Our friends at the Center for Responsible Lending have put out an alert about a growing threat to military families: payday lenders who gouge them with exhorbitant rates and fees. Here are the stats from their new report (pdf):

*** Active-duty military personnel are 3 times more likely than civilians to have taken out a payday loan

*** One in five active-duty military personnel were payday borrowers last year.

*** Predatory payday lending costs military families over $80 million in abusive fees every year.

There's a bi-partisan effort to rein in the new loan sharks. North Carolina Republican Sen. Elizabeth Dole, along with Richard Durbin (D-IL), Bill Nelson (D-FL), Jim Talent (R-MO), and Tom Harkin (D-IA), has introduced an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act designed to protect military families from these lending abuses.

According to the Center, "Dole's amendment would limit annual interest rates to 36 percent for loans made to military families. Such action is crucial at at time when our service members are being exploited with loans at annual rates of 400 percent and higher."

Visit here to send a letter to your elected officials.

So reports the Associated Press:

The Army is closing the books on one of the leanest recruiting years since it became an all-volunteer service three decades ago, missing its enlistment target by the largest margin since 1979 and raising questions about its plans for growth.

Among the factors cited: "The daily reports of American deaths in Iraq and the uncertain nature of the struggle against the insurgency have put a damper on young people's enthusiasm for joining the military."

Yesterday the House voted to strip down the Endangered Species Act, one of the landmark achievements of the 1970s environmental movement:

By a vote of 229-193, lawmakers passed legislation that could greatly expand private-property rights under the environmental law that is credited with helping keep the bald eagle from extinction, but that has led to battles over species such as the spotted owl, the snail darter and the red-legged frog.

This focus on a handful of affected species, of course, misses the point. The law had a much larger and innovative focus, an ecological perspective that included provisions to limit development in entire stretches of "critical habitat." The House vote eliminated these features of the ESA.

There's another, big-picture impact here as well. The ESA was one of the only laws on the books that put a bigger social interest -- in this case, the health of our environment -- above the interests of private property and profit. Most of our laws try to limit damage after it's already underway; by contrast, the ESA forced developers, before they broke ground on new projects, to prove their schemes wouldn't pose a threat to animals threatened with extinction.

So the House gutted one of the few laws that put our common, public interests first, and corporations are now in the driver's seat. There's still hope -- ostensibly enviro-friendly Sen. Chafee (R-RI) apparently has reservations -- but overall, prospects aren't good.

Welcome to "conservation" in the "conservative" revolution.

Remember Newt Gingrich? It's been exactly 10 years since the then-Georgia rep. was the poster child for the conservative movement, voted Time's "Man of the Year" for his role in leading the much-heralded Republican Revolution of the mid-1990s.

Sadly for Gingrich, the GOP insurrection quickly sputtered to a halt and Gingrich fell out of favor, his own allies (including Rep. Tom DeLay) attempting to depose him in a coup in 1997. Mary Lynn Jones of the Gadflyer had a good piece last year about what went wrong. A series of ethical lapses (sound familiar?) played a role, but Jones points to the fact that "Gingrich couldn't transition from minority-party bomb throwing into majority-party governing." The caustic congressman alienated voters with his myopic pursuit of Clinton's impeachment, and drove Congress into a budget impasse that shut down government, a move the public largely blamed on Republicans.

Tom DeLay was a product of Gingrich's slash-and-burn 1990s GOP revolution, and there are many similarities to their stories of power and defeat: the use of fear to impose rule; a chronic and debilitating hubris; operating as if they were in the party of opposition even as their hands were on the levers of power.

Gingrich is now on the road hawking a book, the clearest sign that he's preparing for a 2008 presidential run. And apparently he hasn't learned much over the past 10 years. In explaining why he's making a run for the White House, Gingrich points to the need to "get [his] message out" of conservative reform. He also sees the Katrina catastrophe as opening a big opportunity because it allows Republicans to talk about the current "failure of leadership."

What rock has Newt been living under? Is the problem facing conservatives today really that they're having trouble "getting their message out?" And just who does he think is in the "leadership" of government today? Packaging himself as the crusading outsider may have worked in 2005, but it will be a hard sell in 2008.

Posted by R. Neal

Civil rights lawyer Baker Motley dies:

She went to law school and found herself fighting racism in landmark segregation cases including Brown v. Board of Education, the Central High School case in Arkansas and the case that let James Meredith enroll at the University of Mississippi.

Motley also broke barriers herself: She was the first black woman appointed to the federal bench, as well the first one elected to the New York state Senate.

Motley, who would have celebrated her 40th anniversary on the bench next year, died Wednesday of congestive heart failure at NYU Downtown Hospital, said her son, Joel Motley III. She was 84.

A remarkable woman and a remarkable life.

Over the past few weeks we've seen plenty of evidence that the federal government has in fact not done much post-9/11 in the way of improving Homeland Security other than establish a huge, apparently ineffective bureaucracy run by unqualified, incompetent cronies of the current administration and their corporate pals to whom said cronies hand out billions in no-bid contracts.

