Finocchio

Manhattan Museum-Going -- The Asian Art Junket

Before taking up a new position, I took a few days to do some museum-going in Manhattan, mostly looking at Asian art.  I had read a bit about the Tibetan collections of Shelley and Donald Rubin, but this was my first visit to the Rubin Museum of Art (located in the old Barney's building in Chelsea, 17th Street between Sixth and Seventh).   The museum opened last October and offers an elegant space that was very quiet on a Friday evening.  In a review of the Rubin for New York Magazine, Mark Stevens wrote that:

During the late nineties, reluctant to give their collection to an established institution that would bury it in storage, they decided instead to construct their own museum and, in an inspired bit of serendipity, bought the Barneys building in a bankruptcy sale for $22 million.

A six-story spiral staircase, which Andrée Putman originally designed for Barneys, centers the exhibition space. If the stairs once evoked a Hollywood romance—Garbo swirling downward in a feathery boa to meet her waiting lover—they now suggest cycles, transcendence, and the rippling forms of Buddhist art. The architect Richard Blinder oversaw the transformation from a consumer showpiece into a museum, and Milton Glaser, together with Tim Culbert and Celia Imrey, worked on the design of the galleries. Overall, they have created a jewel-like and serene setting for the art.

Private collectons-turned-museums are often unusual creatures.  The Barnes Foundation, presently outside Philadelphia, the Phillips Collection just off Washington's Dupont Circle, even the Pierpont Morgan Library in Manhattan, began as the collection and obsession of an individual (or two), but then grow beyond that individual's scope and control.  The Barnes is struggling with this transformation now, decades after Dr. Barnes's death.  The Rubin Museum does not yet face this challenge.  It's formation is still fresh.  The exhibit labels are a bit discursive and suggest the collectors' own enthusiasms.  One particularly striking piece (not actually part of the Rubins's collection, but on loan from another collector) is a gilt metal sculpture of a dancing skeleton, which, the label indicates, would have served as a support for a ceremonial horn used by monks.

What the Rubin gains by its independence (instead of the collection being immersed in the larger collections of one of the great institutions) is highlighted by a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Asian collections.  The breadth and depth of the Met's holdings are phenomenal, and the museum's presentation is rich.  But the works that one views in considerable detail at the Rubin, a relatively narrow slice of Asian art explored in some depth, receives a brief survey overview at the Met.  Such deep, narrow treatment of a subject, the Met (and indeed most museums) reserves for special exhibitions.  They are not in the nature of displays of the permanent collections.

Delightful, thoughtful, even ruminative as the Rubin is, the Met's collections are simply far richer.  Still, the strength of the Met's permanent collections lies not in painting, but in sculpture, where one finds a similar ruminative reiterative quality, exploring slight changes across time and geography.

A very light, pleasant note:  At nearly all of the Met's statuettes of Ganesha, the dancing, pot-bellied, elephant-headed Hindu god of abundance, visitors had placed small offerings -- a few pennies, sometimes candies.  It seems that even a museum's hushed darkness can't inhibit the impulse to make an offering for luck.

Katrina And Tsunami Aid Comparison

Yesterday, I wrote about disaster relief foreign countries have offered to victims of the hurricane and floods.  John Quiggan, writing at Crooked Timber, provides an interesting comparison of aid following Katrina and aid following the tsunami.

Ten days after the New Orleans disaster, the US has accepted offers of foreign aid totalling $US1 billion, but most of the assistance is not getting through because of red tape. The total amount given by the US government in response to the tsunami was $950 million (at a comparable point in time after the tsunami, the figure was $350 million).

As a further comparison, here’s a report from December 31, 2004 of aid finally reaching a city in Aceh, close to the epicentre of the earthquake/tsunami that struck 5 days previously. That’s for a more widespread disaster, in the middle of a war zone, in a Third World country, with few roads, and thousands of kilometres from the countries giving most of the aid.

