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The Priorities of Power

This is unbelievable — except that it’s not.


The day after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, killing hundreds of people and stranding thousands of the sick and weak in hospitals without power, Vice President Dick Cheney made a forceful personal intervention in the crisis: he ordered a Mississippi energy utility to divert its emergency crews from restoring power to rural hospitals and local water supplies — and instead set them to work on a pipeline that sends fuel to the Northeast.


People were dying in hospitals; people were languishing in damp, tropical heat, <IMG height=96 hspace=2

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Bringing It All Back Home

From The Onion: More Kids Being Home-Churched
Excerpt: A new trend in the religious upbringing of children has recently emerged in the heart of the Bible Belt. “Home-churching,” the individual, family-based worship of Jesus Christ, is steadily gaining in popularity, as more parents seek an alternative to what they consider the overly humanist content of organized worship.


Norville Tucker, who moved his family to the woods outside Shelby, AL in 1998 to “escape the damaging cultural influences of urban Mobile,” is widely credited with pioneering the home-churching movement. Tucker said he was inspired

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Inquisiting Minds Want to Know

Vatican to Check U.S. Seminaries on Gay Presence (NYT)
Excerpt: “Investigators appointed by the Vatican have been instructed to review each of the 229 Roman Catholic seminaries in the United States for “evidence of homosexuality” and for faculty members who dissent from church teaching…The Vatican document surfaces as Catholics await a Vatican ruling on whether homosexuals should be barred from the priesthood.


“In a possible indication of the ruling’s contents, the American archbishop who is supervising the seminary review said last week that “anyone who has engaged in homosexual activity or has strong homosexual inclinations,”

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Man in a Hurry


“Don Bushino, Michael Brown sleeps with the fishes.”


“Good deal there, Silvio. Now let go of me. I gotta get to the bathroom, pronto!”

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Georgia Crawl

Jim Crow rises again from the red clay earth of Georgia:
Georgia’s New Poll Tax (NYT)

Excerpt: “In 1966, the Supreme
Court held that the poll tax was unconstitutional. Nearly 40 years
later, Georgia is still charging people to vote, this time with a new
voter ID law that requires many people without driver’s licenses — a
group that is disproportionately poor, black and elderly — to pay $20
or more for a state ID card. Georgia went ahead with this even though
there is not a single place in the entire city of Atlanta

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Deja Vu All Over Again

U.S. Deploys Slide Show to Press Case Against Iran (WP)
Here we go again: “sexed-up dossiers,” “smoking guns in the form of a mushroom cloud” and of course, the all-time clincher, “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”

Excerpts: …The
presentation has not been vetted through standard U.S. intelligence
channels because it does not include secret material.

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Hard Right, Hard Heart: The Record of John Roberts

Excellent piece by William Taylor in NYR: John Roberts: The Record


An excerpt: The most intriguing question about John Roberts is what led him as a young
person whose success in life was virtually assured by family wealth and
academic achievement to enlist in a political campaign designed to deny
opportunities for success to those who lacked his advantages. It is a
question of great relevance to Roberts’s candidacy for the Supreme
Court.

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Another Levee Breaks: The Death of Rehnquist Means More Disaster

“When you think that you’ve lost everything,

You find out you can always lose a little more….”
— B. Dylan, “Trying to Get to Heaven”

Looks like America has hit the trifecta of disaster in the past week:
first the storm, then the flood and now the death of rightwing hatchet
man William Rehnquist. Like the destruction in the Delta, Rehnquist’s
long-expected but still-untimely death is a disaster whose malign
effects will reverberate far into the future.

Rehnquist’s

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World Gone Wrong

“Strange things have happened, like never before..”
World Gone Wrong, trad., arr by Bob Dylan

A roundup of stories and commentary on the Delta disaster:

Smoking guns don’t come much smokier than this:
Budget Cuts Delayed New Orleans Flood Control Work (Reuters)

White Folk Gone Wild!
Aussies Loot to Survive (Sydney Morning Herald)
Really,
they’re just animals, these people. What would Jonah Goldberg and
Michelle Malkin and Peggy Noonan say? These thugs should be shot on
sight.
(Excerpt): Trapped Australian tourists describe<br

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