Misanthropes of a feather. . . .

Paul Moore: It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you're the smartest person in the room.

Jane Craig: No. It's awful.

* * *

FOR SOME REASON, that Holly Hunter scene from Broadcast News came to mind when I was taking a look at Kathy Shaidle's Relapsed Catholic blog this morning:

I spent the first 20 years of my life trying to get away from losers like this...

Growing up in Hamilton, Ontario, they were unavoidable. They hated their factory jobs, never stopped bitching about how bad off they were, getting paid a zillion dollars a year plus extravagent benefits to hit something with a hammer for 7 hours a day.

Then when the company goes out of business they all whine -- but they hated their jobs anyway, so what are they bitching about? Get a new job, loser. You were so greedy for money you went to work at the factory rather than go to college. That's your problem, not the government's. Shouldn't have spent all your money on lottery tickets and Cheetos.

Thank God someone has the nerve to fisk them...

OF COURSE, the "someone" Kathy refers to is Rush Limbaugh, whose advice to the most pathetic hard cases invariably reads like a Dear Abby column . . . as interpreted in the classic John Prine song:

Unhappy, Unhappy, you have no complaint
You are what you are,
and you ain't what you ain't
So listen up Buster, and listen up good
Stop wishing for bad luck and knocking on wood

Laid off from your factory job after 25 years? Get a new one!

Retired on disability but then had your company go bust and a third of your pension disappear along with your health insurance? America is the greatest place on earth! Quit your whining and take care of your own damn self!

Rush just wishes that all these "losers," as Kathy so quaintly put it, would just go away. Would just stop bothering those who have already gotten theirs. Would just learn to shift for themselves . . . it's The American Way!

That's Limbaugh's laissez-faire conservatism in a nutshell: Leave me alone. Shift for yourself. Am I my brother's keeper?

It's as old as Abel and Cain. Yahweh saw through it then, and Jesus saw through it later. You would think someone who calls her blog Relapsed Catholic would see through it today. But at least Kathy's honest enough to be in the process of renaming her blog to take out the "Catholic" part.

Apparently, the Beatitudes and the parable of the Good Samaritan aren't the only problems she has with the Church.

OF COURSE, you have to admit that Limbaugh is a funny, bright and entertaining guy. He can be quite convincing, so long as you can ignore your brother -- and that small, still voice nagging at you in the back of your superego. The gospel, after all, is a stumbling block to clever bloggers and radio hosts, and pure foolishness to laissez-faire economic theorists.

That's why I don't listen to Rush Limbaugh . . . haven't in a long time. I want to get to Heaven when I croak, and seductive "I got mine; screw you" propaganda on the radio is a stumbling block on the road between Where I Was and Where I Want to Be.

And the sooner I realize that we're all "losers" -- liable to get just as much mercy as we give -- the quicker I can travel down that gospel highway.

Dems' sympathy is with the Devil

St. Michael the Archangel,
defend us in battle.
Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray,
and do thou,
O Prince of the heavenly hosts,
by the power of God,
thrust into hell Satan,
and all the evil spirits,
who prowl about the world
seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

THE LOUISIANA DEMOCRATIC PARTY ought to have been praying. Hard.

It didn't, however, for that is not a concept commensurate with Party of Lust -- and in Louisiana, Party of Graft -- values. And now, after racial slurs didn't take, we have the looming prospect of the state party launching an ad campaign only Satan could love against Republican gubernatorial front-runner Bobby Jindal.

The state Democrats are flat-out going after Jindal's Catholic faith. In a state where Catholics make up a strong plurality. I wonder how that's going to work out for them. Here's the latest from WAFB television in Baton Rouge:

The Louisiana Democratic Party says an attack ad it is preparing to air against Republican Bobby Jindal -will- focus on Jindal's religious writings from his college days, but will -not- focus on a piece Jindal wrote about observing an exorcism being performed on a female friend. WAFB 9NEWS reported Wednesday night that the exorcism paper would be part of the attack ad, but Democratic Party spokeswoman Julie Vezinot says that is incorrect. Vezinot said other anti-Jindal ads will air that focus on topics others than religion. "The ads are based on facts drawn from his voting records in Congress and his campaign contributions," Vezinot said.

