Re: More Shame on Zaire
Charles, a chimpanzee is also an ape. Check for tails!
Charles, that’s a gorilla head. Gorillas are apes. And that’s an extremely disgusting picture.
Stranger photographer Victoria Renard (and former NOLA resident) reports that Fats Domino has turned up at the Superdome.
KEXP’s John Richards just told me he’s hearing rumors that Alex Chilton may be among the musicians missing. And the weather forecast for the area tonight? More rain. Be grateful for what you have, folks.
Fat Possum recording artist R.L. Burnside, the cantankerous cat who taught indie kids that the blues can be just as raunchy and confrontational as punk rock (check out his 1996 collaboration with Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, A Ass Pocket Full of Whiskey if you require proof), passed away in Memphis today, age 78.
The following came from my buddy Kerri Harrop:
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‘Fats’ Domino Missing in New Orleans
Thursday, September 01, 2005
By Roger Friedman
Katrina Benefits Should Acknowledge Local Legends
Before NBC, MTV, or anyone else puts on a telethon to help victims of Hurricane Katrina, they might want to explore some ancillary issues. To wit: New Orleans is a city famous for its famous musicians, but many of them are missing. Missing with a capital M.
Continue reading "More on Musicians Missing From the Hurricane" »
So, Reagan Dunn, the east side King County Council member (son of former U.S. Rep. Jennifer Dunn and yes, named after Ronald Reagan), is supposed to be the great telegenic hope of the local Republican party. He’s been hyped as a smooth, good looking R that can woo the region’s moderate swing voters.
Due to the reconfiguration of the County Council, Dunn is in a primary fight for a seat on the KC Council this year. Well, his Primary Election Video Voter’s Guide statement certainly upends any notion that Reagan takes after his namesake, the Great Communicator. After a pretty convoluted statement where it sounds like Dunn is saying King County government should be run like the hard working 9/11 hi-jacking operation, he goes on to stumble through this brilliant quote: “Elections is not the only department that has been ma… mismanaged. Everywhere you look there is waste. (Looks down at script. Long uncomfortable pause.) I…It drives up our property values and makes our taxes more congested.”
You’d think, with the four takes the candidates get to film these things, the “telegenic” Dunn would have gotten a better clip. I can’t even imagine his first 3 attempts. You can find the 2005 Primary Election Video Voter’s Guide here. His statement is at the 38 minute mark.
Yesterday Bush ticked off a list of all the help that was supposedly en route to New Orleans. Today the mayor of New Orleans issued a desperate SOS. Something is clearly going very wrong with the administration’s hurricane response.
With grim televised scenes showing bodies lying in the streets or in the city’s convention center, a meeting place for many refugees, and groups of people throughout the area still waiting desperately for the most basic assistance, Mayor C. Ray Nagin issued a dire cry for help.“This is a desperate S.O.S.,” he said. “Right now, we are out of resources at the convention center and don’t anticipate enough buses. We need buses. Currently, the convention center is unsanitary and unsafe, and we are running out of supplies for 15 to 20,000 people.”
This, passed along to me from someone on the creepy “Faith and Freedom Network” email list. It’s a call to battle, no matter what the state supreme court soon decides about marriage equality. (Including a prediction that we’ll have a decision “within the next few week.”)
Meanwhile, Equal Rights Washingtonwhile busy, doing things like holding a high-end fundraiser with the Governor, Rep. Jim McDermott, and County Exec. Ron Sims on September 10hasn’t exactly sounded the alarm on the coming backlash. What are you guys waiting for? The crazy Christians to bust out their pitchforks?
Faith and Freedom NetworkDear XXX,
As you know, traditional values are under attack as never before. Particularly here in the Northwest.
Those who are pushing for gay marriage are not a majority, yet they are exerting a great deal of influence because of their deep commitment to their cause. We see this playing out on every front of the cultural war that is being fought for the very soul of our communities.