Twelve Books That Changed The World

Melvyn Bragg will host a series on UK television discussing 12 books that changed the world.  The books are:

Darwin - The Origin of Species (1859)
The First Rule Book of the Football Association (1863)
William Shakespeare's First Folio (1623)
Newton - Principia Mathematica (1687)
Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations (1776)
William Wilberforce - Speech to the House of Commons (May 12 1789)
The King James Bible (1611)
Patent Specification for Arkwright's Spinning Machine (1769)
Mary Wollstonecraft - A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
Michael Faraday - Experimental Research in Electricity (1855)
Marie Stopes - Married Love (1918)
Magna Carta (1215)

Cheney Heckled During Visit To Disaster Zone

While conducting a press conference during his visit today to New Orleans, Vice President Cheney was heckled by a bystander, who called out "Go f**k yourself, Mr. Cheney.  Go f**k yourself."  To view a video clip, see here.

Schwarzenegger To Veto Marriage Bill

California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who rode into the governor's office on nothing but celebrity and an actor's persona of courage and resolve, has announced that he will avoid making any actual decision at all -- least of all a principalled decision -- and will veto the marriage equality bill the elected legislature recently passed.

Schwarzenegger said the legislation, given final approval Tuesday by lawmakers, would conflict with the intent of voters when they approved a ballot initiative five years ago. Proposition 22 prevents California from recognizing same-sex marriages performed in other states or countries.

"We cannot have a system where the people vote and the Legislature derails that vote," the governor's press secretary, Margita Thompson, said in a statement. "Out of respect for the will of the people, the governor will veto (the bill)."

As KipEsquire points out, however, the legislators who voted on the marriage bill were all elected by the California electorate subsequent to the Proposition 22 initiative.

[E]very single legislator involved in the same-sex marriage vote Tuesday night, regardless of how they voted, was elected by "the people" after the Knight Initiative.

Clearly, "the people" changed their minds.

Therefore, the idea that this "activist legislature" acted contrary to the will of "the people" is the worst kind of nonsense.

Marriage Equality In California -- Time For The Governor's Decision

Now that the California legislature has approved a bill securing marriage equality for same-sex couples, it is time for California's "new Republican" governor to take a stand in favor of fairness and justice.  Some speculate, however, that the Governor will instead veto the bill.

The legislation could be vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has expressed an acceptance of gay marriages but said it's an issue that should be decided by voters or the courts.

"He will uphold whatever the court decides," spokeswoman Margita Thompson said Tuesday after the state Assembly approved the same-sex marriage measure, 41-35. The Senate had approved it last week.

A state appellate court is considering appeals of a lower court ruling that overturned California laws banning recognition of gay marriages. And opponents of same-sex marriage are trying to qualify initiatives for the 2006 ballot that would amend the state Constitution to ban gay marriages.

World Governments Respond, Offer Aid To U.S. For Victims Of Gulf Coast Disaster

The world's nations, many of whom have been receipients of U.S. disaster relief aid in the past (some, in the very recent past), have offered aid to U.S. victims of the Gulf coast hurricane and floods.  One has heard very little if anything about this in U.S. news reports and discussions, so it is particularly interesting to see the extent of the world's response.  The aid takes a variety of forms, from the offer of 20 million barrels of crude oil from Iran to medical staff from Indonesia, water purification units from Denmark and $5 million from China (for an extensive listing of aid offered, see here).  However, much of the proffered aid is held up, awaiting a response from U.S. authorities.

For four days, a C-130 transport plane ready to lift emergency supplies to Katrina victims has stood idle at the Satenas air force base in southern Sweden.

The aid includes a water purification system that may be urgently needed amid signs deadly diseases may be spreading through fetid pools in New Orleans, and blankets for those left homeless.

"We have to get some kind of signal (from the United States) in the next few days," said Karin Viklund of the Swedish Rescue Services Agency. "We really hope we will get it."

More than a week after Canada first offered to send military support, three Canadian warships and one coast guard ship departed for the Gulf Coast on Wednesday.

Although the government in Ottawa has been careful not to criticize the slow response, newspaper editorials asked why Washington seemed reluctant to accept Canadian aid.

The United States has accepted offers of nearly $1 billion in assistance from some 95 countries, Thomas said.

In Switzerland, aid officials expected an answer to their aid offer by Tuesday night. They met Wednesday afternoon to discuss what to do while waiting for a response.

Poland, Austria and Norway also had not heard back on their aid offers, and countries in Asia also were waiting for replies.

India, which regularly is hit by flooding unleashed by monsoon rains, has a planeload of supplies waiting but nowhere to send it.

