When I was out in Black Rock City, the first I heard of Katrina was Tursday night hopping a tandem ride. The lady who gave me a lift had to get it off her chest, had heard bad stories about mobs and rapes and murders.

Turns out these there were greatly exaggerated:

Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan said authorities had confirmed only four murders in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina - making it a typical week in a city that anticipated more than 200 homicides this year. Jordan expressed outrage at reports from many national media outlets that suffering flood victims had turned into mobs of unchecked savages.
...
Four weeks after the storm, few of the widely reported atrocities have been backed with evidence. The piles of bodies never materialized, and soldiers, police officers and rescue personnel on the front lines say that although anarchy reigned at times and people suffered unimaginable indignities, most of the worst crimes reported at the time never happened.

I think it's important to recognize this, both because it speaks to the dignity and humanity of the people of New Orleans, and because it forces all of us to confront the question in our own minds, "did I really believe everything I heard? If so, why."

It also speaks to the ability of people to live in peace without authoritarianism. The philosophical anarchist in me would like to remind people that while the state can play a role in criminal and social justice, it is a very poor apparatus through which to supply law and order directly.

I picked this up off DownhillBattle. Some people were taking the totally smart step of setting up a low-power radio station at the Huston Astrodome where thousands of people who fled the Gulf Coast ended up. It's the right idea, but it's being blocked by local administrator, and apparently for the most ugly of reasons.

Wired News: Astrodome Radio Station Blocked

Support poured in from wireless nonprofits like the Prometheus Radio Project. All levels of government seemed excited by the idea, including Houston's Mayor Bill White, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and federal agencies like the FCC and FEMA.

But late Sunday evening, the troubles began. According to KAMP, Rita Obey, a local official from Harris County Public Health Services, gave them a laundry list of prerequisites. The most notable of these was the command to procure 10,000 personal, battery-powered radios -- and batteries.

"She said she was afraid of 'people fighting over the radios,'" said Liz Surley, a KAMP volunteer. "She made us promise not to play any rap music, because she thought it might incite some of the evacuees to violence."

This is fucking outrageous. After more hoop-jumping -- to the point of the volunteers bringing in their own fucking batteries to power the transmitter when they were told that the Astrodome (the fucking Astrodome) couldn't supply the power -- the this Obey woman still blocked the project. She "did not see the utility" for a radio station when the Joint Information Center (aka the people in charge; aka whitey -- ooh, did I say that out loud?) can use the stadium loudspeaker system to communicate with the people.

Just to be clear, it's apparent that the local Hefes don't see the need to provide the displaced community with its own means of communicating with itself. They believe that because they can squawk at them with the PA system, the community's needs for information have been met. I hope I'm projecting the racial bias, but I think there's a good chance I'm not. Sounds a lot like "keep that Jungle Music off the air, and for god's sake don't let them start doing their own news." I'm disgusted.

Anyway, there's a semi-happy ending here. They're set up to broadcast from the parking lot. And running Drupal. That's a happy thing. I'll send an email to see if they need any website help.

Hey New Yorkers! The primary (the election that matters in this case) is Tuesday the 13th. Take a minute to figure out where to go and go vote tomorrow.

One of the things I've been processing since I got off the road is just what it takes to change a thing, just what it takes to make tomorrow not like today. It takes a lot. I've been thinking lately about just how glacial the pace of progress really is, and on some levels it bums me out. When I first got "involved," I'd hoped to have things more or less back on an even keel in time for me to make babies. That's three presidential elections (ten years) on the outside, and given everything I don't think that's going to square us to be honest.

But it doesn't have to be a hundred years struggle, either. The journey never ends, but there are people who are moving up the food chain of political power who do, in fact, get it. Back in my adopted hometown of New York City, there's a guy named Andrew Rasiej (pronounced "ra-shay") who's trying to get himself elected Public Advocate, the #2 spot in city government. And he's got the right ideas.

I have some friends who are involved in the campaign (it's drawn some talent from the NYC Dean Internet Intelligentsia), and just as I was finishing my recent post on the Hurricane, someone sent me a link to Andrew's speech on the same topic.

