TomDispatch has put together a list of 42 government officials who were fired, made to resign, or otherwise had careers ended for presenting data factually as opposed to twisting it to serve the administration's goals, criticizing decisions, or otherwise upholding their honor. It is by its nature no more than a small cross-section, showing the most visible members of a rapidly dwindling group of honest government officials.

LSU decided to cancel classes on Monday, September 26.

However, the LSU football game will be held in Tiger Stadium on Monday night, as scheduled.

I had speculated before that the actions of the Gretna police might be representative of their entire town, which had a reputation for racism. I find that speculation unfortunately confirmed.

I linked yesterday to the story of a man who got out on a commandeered schoolbus, and one element of that story may have a followup. He ended up getting out on that one lone schoolbus because the buses that the hotels had gotten together to charter (and pay for) privately to get their guests out had been commandeered by the National Guard (rightly, I feel, under the circumstances) to serve as part of the general relief effort.

Bitch, Ph.D. links to (and quotes) an AP story describing how the guests managed to get to the head of the line after all. This is one of those funny confluences of economics and human nature that manages to lead inevitably to the wrong action. The wealthy will always have better access to resources (including emergency resources) than the poor; that is, fundamentally, what it means to be wealthy. There is a responsibility during a rescue operation to triage not by wealth, but by need, however, and that is what makes this business-as-usual event so offensive. There was no requirement for the National Guard to respect that the hotel guests had bought tickets, yet someone felt that the fact that they had spent money entitled them to something.

As if to place a punctuation mark on all of the other recent deaths, it has just been announced that Chief Justice Rehnquist has just passed away. For all the things he has done that I have cursed him for, he at least has been a rational thinker and a fine mind, and will certainly be better than his replacement.

I hope that our civil rights will survive that replacement. I am now thoroughly depressed.

Hat tip for the news to Think Progress.

There have been a lot of problems in New Orleans and Mississippi getting needed support, from helicopters for rescue and evacuation, to sandbags to help plug broken levees, to simple water supplies. A lot of frustration has been expressed by rescuers about how long it has been taking for help to arrive.

It turns out that a good part of the reason is that FEMA was enveloped by the Department of Homeland Security and diverted to dealing with potential threats from al-Qaida. In addition, funds were diverted from emergency management and storm preparedness — including massive budget cuts to the Army Corps of Engineers responsible for maintaining the levees in New Orleans. The budget cuts were so severe that in 2004, they were forced to abandon work on the levee system for the first time in 37 years. Now, two of those levees have failed, and there is neither manpower nor equipment coming in a timely fashion to fix them.

U.S. troops are still holding Reuters cameraman Haider Kadhem more than a full day after wounding him and killing his soundman, Waleed Khaled, who were driving in an ordinary vehicle in western Baghdad. This brings the total of journalists and assistants killed in Iraq up to 66, already more than the 60 killed throughout 20 years of the Vietnam War.

Rolling Stone has published an article titled Four Amendments & a Funeral, detailing just how far the legislative branch has deteriorated. It follows around independent Representative Bernie Sanders from Vermont over a period of a month, as he struggles to and then successfully manages to get solid bipartisan support for four amendments... all four of which are killed, despite having majority support.

It's a rare, direct look at how firmly entrenched the corruption is. The only bright point is that he actually has found a number of honest conservatives to work with, so the system isn't uniformly rotten. Just mostly so.

It's a well written piece, for anyone who still harbors illusions about the United States still having a functioning democracy.

Link credit to The Huffington Post, that I must admit I underestimated earlier.

The Center for Constitutional Rights is reporting that the Bush administration has filed a last minute block of the release of the photo and video evidence of abuse at Abu Ghraib, probably because it utterly annihilates the party line that not much abuse actually happened, and that it was the work of a few renegades.

This is probably the really ugly stuff (including child rape) that was quietly admitted to a year ago. Quietly in the U.S., anyway: although it received practically no news coverage here, the rest of the world did take notice.

I hope that the U.S. press is awake enough this time around to catch it, even if only a year late. There are too many people trying to pass off all the abuses as trivial.

Despite having patched Drupal to run its anti-spam module on trackbacks, too much trackback spam is getting through, even of the form of stuff that it's been theoretically trained on and should know for certain is spam, and the attacks are coming ever more frequently. Thus, I have no alternative but to disable trackbacks until enough of the Drupal modules for 4.6.0 are working well enough for me to attempt a major upgrade and test the systems again.

Days like this make me think the Chinese had the right idea when they started executing spammers.