Those who do not learn from history are stupid
It’s difficult for me to believe that anyone reading my lowly blog hasn’t already seen Hunter’s front-page Daily Kos diary responding to a post at Blogs for Bush called “Do the Democrats Want a Civil War?” But read it if you haven’t.
All I have to add is, has education gotten so bad that Republicans have forgotten what happened to the last people to declare civil war on the United States of America?
A comment I make on the Pre$$titutes article on right-wing revisionism of post-Katrina violence in New Orleans (“Last I looked, New Orleans was still flooded. Did the media make that up?”) gets picked up in a front-pager’s diary at Daily Kos pimping Pre$$titutes, which, in turn, gets linked from Atrios.
Very strange to see your own words quoted by someone.
Via Holden at First Draft, GlobalSecurity.org crunches the numbers from the General Accountability Office (still referred to as the General Accounting Office in the report) to estimate that the armed services have purchased about 250,000 “small- and medium-calibre ammunitions” (bullets) for each of the estimated 20,000 insurgents killed in Iraq — more than five billion bullets between 2002 and 2005.
The standard-issue M16A2 rifle fires NATO-compatible 5.56mm cartridges. The preferred cartridge for the M16A2 is the M855, which weighs 12.31gm (including the case, bullet, and propellant). They’re 57.4mm long; the case is 9.7mm in diamter.
A quarter of a million such rounds would weigh 3,077.5kg — almost 6,800lbs — not as much as an original Hummer or an H2, but about 1,000lbs more than an H3. A single bullet weighing that much would be 3.616m (almost 12 feet) tall and 550mm (just over 2 feet) in diameter. A small — very heavy — missile, in other words. Essentially, we’re dropping an anvil on them.
Retail price for each round is about a quarter: that’s $62,500 in bullets per insurgent.
I should mention that the figures here are based entirely on the smaller rounds used by US forces. “Small- and medium-” actually includes the larger 7.62mm rounds used by some weapons and .50cal ammunition for machineguns. But I like to err on the low side in these types of calculations.
MORE NUMBERS: At the 800 round per minute rate of fire for an M16A2, 250,000 rounds is nearly 5.25 hours of continuous, fully-automatic fire for each dead insurgent. The 820-foot Crystal Serenity of the Crystal Cruises passenger line weighs 68,000 tons, about the same as the combined weight of 250,000 rounds for each of the 20,000 estimated Iraqi insurgents killed.
A number of pictures have come out of tightly-orchestrated photo ops the past couple of years showing President Bush with ringy, halo-like things behind him. The image on the left is from 2003, by AP photographer Charles Dharapak. On the right is my own version, using a slightly different circular object.
During today’s White House Press Briefing, ABC Correspondent Terry Moran said this of President Bush’s plan to visit Texas in the wake of Hurricane Rita: “But it sounds like a bit of a photo op, one that he’d prefer over playing the guitar at the airport photo op before Katrina.”
Regrettably, Mr. Moran’s chronology is slightly off. The photo of Bush playing a guitar by AP Photo/ABC News correspondent Martha Raddatz was taken in San Diego Tuesday, August 30, more than a day after Katrina had hit the Gulf Coast, more than 24 hours after portions of New Orleans were under water. He wasn’t pretending to strum as the biggest (at the time) hurricane to hit the US in recent history was still offshore, he was hamming it up while people were dying in their houses because there weren’t enough troops in place to rescue them.
Mr. Abrams:
In last week’s “Your Rebuttal” you countered J. Doyle’s comparison of the amount of coverage given to Natalee Holloway’s disappearance versus the devastation of Hurricane Katrina with the remark that “it is hard to argue that we’re suggesting it is on a par” since you had done “weeks” of Katrina coverage.
At the time you made that statement, the number of weeks your show had done on Katrina was just about three. You’ve been covering Natalee Holloway’s disappearance for over three months, virtually non-stop except for the break caused by Hurricane Katrina. It’s been your lead story for much of that time, as well as a major story for Joe Scarborough, Rita Cosby, Larry King, Nancy Grace, and Greta van Sustern.
The question isn’t whether you’ve given Natalee as much time as Katrina. It’s a simple fact — based on the number of hours of coverage — that your show hasn’t spent even a fraction of the time on Katrina that you’ve spent on Natalee.