You can read the whole speech (it's good), but boiling it down, his points are:

1. Our communities have become dangerously dis-integrated, especially along lines of class and race. This is the narrative of who lived and died on the Gulf Coast, and it is likely to be the narrative of who reaps the benefits from reconstruction.
2. Our ability to communicate is dangerously fragile. If the government cannot at the very least inform, it looses all credibility. When the people are allowed to intercommunicate freely, great things can happen in absence of direct government action.
3. There are too many people in power who are wedded to the old ways, either to pork-barrel politics, small-world insiderism, or ideological battles that have raged on for decades. The circle of participation in governance and critical decision-making must widen if the above are to change.

Rasiej is an internetista, but he's a staunch progressive too. His campaign is attempting to explore and advance ideas about how the new information ecology can be applied to government, and in doing so he and his people are finding new ways to think and talk about problems which liberals and progressives have been unable to gain traction on for ten, twenty, even thirty years. This is incredibly important. It is quite literally the way to the future.

Rasiej understands, for instance, that often the role of government is to get something started and then get out of the way, to create and maintain infrastructure and let the people use that infrastructure to the benefit of all. He understands the importance of public service, of government's role in raising the common denominator and in providing safety and security against the unexpected. He understands that "trickle down" is bullshit, that more prosperity is created when solutions are built with a many to many mindset. He understands the need to involve vastly more people as real participants in the democratic process to insure its integrity.

The reason I think all this is so vital is not just because these ideas would be good for New York City, but because a win for Rasiej would be a step towards bringing these ideas to the wider world. These ideas will work. They're based off bedrock principles: participation, transparency, public service. These principles are good. Combined with the possibilities of a peer-to-peer information ecology and contrasted with the status-quo, they imply frankly revolutionary changes. They are the way to better government and a better quality of life, to justice, liberty and sustainability.

A win for Rasiej can accelerate the pace of change in these United States. Put that man into office (an office, I might add, which hasn't done much for the city lately) and he'll turn it into a laboratory for new government and a bully pulpit to announce the results. Let us advance our cause in New York City and put the results on the world's stage, open-source style.

There's no deodorant like success. People gravitate towards what works, what was good and right and memorable, even retroactively, and politicians are no different. I see a possible future where one day public servants everywhere claim these ideas as their own, even claim they were always on board. Installing Rasiej as Public Advocate in NYC won't do the job alone, but it is a step in the right direction.

In the face of failure, people are looking for an alternatives. Citizens are looking for something that offers them more than incompetence, equivocation and greed. Politicians are looking for something that can create momentum in an environment defined the gaming of perception. People of conscience are looking for a way to meaningfully participate. We're all tired of the bullshit, and anyone who uses their brain can tell we're in for some tough challenges up ahead, that we need to get it together. But as long as the present establishment remains intact, that's not going to happen. Let's turn up the heat.

So to all my NYC compadres, please vote in the primary tomorrow. Check out Andrew's website; if nothing else read the lessons from Katrina speech to get a taste for what the campaign is all about. Let's make New York a free wi-fi zone, just like Philly, and more than just giving away the access, let's use that to empower people to get more out of their city, to connect our communities, to improve the local economy, develop independent culture, to help us work together in cases of emergency and times of trouble. I think it's an exciting opportunity. If I were there I'd vote Rasiej.

(technorati tag: rasiej)

For those who don't follow the news like I do, the New York Times' outgoing Public Editor, a man named Daniel Okrent, left his post in a bit of an odd way. He fired off a big shot at my dawg Paul Krugman, accusing him of "shaping, slicing and selectively citing" statistics to serve his political agenda. The accusations listed no specifics, and it seems a troubling thing for the Public Editor -- a position created to facilitate self-examination and reader service at the Times in wake one the Jayson Blair scandal -- to level criticism at one of the paper's columnists only after leaving his post and not when his objections would have, say, had the better effect of correcting any misleading statements.

