion also has worked for departments in more than 100 cities over the past 30 years. He  is based in Champaign, Illinois.

His involvement with the Illinois Family Institute was brought to Dolan’s attention at a meeting last week with the Police Community Relations Council when it was learned that Campion had made negative comments about single parents.

…

Although some of Capion’s comments to prospective officers "disturbed" members of the Council, Chief Dolan said there was nothing specific to indicate he was biased in his testing.  Nevertheless he ordered an independent inquiry and said Capion would not be used until the inquiry finished its work.

…

"Does this mean that any person with a Christian or moral belief system cannot work for the city of Minneapolis?" said David Smith. "This case has all the markings of blatant anti-Christian discrimination and bigotry. People of faith should follow it carefully, because they could be next."

Bigotry.  Bigotry.  Homosexuals are disease spreading, child molesting, family destroying perverts that god hates and who don’t deserve any sort of civil rights and people who tell us not to kick them in the face are not moral and are not Christian.  And we’re not bigots, the rest of you are.  Bigotry.  Bigotry.

One year ago today the United States lost a city.  And if you’re still wondering why reconstruction has been taking so long to even get really started, then you’ve been missing the point of the past five years.  Digby has a post up, linking to a Frank Rich column that pretty much nails it, but I wouldn’t go reading it if you’re still not ready to see that open sewer that is the republican party today for what it is…

Douglas Brinkley, the Tulane University historian who wrote the best-selling account of Katrina, “The Great Deluge,” is worried that even now the White House is escaping questioning about what it is up to (and not) in the Gulf. “I don’t think anybody’s getting the Bush strategy,” he said when we talked last week. “The crucial point is that the inaction is deliberate — the inaction is the action.” As he sees it, the administration, tacitly abetted by New Orleans’s opportunistic mayor, Ray Nagin, is encouraging selective inertia, whether in the rebuilding of the levees (“Only Band-Aids have been put on them”), the rebuilding of the Lower Ninth Ward or the restoration of the wetlands. The destination: a smaller city, with a large portion of its former black population permanently dispersed. “Out of the Katrina debacle, Bush is making political gains,” Mr. Brinkley says incredulously. “The last blue state in the Old South is turning into a red state.”

The inaction is the action…  People who are thinking that the devistation of New Orleans, and the Bush gang’s shockingly callow response to it are going to hurt the republicans politically still aren’t getting it.  New Orleans is dead, but Louisiana is red.  The GOP is counting it as a plus, never doubt it. 

In another post, Digby quotes Kurt Vonnegut, on the inner nature of the people who have their hands on the levers of our government now…

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students frm Yale."

George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.

To say somebody is a PP is to make perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia, published in 1941. Read it!

Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or whatever, and this book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is making this whole country and many other parts of the planet go completely haywire nowadays. These were people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything.

PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And they are waging a war that is making billionaires out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of billionaires, and they own television, and they bankroll George Bush, and not because he’s against gay marriage.

So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.

They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin’ day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with any doubts, for the simple reason that they don’t give a fuck what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In these Times, and kiss my ass!

This is why George Bush could strum a guitar while New Orleans died.  Last year, as the appalling scope of the disaster just kept getting more and more worse, and Brad DeLong was saying, astonished, "I really am naive. I did not expect this degree of unpreparedness and incompetence. I did not expect this even though I knew that the Bush administration is worse than you can imagine, even after having taken account of the fact that it is worse than you can imagine"…I wrote this:

For generations the Republicans have played Americans against one another. As government in the late 20th century began to acknowledge and protect the rights of minorities and women, the republicans began a concerted effort to deliberately weaken government, so it could no longer do that. An America that extends the promise of liberty and justice to all is anathema to them. For decades they poured billions of right wing dollars into a relentless campaign to convince Americans that greed is good, and that their worst prejudices were righteous. American self reliance became self interest. American independence became insularity. In pulpits all across America, the Jesus who taught us to love our neighbor was crucified as a communist and a pervert, and a new one who taught that might makes right was put in his place. The payoff came with the election of George Bush. The punch line came this week in New Orleans.

