Become a Republican
Among the the clearest framings I've yet seen of Republicanism today. (Hat tip, Andrew Sullivan)
Who is James Dobson?
This ever happen to you? At some point in life, you leave your normal routine for a time, say for a long vacation or trip abroad. Later, you hear oblique references to world events that occurred during the time you were gone, and you think, “well, when did that happen?” This is how I feel about James Dobson.
At some point while I was not looking, Dobson went from being a minor evangelical figure to the guiding light on the right end of the political spectrum. When we recently heard that Karl Rove had called Dobson in the days before the announcement of the Harriet Miers nomination, I knew the time had come to Google him.
Let me share with you what I found. In brief, James Dobson is a man who finds gay people incredibly frightening. No wonder, for it is the goal of homosexuals to "implement a master plan that has … as its centerpiece the utter destruction of the family." And they will not stop with the obliteration of the family unit, settling for no less than “universal acceptance of the gay lifestyle, the discrediting of Scriptures that condemn homosexuality, muzzling of the clergy and Christian media, granting of special privileges and rights in the law,” and “overturning laws prohibiting pedophilia.” In their march toward marrying one another, they are “like Adolf Hitler, who overran his European neighbors,” and, if ultimately successful, they will, of course, “destroy the Earth."
All this might be funny if Dobson were not the man whom the White House deputy chief of staff/the President’s chief political advisor begs for approval for a nominee to the United States Supreme Court. In their deference to him, is it even hyperbolic to say that the Republican Party has declared war on gay and lesbian Americans?
Baker trailer camp video
 About 8 miles outside the center of Baton Rouge, in a town called Baker, a trailer camp has been built to house a few thousand of those hurricane evacuees still staying in area shelters and hotels. When I was down in Louisiana, I drove out to see the Baker trailer camp. A few days after visiting Baker, I toured New Orleans and the very neighborhoods the evacuees had evacuated from.
New Orleans was, of course, was a city environment and a densely-populated one at that. The area in which the Baker trailer camp has been built has no commerce beyond a convience store attached to a gas station. There was, at the time of my visit, no public transportation. It's the sort of remote open space where one might think to build a prison of some kind. In fact, the nearest establish of any real size is a juvenile detention center.
I cut together a video (.wmv), just over a minute long, showing part of the drive from Baton Rouge out to Baker and some of the 573 trailers in the camp.
(As the video itself has no real audio beyond just the sound of the wind whistling past the windows as we drove, I added in a song called Everything's Just Fine, Thanks by Flatwound that I found through ccMixter.)
Waxman podcast on our "banana republic"
This is a wee bit dated but, last week, we posted a new installment in Rep. Waxman's podcast, this one (mp3) on the so-called Gasoline for America's Security Act of 2005, a bill that squeaked through the House by a two vote margin only after the Republican leadership held open the five minute voting period for nine times that long. Money quote: "the House leadership has finally turned the House of Representatives, the people's house, into a banana republic."
Interview with Louisiana NAACP President
At the very end of this week, I posted on Kos my interview with Dr. Ernest Johnson, the president of the Louisiana NAACP, on why hurricane evacuees might be refusing to move into FEMA-run trailer camps, his long-term fears for the state, and what it all means for the NAACP. It starts:
Ferriday, Louisiana, population 3,700, claims to have produced more famous people per square mile than any other small town in America. Native sons include Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Lee Lewis, country singer Mickey Gilley, and Ernest L. Johnson - civil rights attorney, law professor, ordained minister, and President of the Louisiana NAACP.
Hope you'll check it out.
Video may now kill me
Also, I am now officially a radio personality, having made my debut on 94.9 WQTQ LP FM Baton Rouge, interviewed about what I observed in New Orleans and Slidell. I was witty and urbane.
Black Hawk Update
The good news is that I did in fact do a fly-over of New Orleans, St. Bernard Parish, and Slidell today with the Louisiana Air National Guard. The bad news is that it caused me to miss my flight to Baltimore and I’ll be sleeping over in Dallas tonight. But the somewhat comforting news is that the flight I was scheduled to be on this afternoon was delayed enough so that even if I had made that flight I’d be staying in Dallas tonight anyway.
As for the Blackhawk flyover. In some areas, particularly on the east side of New Orleans, it looked like as if you built a small Lego city, put it down on the ground, and stomped the crap out of it. Buildings that were just piles of sticks, cars overturned in the canals, boats standing up on end. Homes ripped off of their foundations and butted up against other houses. Tree after tree just snapped like matchsticks.