Vezinot says the ad focusing on religion is just one of several the party is planning to launch against Jindal in the coming weeks. The party estimates it will spend nearly $1 million dollars on the series of anti-Jindal ads.

(snip)

"Bobby is a proud Christian, and attacks against his faith prove just how far old-guard party bosses willl go to resist the change our state needs," said Melissa Sellers, communications director for the Bobby Jindal campaign. "People will see this as exactly what it is - the same kind of baseless mudslinging and gutter politics that has held Louisiana back for generations," Sellers said.

WHAT NEEDS AN EXORCISM -- and I am not joking here -- is the Democratic Party. And I say this as a Democrat -- one who doesn't have much use for Republicans. Or Democrats, for that matter.

According to Jindal's campaign manager, Timmy Teepell, the Dems have been previewing the ads, including one attacking Jindal's faith, to potential donors in a bid to raise enough cash to run them on TV.

A party that would stoop to attacking Jindal's Catholic faith, in a largely Catholic state, is not only really, really stupid but something more. Something much more. It is, it would seem, a party that hates Christian faith more than it wants to win an election. It is a party that wants to destroy Jindal and profane the name of Jesus Christ, even if that brings destruction upon itself.

What does that sound like to you? To me, it sounds a lot like being a tool of the devil. Which, of course, always ends with the demonic dupe coming to No Good End.

Why else, as a political entity, would you do it? It's just too insane otherwise, as I say, in a state with a strong Catholic plurality.

Furthermore, in a state desperate for robust debate hinging on policy and civic culture issues, Jindal's religious views are all the Democrats can come up with? That, my friends, points to intellectual bankruptcy in addition to spiritual and moral bankruptcy.

The Louisiana Democratic Party told WAFB that it didn't plan any commercials regarding Jindal's exorcism article in the New Oxford Review, a traditional-leaning Catholic publication. It doesn't have to -- there's already a nasty whispering campaign in the "progressive" blogosphere surrounding that (and even the smear has been recycled from the 2003 gubernatorial campaign), and I'm sure the state party is maintaining plausible deniability.

Jindal's article on a prayer meeting for a cancer-stricken friend that turned into an exorcism when that friend began to act as if she were possessed -- including taunting each person present with an embarrassing personal revelation no one could have known about -- contained nothing that should shock or scandalize any believing Catholic. With emphasis on "believing."

AS A MATTER OF FACT, courtesy of The Daily Kos, you can read it here (PDF file).

I am a Catholic, and I believe with my Church that there is a devil, and that he employs demons who sometimes try in very direct ways to send souls to Hell. We believe that Satan and his minions can possess individuals, treating them as objects to use as he pleases, ultimately destroying them because he hates them.

Come to think of it, that sounds a lot like the Democratic platform . . . and, in this case, Democratic politics. Of course, in the interest of fairness, Republicans have no business pointing fingers in this respect.

It is instructive, though, to see how scandalous the college-student Bobby Jindal's writings are to some snarky-secularist bloggers, Washington ad agencies and their Democratic Party puppet masters. Particularly when it involves such straight-forward Catholic belief -- indeed, such straight-forward evangelical, Pentecostal, fundamentalist and mainline-Protestant belief.

Well, at least back when mainline Protestants used to believe in things other than same-sex orgasms.

IN FACT, I feel a Bible verse coming on. It's 1 Corinthians 1:18-25:

18 The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
19 For it is written: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the learning of the learned I will set aside."
20 Where is the wise one? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made the wisdom of the world foolish?
21 For since in the wisdom of God the world did not come to know God through wisdom, it was the will of God through the foolishness of the proclamation to save those who have faith.
22 For Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom,
23 but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles,
24 but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.

AND THEN THERE'S THIS ONE (Luke 6:20-26):

20 And raising his eyes toward his disciples he said: "Blessed are you who are poor, for the kingdom of God is yours.
21 Blessed are you who are now hungry, for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who are now weeping, for you will laugh.
22 Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude and insult you, and denounce your name as evil on account of the Son of Man.
23 Rejoice and leap for joy on that day! Behold, your reward will be great in heaven. For their ancestors treated the prophets in the same way.
24 But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.
25 But woe to you who are filled now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will grieve and weep.
26 Woe to you when all speak well of you, for their ancestors treated the false prophets in this way.

