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On the occasion of Mark Felt’s (a.k.a. “Deep Throat” of Watergate) recent death, the Washington Post’s former executive editor Leonard Downie pondered whether breaking another Watergate story “could happen again,” and confidently concluded — what with prepaid cell phones, bloggers, whistleblower protection laws and all — that it could, and faster than ever: “Nixon was re-elected five months after the burglary in 1972, and Watergate was not much of an issue during the campaign. That would not happen today.”

But it did.

The NSA warrantless surveillance story –  lawbreaking arguably even more serious than Watergate, and also directly at presidential command — was ready to go before the 2004 election, but far from becoming the critical election issue it deserved to be, it was delayed for more than a year.

My timeline* of the events related to the NSA warrantless surveillance program and its reporting, and my rereading of a lot of secondary reporting, convince me that while there were many contributing factors to the Times’s failure, the most important ones boiled down to one thing: the news leadership at the  New York Times — executive editor Bill Keller, Washington bureau chief Philip Taubman — put an appeasing, fearful kind of politics ahead of reporting a critically important story.  Their own statements and actions indicate they were more concerned — much more concerned — with adapting to and accommodating events than in reporting them.

“There’s more there”

“There’s more there…. There’s talk of indictments over at the Justice Department. Whatever’s going on, there’s even talk that Ashcroft could be indicted.”
– Eric Lichtblau, “Bush’s Law,” p. 186-187,

Eric Lichtblau (standing, center), DCDL/firedoglake
“Bush’s Law”book discussion, 5/13/08.
Originally uploaded by Thomas Nephew.

Times reporter Eric Lichtblau says a tipster told him the above sometime in 2004; assuming that the tipster is in fact former Thomas Tamm, a recent Newsweek story by Michael Isikoff (”The Fed Who Blew the Whistle“) pinpoints the timing to “spring 2004″ and “eighteen months before the [mid December, 2005] Times report.” While his name has been in the news at least since an FBI raid in 2007, Michael Isikoff’s December Newsweek story  confirmed Tamm was Lichtblau’s whistleblower; with elements of Isikoff’s story matching elements of both James Risen’s and Eric Lichtblau’s accounts.

As the “eighteen months” figure indicates, though, Tamm’s risky whistle-blowing took a long, long, long time to turn into the “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts” story Lichtblau and Risen published to the Internet on the evening of December 15, 2005.

Read the rest of this entry »

…that the psychopath who said this:

The good news is – and it’s hard for some to see it now — that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott’s house — he’s lost his entire house — there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch. (Laughter.)

…is going to get repudiated this fall along with the psychopathic wing of the grand old psychopathic party that laughed with him and stuck with him through thick and thin and lies piled upon lies.

It’s the possibility of the electoral annihilation of the Republican Party that intrigues me about Obama. But I can’t count on it, and I just don’t believe he’d be met halfway by people like Bush and the kind of people who laughed with Bush there in Mississippi. For the endless, bitter rearguard fight the Mitch McConnells of the world are sure to put up if Dems win in November, maybe we need a team with a little less youthful enthusiasm and a little more guile and venom. That’s what intrigues me about Clinton. I’d be fine with either one picking the other for Vice President.*

Come fall, I now think I’ll be working for either one. But my mantras won’t be “Change You Can Believe In” or “Hillary Cares.” They’ll be “Remember New Orleans,” “Out of Iraq,” and “Let’s Drown the GOP in the Bathtub This Time.”

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* What about Edwards? Novak may just be engaging in campaign season mischief, but I’d be happy if his Attorney General rumor comes true .

…go to New Orleans today.” That’s Mike Tidwell (Bayou Farewell, The Ravaging Tide), speaking on a typically excellent Bill Moyers Journal:

MIKE TIDWELL: What gives me optimism in the face of this overwhelming challenge, and, you know, Katrina really is a curtain-raiser. If you want to know what Miami’s going to look like 100 years from now, go to New Orleans today. Below sea level, behind levees, battered by huge storms– if we don’t stop global warming. This climate crisis is here now. The Great Lakes are dropping in water levels. Texas has got too much rain. The Carolina’s too little. Hurricanes are getting– it’s here now. It’s not a my kinda sort of a maybe thing in the future that computer modeling says is coming. It’s already deeply here.

So, the fact that it’s here, that this giant climate system with all the momentum built in it toward warming, it’s already unpacking its bags. What could possibly give us the optimism and hope that we can now respond at this late stage, strongly and fiercely enough to hold it in check? And the thing that I come back to is, when we decide to change, we tend to change explosively. You know, look at the great changes in World War II and all these things that have happened in the 20th Century. I believe that this issue of climate change and sustainable– sustainability, which also implies questions of human rights, and fairness. When this light bulb finally goes on, and it’s going on.