There's another festering problem: security at U.S. nuclear weapons facilities, including Oak Ridge. Here's a dispatch from the Service Employees International Union about the next big contracting scandal...

Click "there's more" for the rest of the article.

Posted by R. Neal

Check this out:

The Katrina Reconstruction Summit
Monday, September 26, 2005
Senate Hart Building, Washington, DC

The Katrina Reconstruction Summit is hosted by U.S. Senator Mel Martinez and organized by Equity International as a public service.

The Summit is designed to bring together Congressional leaders, business leaders, and relief and reconstruction experts, discussing details of the $62.3 billion passed by Congress for Katrina relief and reconstruction; specifics of Katrina relief and reconstruction programs; economic infrastructure reconstruction priorities, including energy, housing, healthcare, and other sectors; creating jobs; building small business; and corporate philanthropy.

Confirmed participants include top executives from KBR [a division of Halliburton], McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, L3-Titan, IBM, DynCorp, Accenture, Deloitte, Clark Construction Group, 3M, CACI, Unisys, Lucent, and Parsons, and many government officials and diplomats.

All the heads of all the families in one place! The Washington Post files this report:

As fiscal hawks surrendered, would-be government contractors were meeting in the Hart Senate Office Building to figure out how to get a share of the money. A "Katrina Reconstruction Summit," hosted by Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) and sponsored by Halliburton, among others, brought some 200 lobbyists, corporate representatives and government staffers to a room overlooking the Capitol for a five-hour conference that included time for a "networking break" and advice on "opportunities for private sector involvement."

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) sent his budget director, Bill Hoagland, who cautioned that federal Katrina spending might not exceed $100 billion. But John Clerici, from a law firm that helped sponsor the event, told the group that spending would "probably be larger" than $200 billion. "It's going to be spent in a fast and furious way," Clerici said.

Sipping coffee from china cups and munching on doughnuts, the corporate crowd heard Joe McInerney, president of the American Hotel and Lodging Association, predict: "I think we'll see Mardi Gras in New Orleans to some extent this year."

Yeah, I can hear it now, all up and down Bourbon Street... "Show us your no-bid contracts!"

(Thanks to Brian at Resonance for the heads up.)

The right-wing "porkbusters" are looking for programs to eliminate in order to pay for the Katrina/Rita disaster, i.e. "offsets." Of course, the usual suspects such as funding for PBS, Amtrak, the National Endowment for the Arts, etc. are at the top of the list.

My question is, where were the "porkbusters" and their search for "offsets" when taxpayers were being asked to pony up $200 billion for rebuilding Iraq?

Posted by R. Neal

This guy is so embarrassing for East Tennessee that I was reluctant to mention him but now that he's made the national news wires I guess there's no avoiding it.

Betty Bean at the Halls Shopper (don't let the newspaper's name fool you -- with the local daily and the local "alt-weekly" beholden to the local GOP Good Ol' Boys and Real Estate Developer Prayer Meeting Club, the Halls Shopper is the only paper that actually, like, reports on local issues here) sums it up nicely:

So we gotta hand it to our buddy [Tennssee House Representative] Stacey Campfield [R-Knoxville], who has the darnedest knack for snagging free media of anybody this side of John Ford.

Heck, the guy is a one-man media circus.

If he’s not getting thrown out of the coliseum for trying to punch [Tennessee Governor] Phil Bredesen, he’s renting his spare bedroom to a registered sex offender or committing crimes against the English language on his own personal Web site. But until now, all the aforementioned antics have been good for is a geographically-limited local notoriety.

Boy, howdy, that has all changed.

Read the whole thing, especially the quote by "The Rep" (as he calls himself on his blog) on ethics, which seems to reflect the current attitudes of right-wing conservative politicians everywhere. Boy howdy, indeed.

UPDATE: Tennessee Guerilla Woman Egalia has a complete blog/media roundup.

Posted by R. Neal

The Mrs. and I ran into an interesting young man at a political rally here in East Tennessee last fall. I found his attitude and enthusiasm refreshing, and it gave me hope for the future. I thought it would be interesting to find out what he's up to, and he graciously agreed to an e-mail interview.

Click "there's more" for the rest of the article…

As disgraced Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX) starts pondering why he ever left the bug extermination business, the media is hammering on Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle, who brought the indictment against DeLay's corporate fundraising machine.

The media mantra that Earle is a "partisan Democrat" is, of course, hogwash. But there's also more to the story than Mr. Earle.

The excellent Texas Observer, which has been covering the DeLay scandal with award-winning coverage since the beginning, published this overview last month about some of the lesser-known but key players, such as attorney Cris Feldman -- who TO says "more than any other has brought the TRMPAC scandal to light."

Halliburton and other connected corporations aren't the only ones seeking to profit from the Katrina disaster. The Huffington Post also finds a political opportunist:

Lousiana State Senator Craig Romero (R) visited Washington earlier this month under the ausipces of raising money for Katrina disaster relief, Roll Call reported today. But the trip was also an opportunity for Romero to drum up support for his run for Congress in Louisianan's 3rd district now held by Democrat Charlie Melancon.