OF COURSE, the Bible is dicey source material when trying to make a point to true-believing acolytes of the Party of Lust (TM). So I will appeal to a higher authority, at least in their petty little universe. The Word of the Almighty Kos (from when he originally posted the Jindal exorcism article):

Amen.

Another conservative for Gekko

If the jihadis don't end us, it's a lead-pipe cinch the conservatives will. Unless the Daily Kossacks do.

But let's just say it's the National Review conservatives who will destroy America, because that is the source of today's Gordon Gekko "Greed is good" moment. Over on The Corner at National Review Online, syndicated columnist Mark Steyn took it upon himself to take an MIT prof to task (at least Steyn seems to think his correspondent was a professor) for challenging this country's addiction to Saudi oil:

Americans will never accept that the way to make the world better is to drive smaller, less comfortable cars. And, besides, the premise is completely false: If you trade in the Expedition for a Honda Civic, that oil you save won't stay in the ground and thus impoverish the Saudis; it will merely be sold to the Chinese and Indians and other fast developing nations who will replace America and Europe as buyers of the cheapest and most easily extractable oil in the world. So the sheikhs will be as rich as ever and funding as many Islamist nutters. But we'll be driving worse cars and feeling virtuous.

The long-term solution is to accelerate a move to a post-oil world, to develop something better and cheaper that makes oil obsolescent, and obliges at the very minimum the Saudi princes whoring in London to make do with cheaper hookers. But instead my correspondent calls for "a working passenger rail system", and at that point his choo-choo pretty much jumps the tracks. Look, America is a de-urbanizing society, even compared to Canada. And that's a good thing. This is the cheapest country in the world to buy a four-bedroom house on a big lot and an automobile that'll take three or four kids. That's one reason we're not in the demographic death spiral of Europe or Japan. It's easy to make do with a Honda Civic or 2CV or Fiat Uno when you've got nothing to put in it.

IN OTHER WORDS, "Greed is good."

Americans will sulk themselves into a barren, childless future and send this country into a demographic death spiral unless they can drive their Expeditions and live in their exurban McMansions. Right. That's exactly why the Europeans and Japanese are depopulating themselves into historical-footnote status.

And I thought it was because they just didn't want to be bothered with anyone but themselves, having -- as whole societies -- lost God and then hope. Hopeless people don't create a future, which children most certainly happen to be.

After all, if a suitably big, petroleum-quaffing land barge is a key prerequisite for allowing one's sperm to say howdy-do to another's ovum, please explain Shakwanda in the 'hood, age 24, with three kids, a crappy apartment and no car.

Actually, the explanation is pretty simple. Not the right kind of breeder. EEEEEEEEENNNNNT! Doesn't count. Tidy market-oriented theories require tidy market-oriented people like . . . us!

But thanks for playing Greed Is Good on ConservoTV, and please accept these delightful parting gifts! GOTCHA! No parting gifts for you! Awwwwww, don't cry -- here's Officer Stedenko to haul you away on a bad-check charge!

COME TO THINK OF IT, though, Steyn's premise is even more flawed than that. If you totally discount all the Shakwandas from Compton and all the Esquelas just in from Tegucigalpa, the American birth rate probably isn't that horribly far off European levels of futility . . . er, fertility.

Despite the McMansion in Suburban Sprawl Land. And the two cars and an SUV in the three-car garage, as opposed to having to dash from your London flat to catch the last train to Ipswitch.

Really, the lengths to which morally bankrupt right-wing ideologues will go to avoid saying "Greed is good" when what they really mean is "Greed is good."

Here's a news flash: Nobody -- with the possible exception of the old woman who lived in a shoe -- needs a McMansion in the exurbs. Nobody needs a Ford Expedition. Or a Chevy Suburban.

Nobody.

AH . . . BUT WHAT ABOUT Steyn's argument that "it will merely be sold to the Chinese and Indians and other fast developing nations who will replace America and Europe as buyers of the cheapest and most easily extractable oil in the world."

Well, I guess that's true, as far as it goes. But if we weren't addicted to petroleum, it wouldn't be us the Saudis had by the shorthairs, now, would it?

And we just might be in a position to tell the Saudis to rein in the jihadis and stop exporting Wahhabiism or watch their oil fields and refineries get blowed up real good. Which would turn the sultans back into Bedouins real fast.