Nowhere is the battle more evident than right here in Washington State.
As you know, we are awaiting a ruling by the Washington State Supreme Court regarding same-sex marriage. That ruling should come within the next few weeks.
Our Chairman, Joe Fuiten, and I do not expect the ruling to favor traditional marriage, which is between one man and one woman.
If the Court rules against traditional marriage and in favor of gay marriage, we will immediately engage in a campaign to amend the State Constitution.
From the AP:
The president urged a crackdown on the lawlessness.“I think there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this - whether it be looting, or price gouging at the gasoline pump, or taking advantage of charitable giving or insurance fraud,” Bush said. “And I’ve made that clear to our attorney general. The citizens ought to be working together.”
You think there ought to be zero tolerance? Oh, I’m so glad that you’ve been thinking about it.
You’re the goddamn president. How about you start demanding lawful behavior, and backing up your words by doing something to make it happen? Instead of making something clear to your attorney general, why not make it clear directly to the refugees in New Orleans? Why not send in more of the National Guard, to prove you’re serious? Why not tell your citizenslike a president ought toto stop looting, to step up and help their fellow citizens, and to sit tight, as their country is working as fast as possible to get food, shelter, safety, and health care to everyone.
Unless you don’t really believe that’s going to happen. You just think it ought to.
Bush has one more day, if that, before his administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina becomes a huge political disaster. Already, The New York Times Op-Ed page and the liberal blogosphere have turned on him. Sure, that’s predictable, but even the tone of mainstream news reports is becoming incredulous, like this CNN report on the chaos in New Orleans, in which the subtext is: “How can a major American city be this chaotic four days after a natural disaster that everyone knew was coming, and everyone predicted was going to be a catastrophe?”:
It’s hard to believe this is New Orleans.We spent the last few hours at the New Orleans Convention Center. There are thousands of people lying in the street.
We saw mothers holding babies, some of them just three, four and five months old, living in horrible conditions. Diapers littered the ground. Feces were on the ground. Sewage was spilled all around.
These people are being forced to live like animals. When you look at the mothers, your heart just breaks.
Some of the images we have gathered are very, very graphic.
We saw dead bodies. People are dying at the center and there is no one to get them. We saw a grandmother in a wheelchair pushed up to the wall and covered with a sheet. Right next to her was another dead body wrapped in a white sheet.
Right in front of us a man went into a seizure on the ground. No one here has medical training. There is nowhere to evacuate these people to.
People have been sitting there without food and water and waiting. They are asking — “When are the buses coming? When are they coming to help us?”
We just had to say we don’t know.
The people tell us that National Guard units have come by as a show of force. They have tossed some military rations out. People are eating potato chips to survive and are looting some of the stores nearby for food and drink. It is not the kind of food these people need.
They are saying, “Don’t leave us here to die. We are stuck here. Why can’t they send the buses? Are they going to leave us here to die?”
Here is another report, from The Washington Post, that is getting a lot of play in the blogosphere today, and it highlights more precisely why Bush may be in huge trouble:
“This is mass chaos,” said Sgt. Jason Defess, 27, a National Guard military policeman who had been stationed on a ramp outside the Superdome since Monday. “To tell you the truth, I’d rather be in Iraq,” where he was deployed for 14 months until January.“You got your constant danger, but I had something to protect myself,” he said. “Three meals a day. Communications. A plan. Here, they had no plan.”
The common thread that runs through Iraq and New Orleans is a failure to plan for the predictable unrest and civic disintegration that would follow a huge catastrophe (war, a category 4 hurricane) in an area with rickety infrastructure and simmering social and ethnic tensions (Baghdad, New Orleans). And now New Orleans is starting to look as bad as Baghdad. (Here is the latest Breaking News headline from CNN: “New Orleans hospital halts patient evacuations after coming under sniper fire.” And beneath that: “SCENE OF ANARCHY.”) The American people might give Bush a pass on failing to plan for the aftermath of the invasion in Iraq, but with their patience on that front fading, they are not going to forgive him for failing to stabilize a major American city four days after a hurricane.