"The plane is parked at the airport here and we are awaiting instructions on where to send the medicines and food items," an External Affairs Ministry official said Wednesday, declining to be identified under government briefing rules.

India said it would give $5 million to the American Red Cross on Thursday in Washington. New Delhi also offered to send military medics and water purification equipment.

"The offer to help is on the table. We are awaiting Washington's response," the official said.

FEMA Sends New Orleans Evacuees To Wrong City

Given the level of the agency's failure and the level of criticism the agency has received, it is nothing short of astonishing to learn that FEMA has sent a planeload of people evacuated from New Orleans to the wrong city.  Approximately 180 people were sent not to Charleston, South Carolina, where medical staff and authorities stood by at the airport, awaiting their arrival, but to Charleston, West Virginia -- 400 miles away.

To make matters worse, when the mistake was discovered, the plane was not immediately rerouted to the correct destination.  As of 11:30 Tuesday night, it was not clear that FEMA had made any plans at all to transport the mis-delivered evacuees to their actual destination.

Need it be said again -- Mr. President, please fire Michael Brown immediately.

Marriage Equality In California

By a vote of 41-35, California's legislature approved a bill granting marriage equality to same-sex couples.  The bill now goes to Gov. Schwarzenegger for signature.

Of Foxes And Henhouses: Bush To Conduct Inquiry Into Disaster Response

The President today announced that he will conduct an inquiry into his administration's response to last week's Gulf coast disasters.

"I'm going to find out over time what went right and what went wrong," he said in reply to criticism that the authorities were too slow to respond.

Since Mr. Bush's own inadequate grasp of the situation and failure to take appropriate action is part of what any such inquiry must address, the President's ownership of this project can only be regarded as improper.  An independent inquiry is required.  Presumably, some variant on an independent panel of inquiry is what the President is describing here -- along the lines of the several 9/11 panels the President long resisted and whose ultimate performance his administration seriously impaired by narrowing the inquiries' charges to exclude any actors and agencies the administration would find it inconvenient to have criticized. 

The White House, for instance.

If such inquiries are to be in any way meaningful, and not simply political cover, they must be truly independent and cannot be tailored to avoid questions various parties find it embarassing or painful to have asked.  The scope of these inquiries also must go beyond mere finger-pointing between and among local, state and federal agencies and officials.  The restructuring of FEMA by submerging it into the Department of Homeland Security must be part of these inquiries, as must the administration's funding and personnel priorities.  We have been assured for four years now that the administration's foreign policy choices are not being made at the expense of domestic -- homeland -- security.  That assertion must be tested in these inquiries, and must be tested honestly.  I do not know what the ultimate conclusion of such a line of questioning would be.  At this point, no one does, and anyone who insists that he does is both a fool and a knave.

If the President wants to take meaningful action now, he should fire both Michael Brown and Michael Chertoff and replace them with experienced, capable individuals, without the delays an empty inquiry would afford.  This may not be the administration's style, but that style plainly needs to be changed.

"This Is Working Very Well For Them"

Matt Drudge reports remarks made by the President's mother, Barbara Bush, praising the wonderful new opportunities opening up for the refugees from the disaster in New Orleans.  It seems the former First Lady finds a silver lining in the devastation and loss.

Former first lady and mother to President Bush said Monday that evacuees from New Orleans have found a home in Houston.

"Almost everyone I’ve talked to says we're going to move to Houston," Barbara Bush told NPR.

"What I’m hearing is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.

"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this --this is working very well for them."

Unflaggingly Loyal And Wholly Inadequate

A review in The Economist of American journalist Anthony Shadid's account of the Iraq war, "Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War," resonates with the Bush Administration's domestic failures as well as its misguided and incompetent foreign policy.

Mr Shadid writes engagingly about history and lyrically about destruction. (“The hospital ward was littered with blood-soaked gauze, the stretchers and blankets themselves bore scabs”.) He writes about the Americans in Iraq scarcely at all. The reader comes to see them almost through Iraqi eyes, as distant and dangerous, their presence expressed by absence—of electricity through a burning summer, and of security, when Baghdad is ransacked as the Baathist regime folds. Where Americans do come in, Mr Shadid prefers to let them damn themselves. Why, one startled English-speaking Iraqi asks, did the tank that advanced on his village have “We remember 9/11” written on its gun-barrel? In the Baghdad citadel, the “Green Zone”, from which America ruled Iraq, Mr Shadid encounters a breed of chirpy young Republicans, unflaggingly loyal to their government and wholly inadequate to their tasks: “Iraqis rock!” two of them tell him.

