Rust Belt Raconteur

The Indians are imploding. After going 43-18 from mid-July to a week ago, they’ve lost three in a row: one to Kansas City and two to Tampa Bay, the two worst teams in the league. Suddenly, the piping-hot offense has left the premises and, having recently had a legitimate shot at home field all the way to the World Series, will have to struggle to even make it to the postseason.

There is only one thing you need to know: They’re from Cleveland. Watch ESPN Classic and you’ll run into a dramatic Cleveland loss eventually. The Shot. The Fumble. The Drive. (If you don’t know what those are, just find someone from Northeast Ohio and prepare for 30 straight minutes of cursing.) This is the team that managed to lose the 1997 World Series with champagne chilling in their locker room — and was victim to Willie Mays’ famous over-the-shoulder catch.

[ADDED: The Indians are the cover story in Sports Illustrated. Be afraid. Be very afraid.]

It’s really much easier if you give up all hope, but you can’t help but be set up for a fall.

It’s the same thing that happens when you believe that, someday, your government will adopt the radical policy of not spending more than they steal collect from the American people … or actually stick with that whole Constitution thing … or that the news media will report actual news and maybe — I know I’m completely out of my mind here — provide actual insight and analysis. (Bill O’Reilly screaming at people, startlingly, does not count as “insight” or “analysis.”)

This is just a sampling of the madness in the surrounding world that I read about TODAY:

(1) Cooing at babies is an egregious violation of infants’ human rights.

(2) Jaywalking with a child in hand could get you five years in prison.

(3) Sitting on a playground bench alone will get you a police citation.

(4) FEMA knew that their relief system was FUBAR but didn’t care.

Well honestly, who’s surprised by the last one? An independent report detailed how FEMA wasn’t up to par in last year’s Florida ‘canes: “FEMA’s systems do not support effective or efficient coordination of deployment operations because there is no sharing of information. Consequently, this created operational inefficiencies and hindered the delivery of essential disaster response and recovery services.”

Then, naturally, “In an Aug. 3 response, [then-Director Michael] Brown and one of his deputies rejected the audit, calling it unacceptable, erroneous and negative. ‘The overall tone of the report is negative,’ wrote FEMA chief information officer Barry C. West in a letter that Brown initialed.”

Wow. Negative. Imagine that. Apparently negativity became an unpardonable sin in today’s society.

There’s blood on your hands, Mike. How many times must government be incompetent before folks stop thinking it just needs more money? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

If you read this article and still think that our government isn’t too bureaucratic, cumbersome, and invasive … then I give up. Here’s most of it:

“In the midst of administering chest compressions to a dying woman several days after Hurricane Katrina struck, Dr. Mark N. Perlmutter was ordered to stop by a federal official because he wasn’t registered with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

‘I begged him to let me continue,’ said Perlmutter, who left his home and practice as an orthopedic surgeon in Pennsylvania to come to Louisiana and volunteer to care for hurricane victims. ‘People were dying, and I was the only doctor on the tarmac (at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport) where scores of nonresponsive patients lay on stretchers. Two patients died in front of me.’

‘I showed him (the U.S. Coast Guard official in charge) my medical credentials. I had tried to get through to FEMA for 12 hours the day before and finally gave up. … I asked him to let me stay until I was replaced by another doctor, but he refused. He said he was afraid of being sued. I informed him about the Good Samaritan laws and asked him if he was willing to let people die so the government wouldn’t be sued, but he would not back down. I had to leave.’

FEMA issued a formal response to Perlmutter’s story, acknowledging that the agency does not use voluntary physicians.

‘We have a cadre of physicians of our own,’ FEMA spokeswoman Kim Pease said Thursday. ‘They are the National Disaster Medical Team. The voluntary doctor was not a credentialed FEMA physician and, thus, was subject to law enforcement rules in a disaster area.’ [Note: This comes from the same public relations people that vigorously defended the requirement that 1000 firefighters from other cities undergo a full day of training, including sexual harassment seminars, before they were deployed -- not for search and rescue, but to hand out FEMA leaflets. In response to criticism, another spokeswoman said: 'I would go back and ask the firefighter to revisit his commitment to FEMA, to firefighting and to the citizens of this country.' Here's an article with the quote.]