You know, I think Katrina opened the door, Al Gore walked through it. And the zeitgeist changes a lot more. But once we finally really get serious, we’re going to change really fast.

Tidwell was joined by Melissa Harris-Lacewell. While at the University of Chicago, she co-authored the “2005 Racial Attitudes and the Katrina Disaster Study.”

BILL MOYERS: What have you learned, the two of you, about politics, American politics from the Katrina disaster?

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Well, I often say that Hurricane Katrina and it’s political aftermath is the 2006 win of the democrats in the mid-term elections. And it–

BILL MOYERS: How so?

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: I know it seems odd.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah.

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Because it’s not as though Katrina is at all even talked about in the 2006 elections. But you’ll remember that from September 11th, 2001 until August 28th of 2005, one was unpatriotic if you criticized the Bush administration or really any of the actions taken by our government. So, the Democratic Party and much of the American media was quite timid in terms of its critique of the administration.

But what Katrina and the bungling of Katrina does is it provides a wedge that opens the door. And the criticisms start to flow from CNN, from– and then from the Democratic Party. Now, the sad and scary thing is that all of these issues, urbanism, race, class, environmentalism which were the true core issues that made Katrina possible get lost. Because what the Democratic Party makes the choice to do is to use that wedge as an opportunity to critique Iraq. Not that it’s– I mean, it’s fine, right? But they use that. And so then Iraq becomes the story of the 2006 elections.

BILL MOYERS: At the expense of Katrina?

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: At the expense of Katrina. And all the lessons that Katrina had the capacity to teach us about domestic politics.

I think there’s a lot to that, and I’ve also argued that Katrina was the key turning point for Bush’s political fortunes. It’s sad to see how little the Democratic leadership has done with the opportunity; it suggests they haven’t understood much of anything about the last six years.

There was — and maybe there still is — an opportunity for tying it all together. I’m no political consulting whiz, but it might be something like for real security at home, against vainglorious and selfish politics abroad, for a sustainable future, against circling the wagons and living life under siege, for recommitting to the values of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the people of the United States, against sliding towards a national security and surveillance state run by and for corporations and political elites.

And for impeaching Bush and Cheney for their crimes and their neglect of their duties to the Constitution and the people of the United States, and against spending any more time finding excuses not to.

Anyhow, more excerpts at Recording Katrina — or just go watch the whole thing.

My state senator, Jamie Raskin (MD District 20), visited a forum on impeachment at Montgomery College on April 26; a video of his remarks and discussion with the audience was recently posted by the Takoma Park Impeach Bush and Cheney organization.

After some remarks about an electoral state compact idea he’s working for*, Raskin turned to the subject of the forum: impeachment. As a constitutional scholar, he has very good answers to many common objections to impeachment per se:

The Constitution was designed not in such a way that impeachment represented some kind of crisis; people say “you can’t do impeachment, because that will cause a constitutional crisis.” On the contrary! Impeachment is the tool we use to prevent a constitutional crisis because you’ve got a President who is drunk on his own power and has run away with the resources of the people.

Raskin also went over the history of impeachment in the U.S.: nine presidents have had articles of impeachment presented against them, with only two (Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton) actually being impeached — i.e., the process leaving the House and reaching the Senate for trial. Raskin — having enumerated charges of torture, lawless and warrantless wiretapping, the Iraq war, and criminal negligence in connection with Katrina and its aftermath, commented:

Some people’s objections are “how can you say that anything impeachable has been going on?” And there we’re just dealing with, you know, parallel universes… Nothing that anybody has ever been impeached for comes remotely close to the things that President Bush and Dick Cheney and this administration have done. Nothing even close.

Raskin made some of his most interesting points in rebutting the notion — I’m paraphrasing here — “Why not just wait for the presidential elections? Let’s not mess up our chances in ‘08.” Raskin:

It’s a dangerous thing for a democracy to allow major transgressions of the constitutional rule of law to take place.

You know, conservatives love this theory of crime called the “broken windows” theory, which James Wilson wrote about. The idea is there are small offenses like graffiti, or somebody breaks a window — you’ve got to bring the full force of the law down very quickly because if you leave the graffiti up or the broken windows up, then that leads to people hopping the turnstile, shoplifting, armed robbery, and drug dealing and so on. And you know I think there’s something to that, but surely we can apply the “broken windows” theory to the presidency of the United States.