It isn’t that America can’t respond to the need of New Orleans as well as it can the need of those places destroyed by the Indian Ocean Tsunami…it’s that it isn’t supposed to. That’s what all the vitriolic rhetoric about "nanny government" means. A government that can wage a successful fight against civil chaos after a devastating natural disaster, can also prevent lynchings, wife beatings, and gay bashings. Government isn’t supposed to take care of the powerless, whether they’ve been rendered helpless by a hurricane, or by a lynch mob. Rights are for the powerful. To be able to just get on with your life is a privilege, not a right. That is George Bush’s America.

Somewhere in a corner of the putrid stench the Superdome has become, are the rotting corpses of two elderly New Orleans women, laying where their bodies were dragged to get them out of the way of the still living. Take your mental camera into the Superdome. Pan it across the trash littered bleachers, move down the aisles, through the suffocating stench of hundreds of backed up toilets and cardboard boxes full of human excrement. There…there they are…in that dark corner over there. Two pitiful little bodies you could almost mistake for just another random pile of trash. But they were people once. Your fellow Americans. Slowly zoom your mental camera in on that image. There is the America the republicans have been doggedly leading us to for decades now. There is what is inside the shining city on the hill.

 Mr. President…America is under attack…

Or…to put it in more concrete terms…

Frm the Associated Press:

NEW ORLEANS – Buses taking Hurricane Katrina victims far frm the squalor of the Superdome stopped rolling early Saturday. As many as 5,000 people remained in the stadium and could be there until Sunday, according to the Texas Air National Guard.

Officials had hoped to evacuate the last of the crowd before dawn Saturday. Guard members said they were told only that the buses had stopped coming and to shut down the area where the vehicles were being loaded.

"We were rolling," Capt. Jean Clark said. "If the buses had kept coming, we would have this whole place cleaned out already or pretty close to it."

…

Capt. John Pollard of the Texas Air Force National Guard said 20,000 people were in the dome when evacuation efforts began. That number swelled as people poured into the Superdome because they believed it was the best place to get a ride out of town.

He estimated Saturday morning that between 2,000 and 5,000 people were left at the Superdome. But it remained a mystery why the buses stopped coming to pick up refugees and shuttle them away.

Tina Miller, 47, had no shoes and cried with relief and exhaustion as she left the Superdome and walked toward a bus. "I never thought I’d make it. Oh, God, I thought I’d die in there. I’ve never been through anything this awful."

The arena’s second-story concourse looked like a dump, with more than a foot of trash except in the occasional area where people were working to keep things as tidy as possible.

Bathrooms had no lights, making people afraid to enter, and the stench frm backed-up toilets inside killed any inclination toward bravery.

"When we have to go to the bathroom we just get a box. That’s all you can do now," said Sandra Jones of eastern New Orleans.

Her newborn baby was running a fever, and all the small children in her area had rashes, she said.

…

At one point Friday, the evacuation was interrupted briefly when school buses pulled up so some 700 guests and employees frm the Hyatt Hotel could move to the head of the evacuation line – much to the amazement of those who had been crammed in the Superdome since last Sunday.

"How does this work? They (are) clean, they are dry, they get out ahead of us?" exclaimed Howard Blue, 22, who tried to get in their line. The National Guard blocked him as other guardsmen helped the well-dressed guests with their luggage.

The 700 had been trapped in the hotel, near the Superdome, but conditions were considerably cleaner, even without running water, than the unsanitary crush inside the dome…

Frm the Washington Post:

One military official said that as of Friday morning, 4,200 people had been evacuated, including 1,000 frm the convention center, where many times that number spent days without any aid and where several corpses lay on the street Thursday. Another military official said that commanders had not been aware of the large and desperate concentration of people at the convention center until Wednesday, that the focus had been on evacuating the Superdome and conducting other emergency operations in the city.

"It had not perhaps been raised to our consciousness by the reports we had received," Maj. Gen. Richard Rowe, the chief operations officer of the U.S. Northern Command, said in a phone interview.

…

By Friday night, the number of National Guard troops was expected to reach 11,700 in Louisiana and 8,000 in Mississippi, with more than 5,000 troops still to come over the weekend. Add to that more than 2,500 Coast Guard personnel on the scene with more than 50 aircraft. Four Coast Guard cutters are stationed in the Mississippi River to offer communications and logistics support, said U.S. Coast Guard spokeswoman Sharon Richey. Even so, one frustrated state senator announced that he has lined up barges to float aid down the Mississippi River to stranded individuals…

…

As reports continued of famished and dehydrated people isolated across the Gulf Coast, angry questions were pressed about why the military has not been dropping food packets for them — as was done in Afghanistan, Bosnia and in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami.