At the triage area in the New Orleans airport, Perlmutter was successful in getting FEMA to accept the insulin and morphine he had brought. ‘The pharmacist told us they were completely out of insulin and our donation would save numerous lives. Still, I felt we were the most-valuable resource, and we were sent away.’

Gerhart said the scene they confronted at the airport was one of ‘hundreds of people lying on the ground, many soaked in their own urine and feces, some [dying] before our eyes.’ FEMA workers initially seemed glad for help and asked Gerhart to work inside the terminal and Perlmutter to work out on the tarmac. They were told only a single obstetrician had been on call at the site for the past 24 hours.

Then, the Coast Guard official informed the group that he could not credential them or guarantee tort coverage and that they should return to Baton Rouge. ‘That shocked me, that those would be his concerns in a time of emergency,’ Gerhart said.

Transported back to Baton Rouge, Perlmutter’s frustrated group went to state health officials who finally got them certified — a very simple process that took only a few seconds.

‘I found numerous other doctors in Baton Rouge waiting to be assigned and others who were sent away, and there was no shortage of need,’ he said.”

My proposal: After what’s happened in New Orleans, we ought to find every government official even tangentially connected with contributing to this human catastrophe and charge them all with criminally negligent homicide or a similar offense. In this case, we had regulations that required military personnel to let American citizens die because of lawsuit fears. Don’t forget the fact that we had a levee system built to fail and local officeholders who had disaster plans tacitly acknowledging that they would allow their constituents to die. We should demolish the Department of Homeland Security, which is ill-equipped to handle a natural disaster, let alone a WMD terrorist event.

The people of this nation, however, will not understand what has happened, for they rarely understand anything. Our government, as it almost always does, failed the American people. This is not a flaw of government; rather, it is the nature of government. It seems that the Bush plan for recovery involves pouring $200 billion into rebuilding places that cannot reasonably be defended from nature, pushing our deficit further into the stratosphere and hastening the frighteningly inevitable economic apocalypse. The folks in Washington are fiddling while everything burns down. I’ve told y’all before and I’ll tell y’all again: If you’re in my age bracket, you will live to see the United States become a Third World country.

From the “We’ve always been at war with Eurasia” department:

“House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said yesterday that Republicans have done so well in cutting spending that he declared an ‘ongoing victory,’ and said there is simply no fat left to cut in the federal budget.

DeLay was defending Republicans’ choice to borrow money and add to this year’s expected $331 billion deficit to pay for Hurricane Katrina relief. Some Republicans have said Congress should make cuts in other areas, but DeLay said that doesn’t seem possible. …

Asked if that meant the government was running at peak efficiency, DeLay said, ‘Yes, after 11 years of Republican majority we’ve pared it down pretty good.’”

This has to be a joke, right? Either DeLay is completely deluded by the power that has corrupted him or has no problem making a statement about as blatantly false as “two plus two is five.” C’mon now, Tom. Congress just passed a $286 billion transportation bill that pays for Alaskan bridges to nowhere and California’s essential infrastructure of traffic lights and roadside landscaping. Let’s have a reality check here: In 1995, when the GOP took control of Congress, the feds spent $1.5 trillion. Last year, after having a full decade in power to enact their small-government agenda, spending was a miniscule, uh, $2.3 trillion. In that time, ten of fourteen Federal departments saw their budgets increase by 50% or more; six of those saw 80% increases. A bloated Department of Homeland Security was created so that our nation could more effectively harass airline passengers and drown the poor and elderly in New Orleans. The Department of Education, which Republicans wanted to eliminate 10-15 years ago, now has a massive new mandate under the No Child Left Behind Act to meddle in every school district nationwide. Despite the obvious fact that farm subsidies are starving millions in Africa and Asia, we radically increased the amount of checks we write to country folk to sit out there in the fields and not grow things … so that we can maintain the horribly inefficient American farm.

Are you seriously trying to tell me, Congressman, that there is NOTHING out there worth getting cut from the Federal budget? Have you lost your fucking mind?!?

I can’t take this any more. We’re headed toward socialism and there’s nothing that can be done to stop it. The right wing is too concerned about keeping gays from marrying to see the bigger picture — that our government is paving the road to economic apocalypse with good intentions.

The Iraqi draft constitution: Who’s backing this piece of trash? Oh yeah. Whoops. Can we have a do-over?