The Huffington Post has acquired pages from a packet of candidate information that Romero handed out to special interest groups: A main selling point of Romero's candidacy is that if Katrina's victim don't move back home, the district will go Republican.

In the 2004 election, 50.2 percent voted for Democrat Charles Melancon and 49.8 percent for Rep. Billy Tauzin (R).

Romero's campaign information includes a pie chart that shows the district's make-up without the residents who were displaced by Katrina. Leaving those residents out, the chart says the district would be have voted 57.1 percent Republican and 42.9 percent Democrat in the 2004 election.

Compassionate conservatism?

Posted by R. Neal

Scotty McLellan, just now in a news conference: "Tom DeLay is an ally, a leader, and someone we have worked closely with to get things done for the American people."

OK, then.

P.S. Apparently, the SEC has opened a formal investigation into Frist's "alleged" insider trading. The GOP certainly seems to be having a bad hair day.

Yesterday's news that the Supreme Court will be hearing DaimlerChrysler Corp. v. Cuno -- the landmark case out of Ohio about corporate subsidies -- was big news about one of the biggest issues facing state and local governments today.

Every year, cash-strapped states, counties and towns spend over $50 billion in giveaways to corporations to lure them to set up shop or expand in their area. Tax breaks, cheap land, low-interest bonds, cash grants -- these are all part of arsenal of "incentives" -- really give-aways -- that corporations receive to ostensibly create jobs, but what author Greg LeRoy calls the "Great American Jobs Scam." The deals are usually made in secret, often don't create many jobs, and rarely protect wage and environmental standards -- all while busting local government budgets.

Southern states are among the most notorious subsidy-givers, with states like Alabama, Mississippi, and North Carolina recently shoveling deals over $200 million to lure footloose factories.

The Cuno case could change all that. A group of Ohio taxpayers challenged a multi-million deal to lure DaimlerChysler, who promised to build a Jeep plant in Toledo. The plaintiffs challenged that the subsidies were a violation of Commerce Clause, which protects "free trade between the states" (since the goal of incentive deals is to keep plants from opening elsewhere). The lower court shot down the challenge, but on appeal the 6th U.S. Circuit Court ruled against DaimlerChrysler and the subsidies last October.

Powerful business interests quickly sprung into action, with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and several leading corporations filing supportive briefs for DaimlerChrysler's request that the Supreme Court overturn the 6th Circuit Court's decision. The Supremes agreed, taking on Cuno as one of just 11 cases they'll consider in their new term starting Monday.

Corporations that have been milking corporate subsidies for decades are right to be concerned. As their brief argues, the decision "calls into question the constitutionality of all state income tax and related business incentives." The plaintiffs also sense the national significance of their case, arguing that their goal is to "free all the state from the necessity of engaging in an escalating competition over incentives that deprives them of needed revenues."

Cuno isn't the only challenge to runaway corporate giveaways. Robert Orr, a conservative former North Carolina Supreme Court justice, filed a suit this summer challenging a $280 million handout to Dell Corp. Orr's suit argues that the subsidies to Dell violates state constitutional prohibitions against the use of public resources for private benefit and fail to treat taxpayers equally.

Momentum is building across the political spectrum to stop the corporate giveaway game. However the Supreme Court rules in Cuno, the case is giving a vital issue much-needed exposure.

Posted by R. Neal

The New Confederacy:

President Bush:

Allow me to introduce myself: I am Ignatius J. Reilly of New Orleans, Louisiana (sweeping flourish, small bow). I achieved great acclaim back in the 1980s for a published work of mine, a small gem, really, a parvum opus, entitled The Journal of a Working Boy. (Shortly after its publication, I retreated from the frenzied hustle of celebrity and academia, and have since returned to my prior, rather Miltonic isolation, from which I have observed the continued decline of our civilization.)

Sir, I must reprove you now with sharpness!

Read the whole, hilarious thing.

(Thanks to Andy Axel for the link.)

No, seriously:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A congressional panel on Tuesday is expected to scrutinize the decision to keep ousted Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown on the federal payroll.

Brown told congressional investigators Monday that he is being paid as a consultant to help FEMA assess what went wrong in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, according to a senior official familiar with the meeting.

In related news, the Bush Administration announced they are bringing John Ashcroft back to consult on U.S. torture policy, while Colin Powell and George Tenet will be looking for WMD in Iraq.

Posted by R. Neal

Department of Defense briefing, September 9 (five days after Katrina):

The security situation in New Orleans continues to improve. The most contentious issues were lawlessness in the streets, and particularly a potentially very dangerous volatile situation in the convention center where tens of thousands of people literally occupied that on their own. [..]