While America's leadership bragged of bringing freedom (a “catchphrase it used reflexively,” he says), Mr Shadid asks again and again the question thrown up during the 7th-century squabble between Sunni and Shia Muslims in Iraq, which has not been settled since: “Who has the right to rule, and from where does that right arise?” In the flourishing of radical Islam and nationalism after the invasion, that turned Shia and Sunni against each other and both groups against the invader, he sees a breakneck bid to supply the answer. So too in the democratic process that America and its allies hastily, if belatedly, introduced, with elections last January. Which logic will prevail, war and domination, or negotiation and compromise, Mr Shadid is careful not to try to predict.

Even if, against the odds, Iraqis manage to avert worse violence, history will still condemn America for its blundering in their country. Mr Shadid lists the mistakes dispassionately, including those well known—the insufficient number of occupying troops, the disbanding of Iraq's security forces—and those less advertised, that the Sadrist uprising began after an American helicopter rammed a sacred Shia flag for fun, or that the resistance in Fallujah began after American troops there massacred 15 unarmed protesters.

And yet, he asks, even without all these errors, was the occupation's failure inevitable? Mr Shadid suggests that it was. Brutalised over two decades, yet still bristling with ancient pride and possessing no common idea of how their country should be, Iraqis were ripe for revolt the day the dictator's boot was lifted from their throats. And America, a well-meaning but ignorant occupier, widely distrusted across the Arab world because of its backing for Israel, was hopelessly ill-equipped to quell them. “Not insubstantial were decades over which the United States had grown as an antagonist in the eyes of many Arabs. Iraq had long been removed from the Arab world, isolated by dictatorship, war, and sanctions, but it remained Arab.”

Roberts To Succeed Rehnquist

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that administration officials are indicating that the President today will announce that he is nominating John Roberts to replace William Rehnquist as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Mr. Bush met with Judge Roberts at the White House on Sunday evening for about a half an hour and then offered him the top position at the Supreme Court on Monday morning, the administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because Mr. Bush hadn't yet announced his selection.

Mr. Bush already had nominated Judge Roberts to fill the seat of retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. It would just take a little paper shuffling to change the nomination for Chief Justice's Rehnquist's seat.

The president still wants Judge Roberts to be on the bench when the Supreme Court resumes its work on Oct. 3, the official said. That means Mr. Bush would have to find a new nominee for Justice O'Connor's seat. She has offered to remain on the bench until a successor is seated.

Times-Picayune Open Letter To The President

The Times-Picayune of New Orleans has published an open letter to the President, addressing his administration's incompetent response to last week's hurricane and flood:

Dear Mr. President:

We heard you loud and clear Friday when you visited our devastated city and the Gulf Coast and said, "What is not working, we're going to make it right."

Please forgive us if we wait to see proof of your promise before believing you. But we have good reason for our skepticism.

Bienville built New Orleans where he built it for one main reason: It's accessible. The city between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain was easy to reach in 1718.

How much easier it is to access in 2005 now that there are interstates and bridges, airports and helipads, cruise ships, barges, buses and diesel-powered trucks.

Despite the city's multiple points of entry, our nation's bureaucrats spent days after last week's hurricane wringing their hands, lamenting the fact that they could neither rescue the city's stranded victims nor bring them food, water and medical supplies.

Meanwhile there were journalists, including some who work for The Times-Picayune, going in and out of the city via the Crescent City Connection. On Thursday morning, that crew saw a caravan of 13 Wal-Mart tractor trailers headed into town to bring food, water and supplies to a dying city.

Television reporters were doing live reports from downtown New Orleans streets. Harry Connick Jr. brought in some aid Thursday, and his efforts were the focus of a "Today" show story Friday morning.

Yet, the people trained to protect our nation, the people whose job it is to quickly bring in aid were absent. Those who should have been deploying troops were singing a sad song about how our city was impossible to reach.

We're angry, Mr. President, and we'll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That's to the government's shame.