Bill Wattenburg, a consultant for the University of California Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and one of the designers of the earlier food drop programs, said that he has lobbied the administration and the military to immediately begin something similar. He said he was told that the military was prepared to begin, but that it was awaiting a request frm FEMA.

"We know very well how to do this, and it’s just incomprehensible that we’re not," Wattenburg said.

…

Canaan Spriggs, 31, and his extended family, including three infants, again prepared to sleep on the floor of a nearby parking garage. He said he was pleased by the sight of the military convoys but that the city was far frm tame.

"It’s quiet now, but the night-time is wild," he said. "They’re sugarcoating it on the news. Come out here at night, but only if you have the National Guard with you. There are gunshots, and you hear people screaming for help.

Frm the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON – Several states ready and willing to send National Guard troops to the rescue in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans didn’t get the go-ahead until days after the storm struck — a delay nearly certain to be investigated by Congress.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson offered Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco help frm his state’s National Guard on Sunday, the day before Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana. Blanco accepted, but paperwork needed to get the troops en route didn’t come frm Washington until late Thursday.

Frm CNN:

The big disconnect on New Orleans

The official version; then there’s the in-the-trenches version

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) — Diverging views of a crumbling New Orleans emerged Thursday, with statements by some federal officials in contradiction with grittier, more desperate views frm the streets. By late Friday response to those stranded in the city was more visible.

But the conflicting views on Thursday came within hours, sometimes minutes of each of each other, as reflected in CNN’s transcripts. The speakers include Michael Brown, chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, evacuee Raymond Cooper, CNN correspondents and others. Here’s what they had to say:

Conditions in the Convention Center

# FEMA chief Brown: We learned about that (Thursday), so I have directed that we have all available resources to get that convention center to make sure that they have the food and water and medical care that they need. (See video of Brown explaining how news reports alerted FEMA to convention center chaos. — 2:11)

# Mayor Nagin: The convention center is unsanitary and unsafe, and we are running out of supplies for the 15,000 to 20,000 people. (Hear Nagin’s angry demand for soldiers. 1:04)

# CNN Producer Kim Segal: It was chaos. There was nobody there, nobody in charge. And there was nobody giving even water. The children, you should see them, they’re all just in tears. There are sick people. We saw… people who are dying in front of you.

# Evacuee Raymond Cooper: Sir, you’ve got about 3,000 people here in this — in the Convention Center right now. They’re hungry. Don’t have any food. We were told two-and-a-half days ago to make our way to the Superdome or the Convention Center by our mayor. And which when we got here, was no one to tell us what to do, no one to direct us, no authority figure.

Uncollected corpses

# Brown: That’s not been reported to me, so I’m not going to comment. Until I actually get a report frm my teams that say, "We have bodies located here or there," I’m just not going to speculate.

# Segal: We saw one body. A person is in a wheelchair and someone had pushed (her) off to the side and draped just like a blanket over this person in the wheelchair. And then there is another body next to that. There were others they were willing to show us. ( See CNN report, ‘People are dying in front of us’ — 4:36 )

# Evacuee Cooper: They had a couple of policemen out here, sir, about six or seven policemen told me directly, when I went to tell them, hey, man, you got bodies in there. You got two old ladies that just passed, just had died, people dragging the bodies into little corners. One guy — that’s how I found out. The guy had actually, hey, man, anybody sleeping over here? I’m like, no. He dragged two bodies in there. Now you just — I just found out there was a lady and an old man, the lady went to nudge him. He’s dead.

Hospital evacuations

# Brown: I’ve just learned today that we … are in the process of completing the evacuations of the hospitals, that those are going very well.

# CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta: It’s gruesome. I guess that is the best word for it. If you think about a hospital, for example, the morgue is in the basement, and the basement is completely flooded. So you can just imagine the scene down there. But when patients die in the hospital, there is no place to put them, so they’re in the stairwells. It is one of the most unbelievable situations I’ve seen as a doctor, certainly as a journalist as well. There is no electricity. There is no water. There’s over 200 patients still here remaining. …We found our way in through a chopper and had to land at a landing strip and then take a boat. And it is exactly … where the boat was traveling where the snipers opened fire yesterday, halting all the evacuations. ( Watch the video report of corpses stacked in stairwells — 4:45 )

# Dr. Matthew Bellew, Charity Hospital: We still have 200 patients in this hospital, many of them needing care that they just can’t get. The conditions are such that it’s very dangerous for the patients. Just about all the patients in our services had fevers. Our toilets are overflowing. They are filled with stool and urine. And the smell, if you can imagine, is so bad, you know, many of us had gagging and some people even threw up. It’s pretty rough.(Mayor’s video: Armed addicts fighting for a fix — 1:03)

Violence and civil unrest

# Brown: I’ve had no reports of unrest, if the connotation of the word unrest means that people are beginning to riot, or you know, they’re banging on walls and screaming and hollering or burning tires or whatever. I’ve had no reports of that.

# CNN’s Chris Lawrence: Frm here and frm talking to the police officers, they’re losing control of the city. We’re now standing on the roof of one of the police stations. The police officers came by and told us in very, very strong terms it wasn’t safe to be out on the street. (Watch the video report on explosions and gunfire — 2:12)

The federal response:

# Brown: Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans, virtually a city that has been destroyed, things are going relatively well.

# Homeland Security Director Chertoff: Now, of course, a critical element of what we’re doing is the process of evacuation and securing New Orleans and other areas that are afflicted. And here the Department of Defense has performed magnificently, as has the National Guard, in bringing enormous resources and capabilities to bear in the areas that are suffering.

# Crowd chanting outside the Convention Center: We want help.

# Nagin: They don’t have a clue what’s going on down there.

# Phyllis Petrich, a tourist stranded at the Ritz-Carlton: They are invisible. We have no idea where they are. We hear bits and pieces that the National Guard is around, but where? We have not seen them. We have not seen FEMA officials. We have seen no one.

Security

# Brown: I actually think the security is pretty darn good. There’s some really bad people out there that are causing some problems, and it seems to me that every time a bad person wants to scream of cause a problem, there’s somebody there with a camera to stick it in their face. ( See Jack Cafferty’s rant on the government’s ‘bungled’ response — 0:57)

# Chertoff: In addition to local law enforcement, we have 2,800 National Guard in New Orleans as we speak today. One thousand four hundred additional National Guard military police trained soldiers will be arriving every day: 1,400 today, 1,400 tomorrow and 1,400 the next day.

# Nagin: I continue to hear that troops are on the way, but we are still protecting the city with only 1,500 New Orleans police officers, an additional 300 law enforcement personnel, 250 National Guard troops, and other military personnel who are primarily focused on evacuation.

# Lawrence: The police are very, very tense right now. They’re literally riding around, full assault weapons, full tactical gear, in pickup trucks. Five, six, seven, eight officers. It is a very tense situation here.

Frm Maureen Dowd:

Shirt-sleeves rolled up, W. finally landed in Hell yesterday and chuckled about his wild boozing days in "the great city" of N’Awlins. He was clearly moved. "You know, I’m going to fly out of here in a minute," he said on the runway at the New Orleans International Airport, "but I want you to know that I’m not going to forget what I’ve seen." Out of the cameras’ range, and avoided by W., was a convoy of thousands of sick and dying people, some sprawled on the floor or dumped on baggage carousels at a makeshift M*A*S*H unit inside the terminal.

…

Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA – a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association – admitted he didn’t know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.

Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job."

It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle – Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo’s on Fifth Avenue and attended "Spamalot" before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine – lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.

Frm Steve Gilliard:

No matter how nervously Kanye West said what he did, it wasn’t some revealed truth, but a long assumed feeling. Bush doesn’t care about black people. No fucking kidding.

The problem is that he doesn’t care about anybody.

The fact that the citizens of New Orleans are now Aligator MRE’s is of concern to Bush, because it may make him look bad. But the world of George Bush is a narrow one, not much beyond his nose. Everything is about him.

Which is why he can praise Brown. Even the French fired Nivelle once he failed and replaced him with Petain. Bush only sees what affects him.

 

In which I am busy drawing a certain foxy boy, while reassuring myself that I’m not really gay.  Nope.  Not me.