Are we going to allow people to come into office through something very close to a stolen election and then to defy the rule of law every step along the way, and to plunge the nation into aggressive war through a new doctrine of preemption? I don’t know. That’s a dangerous, dangerous thing just to allow. At very least, the

moral case and the political case for impeachment must be made, so people understand it.

Whether or not it’s followed through or not, it’s very important not to say “well, yeah, Bill Clinton lied under oath about whether or not he had an affair of sorts with an intern; that’s impeachable. But the loss of thousands of lives and putting people into secret prisons and presiding over atrocities against civilians in a foreign country, well, you know, that’s neither here nor there.

Raskin makes a lot of important points here, I think, but particularly at the end. The sheer scale of what Bush and Cheney have done — a fraudulent war, trampling human rights, diminishing our rights in this country, brazenly breaking the law, squandering our reputation abroad — has sometimes led to a kind of perversely fatalistic “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown politics” attitude among many. Are we saying some constitutional betrayals are too big to be impeachable?

The result is that this country is better right now at arresting a kid for eating french fries in the Metro than at saying “no more” to a president hell bent on asserting the “right” to do whatever illegal, immoral thing comes into his head (or to fiddle while a city drowns). It’s important — it’s essential — for the American people to regain the reins of political power and defend our Constitution and our rights from rogue usurpers like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

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* Nutshell version: states agree to instruct electors to vote for the national popular vote winner. At this point I don’t support this idea, but I will look in to it more closely to see if I understand it correctly and if my concerns are misplaced.
EDITS, 6/7: “rebutting the notion” for “answering the question” — the Raskin quote was made in the course of his prepared remarks, not in answer to an audience question; “Chinatown” allusion spelled out.

UPDATE, 6/7: CROSSPOSTED by “Chip” to AfterDowningStreet.com, with acknowledgement. I’m glad Raskin’s remarks will reach a wider audience.

The 2006 Koufax nominations are now open at “Wampum,” which hosts this extravaganza annually. As the announcement states,

The Koufax Awards are named for Sandy Koufax, one of the greatest left handed pitchers of all time. They are intended to honor the best blogs and bloggers of the left. At the core, the Koufax Awards are meant to be an opportunity to say nice things about your favorite bloggers and to provide a bit of recognition for the folks who provide us with daily information, insight, and entertainment. The awards are supposed to be fun for us and fun for you.

Categories are explained in more detail in the linked post. The explanatory blurbs and introductions below are written as if new readers might check this out — which I hope they will, because I’ll link to this from my nomination comment at “Wampum”. Herewith my nominations for 2006:

Best Blog —The Sideshow (Avedon Carol), The Carpetbagger Report (Steve Benen), Balkinization (Jack Balkin et al)

Sideshow and Carpetbagger two are definitely among my “go to” blogs, sifting an incredible range of news and writing for the nuggets that sum it all up that day, and adding either sharp, quick commentary and sometimes essay-length analysis along with it. Balkinization will be introduced in more detail below; overall, it runs away with my personal nominations list.

Best Blog — Pro Division — Talking Points Memo

Far and away. Between this and the above three, you see close to half of what I look at each day. (UPDATE, 1/17: ineligible! …because it won last year)

Best Blog Community — KnoxViews

A while after East Tennessean R. Neal ended his own blog (”Southknoxbubba”), he came back with “knoxviews”, but as the category nomination indicates, it was a different kind of site: a blog community where multitudes could sign up to add their own posts to the front page feed. (Full disclosure: I’m a member– having grown up in Oak Ridge, TN — albeit an infrequent contributor.) To my mind, it’s a huge success: the site is lively without being overwhelming. While contributors’ interests run the gamut,, the site is a particularly good resource for any and all interested in Tennessee politics. The tenor of most contributors’ politics is generally but by no means exclusively leftish; the key thing is that while there are inevitably exceptions to the rule, political arguments generally remain well-spoken and polite.

Best Writing — Jim Henley (”Unqualified Offerings”), digby (”Hullaballoo”), Roy Edroso (”alicublog”), Marty Lederman (”Balkinization”), Scott Horton (”Balkinization”), James Wolcott (Vanity Fair), Teresa Nielsen Hayden (”Making Light”)

Here’s 50% of the rest of what I look at each day. 3 semi-amateur, 4 professional, 1 libertarian, 2 humorists, 2 lawyers, 1 editor, all excellent writers.

Best Post —There are so many, of course, but looking through my “worth reading” posts and others, here’s a list of some that impressed me last year:

• Ticking Bombast (Jim Henley, “Unqualified Offerings”) — a discussion of the “ticking time bomb” fallacy, later extended and revised for Reason Magazine.
  