Mayor Ray Nagin did the right thing Sunday when he allowed those with no other alternative to seek shelter from the storm inside the Louisiana Superdome. We still don't know what the death toll is, but one thing is certain: Had the Superdome not been opened, the city's death toll would have been higher. The toll may even have been exponentially higher.

It was clear to us by late morning Monday that many people inside the Superdome would not be returning home. It should have been clear to our government, Mr. President. So why weren't they evacuated out of the city immediately? We learned seven years ago, when Hurricane Georges threatened, that the Dome isn't suitable as a long-term shelter. So what did state and national officials think would happen to tens of thousands of people trapped inside with no air conditioning, overflowing toilets and dwindling amounts of food, water and other essentials?

State Rep. Karen Carter was right Friday when she said the city didn't have but two urgent needs: "Buses! And gas!" Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially.

In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn't known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, "We've provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they've gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day."

Lies don't get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.

Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, "You're doing a heck of a job."

That's unbelievable.

There were thousands of people at the Convention Center because the riverfront is high ground. The fact that so many people had reached there on foot is proof that rescue vehicles could have gotten there, too.

We, who are from New Orleans, are no less American than those who live on the Great Plains or along the Atlantic Seaboard. We're no less important than those from the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia. Our people deserved to be rescued.

No expense should have been spared. No excuses should have been voiced. Especially not one as preposterous as the claim that New Orleans couldn't be reached.

Mr. President, we sincerely hope you fulfill your promise to make our beloved communities work right once again.

When you do, we will be the first to applaud.

The President's Failure

On Wednesday, as the scope of the disaster in New Orleans was becoming clear, The New Hampshire Union Leader voiced strong disapproval of the President's failure to grasp what the situation required of him and his government.  I quote the paper's editorial comment in full below.  It is notable that the President finally summoned his government to respond to the crisis only days after the Union Leader's call for what was even then belated action.

AS THE EXTENT of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation became clearer on Tuesday — millions without power, tens of thousands homeless, a death toll unknowable because rescue crews can’t reach some regions — President Bush carried on with his plans to speak in San Diego, as if nothing important had happened the day before.

Katrina already is measured as one of the worst storms in American history. And yet, President Bush decided that his plans to commemorate the 60th anniversary of VJ Day with a speech were more pressing than responding to the carnage.

A better leader would have flown straight to the disaster zone and announced the immediate mobilization of every available resource to rescue the stranded, find and bury the dead, and keep the survivors fed, clothed, sheltered and free of disease.

The cool, confident, intuitive leadership Bush exhibited in his first term, particularly in the months immediately following Sept. 11, 2001, has vanished. In its place is a diffident detachment unsuitable for the leader of a nation facing war, natural disaster and economic uncertainty.

Wherever the old George W. Bush went, we sure wish we had him back.

Anne Rice On New Orleans

Anne Rice, a writer closely identified with the city of New Orleans, considers her city in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times:

WHAT do people really know about New Orleans?

Do they take away with them an awareness that it has always been not only a great white metropolis but also a great black city, a city where African-Americans have come together again and again to form the strongest African-American culture in the land?

The first literary magazine ever published in Louisiana was the work of black men, French-speaking poets and writers who brought together their work in three issues of a little book called L'Album Littéraire. That was in the 1840's, and by that time the city had a prosperous class of free black artisans, sculptors, businessmen, property owners, skilled laborers in all fields. Thousands of slaves lived on their own in the city, too, making a living at various jobs, and sending home a few dollars to their owners in the country at the end of the month.

This is not to diminish the horror of the slave market in the middle of the famous St. Louis Hotel, or the injustice of the slave labor on plantations from one end of the state to the other. It is merely to say that it was never all "have or have not" in this strange and beautiful city.

Later in the 19th century, as the Irish immigrants poured in by the thousands, filling the holds of ships that had emptied their cargoes of cotton in Liverpool, and as the German and Italian immigrants soon followed, a vital and complex culture emerged. Huge churches went up to serve the great faith of the city's European-born Catholics; convents and schools and orphanages were built for the newly arrived and the struggling; the city expanded in all directions with new neighborhoods of large, graceful houses, or areas of more humble cottages, even the smallest of which, with their floor-length shutters and deep-pitched roofs, possessed an undeniable Caribbean charm.