Click the panel above to see episode seven of A Coming Out Story, or click Here to go to the main page…

Surprise, surprise…  They’re putting blacks in the back of the bus again here in America…

Black students ordered to give up seats to whites

COUSHATTA — Nine black children attending Red River Elementary School were directed last week to the back of the school bus by a white driver who designated the front seats for white children.

The situation has outraged relatives of the black children who have filed a complaint with school officials.

Superintendent Kay Easley will meet with the family members in her office this morning.

…

Easley would not comment much on the allegations Wednesday, saying it is a personnel issue. She acknowledged that she has investigated the claim. And she confirmed that the bus driver did not run her route Wednesday, nor would she today.

Asked if the driver would work for the rest of the year, Easley said, "I’m not going to answer the questions. "You’re getting all that you’re going to get from me. I’m sorry."

…

After Richmond and Williams [the parents of the children] filed complaints with the School Board, Transportation Supervisor Jerry Carlisle asked Davis to make seat assignments for her passengers, Sessoms [a relative] said.

"But she still assigned the black children to the back of the bus," she added.

And the nine children had to share only two seats, meaning the older children had to hold the younger ones in their laps.

A new solution reached Monday by School Board officials has a black bus driver driving across town to pick up the nine black children.

Dig it.  The new solution was to kick the black kids off the white lady’s bus altogether. 

It’s Louisiana and I’m not surprised.  I’ve driven from one end of this country to the other and Louisiana has always stood out in my remembrance for the level of openly in-your-face white racism I saw while I was there.  It’s a problem everywhere, but in Louisiana it was like stepping into a time warp, not just in terms of how often you saw it, but how they all seemed to accept it as a fact of life.  New Orleans was the exception to that.  Drive across the causeway into Covington and north and there might as well have never been a civil rights movement.  But in New Orleans itself, at least the parts I explored, you didn’t see that.  And that’s almost certainly why New Orleans is still a devastated ruin.  I’m convinced the rest of Louisiana was glad to see it go.

Pluto gets demoted as astronomers approve new definition for planets

After a tumultuous week of clashing over the essence of the cosmos, the International Astronomical Union stripped Pluto of the planetary status it has held since its discovery in 1930. The new definition of what is – and isn’t – a planet fills a centuries-old black hole for scientists who have laboured since Copernicus without one.

…

The decision by the international group spells out the basic tests that celestial objects will have to meet before they can be considered for admission to the elite cosmic club.

For now, membership will be restricted to the eight "classical" planets in the solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Much-maligned Pluto doesn’t make the grade under the new rules for a planet: "a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a . . . nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit."

Pluto is automatically disqualified because its oblong orbit overlaps with Neptune’s.

Instead, it will be reclassified in a new category of "dwarf planets," similar to what long have been termed "minor planets."

A planet is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.

 

A dwarf planet is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, (c) has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and (d) is not a satellite.

Pluto is a dwarf planet by the above definition and is recognized as the prototype of a new category of trans-Neptunian objects.
All other objects orbiting the Sun shall be referred to collectively as "Small Solar System Bodies".

 

…you’re such a dear!

ThankYouThankYouThankYouThankYouThankYouThankYou ThankYouThankYouThankYouThankYouThankYouThankYou

Via Brad DeLong…

USNews.com: Washington Whispers: Animal House in the West Wing: He loves to cuss, gets a jolly when a mountain biker wipes out trying to keep up with him, and now we’re learning that the first frat boy loves flatulence jokes. A top insider let that slip when explaining why President Bush is paranoid around women, always worried about his behavior. But he’s still a funny, earthy guy who, for example, can’t get enough of fart jokes. He’s also known to cut a few for laughs, especially when greeting new young aides, but forget about getting people to gas about that.

"He came in here and he trashed the place and it’s not his place."  -D.C. pundit David Broder, bloviating on the unacceptable personal behavior of…Bill Clinton. 

Some more postcards from my road trip this year…

The Leaning Tower Of Britten, Tx.

The Plains, East of Amarillo, Tx.

Surfers, Pismo Beach California.

Boy And Seagull, Pismo Beach California.

Surfers, Pismo Beach California.

Sunset, Pismo Beach California.

Inflatable Sheriff, Laramie Wyoming 

Colorado Plains, West of Lymon.

More later…