Before we took off from Baton Rouge, our National Guardsman pilot said to keep an eye out for holes in the roofs of the houses, where people cut their way out of their way out as the flood waters rose. But it didn’t really hit me until I saw it myself -- holes maybe six feet or so across in the roofs of large family houses, house after house. Some looked as if they had somehow been burnt out. Others looked as if they had cut with an axe. House after house, people clawing their way out to survival. And then there was the stuff that people had written on the roofs of their houses, things like “Need water,” or a list of the names of the families still inside. The handwriting on a few I saw was almost perfect block letters. It made me wonder how someone in a situation like that could manage to spray paint those words - cries for help - so neatly.
I’d post some pictures but I wisely separated all my electronics -- in my carry-on bag --from all of my plugs and cables -- in my checked pack. So I have a camera and I have a laptop, but, alas, nothing to connect the two.
(Just posted this now but wrote it up yesterday. One of the plugs I packed was the one for my laptop and it died after I wrote it but before I posted it. I'm back in DC now, after a lovely night in Grapevine, Texas.)
Photos from the Superdome, French Quarter, 9th Ward, and Slidell
Bike outside of Superdome, New Orleans
Boat on street outside of Superdome, New Orleans
"Stuck on Stupid -- Thanks, Gen. H.," French Quarter
Business complex, Route 90, New Orleans
"You loot, we shoot," Route 90, New Orleans
"Proud to call it home," 9th Ward
Street sign, 9th Ward
Boat on a hill, 9th Ward
Stuffed bunny in the street, 9th Ward
Bushes, 9th Ward (The red leaves start where the water stopped.)
Scene from a parking lot, 9th Ward (It's nice when a car and a couch can find love like this.)
Upside-down car, 9th Ward
Car showing waterline, 9th Ward
Dogwasher, 9th Ward
Business, 9th Ward
Street sign, 9th Ward
Fence with waterline, 9th Ward
Fridge on the street, French Quarter
House with goat markings, 9th Ward
"Katrina Cafe," New Orleans
Me, just to break things up
House showing water level, 9th Ward
Pet food left under an overpass, 9th Ward
Plane at the harbor
Car showing water line, 9th Ward
Purse and dried mud, 9th Ward
House with roof off, 9th Ward
Shoe collection, 9th Ward
Pair of shoes, 9th Ward
Pair of shoes II, 9th Ward
Toy truck in yard, 9th Ward
Upsidedown truck, 9th Ward
Tweety and stuffed dog, 9th Ward
Two cars, 9th Ward
Damaged house, Slidell
House still standing, Slidell
Canned drinking water, Slidell
"T's will be back," Slidell
All is right with the world
I got liquored up in the French Quarter.
Blackhawk up
I'm writing up some notes from the last several days but want to share the exciting news that tomorrow I am scheduled to do a flyover of the New Orleans and the Louisiana coast in a Blackhawk helicopter.
UPDATE: Alas, the flyover was not to be today. There was some confusion this morning about whether the Air Force had to do some sort of official mission instead. I decided to use the day to drive down to New Orleans and I am hoping that it'll happen tomorrow.
First photos from Baton Rouge
Things are a bit crazy down here but here a few first photos. More to follow.
The River Center in downtown Baton Rouge is housing about 1,000 evacuees, down from about 6,000 at its peak. It operates as a mini-city, under the direction of the Red Cross and with security provided by the Kentucky National Guard.
Ready meals provided by the Red Cross at the Calvary Third Baptist Church in Baton Rouge, stacked in a corner in a supply room. Reverand Freedman and the congregation are instead cooking breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day for the 25 or so evacuees sheltered there. And they've being doing it for a month now, since the storm.
On the way out to a trailer camp being built 10 miles outside downtown Baton Rouge in an area called Baker. The telephone poles are new. A contractor called the Shaw Company was on site installling and outfitting the 573 trailers. The Baker camp is situated near a juvenile detention center, in an area with no public transportation and no commerce except a small gas station and one-stop store.
A few of the Camp Baker trailers. We walked into one that was somewhat bare but for a Bible in the refrigerator's vegetable drawer, a gift from the trailer manufacturer.
Down in Baton Rouge
Just got down last night. I spent my first night in the Baton Rouge Marriott mentioned in this Washington Post article about the housing situation down here.
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