Through this all, black culture never declined in Louisiana. In fact, New Orleans became home to blacks in a way, perhaps, that few other American cities have ever been. Dillard University and Xavier University became two of the most outstanding black colleges in America; and once the battles of desegregation had been won, black New Orleanians entered all levels of life, building a visible middle class that is absent in far too many Western and Northern American cities to this day.

The influence of blacks on the music of the city and the nation is too immense and too well known to be described. It was black musicians coming down to New Orleans for work who nicknamed the city "the Big Easy" because it was a place where they could always find a job. But it's not fair to the nature of New Orleans to think of jazz and the blues as the poor man's music, or the music of the oppressed.

Something else was going on in New Orleans. The living was good there. The clock ticked more slowly; people laughed more easily; people kissed; people loved; there was joy.

Which is why so many New Orleanians, black and white, never went north. They didn't want to leave a place where they felt at home in neighborhoods that dated back centuries; they didn't want to leave families whose rounds of weddings, births and funerals had become the fabric of their lives. They didn't want to leave a city where tolerance had always been able to outweigh prejudice, where patience had always been able to outweigh rage. They didn't want to leave a place that was theirs.

And so New Orleans prospered, slowly, unevenly, but surely - home to Protestants and Catholics, including the Irish parading through the old neighborhood on St. Patrick's Day as they hand out cabbages and potatoes and onions to the eager crowds; including the Italians, with their lavish St. Joseph's altars spread out with cakes and cookies in homes and restaurants and churches every March; including the uptown traditionalists who seek to preserve the peace and beauty of the Garden District; including the Germans with their clubs and traditions; including the black population playing an ever increasing role in the city's civic affairs.

William Rehnquist Dies, Age 80

Chief Justice William Rehnquist died Saturday evening.  For a brief biography of the former Chief Justice, see here.

"Strict Construction" And Federal Power To Provide Aid

Jack Balkin offers an interesting commentary on early disputes in Constitutional interpretation concerning the federal government's power to provide disaster relief

One of the earliest and most contentious debates during the first years of the Constitution's history was whether or not the federal government had the power, under its authority "to pay the debts and provide for the common defence and general welfare of the United States," to spend money for disaster relief for a specific community. Jeffersonian strict constructionists argued that the words "general welfare" precluded such a power, arguing first, that the general welfare clause only gave Congress the power to spend on behalf of one of its other enumerated powers, and second, that even if the power to spend for the general welfare were an independent power, Congress could not devote money to a specific locality or region, but must spend for the entire country as a whole, i.e., "the general welfare of the United States." Loose constructionists, following Alexander Hamilton, argued that the general welfare clause gave Congress a separate power, and that the clause gave Congress wide latitude to spend money to promote what it viewed as conducive to the general welfare. . . .
     The strict constructionist/state's rights position which was offered by Jefferson's party caused the Republicans political embarrassment because of floods and fires that occurred in the South, where the Republicans were strongest.
     As David Currie writes in THE CONSTITUTION IN CONGRESS: THE FEDERALIST PERIOD 1789-1801, at 224 (1997):

A fire that devastated the Georgia port city of Savannah presented a spectacular opportunity for Hamilton's disciples, for the idea of aiding the victims had obvious emotional appeal for Southern Representatives, many of whom were ideologically allergic to federal spending…. One has the sense that wily Federalists were hoping to slip this one by on sympathy grounds, only to employ it mercilessly as a precedent later on.

Despite this, the Jeffersonian Republicans, claiming that they were being faithful to the original understanding, refused to support federal funds for a specific area of the country.
     Hamilton's view has won out, which is why nobody in the federal government today has any constitutional qualms about sending federal money and assistance to New Orleans.

Katrina's Aftermath

The President is reported to have done a quick flyover of the drowned and destroyed Gulf coast and observed that the area looked "devastated" but was "probably more devastated on the ground."  Official response to the urgent, desperate need in New Orleans and other parts of the coastal south has been stunningly inadequate.  Courtesy of Wonkette, the following, from Anderson Cooper and New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, encapsulates the misery and infuriating incompetence:

KING: Anderson Cooper in Biloxi, Mississippi and you were an angry man today, Anderson at what?

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: I wouldn't say I'm angry, you know. I think I'm tired of hearing the politicians say that, you know, they understand the frustration of people down here. To me, you know, it's not frustration. It's not that people are frustrated.