Americans are not a stupid people, nor do we lack ingenuity. We could live in a world of possibility -- freed from the Persian Gulf death trap -- if only we didn't love our greed more than we hated seeing those towers fall six years ago.

Harry Potter and the Cultural Black Hole

Mark Shea today tackles the Know-Nothing wing of the Church, which is still on a toot about Harry Potter and the Minion of Satan (TM) who created him.

This stripe of Catholic is virtually indistinguishable from Falwellian fundamentalists -- indeed, many of them used to be Falwellian fundamentalists . . . or Pat Robertson charismatics -- except for their fundamental belief in the basics of Catholic belief. The Catholic cultural thing, they haven't got such a grip on.

Nor do they have too much of a grip on the basic premise that the Almighty gave humans a brain -- and an intellect -- for sound reasons.

Shea unloads on one of the chief Catholic critics of J.K. Rowling's (hence referred to as She Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken) masterful series, Michael O'Brien, who is quoted in this Washington Times article. Shea writes:

In short, O'Brien talks about Rowling's conversion of more of the devil's real estate into Christendom as though it were a *bad* thing. It's a classic fundamentalist mistake which assumes that imagery borrowed from paganism must corrupt the Faith rather than assuming that the Holy Spirit has the power to sanctify the image. It's like those Chick tracts that say "Egyptians used sun disks in their art, so Catholic art with haloes is a pagan snare to the soul!" As I say, I think the devil must be fit to be tied at Rowling's jiu jitsu: taking the image of the mage and "perverting" it to the service of the gospel. I wish O'Brien would drop this silly vendetta.

IN FAIRNESS, O'Brien isn't the only Wahabbi Catholic out there cracking on the books of She Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken. Steve Wood would be another one -- and he's got an EWTN radio show to use as a bully pulpit in trying to shoehorn a round Catholic culture into the square hole of his former evangelical Protestant beliefs.

In an essay on his website, Wood notes that he used to be involved in the New Age and decries the Harry Potter series' potential to draw susceptible young minds into the world of the occult:

The majority of those who fool around with Dungeons and Dragons, toy with Ouija boards, listen to heavy metal rock, or read books like the Harry Potter series that are filled with themes with witchcraft and sorcery, will never fall into any permanent spiritual deceptions. Yet, I can guarantee that Harry Potter will be an entry point into the demonic /New Age world for thousands of young Catholics. Many Christians scoffed at the potential dangers posed by Dungeons and Dragons, yet research has validated those warnings.

AND CHURCH AUTHORITIES should put the collected works of William Shakespeare on a revived Index of Forbidden Books because Falstaff will tempt us to obese, drunken gluttony and Othello will cause us to murder our wives. Don't get me started on Sophocles' Oedipus Rex.

Expecto Patronum!

I just committed sorcery. Steve Wood is now a newt.

What??? I'm informed Steve Wood is not now nor ever has been a newt, despite my spell. I don't understand . . . I watched two of the Harry Potter movies, already!

Snarkiness aside, the last thing a Church which has all but abandoned its social and liturgical patrimony needs is to import -- to be uncharitable, but I know no other way of putting it -- fundamentalist and evangelical iconoclasm, which has worked its way into a historical disdain of art, literature and intellectual pursuits.

To the Steve Woods of the world, art seemingly is utilitarian at best. You use art to bait-and-switch someone into Christian faith; Satan uses it to top off Gehenna. But never can it organically flow out of our human experience . . . of our Christian experience.

And while I am glad that ex-New Agers who become evangelicals who become Catholics have come into the fullness of the faith, I really wish they could find it within themselves to become catholic as well as Catholic.

The phenomenon of orthodox Catholic hyperpious know-nothingism has vexed me for almost as long as I've been Catholic. A priest friend once wrote me that it's the byproduct of the utter collapse of anything resembling a Catholic culture, which no American Catholic under 45 ever has experienced.

We Catholics who fancy ourselves as possessing some degree of cultural sophistication, and who came into the faith -- by birth or conversion -- after Vatican II was a done deal basically don't have a clue about being authentically well-rounded, lives-in-balance Catholics.

Some of us make game stabs at it. Some of us get pretty close. Others just become susperstitious Puritans with sacraments.