We waited until we had enough force in place to do an overwhelming force. Went in with police powers, 1,000 National Guard military policemen under the command and control of the adjutant general of the State of Louisiana, Major General Landreneau, yesterday shortly after noon stormed the convention center, for lack of a better term, and there was absolutely no opposition, complete cooperation, and we attribute that to an excellent plan, superbly executed with great military precision. It was rather complex. It was executed absolutely flawlessly in that there was no violent resistance, no one injured, no one shot, even though there were stabbed, even though there were weapons in the area. There were no soldiers injured and we did not have to fire a shot.

Some people asked why didn't we go in sooner. Had we gone in with less force it may have been challenged, innocents may have been caught in a fight between the Guard military police and those who did not want to be processed or apprehended, and we would put innocents' lives at risk. As soon as we could mass the appropriate force, which we flew in from all over the states at the rate of 1,400 a day, they were immediately moved off the tail gates of C-130 aircraft flown by the Air National Guard, moved right to the scene, briefed, rehearsed, and then they went in and took this convention center down. [..]

It's a great success story -- a terrific success story.

Contrast that to this report from yesterday:

That the nation's frontline emergency-management officials believed the body count would resemble that of a bloody battle in a war is but one of scores of examples of myths about the Dome and the Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the news media and even some of the city's top officials, including the mayor and police superintendent.

The vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees — mass murders, rapes and beatings — have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law-enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know.

"I think 99 percent of it is [expletive]," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. "Don't get me wrong — bad things happened. But I didn't see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything ... 99 percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved."

Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state Health and Human Services Department administrator overseeing the body-recovery operation, said his teams were inundated with false reports.

Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan said authorities have only confirmed four murders in the entire city in the aftermath of Katrina — making it a typical week in a city that anticipated more than 200 homicides this year.

"I had the impression that at least 40 or 50 murders had occurred at the two sites," he said. "It's unfortunate we saw these kinds of stories saying crime had taken place on a massive scale when that wasn't the case. And they [national media outlets] have done nothing to follow up on any of these cases; they just accepted what people [on the street] told them. ... It's not consistent with the highest standards of journalism."

We'll probably never know the real story. But that general's description of "taking down" the convention center sounds more like a raid on an Iraqi insurgent stronghold than an operation to help U.S. citizens. It's also in sharp contrast to footage of Lieutenant General Russel Honore ordering solders to "put those goddamn weapons down!" admonishing that "we're here to deliver food!"

Anyway, remember all this when the Bush administration starts making more noise about suspending Posse Comitatus and putting the DOD in charge of disaster response. With their long memories of Sherman and all that unpleasantness in Atlanta a while back, I can't think of a better way to get the Confederate-flag-waving good old boys down here all riled up again.

OK, then.

P.S. Is it just me, or is all this reminiscent of the time a senior Bush official told New York Times writer Ron Suskind that guys like Suskind lived "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." Chilling.

P.P.S. Thanks to Newsrack for the DOD link…

Posted by R. Neal

Texas Governor Rick Perry and Houston Mayor Bill White held a press conference to praise each other and President Bush for the magnificent response to the massive traffic jams in Houston. President Bush, who directed I-45 traffic from a secure bunker deep inside a Colorado mountain, praised the governor, the mayor, and FEMA for their quick action. "It could have been a lot worse if there had been only Democrats in charge like over there in the state of New Orleans," said Bush. "I'll be working closely with Congress on that problem," he added.

As the media covered the Houston traffic jam and the horrific conditions at their luxury hotels in Galveston (room service was suspended and they ran out of half-and-half for the coffee), local officials in Beaumont and the former towns and parishes of Lake Charles, Cameron Parish, Sulphur, Vinton, and Lafitte Louisiana said from their new fishing boat and treetop headquarters that FEMA, the Red Cross, the National Guard, and the media shouldn't worry about them and should instead concentrate on Houston. "We saw the heartbreaking videos of those traffic jams and that shingle blown off the roof of that multi-million dollar beach home in Galveston, and just thought, hey, we can wait. There's not much left here to recover anyway," said one local official.

Researchers at LSU, meanwhile, are studying a strange phenomenon that steered Hurricane Rita northeastward towards Louisiana at the last minute, saving the Houston area from a potentially embarrassing revelation on national TV that there are poor minorities living there. While reluctant to draw any conclusions, scientists noted the hourly news conferences held by local, state, and FEMA officials to discuss their diligent preparations for Rita, and the possible correlation to a large mass of hot air that formed over Austin and spread all the way to Houston which may have been a factor.

If you haven't seen it already, today's New York Times story about post-Katrina contracts byEric Lipton and Southern Exposure alumn Ron Nixon is a good one. They've culled through the government's first batch of documents about who's getting the money. Here's some of what they found:

More than 80 percent of the $1.5 billion in contracts signed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency alone were awarded without bidding or with limited competition, government records show, provoking concerns among auditors and government officials about the potential for favoritism or abuse.

Some industry and government officials questioned the costs of the debris-removal contracts, saying the Army Corps of Engineers had allowed a rate that was too high. And Congressional investigators are looking into the $568 million awarded to AshBritt, a Pompano Beach, Fla., company that was a client of the former lobbying firm of Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi.