Where are the war ships that were supposedly dispatched to New Orleans? Where are the thousands of National Guard troops that are supposedly coming to restore order? Where are the busses that were supposed to have emptied the stinking refugee camp in the Superdome yesterday? How can Bush say, as he did this morning on national television, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breech of the levees,” when, as is being reported everywhere today, everyone anticipated a breech of the levees, including people within his own administration whose calls for more funding for the levees years ago were ignored?
Bush will visit New Orleans tomorrow, and if the scenes of anarchy in the city continue up to and through his visit, he is toast. He has one more day.
I particularly appreciated this observation: “Truly, this is President Bush’s blue-dress moment.” I’m surprised no one’s found the opportunity to use that analogy before.
The Seattle Weekly published a story this week about the pending merger between its parent chain company, VVM, and the larger media chain, New Times. At a first glance, the Weekly story seemed pretty straightforward. They reported the basics (New Times and its investment bankers, Alta, will control the boardwhile the Weekly’s parent, VVM and its investment bankers, will have a minority ownership of the company.)
Weirdly, though, rather than asking the front-and-center question for its readersWhat does it mean for the Seattle Weekly that the New Times 11-paper chain may take them over?the only issue the the Weekly story raised about the deal focused on … the Stranger. They wrote: “In Seattle, aggressive tactics by a merged company controlled by New Times could be trouble for the Stranger, the smaller, locally controlled weekly here.” Even weirder, they don’t bother to answer that burning question.
Well, I’m happy to take a stab at it. For starters, we’ve been here before. The Weekly was bought out by a larger company in 1997 (Stern’s Village Voice). The result? The “endangered” Stranger grew and grew and became more relevant while the Weekly started its slip. (Note: Before that buy-out, The Weekly was on average per week 37 pages bigger than the Stranger. By 2000, three years later, the Weekly was on average per week only 10 pages bigger than the Stranger. ) At that point, again in 2000, the Weekly got bought out a second time. Stern’s Village Voice company, including Seattle Weekly, was swallowed by an even bigger fish, VVM, and its investment bankers including Goldman Sachs and Weiss and Peck & Greer. (Goldman Sachs is a huge contributor to George W. Bush, by the way.) The result? The “endangered” Stranger grew and grew some more and the Seattle Weekly continued its decline. Today, the Weekly is on average per week 7 pages smaller than the Stranger. Hey, check out this week when the city’s biggest community event, Bumbershoot, gave way to a 156-page Stranger and a 112-page Seattle Weekly.
So, it seems to me that the locally-owned Stranger isn’t going to suffer when another bigger fish gobbles up the Weekly and tries to prop them up.
The issue the Weekly should be raising for its readers about the pending merger isn’t what the buy-out means for the Stranger, but what it means for Seattle Weekly. New Times is famous for coming in and cleaning house. A merger with New Times spells more trouble for current Weekly staffers than it does for the locally-owned Stranger.
Here’s a more insightful story about the pending merger.
Citizens of Zaire please read this article and accept the evidence. Eating ‘bushmeat,’ as your people call it, is practically the same as eating humans. So, put the cooked hand down and focus your diet on creatures that have hoofs, fins, and wings.
Thousands possibly dead, an entire American city gone, and Condoleeza Rice checks out a Broadway show, then goes shoe shopping.
Although they vow not to go down easy, legendary punk club CBGB is back to being evicted.
We’re smaller?
Our Bumbershoot issue, as Tim points out, is 156 pages. Their Bumbershoot issue is 112.
The Weekly is owned by Republicans. Apparently they count like Republicans too.
Here’s part of what the Weekly wrote, for those of us in the building blocked from their website. And for those of you outside the building who can’t be bothered to pick up the Weekly.
