Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Potential Katrina looters — for example, Halliburton — had better watch out, says Adina Levin.

Corruption in awarding fat no-bid contracts is no longer possible. Why? Because…!

“…the Democrats will be keeping an eye on the Feds and the Republicans will be keeping an eye on the locals.”

Maybe the “blame-game” has a good side after all.

Errol Morris in the Onion on why the 2004 Kerry campaign never used the real-people-who-switched from Bush to Kerry ads he did for MoveOn:

EM: … And so everyone knew—this is what puzzles me even now as I talk about it, it’s just so immensely frustrating—everybody knew that the election was going to be decided by a small fraction of the voters! …

AVC: Maybe there’s polling data that shows that attack ads and profile ads are more effective, no matter how much they reportedly turn off voters. Maybe the political machines know better.

EM: No, they don’t know more than we know, because they lost the election. If they knew so much, why’d they lose? [Laughs.]

On September 11, 2001, I got a strange phone call from my daughter Amity. Something very scary had happened, she told me. An airplane had crashed into a big NYC building.

The rest of that day, as the news got stranger and scarier, our own lives were jolted out of their normal pattern. Afraid that some nut might target MIT, I drove down there and fetched home both Frank and our sophomore daughter Mira. My next anti-disaster activity was organizing a big super-family dinner for that night, to include also Zoe VanderWolk and three of her fellow Harvard freshmen.

We didn’t talk much about the World Trade Center news over dinner. None of us really had any wise things to say. In retrospect, the implicit Wilczek position was that in time of disaster you grab your family, reach out to others you love, and find some useful, preoccupying work.*

For weeks afterward, the country drew together. Even the usual noisy Cambridge drivers stopped blowing loud horns at pedestrians and one another.

Now, four years later, we’re fresh from a different national disaster, Hurricane Katrina. This one has divided our nation instead of uniting us.

We can’t blame Al Qaida for the misery and chaos in New Orleans–or the many extra deaths when expected help arrived too late. Democrats blame FEMA, which congratulated itself only last year on the great success of its hurricane-readiness activities in New Orleans. Republicans blame local governments, which acted too slowly and then failed to use all the proper phrasings and secret handshakes when asking for federal help.

If we all agree that our own government failed miserably to keep US citizens safe, then is the solution to keep cutting taxes and starving government agencies, as Republicans hope? They seem to be dealing with the political storm much more successfully than with Hurricane Katrina. If catastrophe should hit your town or mine, I really, really hope they don’t win this one.

Hard at work on Sunday morning, FEMA moved swiftly to turn down a Swedish offer of aid for New Orleans survivors. That’s just part of a larger pattern, according to this list from Daily Kos:

FEMA won’t accept Amtrak’s help in evacuations

FEMA turns away experienced firefighters

FEMA turns back Wal-Mart supply trucks

FEMA prevents Coast Guard from delivering diesel fuel

FEMA won’t let Red Cross deliver food

FEMA bars morticians from entering New Orleans

FEMA blocks 500-boat citizen flotilla from delivering aid

FEMA fails to utilize Navy ship with 600-bed hospital on board

FEMA to Chicago: Send just one truck

FEMA turns away generators

FEMA: “First Responders Urged Not To Respond”

After all, why should New Orleans survivors get free help from outsiders now? Halliburton will eventually provide those same exact services, all paid for by your tax dollars.

Talk about looting…

When Frank and I left the US, the “here-comes-Katrina” story sounded like typical media* weather hype. (Just last month, IIRC, hurricane Dennis was going to “devastate” my home town.)

Amazon is makes it easy to send the Red Cross money. (My browser couldn’t get through to the Red Cross’s own site, which is no doubt a good sign.)

Katrina may not (yet) have left tens-of-thousands-dead, but survivors are enduring real chaos and misery.

What voting scandal has the Republican National Committee paid $722,000 (and counting) to keep under wraps? And how are they keeping it out of the national press?

RNC bigwig James Tobin (says
his Federal indictment) arranged for thousands of hang-up calls from a phone bank in Idaho, blocking Democrats’ efforts to give people rides to the polls and swinging a hotly contested 2002 Senate race to the Republican candidate.

If such dirty tricks aren’t official RNC policy, why is the RNC paying all Tobin’s legal fees?

Within days after Tobin’s indictment, RNC cash started paying for top DC lawyers to defend him. (Story here, or if that’s under firewall here.)

How can this blatant attempt to buy Tobin’s silence be a non-story?

How can the
Boston Globe treat it as a “New Hampshire” story. But wait–that most recent Boston Globe story fails completely to mention that the RNC was discovered (just ten days earlier) to be secretly funding Tobin’s full legal defense.

It also fails to mention that the Federal prosecutor (Todd Hinnen) who got Tobin indicted has been summarily pulled off the case.

This is real news, folks–please, won’t somebody cover it?

On a related note, here’s a
pdf of multiple Republican tactics to disrupt the 2004 election by preventing people from voting including:

• Failure to send out absentee ballots to Democrats
• Allocating many more voting machines per capita to Republican districts, so that voters in Democratic districts had to wait in line up to 5 hours in order to vote
• Misleading mailings to minority districts, saying for example that the date of the election had been changed to November 3

Focus of Plame CIA leak shifts to perjury and obstruction of justice.

Also in the news, Ex-agents rip Bush on CIA leak, and I quote:

”What has suffered irreversible damage is the credibility of our case officers when they try to convince an overseas contact that their safety is of primary importance to us,” said Jim Marcinkowski, a former CIA case officer.

He also criticized Republican efforts to minimize the damage caused by the leak.
”Each time the political machine made up of prime-time patriots and partisan ninnies display their ignorance by deriding Valerie Plame as a mere paper-pusher, or belittling the varying degrees of cover used to protect our officers, or continuing to play partisan politics with our national security, it’s a disservice to this country,” he added.

Would convictions for perjury meet the Bush criteria for firing Karl Rove?

The outing of Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife as an undercover CIA agent (if that is what she was) would be contemptuous — not to say felonious. As former President Bush said in 1999 of those who expose intelligence agents, they are “the most insidious of traitors.” We fully agree…even if the actors may not have appreciated the nature of their conduct.

 Robert F. Turner, associate director of the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia,…said the identity of Mrs. Plame in the Novak column appeared to be the reporter’s attempt to explain why Mr. Wilson was sent to Niger, not to reveal her role as an undercover CIA officer. “It does not strike me as going to the core what this law was intended to prevent,” he said.