Jansenism -- a puritanical Catholic heresy -- is the gift that keeps on giving, apparently.

FOR EXAMPLE, do you think EWTN would ever do a full-blown, uncensored theatrical version of just about any Walker Percy novel or any Flannery O'Connor short story? The blue-hairs would get the vapors!

Others, meanwhile, would find such programming just not "religious" enough, or that it really wasn't "teaching the faith."

The Harry Potter tempest and the neo-Jansenist revulsion at the artistic for its own sake point to the central problem of contemporary Catholicism as you find it in everyday life: The Catholic mind is dead.

The liberals are loony New Agers, and the "orthodox" -- particularly some charismatics, I think -- are sliding fast into some sort of Magisterial offshoot of the Primitive Baptists, with a dash of mystical apocalypticism thrown in with a subtext of the worst of Evangelical faddishness.

I recall one time, during my days in Catholic radio, when Father Stephen Valenta, a charismatic guru, and Steve Wood were the speakers at a conference our station sponsored. Father Valenta, a Conventual Fransiscan evangelist, expounded on how we ought not think, that our thinking gets in the way of the Holy Spirit acting.

Folks went gaga over him. I was going "Huh?"

He also was fairly apocalyptic (real Spirit Daily type stuff), and boasted that he hadn't read more than five books in however many years -- the Spirit reveals to him everything he needs to know. It sounded to me too bloody much like Magisterial snake-handling.

The Steve Wood talk I recall involved a condemnation of dating for Christians, advocating instead the concept of "courtship." If you've got the money, honey, he's got the CD here.

Often, I look at the Catholic wreckage surrounding me -- a religious and cultural landscape laid waste by the war machines of secularism, consumerism and plain old nutism -- and I wonder what Father Chuck O'Malley or Sister Liguori would make of any of it.

Breakfast of cheaters

Dear Diary: The power of punk

EDITOR'S NOTE: Revolution 21's Blog for the People continues an occasional series of dispatches recorded some years ago in the trenches of Catholic radio . . . Pope FM, if you will. The names aren't real, nor are the places, but the stories are -- and it's a snapshot picture of what happens when "Their zeal consumes them" meets "Sinners sacrifice for the institution, not vice versa."

In other words, there has to be a better way.

SUNDAY, AUG. 25, 2002


Dear Diary,


It had to happen. It hadn't happened in awhile.

I was working on Holy Spirit Rock early this afternoon, pulling some of the music for next Saturday's show, when I hear a knock on the door. Mrs. Favog was due back shortly with our almost-16-year-old friend Ruth, one of the co-hosts of the Pope FM show, and I thought she didn't want to bother with the key or had her hands full with groceries.

So I open the front door, and . . . .

Mormons.

You know, the bicycle guys. White shirts, black slacks. Name tags. A cross between Wally Cleaver and the Stepford Wives.

I'm Catholic, I say, but they won't stop the step-by-step spiel. I'm the production director at the Catholic radio station, I say, but that didn't make a dent. And I throw in that I'm really busy now working on our Christian rock show. They won't leave me alone, I really don't have time to talk to them and I really don't want to be rude.

At this point, Mrs. Favog comes home with Ruth. We're active in our church, she says. Would you like to come to our 11 a.m. service, they say. We'll be at our church, I respond. Can we come back? they persevere.

"So," asks Stepford Cleaver, "how did you come to your faith?"

"I became Catholic after studying the faith and searching," I replied.

"I came to my faith in the Lord through the Spirit," Stepford said.

"The Spirit has to have something to work with," I shot back.

Just at that moment, an eruption of grinding guitars and screamed vocals pours forth from the huge speakers in our living room, literally shaking the joint. It's the remote speakers from the amp in my home studio/office . . . Ruth has put in a hardcore Christian punk CD, and it's kind of cranked up.

The Mormons jump back from the door. Stepford is startled -- horrified even.

"I don't know how the Spirit could work with that playing," he says.

"Would you believe that's Christian music?" I politely answer.

Stepford is aghast.

"I can't picture Christ listening to that!"

"I can," I tell him as I shut the door.

For Baton Rouge High, we just cry

I had my say about the deplorable state of my old high school, Baton Rouge Magnet High, here.