Should you care if the nation’s two biggest urban-weekly chains merge? That depends on how you feel about Seattle Weekly. This newspaper has been in the Village Voice family since 1997, when 48 local Seattle Weekly co-owners sold it. Papers in the Village Voice chain have operated with a great deal of independence, while New Times papers are to varying degrees aggressively centralized in editorial approach and lean business practices. The Bay Guardian is doing the key reporting on this issue because it is fighting New Times’ SF Weekly and East Bay Express, which are squeezing the Bay Guardian for readership and ad sales. In Seattle, aggressive tactics by a merged company controlled by New Times could be trouble for The Stranger, the smaller, locally controlled weekly here.
You bet.
The soon-to-be-unemployed folks at Seattle Weekly are trying to spin their upcoming sale as somehow a bad thing for The Stranger. In a story in today’s Weekly, they claim that being soldalong with the rest of the Village Voice Media chainto New Times is bad for us. Stranger publisher Tim Keck sent this email to his staff yesterday…
Hey Gang,First off, congratulations on the Bumbershoot issuepeople put in heroic efforts and it turned out great. Thank you.
A few people have asked me about a possible merger/acquisition deal between Village Voice Media (VVM), which owns the Seattle Weekly, the Village Voice, and a handful of other alternative papers, and Phoenix-based New Times Inc., which owns a dozen or so other alt papers. (You can read about the sloppy negotiations and leaked documents at sfbg.com. So far, the merger has been a mess.)
A little trip down memory lane:
In 1997, Seattle Weekly was purchased by real estate magnate Leonard Stern, who also owned the Village Voice and the other papers VVM has right now (plus three newspapers that have since gone out of business, including Seattle Weekly’s sister paper, Eastside Week). At that time, The Stranger was putting out 64-page papers and Seattle Weekly was regularly twice our size. The Weekly crowed that, with the backing of the Village Voice, it was going to become a giant paper, and that The Stranger was in deep trouble. Well, what happened was they lost advertisers, staff, and readers. And their new owners closed their sister paper, Eastside Week. We on the other hand had the biggest surge in both circulation and page count in the paper’s history.
In 2000, Village Voice Media was sold to a giant group of investment bankers, including Goldman Sachs, who have billions of dollars in holdings. Again folks at the Weekly claimed they were going to use their huge new resources to crush us. What happened? We surpassed them in advertisers and page count. Take this week: Both papers had Bumbershoot issues—ours was 156 pages, theirs 112. Or last week: We were 108 and they were 96.
There’s a pretty good chance Seattle Weekly will once again be purchased by a new “powerful entity.” They’ll make big claims about crushing The Stranger, most of their staff will be fired, and they will probably do another redesign. We’ll take the threat seriously, do an even better job, and be a better paper because of it. And we’ll beat `em again.
That’s the scoop and way to go on Bumbershoot.
Tim
This morning, Last Days received this mysterious report from Hot Tipper Avery:
Last night, a man charged into left field from out of the stands during the Mariners/Yankee game. He held a sign with someone’s picture on it in one hand and appeared to be sprinkling someone’s cremated remains on the the field with the other. Once the dust settled, the man laid down on the field to wait to be escorted out of the stadium by security and police.
I searched stories on last night’s game at the various local news outlets, but learned nothing of the man, his ashes, or his mysterious sign. (I even checked the Seattle P-I’s Mariners Blog, easiest the spookiest six minutes I’ve ever spent in cyberspace, but still, nothing.) Readers who have any knowledge of, or even entertaining guesses about, the identity of the man, the nature of his protest, or the person pictured on the sign, please let me know in the Slog forum.
In other news, reading so many sports reports one after the other was fascinating. Most sources framed the game as a battle between the Mariners’ 19-year-old Felix Hernandez and the Yankees’ 41-year-old Randy Johnson, hence this remarkably catty P-I headline.
Still, I guess that’s better than the one used by the Seattle Times.