Year: 2005

The Los Angeles Times makes an important point about the historic fact of a state legislature passing marriage rights for gay couples:

[O]nce the highest court does order the state to stop discriminating, it will be harder for critics to complain about activist judges getting ahead of the political process. In this case, judges will be reaffirming the Legislature’s intent.

And the social right will then say … what? They’ll blame “legislative activism”? As to what gay couples, their friends, families and supporters should do … use this as another opportunity to make the case for responsibility, equality, and family for everyone. Polls in California show that an initiative backing marriage rights has a chance of winning. Support this organization. Talk to every non-gay person you know and explain why everyone deserves the chance to have a family protected by law. Make the case. Now more than ever.

Don’t miss Paul Campos’ review of Michael Brown’s career at TNR. Money quote:

When Brown left the IAHA four years ago, he was, among other things, a failed former lawyer – a man with a 20-year-old degree from a semi-accredited law school who hadn’t attempted to practice law in a serious way in nearly 15 years and who had just been forced out of his job in the wake of charges of impropriety. At this point in his life, returning to his long-abandoned legal career would have been very difficult in the competitive Colorado legal market. Yet, within months of leaving the IAHA, he was handed one of the top legal positions in the entire federal government: general counsel for a major federal agency. A year later, he was made its number-two official, and, a year after that, Bush appointed him director of FEMA.

In normal times, appointing this kind of unqualified political hack to an agency with direct responsibility for saving lives is reckless. After 9/11, it is an incomprehensible failure.

Bob Novak rips into Michael Chertoff. Money quote:

The Democrats on the ground, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, have done little to commend themselves. But that does not excuse the federal performance, in the candid opinion of many Republicans. To start with, these Republicans talk about taking FEMA back from the Homeland Security Department. They agree that heads must roll, certainly Brown’s and possibly Chertoff’s.

I’m still predicting that Bush will fire no one.

You can’t keep making this up:

Five West Virginia Air National Guard C-130 transport aircraft sent to pick up displaced victims from Hurricane Katrina returned home empty early Wednesday, following a series of frustrating bureaucratic snafus. “We met with obstacles everywhere we turned,” said Lara Ramsburg, communications director for Gov. Joe Manchin. “It’s been a frustrating experience.” “To bring five planes back empty is a crying shame,” Manchin told The Associated Press… “Until we hear something from FEMA – until they can put a plan together where we’re sure the planes will be used – the planes will stay here,” Ramsburg said.

Fire Michael Brown.

Arnold vetoed: predictable, if truly depressing. He’s as good as it gets in today’s fundamentalist GOP, and he punted. I’m taking a huge amount of flak from the gay blogosphere for ever backing Arnold – and that’s what you get if you ever try and support a Republican in today’s context. Schwarzenegger’s argument is that Proposition 22 already settled the question. No, it didn’t. When Proposition 22 was passed, there were no marriage rights for gay couples in California: they were already banned. Prop 22 was not about legalizing marriage rights for gay couples in California. The point and origin of Prop 22 was to prevent marriages in other states being automatically recognized by California. In the official arguments for and against the Proposition, the proponents argued:

When people ask, “Why is this necessary?” I say that even though California law already says only a man and a woman may marry, it also recognizes marriages from other states. However, judges in some of those states want to define marriage differently than we do. If they succeed, California may have to recognize new kinds of marriages, even though most people believe marriage should be between a man and a woman.

In the same document, they even underlined this point in capital letters:

THE TRUTH IS, UNLESS WE PASS PROPOSITION 22, LEGAL LOOPHOLES COULD FORCE CALIFORNIA TO RECOGNIZE “SAME-SEX MARRIAGES” PERFORMED IN OTHER STATES. That’s why 30 other states and the federal government have passed laws to close these loopholes. California deserves the same choice.

The debate at the time centered entirely around that question. You can see that from the actual legal code that added Prop 22. Section 300 defines civil marriage. Section 308 defines recognition of out-of-state marriages. Proposition 22 was inserted at Section 308.5. The issue of whether California itself should pass a proposed equal marriage law was not on the ballot – and the ballot was five years ago. Arnold cannot get off the hook on this one. He took a stand against civil rights; and history will record that.