• I am a Muslim (Aziz Poonawalla, at Daily Kos) — a typically constructive, thoughtful rejoinder to “I am a Jew” (also worth reading) by practicing Muslim, Howard Dean supporter, and committed Texan Aziz Poonawalla.
• This is no fun (John Cole, “Balloon Juice”) — an (ex-)Republican looks back in anger at what’s become of his party.
• Why I blog (Teresa Nielsen Hayden, “Making Light”) — A manifesto for writing about stories that matter, whether the professional media or public relations firms do or not.
• Katrina and the common good (Boyd Blundell, “After the Levees” at TPM Cafe) — Why Katrina was a tipping point for the Bush White House, and what that says about America.*

Best Series — The Talking Dog interviews

…with people knowledgeable about “legal issues and related matters associated with the ‘war on terror.’” Actual, valuable journalism, committed by one of us nasty bloggers. The last interview of 2006 was with Trevor Paglen; links to previous ones can be found at the end of that post or in the sidebar.

Best Single Issue Blog — Balkinization (law), Global Guerrillas (security, terrorism)

Balkinization has become nothing less than a profound service to civil society in the United States, by providing timely, understandable legal and constitutional analysis of issues of the day. While I’ve mentioned Lederman and Horton in particular, all the contributors, including of course founder Jack Balkin, are able and eloquent writers. See an earlier post for an introduction to Global Guerrillas.

Best Group Blog — Balkinization

See above. Relevant to the “group” part is that contributors often take up each other’s posts for further comment in post form.

Most Humorous Blog — alicublog (Roy Edroso)

Edroso deserves a medal for reliably skewering right-wing bloggers and writers like Glenn Reynolds, Jonah Goldberg, Stanley Kurtz, Ann Althouse and others. His “more in contempt than in anger” tone and his refusal to let right wingers get away with putting every single cultural item on a conservative/good to liberal/bad scale are two of the characteristic features of his writing. I can’t really explain or analyze why (I think) he’s funny. He just is. Go read him.

Most Humorous Post — Again, sifted from my “Good for a grin” and “Heh. Indeed” posts:

• Meet the Press in Hell (World O’Crap) — “Russert: Mr. Satan, let’s start with you.”
• Without all of you my career could never have gotten this far (Roy Edroso, “alicublog”) — “What bargain? Who are you?”
• Hard Core (T.A. Frank, “Showdown ‘06″, Washington Monthly) — on people still supporting Bush:“…the image that comes to mind is that of a pot left accidentally on a burner, leaving only a strange, ugly clump. “You’ll never pry me loose,” it says. “I’m your base.”
• I’m Offended (Chris Bertram, “Crooked Timber”) — all-purpose “bad other culture” post, e.g., “To those who say that our side has also erred, I agree: there have been errors of judgement. But if anything our mistake has been to do too little and too late.”

Most Deserving of Wider Recognition — Fact-esque

Not sure it’s right to say eRobin “plod[s] away in wilderness, or is yet to be discovered,” but I don’t think she’s as widely known as she deserves to be. Her blog combines excellent political and issues analysis with a signature dose of activism — how, where, and when you, the reader, can do something about what you’ve just read. (Full disclosure: eRobin nominated me for this category, too; thanks!)

Best Consonant Level Blog — The Sideshow (Avedon Carol), The Carpetbagger Report

The category is for moderate-sized blogs which have not yet, or perhaps are happy not to, reach the ranks of the “A-listers.” As I said above, these two are definitely among my “go to” blogs. I should also say that (1) I find myself thinking “I should write about that” and find these two have beat me to it, but also (2) Ms. Carol, in particular, has often linked to items of my own.

Best Expert Blog — Schneier on Security, RealClimate

Bruce Schneier writes clearly about security — from private to national — which often means he’s skeptical of current U.S. policies. RealClimate is “climate science from climate scientists,” and is as valuable in its way as “Balkinization” is for legal and constitutional issues.

Best Human Equality Blog — All Facts & Opinions (Natalie Davis), Andrew Sullivan

Although Natalie has recently been in more of a musical frame of mind, she’s a reliable and eloquent voice for gay issues, and particularly for full equality in matters of marriage and religious worship. Andrew Sullivan has been instrumental in teaching mainstream America about gay rights, particularly marriage rights. Sullivan has also been outstanding on what is perhaps the ultimate human equality issue — torture and other prisoner abuse. The difficulty with a “Koufax” for Sullivan, of course, is that he’s not “of the left” per se, and was in fact a rather caustic and even intolerant critic of the left during the run-up to the Iraq war, which he supported. I’ll leave it to others to decide how critical that history is to them.