It's that people are dying. I mean there are people dying. They're drowning to death and they drown in their living rooms and their bodies are rotting where they drowned and there are corpses in the street being eaten by rats and this is the United States of America.

In a similar vein, N.O. Mayor Ray Nagin gave indignation an elegant if slightly blue gloss yesterday on local radio:

"After 9/11 we gave the president unprecented powers to take care of New York and those other places.... you mean to tell me that a place where thousands of people and thousands more people are dying, we can't figure out [how to get them help]. . . somebody need to get their ass on a plane and sit down, the two of them, and figure this out right now.

And he offers a fine suggestion:

"I don't want to see anybody to anymore more goddamn press conferences. Put a moratorium on press conferences. Don't do another press conference until the resources are in this city."

The President will be speaking at the New Orleans airport at 2:50PM.

To put the slow response in perspective, however, the United Nations' Jan Egeland (who rankled the Bush administration months ago with his criticism of the administration's slow and hesitating response to providing tsunami aid) notes:

"I understand people's frustration, but I also know from bitter experience that this, the fifth and the sixth and the seventh days are always among the worst, because it is before you reach, really, the largest amount of people," he told the BBC.

"Could more have been done? I would say every society in the world is not preparing adequately for catastrophic events. Disaster prevention is something that we are campaigning for all over the world, and I would say no society is fully prepared for all eventualities."

The very fine Vilaine Fille provides helpful links to organizations through which one can contribute to the Katrina recovery efforts.

Jesse Jackson's Gift To Pat Robertson

In a battle of religio-political bloviation, Jesse Jackson (megalomaniacal media-whore) has now engaged Pat Robertson's recent foolishness -- in which Robertson (megalomaniacal media-whore) called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (megalomaniacal leader of an otherwise obscure oil-and-drug-producing country).  Jackson traveled to Venezuela to lend his support to what he describes as a more reasoned and rational rapprochement between the U.S. and Venezuela.  "Mr Jackson's visit is a propaganda coup for the Venezuelan president, says the BBC's Justin Webb in Caracas."  I disagree.  Rev. Jackson's visit is instead a propaganda coup for Rev. Robertson and his supporters, neutralizing Robertson's bizarre statements with an equally unnecessary and irrelevant statement from the left.  This was a move that Rev. Jackson's advisors should have been wise enough to prevent.

Daniel Dennett Contra "Intelligent Design"

Writing in today's New York Times, Daniel Dennett takes on the foolish claims of "intelligent design" to the status of scientific theory:

The focus on intelligent design has, paradoxically, obscured something else: genuine scientific controversies about evolution that abound. In just about every field there are challenges to one established theory or another. The legitimate way to stir up such a storm is to come up with an alternative theory that makes a prediction that is crisply denied by the reigning theory - but that turns out to be true, or that explains something that has been baffling defenders of the status quo, or that unifies two distant theories at the cost of some element of the currently accepted view.

To date, the proponents of intelligent design have not produced anything like that. No experiments with results that challenge any mainstream biological understanding. No observations from the fossil record or genomics or biogeography or comparative anatomy that undermine standard evolutionary thinking.

Instead, the proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist’s work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a “controversy” to teach.

Note that the trick is content-free. You can use it on any topic. “Smith’s work in geology supports my argument that the earth is flat,” you say, misrepresenting Smith’s work. When Smith responds with a denunciation of your misuse of her work, you respond, saying something like: “See what a controversy we have here? Professor Smith and I are locked in a titanic scientific debate. We should teach the controversy in the classrooms.” And here is the delicious part: you can often exploit the very technicality of the issues to your own advantage, counting on most of us to miss the point in all the difficult details.

William Dembski, one of the most vocal supporters of intelligent design, notes that he provoked Thomas Schneider, a biologist, into a response that Dr. Dembski characterizes as “some hair-splitting that could only look ridiculous to outsider observers.” What looks to scientists - and is - a knockout objection by Dr. Schneider is portrayed to most everyone else as ridiculous hair-splitting.