That is, assuming of course, that there was any substance to Okrent's charges. As the dialog has progressed on the new Public Editor's page, it has become apparent that there isn't.

If you want to read the back-and-forth, I recommend Brad Delong's annotated version of the exchange. Okrent does not come off looking good.

I'm trying to imagine how this happened. It would seem that Okrent sort of fell for a lot of right-wing hooey. The leading theory is that that this might have something to do with the purported 40,000 word correspondence with conservative activist Donald Luskin (not an economist) who writes at the National Review. Okrent seems to have absorbed not only the faulty substance of Luskin's critique, but also his poisonous style. He repeatedly caricatures Krugman as playing to his "acolytes" with his work, effectively striking out not only at Prof. Krugman, but anyone who would bother to support him.

My comment? It's a shame the Times hired such a fucking bitchy little lightweight. Sure he invented Rotisserie League Baseball, and that's cool and all, but his ability to wade in the waters of 21st Century Politics are clearly for shit.

I don't know if he's just kidding or he thinks he's being coy, but David Brook's Sunday column in the Times gave me the willies. Entitled, Karl's New Manifesto, he reacpitulates the language of Marx's communist manifesto, but with the glib Friedman-esque turn of updating it to "the information age" and identifying education as the new class signifier.

Undereducated workers of the world, unite! Let the ruling educated class tremble! You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win!

Clever. Except, you know, they actually tried that in China. It was called The Cultural Revolution and it didn't really work out all that well.

Maybe not clever though. I think Brooks is using his perch at the NYT to needle the readerbase, but this is how propaganda starts. Propaganda is something, by the way, Bush self-identifies as using (nice little video there). Just another one of those days, I guess.

Duncan taking Mr. Reasonable Matt Yglesias to task:

Eschaton:
The primary conceit of the "liberal hawks" has been and is that only they are "serious" about the security of the nation. Support for the Iraq war demonstrated that seriousness, no matter how misguided it was. The truth is concern for our national security was a very real reason to oppose the Iraq war, and the primary reason for lots of its opponents.

That's what I'm fucking talkin' about! You want to hear a hawkish liberal stance? How about "we're at the mercy of Communist China because of our disasterous fiscal policies!" How about "Our lack of a comprehensive health care system has made us a sitting duck for bioterrorism!" How about "our reactionary drug laws are preventing effective treatment (via MDMA) of Post traumatic Stress Disorder; why do they hate our troops?"

Big ups to what Atrios says here. My problem with the so called "Liberal Hawks" (and the conservatives too) is that they really don't seem to be serious about the real threats we face as a nation and as a world. There's nothing like getting a condescending lecture from someone who's ass is hanging out of their pants.

The NYT is reporting that there's about to be some shit going down in Iraq:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 26 - In a sweeping effort to strike back at a violent insurgency that has hobbled Iraq's new government since it took power nearly a month ago, the Defense and Security Ministers said today they would deploy thousands of troops to stage a massive search-and-arrest operation in the capital over the next week.

This is going to be interesting. The insurgency seems to be pretty liquid, so they might melt into the surrounding areas, making this a kind of empty show of force that will probably annoy citizens with it's authoritarian intrusiveness. On the other hand, the insurgency also seems to strike when it wants. And if it wants, this could mean real urban combat, which would be ugly.

There's an off chance that this might really break some insurgent networks, but given that they're tellegraphing it and the lockdown is temporary, I don't see it as likely.

I don't have the wonkish fever to follow things like the recent political drama over the "Nuclear Option" in great detail, but the situation has come to a close. The outcome: three pretty extreme conservatives will make it to the appelate court and the Senate will not change its rules to strip the minority party of its right to filibuster. Here's a detailed analysis of the actual text of the compromise, if you want.

My Take
Ont he face of it, it doesn't look like much of a victory for Democrats. Basically three people who are right-wing ideologues get lifetime jobs on the bench. Boo. However, the reality is that the amount of political capital this has cost the GOP makes it largely a loosing proposition from their end. Also, the 9th Circut (one of the few courts that can still be relied on for the kinds of opinions I like to see) will not be touched.