Best Coverage of State or Local Issues — Free State Politics (Maryland), Jousting for Justice (Maryland), KnoxViews (Tennessee/East Tennessee), Facing South (Southern U.S./Gulf Coast/New Orleans)

Of these, only Free State Politics is completely focused on its geographic area, but local and state coverage is a signature feature of all of them. Knoxviews accomplishes that using the “swarm” approach; one or the other of its (generally) East Tennessee members will usually cover any interesting state or local news item, and will generally get quite a bit of comment about it. “Jousting for Justice” is also a blog community, but the lion’s share of local coverage is done by founder and Baltimore area activist Stephanie Dray. Free State Politics is a group blog of a number leftish Maryland bloggers. (Full disclosure: I’m a member; although I’ve contributed only a few posts so far, I think they’ve been worthwhile.) Facing South is the most successful blog started by an institution (Institute for Southern Studies) that I’m familiar with; above all, their coverage of post-Katrina New Orleans is second to none.

Possibly the most brilliant thing ever to happen to the blogosphere. (Insert your own joke there.) The site is still live, but there haven’t been new posts since last July.

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* Some of my own 2006 posts that I think were pretty good: Remember Symbol Susan?; Judgment at Nuremberg; Darfur rally… “in the shadow of Iraq”; Lincoln v. Bush; How DINOs evolve, how they go extinct. For a listing of all of what I think are my better posts, go to “Selected Posts.”
** Leo Strauss is a German-Jewish political philosopher viewed by many as the ur-neocon; “Stiftung” means foundation; however, the blog and site are by no means a tribute to neoconservatism.
EDIT, 1/16: Zossen entry rewritten, footnote added.

Josh Marshall asks an interesting question at TPMCafe:

…far from having the political capital he boasted of in November 2004, President Bush is positively radioactive in much of the country. Certainly, he is more consistently unpopular than probably any president in modern American history. So here’s the question. Was there a key galvanizing event? And if so, what was it? Katrina? The failed Social Security gambit? Abramoff? Or was it simply the long political fuse of Iraq finally catching up with the president? Certainly all these events and trends played a role. But what was the tipping point? Looking back, what mattered most?

“Tipping point” is an interesting concept; whole books have been written about it, and there are certainly any number of web sites and articles applying the idea to social change, climate change, and epidemics, to name a few. Think of a penny balanced on its edge; with just a small push at this tipping point, it falls heads or tails.

But usually tipping point also means that once the tipping’s done, a new equilibrium rules: i.e., the penny lies flat, heads or tails. It seems to me that both the 2000 and 2004 elections showed that the whole country was roughly balanced at a tipping point — but throughout Bush’s first term. And without at least two photo finishes in Montana and Virginia, the 2006 election wouldn’t have quite the same promise of being a watershed event (similar notion, I think) in its own right. So being at a “tipping point” has become a political way of life in this country.

Still, there’s an undeniable change of momentum, and Marshall proposes a number of events that may have provided the impetus. I’d add at least a few other suggestions: Cindy Sheehan’s vigil at Bush’s Crawford ranch (August 2005) , the Scooter Libby indictment (October 2005), the Samarra mosque bombing (February 2006) the Foley scandal (September 2006), and the overwhelming 90-9 passage of the McCain amendment prohibiting torture by US personnel (October 2005).

You don’t have to agree with Sheehan on every count to acknowledge that her vigil was supremely effective political theater. The symbolism and, yes, spectacle of a dead soldier’s mother confronting a president off on yet another vacation resulted in a public relations shellacking for Rove and Bush that they never did figure out how to address. At least as important, she was an inspirational rallying point when others were ready to throw up their hands and just wonder what the matter was with Kansas, so to speak. Camp Casey may have been a “little tipping point” between giving up and not giving up for a lot of people.

That isn’t to say the other events listed above didn’t play important roles, too. The Social Security debate showed what even a humbled Democratic Party could do if it stuck together and stuck to its guns about an issue. The Schiavo travesty was an extremely sharp reminder of the Bush administration’s identification with and service to its radical base. It’s hard to classify a continuous debacle like Iraq as a “tipping point,” but the Samarra mosque bombing in February 2006 was at least one of several waypoints towards irrevocable civil war and the attendant American public disillusionment. For all that Senator McCain was so deeply disappointing later on in his support for the Military Commissions Act, the McCain amendment vote was a rare but important legislative defeat for the Bush administration, and showed there was the possibility of a broad coalition against human rights abuses by this country. And the Foley scandal might deserve to be the runnerup; it dominated news coverage, undercut GOP claims to the “moral values” vote, and it was far more easy to understand than the convoluted webs of corruption woven by the likes of Abramoff and DeLay.