The fact that a major hurricane was about to hit the Gulf Coast of the United States wasn’t even mentioned in your show the Friday before the Hurricane. What was? Natalee Holloway. And that was true across the board for all of the people I mentioned above. You missed the legal problems for people forced to evacuate their homes, issues with lost public records, prisoner and sex offender transfers, all of that, because you chose to stick with the story of a girl who undoubtedly got murdered in Aruba. Last year there were 300 murders in New Orleans alone. Where were you then?
Three days before Hurricane Katrina devastated much of the Gulf Coast and swamped New Orleans, almost every “news” discussion show on cable was talking about the Natalee Holloway missing persons case, just as they’d done for most of the previous three months.
Hannity, van Sustern, Grace, King, Abrams, Cosby, Scarborough. Much of their summer had been spent talking about Aruba. If people in New Orleans had been watching them for “information” they’d have been screwed.
And, once the disaster struck — just as after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 — people wondered if it meant that a new dedication to real issues was going to take hold. Skeptics like myself were doubtful, but I hoped that given the scale of the disaster that it might deserve at least an equal amount of time as the Holloway case has. We have been proven, regretfully, wrong.
Of the seven shows we picked who aired substantial reports on Holloway the Friday before the hurricane hit Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, four of them have already gone back to the story, adding in yet another MWF (missing white female) in most cases. And they all did it last week, only a couple of weeks after Katrina struck.
FOX’s Greta van Sustern had Beth Holloway Twitty (Natalee’s mother) on as a guest Friday, 16 September, after congratulating herself for not having any shows on the subject since the storm (although she said “we monitor it daily”). Twitty, according to van Sustern, “understood this.” But c’mon now, get over it, N’awlins!
CNN’s Nancy Grace beat everyone to the punch on 13 September — two weeks and a day after Katrina — devoting the last quarter of her show to an interview with Twitty, after spending the rest of the program on the real — but somehow predictable for Grace — issue of sex offenders spread out over the country as evacuees. Twitty makes the charge that the news focus on Katrina gave cover to the Aruban government to let the suspects in her daughter’s disappearance go. Neat tie-in.
On MSNBC, Rita Cosby took up the gauntlet the next day (14 September) while bodies were still floating in the canals of Bayou St. John. In a short segment, she talked to both Twitty and Antonio Carlo, the attorney for Joran van der Sloot, the primary suspect in Holloway’s disappearance. Again, the idea that the press focus on Katrina took the heat off the Aruban authorities was brought forth, this time by Cosby.
That same night, Dan Abrams of MSNBC interviewed Twitty. At the end of the interview he remarked:
I can just tell you that even in the aftermath of the hurricane we were still getting a lot of e-mails from people saying please have Beth back on. Please update us on the story. Let us know whats going on.
The next night, he took some flak for the piece (emphasis added:
Last night I spoke to Beth Holloway Twitty, the mother of missing Alabama student Natalee Holloway, missing from Aruba since May 30.
Jeanmarie Miller from Flint, Michigan, “Natalees mother made a comment that the Aruban government was trying to hide behind Katrina in making some of the recent rulings in the cases against Joran van der Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers. Was she suggesting that the Aruban justice system should have been put on hold until her daughters story was once again front page news?”
Howard Aronoff, “I object to you continuing to allow Natalees mother, Beth, to make totally unsubstantiated claims that Joran van der Sloot and the two Kalpoe brothers raped and killed Natalee. She continues to refer to a myriad of statements made by the three, which support the claim. I cant recall a single time that these so-called statements were acknowledged by Aruban officials. At best they are the result of leaks from unauthorized people and might even be invented out of thin air.”
Howard, youre right that theyre unsubstantiated and I made that point, but regardless, dont expect the Aruban authorities to acknowledge it the same way American authorities wouldnt either. I also dont care if they were leaked by unauthorized individuals. I only care if it is true. And youre right. We do not know if it is true. And thats why we had on his lawyer tonight.
From Beckley, West Virginia, Frances Thompson. “I know the Katrina coverage and Supreme Court coverage is more important right now, but I appreciate the time you gave to let us know how things are going in the Natalee Holloway case.”