"The contracts also show considerable price disparities: travel trailers costing $15,000 to $23,000, housing inspection services that documents suggest could cost $15 to $81 per home, and ferries and ships being used for temporary housing that cost $13 million to $70 million for six months.

Didn't they learn anything in Iraq?

Meanwhile, the House Progressive Caucus went public with its letter today, calling upon the President to enforce the "responsible contractor" provisions of federal acquisition regulations by suspending Halliburton/KBR from any new contracts, based on their track record in Iraq and elsewhere. A good start.

...Best Blog Headline of the Week:

Frist Blind Trust Miraculously Regains Eyesight -- Praise the Lord

OK, then.

Posted by R. Neal

On a morning that finds our nation holding its breath, waiting and wondering what new hell will be visited on the Gulf Coast, where there are already millions of homeless and millions more fleeing the next storm, what does our local "news" paper here in Knoxville decide should go on the front-page as the above-the-fold top story with a bold headline?

UT-LSU GAME POSTPONED

I guess it's really getting serious now. Here's a link to the stupid front-page article, but registration is required, and trust me, it ain't worth it. E-mail to the editor, on the other hand, does not require registration.

Posted by R. Neal

Rita Causes New Flooding in New Orleans: "Dozens of blocks in the Ninth Ward were under water as a waterfall at least 30 feet wide poured over and through a dike that had been used to patch breaks in the Industrial Canal levee. On the street that runs parallel to the canal, the water ran waist-deep and was rising fast. Guidry said water was rising about three inches a minute."

Posted by R. Neal

The latest from NOAA: ...EXTREMELY DANGEROUS CATEGORY FOUR HURRICANE RITA CONTINUES TOWARD THE SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA AND UPPER TEXAS COASTS...

The good news is that it appears Houston and Galveston will be spared a direct hit. The bad news is that the Port Arthur/Beaumont area with its concentration of chemical plants and oil refineries will suffer the worst of Rita's wrath, and a tropical storm warning has been issued for New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain.

Folks seem particularly concerned about the oil refineries, and the prospect of waiting in line to buy gas for $5 per gallon. Personally, I tend to favor the idea of $5 per gallon gas, as long as the windfall goes into alternative energy/transportation research instead of the pockets of wealthy oil company executives and investors.

But gas price disasters aside, there's yet another human disaster unfolding along the Texas and Louisiana coast. This storm is going to hit hard, and despite the lessons of Katrina and the best efforts of local and state officials, the evacuation does not appear to be going well. Traffic out of the Houston area is stalled, people are breaking down and running out of gas, and, most tragically, 24 elderly people being evacuated from nursing homes died in a bus fire. All of this is happening before the storm has even hit. And let's not forget the folks in New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast who are just starting to dig their way out of Katrina's destruction.

This may be more than America is prepared to handle in the short term. We wonder why it is happening to us. There is evidence that the intensity of the storms may be related to the "mythical" global warming. Kurt Vonnegut said last week on Jon Stewart's show that humans are "terrible animals" and "Earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us."

I don't know about that, but Vonnegut said a couple of other things that ring true. First, he is quoted as saying "True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country." And the corollary, "George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography."

I think we've witnessed the truth in those remarks over the past four years, and particularly the past few weeks. The coming days, months, and years, will be a test of the American people and our elected leaders at all levels of government.

Will we learn any lessons that make us better prepared for future natural disasters or something even worse?

Will we quibble along with Congress over a billion here or there for pet projects in our districts while the people of the Gulf Coast suffer in misery, or will we get down to business and find the money to fix it and get the job done?

Will we allow war profiteers to become disaster profiteers, or demand accountability and oversight and fair prices and fair wages?

Will we let developers and local governments displace millions of poor and minority populations with multi-million dollar condos and the attendant property tax windfall, or will we wake up to the fact that poverty and racial divides still exist in the 21st Century and start working for real reforms that ensure Liberty and Justice for All?

Who knows? Time will tell. Right now all we can do is hold on, watch and wait, and hope and pray or genuflect or whatever it is you do to your deity of choice, again, for the people of the Gulf Coast. And give whatever you can. God help us all, assuming She's still listening.

OK, then.

Posted by R. Neal

WILMER, Texas: A bus carrying elderly evacuees from Hurricane Rita caught fire and was rocked by explosions early Friday on a gridlocked highway near Dallas, killing as many as 24 people, authorities said.

Posted by R. Neal

Jesse Fox Mayshark, former editor of the local alternative weekly paper here in Knox Vegas (local-speak for Knoxville, TN) is on a mission. When he's not slaving away somewhere deep in the bowels of the New York Times, that den of liberal sedition up there in New York City, JFM is launching the Red State Reader, a new literary publication that celebrates diversity and progressive thought in his adopted South.