But the big tipping point, I think, hit with hurricane force. It was the Katrina disaster that irrevocably lost Bush the respect of his electorate, and knocked a lot of the swagger out from under the “drown the government” crowd that supplies half of the Republican Party’s ideology. As Boyd Blundell wrote in May, Katrina

…offered irrefutable images that [Bush] was not looking after the common good. It undermined the average American’s self-image of being part of a country that actually worked. Without consciously changing their mind on a single policy, a good quarter of the country just stopped believing in the President.

It turned out Americans didn’t like seeing their government fail at essential services; they were, in fact, profoundly ashamed. Even if that memory has receded more than it should have, Katrina tipped the scales from Bush the Bold to Bush the Bumbler, and crucially had nothing to do with terrorism or Iraq — for which Bush deserved a failing grade as well, but which had been politicized seemingly beyond all hope of consensus.

Katrina, by contrast, was an undeniable, consensus disaster of biblical proportion — with an equally undeniable, consensus verdict that knaves and fools were “leading” the country as the levees broke. While Bush’s approval ratings were already declining by late August 2005, it never recovered from the additional hit Katrina delivered. I’d argue that Katrina provided the point of comparison and even, for many, the psychological permission to realize that Bush was likely a screwup in Iraq as well.

Katrina was and remains a breach of faith between a government and its people, and I think it’s not “merely” right for Democrats to address it — it’s politically smart to do so. Democrats must establish themselves as the “can do” party, and whatever they can do in the Gulf coast will simultaneously remind voters of the “can’t do” party. Whether or not that translates into winning a particular Louisiana or Missisissippi election down the road, it could be a “tipping point” too: reminding voters of what a government with and by adults can look like, and helping them decide that’s the kind of government they want.

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NOTE: “never recovered” leads to a graph of presidential approval ratings by Charles Franklin (”Political Arithmetik”), a UW political science professor who puts Katrina more in the middle of the pack of “galvanizing moments”: Katrina was a substantial “hit” to approval after a decent summer in which the approval decline had flattened out a little bit (though not started back up) after a very poor winter and spring that included the failed social security reform. However, “never recovered” seems a fair reading of the graph as well. DemFromCT (”The Next Hurrah”) cites Gallup findings suggesting that it wasn’t Bush’s job approval ratings that changed so much — just evaluations of his competency and leadership.
UPDATE, 12/28: Marshall links to several responses including ones by Mark Schmitt and Todd Gitlin. For his own part, Marshall agrees with a reader that the Social Security debate was key, pointing out that Bush’s fortunes were declining before Katrina. Elsewhere, digby bends the rules and IDs the pre-2004 election Duelfer report officially concluding there were no Iraqi WMD (“it just took a while to sink in.”)

Robert Reich lays out a case for caution in the American Prospect:

The 2008 Presidential campaign began yesterday. Whatever the Democrats do with their new-found congressional power over the next two years, it will be with the big 2008 prize in mind.

Some Democrats want to expose the malfeasance and nonfeasance of the Bush Administration — find out who really knew what and when with regard to weapons of mass destruction, Abu Graahb, Katrina, payoffs to Abramoff, and all the other rot. That’s understandable, but it would be far better if Democrats used their new-found power to lay out a new agenda for America.

Reich is ordinarily smarter than this, I think. First off, the 2008 Presidential campaign is not the be-all and end-all of Democratic aspirations. There is some work to be done and some respect to be re-earned right now by a party that has not acquitted itself very well as an opposition party in the Bush era — even when it had a Senate majority.

I’m all for concrete achievements first and foremost; raise the minimum wage, fix Medicare, fix the alternative minimum tax, render aid to the Gulf Coast, force an Iraq withdrawal plan on Bush, and (in my opinion) roll back corporate and upper income tax cuts. That way Democrats earn the mantle of a “can do” party to contrast with GOP fecklessness and incompetence.

But I’m not for setting up false dichotomies between “new agenda” and “investigations” as we do so, because if we don’t know exactly what went wrong, we can’t hope to fix it, either. That goes for Katrina and the New Orleans levees, that goes for the misuse and politicization of intelligence, that goes for the conduct of the war in Iraq, that goes for warrantless domestic surveillance and other abuses of executive power, that goes for torture and death in American custody.