Net-net, it's a bad thing in the short term for the country, but it's not a calamity that these people get to be judges. More importantly, in the long political game it's going to weaken the Radical Conservative movement, and as such is a victory for anyone who's alarmed with the direction the government has been taking over the past 25 years or so.

In particular it's going to dampen the political enthusiasm of some of the Dominionist christians, a largely inexperienced population who comprised a lot of the first-time voters who came out for Bush back in November. As a compromise, it should also irk the hard-right radio crowd and the warbloggers. Finally, this deal will seriously impair Sen. Majority leader Bill Frist's chances of making a run for the White House in 2008. He didn't bet his political life on this fight, but he wagered an arm and a leg, and it's not often that double-amputees make it to the Oval Office.

In truth, with one party (the GOP) in control of the process, this is a decent outcome for anyone who opposes the animating ideas of that party. It's also nice that compomise is still possible, as in better times this is the nature of democratic governance. Bottom line: if Dems had been able to lock up the necessary defectors to win a vote on changing the Senate rules, that would have been a triumph, but this is still a strategic victory.

Bush and the Washington Republicans are taking a bath on matters of public opinion and they've been unable to make any headway on their major initiatives. At this rate, it seems unlikely that they retain enough political capital to propose any new policy (e.g. a national sales tax) and barring a major change in the geopolitical situation they will be forced to begin bringing our involvement in Iraq to a close within the next year or so to avoid crushing political consequences.

Assuming the Democrats can put together the message, money and organization to capitalize on this, better political times are coming. The question then is whether or not Democrats will successfully reframe the national debate and forge a real governing consensus, or whether we'll get another round of trench warfare. I'm hoping for the former because there are large problems facing humanity, and Public action will be needed to effectively deal with them.

While I'm here I will probably be completing my last paid work for Jolly old MFA. But I want to point out that I'm fucking proud of what that organization is doing and standing for, even if I made a decision not to keep working there. Here's an example.

Amanda of Pandagon has a blistering post on the "greatest generation" vs. today's warbloggers. Today's the 1,346th day since 9/11. It took 1,346 days since Pearl Harbor to declare victory in World War II. The critique is strong:

The Greatest Generation knew that a war effort this massive would require effort from everyone and with that end in mind, they intergrated women into the military for the first time with the WAC and while black Americans were still serving in segregated units, the contributions of both blacks and women during WWII set the stage for rebellions that came later and society progressed. The Cowardly Generation thinks the best way to win a war is to exclude gays and women from military duty as much as you can while rolling back social reforms at home.

The Greatest Generation rationed sugar, coffee, fabrics and mostly oil for the war effort. The Cowardly Generation decided that the best way to show support was to purchase massive SUVs that looked manly while increasing our dependence on the oil that got us into this shit to begin with.

This is something I've thought about a lot myself, as I still can't shake the sensation of biking down an empty 5th Avenue towards a massive column of smoke 1,346 days ago. I was a little afraid, yes, but mostly I was sick to my stomache because I knew that at full population there are 50,000 people in those towers and I figured most of them must be dead.

At the same time, as this was a meltdown of the status quo I felt a thrilling sense of possibility. I think I started singing "We Can Be Heroes." It seems a little inappropriate in hindsight, but the words were electrifying. Experience is a product of contrasts, and there's nothing like the towering visage of death taking over the city you call home to make you feel alive.

I think my greatest beef with Bush and his cohort is how they squandered that opportunity. That was a moment in which the United States could have taken an enormous step forward and taken most of the world with us, I think. That was a moment when our society was aching to come together as never before. People were giving blood because no one knew what the fuck else to do, and in that moment the President told us to keep shopping and keep praying. And then he started getting ready to scare us into an unnecessary and poorly planned war.

I don't know if that window of optimisim is closed or not. I don't want to believe it, but the depth of divisions and rancor in this country today are staggering. If a potential for real change swept in along with the grim reaper that clear tuesday morning, I fear it has been spent to take us to war and turn us against ourselves. 1,346 days. What a motherfucker.