The inaugural edition hasn't quite made it into print, but it's available here at Redstatereader.com. Following are some excerpts:

Jesse Fox Mayshark introduces the Red State Reader with "They Hate Us (a.k.a. Why a Red State Reader?)":

…There was a sense of betrayal, alienation, things coming apart. And so it went everywhere. Whatever national unity had briefly emerged to do triage after the massacres had long dissipated. Looking at the electoral maps, with all that hostile red and blue ink, it was easy to imagine fences, moats, mine fields.

…The national media, still largely based in New York, Washington and Los Angeles, scrambled to figure out how to reach Red State Americans, this exotic population presumed to be so different in outlook and values.

All of which was understandable and maybe inevitable, but also so simple-minded that it made my teeth hurt. As some self-styled moderates tried to demonstrate with maps showing the country as a mass of undulating purple, the nation doesn't break down along such neat lines. There are a lot of voices missing. I know some of them personally, because I lived in the fine city of Knoxville, Tennessee, for nearly a decade before moving to the equally fine city of New York. The history of the country is such that culture and politics and religious zeal, conservatism and radicalism, have intertwined and cross-fertilized each other in mutating recombinations since its founding, and before. No sweeping statement can be made about any region of the nation that can't be quickly tattered by contradictory evidence.

Then there's this piece by Joe Tarr, a former writer for the local alt-weekly (and one of my favorites) on Gay Day in Rhea County, a celebration that ensued when Rhea County officials banned "those kind of people" from living in their county, declaring they would be charged with "crimes against nature" if caught:

In appearance, Dayton doesn’t rank all that high on the hick scale. On the outskirts of town, there’s a typical sprawling strip of fast-food restaurants, gas stations and a Wal-Mart. Several antique shops and homegrown restaurants clutter the main drag downtown, where there’s a quaint folksiness that would appeal to tourists and yuppies from the big city.

Walk into Brad Putt’s music shop across the street from the historic courthouse and you might hear the Sex Pistols, Radiohead, Esquivel or The Darkness playing on the stereo, and kids from the local rock bands drop by. When people were holding protest and apocalyptic signs across the street, Putt stood outside his shop with one that read “Buy A Guitar.”

Then there's this piece by yours truly, R. Neal (the blogger formerly known as SKB) with a humorous look at "Tennessee: Myth v. Fact"

But most of the things you think you know about Tennessee are probably not true. For example, you probably think that the University of Tennessee’s head football coach is paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 million per year while Tennessee public school teachers’ annual raises don’t even cover the increase in their health insurance premiums. But you would be wrong. Coach Fulmer makes $2 million per year.

There's more, including a rundown of the Houston hip-hop scene, music and film reviews, and classic literature and essays from Southern history. As they say, read the whole thing!

The Red State Reader joins other great Southern publications like Southern Exposure (published by the Institute for Southern Studies, the home of Facing South) and the Oxford American as another "thinking person's alternative" to Field and Stream and Southern Living (with no disrespect to those fine publications -- I've subscribed to both for decades) for outstanding periodic Southern literature.

OK, then.

I'm on the road again, this time in San Francisco -- and as you can see, your friend and mine Mr. Neal is hold down the Facing South fort, so it's all good.

Since I'm in the Bay Area, spiritual home of DKos, it feels appropriate to point to two excellent recent posts there:

1) Nathan Newman's illuminating account of the long-term war against workers in southern Louisiana, of which Bush's rescinding of the Davis-Bacon prevailing wage act was just the latest installment (thanks to BR for the tip); and,

2) dmsilev's post about a piece in the Chicago Tribune exposing the role of FEMA privatization, cronyism and (of course?) incompetence in keeping buses from evacuating flooded-out New Orleans residents.

R. Neal, back to you. Crossing my fingers for the people of west Louisiana and east Texas ...

Posted by R. Neal

The latest from NOAA: ...POTENTIALLY CATASTROPHIC CATEGORY FIVE RITA OVER THE CENTRAL GULF OF MEXICO...

I’m not sure how much more folks down there on the Gulf Coast can take. Fortunately, the storm is expected to weaken some before making landfall, but still.

This is going to be pretty bad. Again. It appears that the Katrina wake-up call has local, state, and federal officials better prepared. But FEMA said they were prepared last time, too.

All the posturing by Texas officials and FEMA about how they're going to do a better job this time is a little disheartening, though. This isn't a competition. The entire Gulf Coast needs to come together and help each other survive. The scale of the problem in New Orleans was inversely proportional to the amount of preparation, as appears to now be the case in Texas except in the opposite. I saw on the news last night that there are 300,000+ National Guard available to respond in Texas. There were 10,000 available to respond in Mississippi and Louisiana for Katrina.

The bottom line, though, is that Texas is better prepared. People are being evacuated, including the poor and those without means. And that’s a good thing. And maybe the only good thing to come out of Katrina. Let’s all hope and pray for the best.

Posted by R. Neal

So yesterday I had to drive our old junker that we keep around for utility purposes. Unfortunately it doesn’t have XM Radio, and somebody had left the radio on the local East Tennessee talk station. It’s a swell station, too, with a great lineup of local conservative yahoos and creeps like Limbaugh, Boortz, O’Reilly, and Savage. You know, the usual suspects. (Which is why we have XM Radio in our everyday vehicle.)