There’s an even deeper reason to investigate and, when appropriate, apportion blame without fear or favor. It’s because we owe it not just to this electorate but to future electorates to draw a line in the sand wherever we can and say “this must not ever happen again”: torture, lawlessness, cronyism that costs lives. That’s not some kind of frivolous waste of time, that’s the solemn duty of newly elected and re-elected Representatives and Senators. We can’t afford to let cries and lies of “partisanship” get in the way of that, and Reich has not rendered his party, his country, or his ideals a service by arguing otherwise. He concludes,

That’s what the election of 2008, which started yesterday, ought to be about.

Possibly so — but this business of always looking to the next election overlooks our responsibility to this one. We ought to live up to the election of 2006 first, and then worry about 2008. That’s certainly what we owe the voters of 2006 — and I think it’s actually better politics as well.

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NOTE: Reich via “Crooks and Liars.”
UPDATE, 11/14: I’m somewhat surprised to see I’m more in agreement with Peter Beinart on this than I am with Robert Reich.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been helping out now and then with a second blog about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. It’s called “Recording Katrina,” and our description of it is

A collection of survivors’ stories and non-traditional reporting on the recovery effort in the Gulf.

The effort was fellow “RK” blogger eRobin’s (”fact-esque“) idea. We were both outraged by what we were seeing in the news in the first weeks after the hurricane hit, the levees broke, and the Bush administration proved so incompetent and venal at everything (again).

We were moved by the raw, first-person accounts we were finding around the Internet which we had started to mention in posts on our blogs, and we decided to collect links and excerpts in one place. Soon after, we were joined by riggsveda (”it’s my country, too“) and thatfarmgirl, who have posted first-person accounts about what they saw and learned as volunteers. Now riggsveda is adding new entries from her time in Louisiana in October, 2005.

Over time we’ve also included other “nontraditional” takes on Katrina, including everything from activist organization press releases, and key official documents and reports, to satellite photographs, innovative or freelance journalism, and more. When a post isn’t a narrative by one of us, I think we’ve succeeded in keeping our own commentary to a minimum and letting the accounts and documents we’ve found speak for themselves. We haven’t been all that different from everyone else in moving on to other topics as well, but maintaining the site challenged us to keep paying attention to the story and continue recording what we found.

We’re all pleased now to have drawn the notice of the New York Inquirer (“The first all-online alternative weekly”; “We don’t break news — we put news back together”) where Andrew Bast and his team have assembled a feature one-year retrospective on the disaster: “Katrina: One year later, shameless silence.” It’s a perfect fit between two non-traditional news gathering teams — Bast complimented “Recording Katrina” as a great resource as he researched the series, and the Inquirer will run one of riggsveda’s accounts on Thursday. We thank him in advance for including riggsveda’s story and mentioning our group blog, and invite everyone to have a look both at the Inquirer series and at “Recording Katrina.”

Personally, the main way I’d like to see “Recording Katrina” improve is to get some Gulf Coast residents and/or Katrina survivors to join us. If you’re interested, leave a comment here or e-mail one of us, and we’ll let you know.

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CROSSPOSTED in revised form at “Recording Katrina.” NOTE: banner by permission of the New York Inquirer.

From the announcement:

Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch has published “One Year after Katrina” (pdf), a 96-page report that reveals the state of Gulf Coast rebuilding on the anniversary of the storm. Through statistics, status reports, in-depth investigations, and profiles of community leaders, “One Year After Katrina highlights the challenges ahead for a just and sustainable renewal.

The report analyzes over 250 indicators and reports on 13 major issue areas, including Demographics, Housing, Economy, Schools, Healthcare, Arts and Hurricane Readiness. The report also lists an index of some of the organizations working on Gulf Coast issues.

From the introduction to the report (.pdf file):

A year after Katrina, how much progress has New Orleans and the Gulf Coast made?To answer this question, the Institute analyzed over 200 indicators in 13 categories. We have also conducted status reports on key Gulf issues, launched in-depth investigations into the region’s economic power brokers and interviewed leading community activists in the Gulf region.

The conclusion is unavoidable and devastating: One year later, New Orleans and the Gulf region still face basic, fundamental barriers to renewal. Further, lack of federal leadership and misplaced priorities are preventing the region from achieving a vibrant future. For example:

Lack of HOUSING still keeps tens of thousands of Gulf residents from coming back home. Aid for homeowners in Louisiana and Mississippi was approved 10 months after the storms, and none has been disbursed. Little money has been earmarked for rebuilding rental units—none in Mississippi— and rents are skyrocketing. Eighty percent of public housing in New Orleans is still closed, despite minimal storm damage, and Mississippi residents learned that three coastal facilities will be shut down soon.