BE THAT AS IT MAY: The truth is: this moment transforms the civil marriage debate entirely. For the first time, unprompted by a court, a state legislature in America has passed a bill granting equality in marriage to gay couples. And this gets to the crux of the matter. The conservatives who have said they oppose equality in marriage for gay couples solely because of the way it was imposed no longer have that argument. That argument is over. Dead. Kaput. This was not “judicial activism”. It was not a court deciding for civil rights. This was an elected legislature in the biggest state of the union; just as in Massachusetts, it was and is an elected legislature, answerable to voters for their decisions. So two questions remain for conservatives. Do they prefer government by proposition or representative government? The Burkean argument has always been the latter. Today’s “conservatives” back whatever method appeases their fundamentalist base. The second question is whether conservatives believe that states should be able to make their own decisions on the question of civil marriage. The classic, principled argument has been: states’ rights, especially that of state legislatures. Today’s conservatives would remove that right from such legislatures and impose a uniform ban on any protections for gay couples across the entire country. Again, they have abandoned federalism to appease fundamentalism. Today’s Republican party wants to prevent legislators representing one tenth of the country’s citizens from governing themselves.

THE GOOD NEWS: With the “judicial tyranny” canard removed, we can now have the real debate. Are gay people equal citizens? Are their relationships worth as much as, say, Britney Spears’ 55-hour stunt in Las Vegas? Will including them in civil marriage destroy the institution, strengthen it or have no measurable impact? Is it better for society that gay people have incentives to look after each other, stay close to their families, build their own families, and become fully responsible citizens? Or should we continue to devalue their relationships, keep them on the edge of society, stigmatize and strip them of basic protections for their relationships? We may soon have ballot initiatives in Massachusetts and California that are designed to strip gay couples of all legal protections, including the civil unions and domestic partnerships that those states have enacted. Then we’ll see what’s truly behind this “pro-marriage” movement.

Watch this clip of a woman talking to a priest about what she went through. She says the National Guard just waved at them from helicopters. She doesn’t understand why more wasn’t done to save her and those with no resources to get out. I still don’t understand.

Soon, soon, through dykes of our content
The crumpling flood will force a rent
And, taller than a tree,
Hold sudden death before our eyes
Whose river dreams long hid the size
And vigours of the sea.

But when the waters make retreat
And through the black mud first the wheat
In shy green stalks appears,
When stranded monsters gasping lie,
And sounds of riveting terrify
Their whorled unsubtle ears,

May these delights we dread to lose,
This privacy, need no excuse,
But to that strength belong,
As through a child’s rash happy cries
The drowned parental voices rise
In unlamenting song…..

– from W.H. Auden’s “A Summer Night” (1933).

His blog is called “Right Wing Nut House,” just so you know where he’s coming from:

Thanks for linking my timeline.
Your analysis is correct. The timeline highlights what federal officials – and state and local leaders also – said they were doing in response to the disaster. Why there was a Grand-Canyon-like chasm between what they said and what actually arrived is for whatever blue ribbon Commission or Congressional inquiry to decide.
Unless one is willing to posit the notion that the feds were simply lying through their teeth and had no intention of assisting those desperate, hungry people stranded in New Orleans then one must assume that what they said they were going to do, they had every intention of doing. Hence, the nature of the timeline.
If one were to do a proper timeline of events, then it would have been appropriate to include the dog that didn’t bark items. Maybe one could even slip in Condi’s shopping spree or Bush’s guitar strumming photo-op. But that was not my intent.
And if I left the impression of absolving the President of any “blame” then let me make it a little clearer. Anyone who would hire as Director of FEMA a Michael Brown has made a ghastly, unconscionable mistake. Bush wouldn’t be the first President to make a mistake of such magnitude nor will he be the last. I suspect when all is said and done, the American people will make the appropriate judgement and the Republican party will suffer for their leader’s shortsightedness at the polls.

A fair assessment, I’d say.

Right-wing attack-machine Michelle Malkin goes after Michael Brown. I reiterate her contention that Nagin and Blanco deserve censure as well. Bush administration flak, Kathryn Jean-Lopez, predicts Brown will quit Friday morning. I predict he’ll be in his job for a long, long time. This is the Bush administration. Brownie did a “heck of a job.” So did Bremer, remember?

Money quote from the St Petersburg Times:

Just last year, FEMA hired a private company, IEM Inc. of Baton Rouge, to help conduct an eight-day drill for a fictional Category 5 hurricane in New Orleans named Pam. It included staging a helicopter evacuation of the Superdome, a prediction of 15 feet of water in parts of the city and the evacuation of 1-million people.
But the second part of the company’s work – to design a plan to fix unresolved problems, such as evacuating sick and injured people and housing thousands of stranded residents – never occurred because the funding was cut.

Tragic.