The afternoon yahoo is some local guy called "Big Phil" or something. Imagine a cross between Rush Limbaugh and Larry the Cable Guy, except not as smart. Yesterday he was broadcasting from a local gun store. (In one of his spots hawking some kind of assault rifle he said “wouldn’t you like to have one of these the next time some punk comes driving down your street with one of those loud thumpa-thumpa stereos?” No, seriously, he really said that.) It’s a real redneck-o-rama. It’s quite embarrassing, really.

Anyway, Big Phil was all worked up about, get this, a new anti-war song by Merle Haggard. Apparently Merle also posted some comments on his website saying the "problems aren’t in Iraq" and that we need to "look inward" and reduce our dependence on foreign oil and start rebuilding our own highways and bridges. Yep, sounds like old Merle has gone off the reservation. Big Phil was giving that traitor Merle down the road and invited callers to agree.

The first guy said his son was over there in Iraq on his second tour of duty. He was understandably upset. He said the song is an insult, like sending a letter to his son with one of those "Muslim stamps" the Post Office sells. He said it’s like a "bullet to the head" for our troops, and it don’t do nothing but help "the Communists" over there. (No, seriously, he really said that.) He was a big fan of Merle Haggard before, but he ain’t buying no more Merle Haggard records, nor any other records on that label, and he’s taking his whole collection of Merle Haggard records out to the trash.

Big Phil concurred. But then it got interesting.

Next up was another guy who said his son was over there. He thinks Merle is right. He supports his son and the rest of the troops for doing their patriotic duty, but thinks that the war is unjustified and questions why we are there. He compared it to Vietnam.

Big Phil was flabbergasted.

Then, a truck driver called in. I believe he said he was former military. He, too, agreed with Merle. And he doesn’t think we have any business in Iraq.

Big Phil can’t believe it. He asked the guy, "So you’re saying you think we should bring back our troops?"

The guy said "I’m saying they shouldn’t have never been over there in the first place."

Big Phil is flummoxed. He started rambling on about "these people" but I couldn’t take any more and had to turn it off.

I know it’s a pretty small sample with a huge margin of error (and I’m sure the "real patriots" piled on later in the show), but by my count that was 2 to 1 against the war and for Merle. And these weren’t some radical peace activists. These were your "pickup-truck-with-a-gun-rack-driving Confederate-flag-waving good ol’ boys down South" that Howard Dean was talking about.

So, what does this mean? It could mean that Bush and the Neocon War Profiteers are losing the carefully cultivated core of their base that they have previously been so successful in manipulating. It could mean trouble for them and their agenda.

The Mrs. said her theory is that these guys have been watching TV reports from the hurricane-stricken Gulf Coast and they’ve finally seen with their own eyes that the government doesn’t really care about "regular people" and can’t be trusted. If she’s right and there is a sense of betrayal finally sinking in and causing folks to wake up and start asking questions, it could indeed mean trouble for the right-wing agenda.

OK, then.

City Pages of Minneapolis/St. Paul has collected a moving series of first-hand accounts of New Orleans residents relocated to Minnesota in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

In CP's estimation, about 1,000 have been transported to Minnesota, and the paper shares 20 of their stories. As project editor Steve Perry writes, "The real measure of all that was done wrong by city, state, and federal governments, and of all that people trapped in New Orleans had to do and endure as a result, is in these tales and thousands of others like them."

Check it out here.

Weather.com as of 12:20 pm:

Hurricane Rita continues to grow stronger over the Gulf of Mexico. Top winds are estimated to be 140 mph, a Category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale [...]

Rita is forecast to continue on a westward track into the Gulf of Mexico and may grow even stronger. It has already reached Category 4 status. Later in the week, Rita is expected to shift to a more northwesterly course. Residents along the Texas Gulf Coast should be prepared for a significant hurricane on Friday night or Saturday.

School is back, and a hot issue in communities nationwide is what students are doing about aggressive tactics used by military recruiters at schools -- especially provisions in the No Child Left Behind Act that give military recruiters full access to student records and heighten their ability to prey on teens unsure about their future.

My friend JoAnn Wypejewski has a good piece in the most recent Mother Jones about how military veterans are taking a lead role in the growing counter-recruitment movement, offering eye-opening accounts of real-world experiences in war that students won't find in an Army brochure.

They're also letting youths know that under the No Child Left Behind Act, students can file paperwork to prevent schools from releasing personal information to military officials. Parents and students have organized "opt-out" events in 321 communities across the country. As of this week, more than 24,000 opt-outs had been requested, says Leave My Child Alone, a national coalition coordinating the events.

It will be interesting to see how these efforts fare in the South, which supplies a disproportionate share of the new recruits in the armed services. A recent Institute report (pdf) found that 35-40% of new enlistees come from the South, and the American Friends Service Committee recently revealed that of the 16 states in the country where recruiters enlisted the greatest share of the 17-24 year-old population, seven are in the South (Alabama, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Louisiana, Texas and North Carolina -- although D.C. and Hawaii topped the list).