Problems continue to plague SCHOOLS in the region, making it difficult for many families to return. Only 57 of the 117 public schools in New Orleans before Katrina are scheduled to open in the 2006-2007 school year.

CONTRACTING SCANDALS and other special-interest dealings continue to plague the recovery. Institute analysis has found $136.7 million in corporate fraud in Katrina-related contracts, and government investigators have highlighted contracts worth $428.7 million that are troubling due to lack of oversight or misappropriation. Altogether, the Institute finds that corporate contracting abuse has cost taxpayers 50 times more than widely-publicized scandals involving individuals wrongfully collecting assistance.

Threats to the ENVIRONMENT are exposing residents to a wide range of toxins and making many think twice about returning to the region. Federal officials also have yet to commit the resources to restore coastal wetlands—the region’s best defense against future storms.

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CROSSPOSTED from Recording Katrina.

One of the Hurricane Katrina stories I thought was the “Kitty Genovese story of our times” isn’t going away. On Saturday, the Washington Post published an AP story about the repercussions of a September 1, 2005 incident on the bridge from New Orleans to Gretna, Louisiana. From La. Police Who Turned Away Katrina Victims Face Inquiry:

A grand jury will investigate last year’s blockade of a Mississippi River bridge by armed police officers who turned back Hurricane Katrina evacuees trying to flee New Orleans.

Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan declined to reveal any details of the investigation on Thursday.

The grand jury will not begin the investigation next week, but it will start soon, said Leatrice Dupre, spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office.

Good. No: excellent. And “turned back” isn’t quite the word for it. Lorrie Beth Slonsky — a paramedic from the Bay Area in New Orleans for a convention when the hurricane hit — recounted what happened to “This American Life” last year*:

SLONSKY: So we are going through town and people *saw* us and thought, “Hm, you know, here come some folks, they must know something,” so our numbers doubled, from probably about 200 and then doubled again, so we were probably about 800 to a thousand people, marching up to the bridge. When we got to the bridge, there was the armed Gretna sherriffs, and they had formed a line at the foot of the bridge–

BLUMBERG: Uh-huh–

SLONSKY: –so even before we could *explain* what we wanted or what we had heard, that’s when they began firing the weapons. Gretna police *shot* at us and said, “Get away, get away, you *cannot* come on the bridge.” [...]

SLONSKY: And when we approached and had them in conversation, the sherriff informed us that there *were* no buses, that the police commander had lied to us, and when — Larry questioned, it’s like “Can we just ask you *why* we can’t cross the bridge?” because there was *no* traffic, very little traffic on this six-lane highway, and they said that — [sighs] “You are *not* crossing this bridge. We are *not* turning the West Bank into another Superdome.” [fierce] And to *us*, when they said that, that was *absolutely* these were code words for, “If you’re poor, and you’re black, you are *not* getting out of New Orleans, you are *not* coming to our territory.”

Last year, I titled a blog post about the Gretna incident “Louisiana mayor, sheriff, police chief wanted for questioning,” adding “By me, anyway.” It’s nice to see a district attorney agrees.

In late July, the United Nations Human Rights Committee noted both the Gretna incident and another one (U.N. Panel takes U.S. to task over Katrina, AP, Bradley Klapper):

The U.N. panel said it wants to be informed of the results of inquiries into the alleged failure to evacuate inmates from a prison, and into allegations that authorities did not allow New Orleans residents to cross a bridge into Gretna, La.

I’m guessing the prison is the Orleans Parish Templeman III facility; Human Rights Watch reported that hundreds of prisoners there were abandoned to the rising flood waters after the levees broke. I hope that sheriff and prison warden are held accountable as well.

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* Transcript by “bellatrys.”

UPDATES, 8/9: In comments, eRobin reminds me that Gretna police turning away the refugees wasn’t the end of it. The group formed a small community down the freeway, scavenging supplies and improvising shelter. Then:

Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, “Get off the fucking freeway”. A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water.

Via our joint blog, “Recording Katrina,” which we’ve kept updated with fresh non-mainstream media news about the disaster’s aftermath.

Also, the New Republic has an excellent article by David Morton (”Empire Falls“) on the Templeman III incident, and the background and future of the Orleans Parish jails as the engine for a New Orleans political machine. The issue’s lead editorial, “Lost City,” is also eloquent and on target: “If Katrina suggested a rot in American society–a decrepit federal government, a blunted sense of social solidarity, the entrenchment of poverty–the aftermath has confirmed it.”