But J. Doyle from San Francisco, “Taking time away from the tragedy of likely thousands of mainly poor African Americans to again present the Aruban story suggests the disappearance of one rich white girl is somehow on par. It is not.”
Well considering it is the first time we did a segment on it after weeks of 24-hour Katrina coverage, it is hard to argue that were suggesting it is on par and I think actually I made the point in response to someone who wrote in that many of my viewers probably disagree that were not doing enough Natalee Holloway coverage.
A number of you writing saying you want more, more, more. Ive got to tell you, I dont think the majority of you want that, but I know, I know. People are going to write in and say yes you do.
That would be two weeks of coverage of Hurricane Katrina versus three months of Natalee Holloway coverage.
I wasn’t at the National Conference of Editorial Writers convention last week, so I can’t verify the accuracy of the account from Linda Seebach of Denver’s Rocky Mountain News in today’s Oregonian.
She writes that during a panel on challenges facing Portland, political pollster Tim Hibbits “observed dryly that politics in Portland covers the full range of opinion from left to far left to ultraleft.” If her representation is accurate — and if Hibbits was being serious — then there is a definite problem with his credibility from here on out, considering that more than a quarter of Multnomah County’s voters chose the Bush/Cheney box in the 2004 general election. They weren’t all in Gresham. I’m inclined to believe Seebach’s reporting here; aside from the fact that she comes from the conservative side of the fence herself, Hibbits has little good to say about liberals in general.
Seebach also trusts Hibbits for the story about Tom Potter meeting with the Critical Mass bike riders before business leaders. Never mind that Potter had been meeting with a wide variety of people in business and private forums during the two phases of his campaign for mayor, it’s a fun story for someone like Hibbits to tell as an example of how loony the city government is. And gullible people like Seebach — who admits to being surprised that “so much evidence of urban decay” was visible in Portland — like to hear those stories.
The fiction that conservatives have been driven out of the city of Portland is simply ludicrous. If it was true, the Oregonian wouldn’t have David Reinhard on its opinion pages. There wouldn’t have been any fight about the city takeover of PGE. The whining about whether Portland was business-friendly wouldn’t be taking place, because everyone would agree that everything was just hunky-dory.
People who feel a need to give a pass to George W. Bush on whether race played a factor in the federal response to Hurricane Katrina have made much of the fact that other sections of the Gulf Coast which were predominantly white were afflicted with the same lackadaisical response. Their line of defense is that even areas adjoining Orleans Parish in Louisiana were neglected, apparently proving that Bush’s administration is either incompetent at responding to threats that have been examined for years or willfully negligent, but not racist.
The problem with that defense is it assumes that Bush is better informed about the racial makeup of the poor in the South than he is about anything else. Throughout the 1980s, Ronald Reagan used the phrase “welfare queen” — sometimes in close conjunction with the word “Cadillac” — to paint a specific image of the types of people on public assistance. Never mind that most recipients of welfare were white, his supporters knew the type of people he was talking about.
The story of poverty in the South — when it’s been discussed at all in the past decades — has been portrayed as an African-American issue. George Bush is — to borrow Calvin Trillin’s assessment of Reagan — disengaged at best. Someone who expects him to know that the group “poor people in the South” wasn’t more or less congruent with the group “poor black people in the South” seem to me as if they themselves are suffering a serious disengagement.
Sometimes things just don’t come out right when you’re talking off-the-cuff with reporters.
In an article from the latest issue of Willamette Week on emergency preparedness (“Lessons from Katrina”), Dr. Bill Long, the chief trauma director at Legacy Emmanuel Hospital says:
As we learned in Louisiana, there has to be someone in charge who knows what to do.
Of course, this isn’t a lesson that we had to learn from Hurricane Katrina. Someone who knows what to do is essentially the definition for the type of person you want to have in charge and it has been for a long time. Which is why so many of us were opposed to the idea of having George W. Bush — not to mention the many, many Democratic and Republican politicians who have helped cover his ass for the past five years — as the “leaders” of this country.
What we’ve actually learned from Katrina (well, those who weren’t already aware of it) was that the people in charge don’t know what they’re doing.