Community Labor United -- an excellent group of grassroots activists in Louisiana and Mississippi and their allies -- have released a new dispatch about their work to ensure Gulf reconstruction serves ordinary people, not the developers, contractors and other powerful interests seeking to impose their agenda on the region.

CLU has launched a People's Hurricane Relief Fund and Reconstruction Project to "oversee all aspects of the relief, recovery and reconstruction of their homes, neighborhoods and lives."

This broad-based coalition of groups in the region has a clear set of demands which

• Provide funds for all displaced families to be reunited;
• Allocate the $50 billion for reconstruction to the victims of the hurricane in the form of a Victims Compensation Fund;
• Accept representation on all boards that are making decisions on spending public dollars for relief and reconstruction;
• Place displaced workers and residents of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in public works jobs, offering union wages;
• Publicly account for and show the entire reconstruction process.

They've also set up an office in the heart of the catastrophe: "Mama Dee of 1733 N. Dorgenois has not stopped since the day of the storm, August 29th. She, like so many New Orleans and Gulf Coast residents, is doing everything in her power and beyond imagination to maintain some semblance of everyday life and to rebuild from the shattering of the storm and neglect. Today she announces that she will turn her home into a local office and collection point for the People's Hurricane Relief Fund and Reconstruction Project."

These are dedicated, thoughtful activists with deep roots in the community, many dating back to the Black Freedom Movement of the 1950s and 60s. And they could definitely use your support. Contributions can be sent to:

Vanguard Public Foundation
383 Rhode Island St., Ste 301
San Francisco, CA 94103
(put Community Labor United on the memo field)

For more information, email Becky Belcore at bbelcore@hotmail.com.

UPDATE: You can read more about CLU and the Relief Fund and Reconstruction Project here (click on "Vets and the Storm" in the left-hand navigation bar)

In the new round of polls showing the U.S. public turning against the Iraq war, there was one statistic that shows progressives have a big opening for reaching Southerners about the war. For example, in drawing on the the New York Times/CBS News Poll released this past weekend, the Times wrote:

A majority of all respondents said that the war in Iraq was having an impact on their communities - 27 percent rated the impact as major and 37 percent as minor.

Those in the South were affected more than those in other regions: 34 percent said the impact was major and 31 percent said it was minor.

This is in line with the Institute's recent report (pdf) on how issues of war and foreign policy are disproportionately impacting people in the South.

Clearly, there is a deep awareness in Southern communities about how war is hurting people's lives. I think what's been missing -- with some notable exceptions -- are clear Southern progressive voices who 1) been willing to consistently and vocally question the war, (I'm thinking here especially of the Southern Congressional delegation), and 2) do it in a way that puts front and center the pain of military families and people who make their livelihoods in the armed services.

Posted by R. Neal

If there's no such thing as a Pulitzer Prize for Outstanding Journalism Under Duress, they ought to invent one for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. U.T. journalism teacher and blogger Bob Stepno has an interesting take on it, and how "journalism may never be the same again."

Posted by R. Neal

Delta Airlines is inarguably one of the South's greatest business success stories. Delta started with the purchase of a Macon, Georgia crop dusting service in 1928. Its first passenger flight was in 1929, on a route from Dallas to Jackson, Mississippi by way of Shreveport and Monroe, Louisiana using Travel Air S-6000B airplanes that carried five passengers and one pilot. Delta moved its headquarters from Monroe, Louisiana to Atlanta in 1961. With its purchase of Pan Am's trans-Atlantic routes in 1991, Delta has grown to become the second largest domestic carrier in terms of passengers, third in revenues, and the top trans-Atlantic carrier. Today, Delta has nearly 70,000 employees and 869 aircraft, and operates daily flights to 502 destinations in 88 countries.

Last week, Delta filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, citing $28 billion in debt and $21 billion in assets. Despite annual revenues of $15 billion, Delta's market cap plunged from approx. $7 billion before 9/11 to about $138 million yesterday. (Although they recovered somewhat in the following months, nearly half of that loss occurred on 9/17/2001, the first day of trading after 9/11.) $138 million sounds like a pretty good deal for a potential buyer, except they would also be buying $28 billion in debt and about $5 billion annual operating losses.

Company officials and analysts attribute Delta's problems, and problems in the "legacy airline" industry at large, to a decline in air travel after 9/11, rising wage and benefit costs, rising fuel costs, excess capacity, and competition from discount carriers. There is also speculation that the post-Katrina spike in fuel costs, and tightening of Chapter 11 bankruptcy laws which take effect October 17th were the "tipping point."

It's hard to imagine a South, or even an America, without Delta Airlines. Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson (and the Crown Room there for some) is like a home away from home for travelers in the South. It's possible, though, that Delta might not survive bankruptcy despite their best efforts. According to industry analysts, most airlines don't:

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