In short, no science. Indeed, no intelligent design hypothesis has even been ventured as a rival explanation of any biological phenomenon. This might seem surprising to people who think that intelligent design competes directly with the hypothesis of non-intelligent design by natural selection. But saying, as intelligent design proponents do, “You haven’t explained everything yet,” is not a competing hypothesis. Evolutionary biology certainly hasn’t explained everything that perplexes biologists. But intelligent design hasn’t yet tried to explain anything.

To formulate a competing hypothesis, you have to get down in the trenches and offer details that have testable implications. So far, intelligent design proponents have conveniently sidestepped that requirement, claiming that they have no specifics in mind about who or what the intelligent designer might be.

And the creationist/intelligent design response to the challenge to engage in responsible, testable science?  The Los Angeles Times reports on efforts to build a creationist theme park.

"We're putting evolutionists on notice: We're taking the dinosaurs back," said Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, a Christian group building a $25-million creationist museum in Petersburg, Ky., that's already overrun with model sauropods and velociraptors.

"They're used to teach people that there's no God, and they're used to brainwash people," he said. "Evolutionists get very upset when we use dinosaurs. That's their star."

The nation's top paleontologists find the creation theory preposterous and say children are being misled by dinosaur exhibits that take the Jurassic out of "Jurassic Park."

"Dinosaurs lived in the Garden of Eden, and Noah's Ark? Give me a break," said Kevin Padian, curator at the University of California Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley and president of National Center for Science Education, an Oakland group that supports teaching evolution. "For them, 'The Flintstones' is a documentary."

The Long Road -- Gay Rights In China

China is on the tip of many tongues -- as a trading partner, as a promising (and enormous) emerging market, a growing force on the international political scene.  As a bastion of human rights, well, not so much.  But there are some signs of change even there, hesitant, partial and exceedingly tenative though they may be.  Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, Hamish McDonald consider advances China's gays and lesbians have made in recent years (hat tip:  Andy Towle).

"In the Chinese hinterland, except in a few big cities such as Beijing and Chongqing, the gay emergence is more tentative but strengthening among a homosexual community that statistically must number some tens of millions.

In May, about 40 "comrades" attached themselves to a sports parade in Dalian, carrying placards calling for tolerance of gays. In June, others flew kites in front of Shenyang's city hall to mark a gay-awareness day.

Like heterosexuals, China's gays and lesbians have benefited from the retreat of the communist state from the puritanism that Mao forced on everyone except himself, and the official attitude that homosexuality was a "mouldering lifestyle of capitalism".

Legal reform in 1997 removed the all-purpose crime of "hooliganism", often applied to gay men arrested while looking for sex in public toilets and parks, along with the crime of sodomy - effectively decriminalising homosexuality. In 2001, it was removed from the official list of mental disorders. . . .

Chinese gays moved into a legal and social environment often described as the "three no's" - "no approval, no disapproval, and no promotion".

Li Yinhe, a leading researcher on homosexuals, has described China as "a half-heaven for homosexuals". Many scholars and gays think the country has moved back to a traditional ambiguity about sexuality.

On one hand, China's religions permitted diversity: Buddhism regarding all sexual desire pretty equally as something to be relinquished; and Taoism accepting that people could have differing balances of yang and yin (male and female).

On the other, Confucius pronounced that men should behave as men, and women as women, and that "there are three things which are unfilial and the greatest of these is to have no posterity".

In practice, it was often accepted that young men could have sex with each other as a part of friendship, and that married men could have sex with boys, or female concubines and prostitutes, or both, as long as they married and produced an heir. "The atmosphere for man-man sex has been quite free and loose in Chinese culture," says Tong Ge, China's leading gay novelist, who writes under this nom-de-plume. "It's not about sexual preference, but more about sexual roles and sexual identity. For example, if a man of high status had sexual relations with a man of low status like a barber or a waiter, people would not blame him and just regard him as a playboy. They would assume he was the inserter, rather than the insertee. This role-playing would be how they judge the issue."

Swanning About In A Boston Marriage

Nature may be red in tooth and claw, but she is certainly queerly lavender in most everything else.  Only a few months after the kerfuffle over the Bremerhaven Penguins, monogamously-mated male penguins whom a German zoo attempted to break up, in a bit of reparative therapy using imported Swedish siren-penguins (the experiment didn't work -- see here and here and here), officials at the Boston Parks and Recreation Service have now revealed that a beloved pair of swans in the Public Garden are, in fact, a female couple.