Years of abject neglect by the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board has brought it to this, as reported a couple of weeks ago in The (Baton Rouge) Advocate:

Renovations to Baton Rouge Magnet High School likely would cost twice as much as planned and take twice as long to complete, leading school officials to rethink the whole project.

Instead, a special committee of students, alumni and educators will meet to figure out alternatives, including rebuilding the school in another location.

The partial renovations, scheduled to start this fall, would replace only exterior windows and prevent outside moisture from penetrating the 80-year-old building, built before air conditioning.

The estimated cost is now $7.6 to $9.2 million, based on three construction bids opened last month.

The increases stem from the discovery of no ties between the bricks in the school’s four-story façade and the structure. Fixing that problem would require laborious brick-by-brick reattachment to the school, school officials say.

This spring, the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board raised the construction budget to $4 million and extended construction time to 18 months, with work taking place around the students.

The bids call for twice that amount; two of the bids urged doubling the construction time to three years.

“We need some direction,” Bob Cooper, director of the physical plant, told the School Board on Wednesday. “I’m not just speaking to the board, but I’m speaking to the community.”

One alternative is to conduct a full historic restoration, costing an estimated $37 million, but that would leave the school without some modern educational amenities. Another is to rebuild it somewhere else, costing an estimated $40 million. Still another is to preserve the façade but build a new school behind it.

East Baton Rouge Parish Superintendent Charlotte Placide expressed skepticism of a traditional historic restoration.

“We shouldn’t be trying to do more stuff after we’ve spent $37 million,” she said.

I HAD BEEN WAITING to get more information about this before posting, but news just hasn't been forthcoming. That the ironically named "school board" has let things get to this state of crisis is just one illustration of the challenges of giving youth a future in a state where people generally don't care, and government generally doesn't work.

If you were a bright, college-bound high school student attending classes in a facility allowed to -- quite literally -- fall apart over the past 30 years, what would you think of the city, parish and state where such neglect is looked upon as par for the course? What would you think of a city, parish and state where this is good enough for its children?

Exactly.

I guess that's why a sizable portion of my Baton Rouge High graduating class got the hell out of Louisiana ASAP, and why I'd wager that increasing numbers of each of the succeeding 28 graduating classes have done likewise.

MEANWHILE, A 1953 GRAD had his say about what's become of our old school in a recent Advocate letter to the editor:

Published: Aug 1, 2007

I graduated from Baton Rouge High in 1953. It breaks my heart and thousands of others to see what “they” are trying to do to our school — a school we all cherished. Then, all students were brothers and sisters, and the school — the building — itself was one of us — if you can imagine beautiful bricks as a brother or sister.

I remember how we sat on the big front steps with our books before the bell rang … how we walked the wide, long halls … how we looked out of the open giant windows of the classrooms, and enjoyed, without knowing it, the solidarity of the fine building.

If I could write a book on how we loved it, and maybe I will, there would be so many fine things to tell. Someone should write: THE HISTORY OF BATON ROUGE HIGH, with lots of pictures showing the “way we were.”

Next spring we may have our 55th reunion. When we had our 40th we went over to the ol’ school to look at it: Go to every floor … see our old lockers … look at the big stage where we had plays. I don’t think we’ll go there next spring.

You had to be there then to know the heartache now.

David Lewis
retired writer
Baton Rouge

MR. LEWIS, I couldn't have said it better myself. I am grateful you did.

Who is supplying the insurgents with weapons?

What in the world can I -- or anyone -- say about this story? Except . . .

* We're relying on who as the All-Knowing Wise Man to tell us whether the "surge" is working or not?

* Has Bush just been caught trying to Wag the Dog?

The Washington Post elucidates:

The Pentagon has lost track of about 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols given to Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005, according to a new government report, raising fears that some of those weapons have fallen into the hands of insurgents fighting U.S. forces in Iraq.

The report from the Government Accountability Office indicates that U.S. military officials do not know what happened to 30 percent of the weapons the United States distributed to Iraqi forces from 2004 through early this year as part of an effort to train and equip the troops. The highest previous estimate of unaccounted-for weapons was 14,000, in a report issued last year by the inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

The United States has spent $19.2 billion trying to develop Iraqi security forces since 2003, the GAO said, including at least $2.8 billion to buy and deliver equipment. But the GAO said weapons distribution was haphazard and rushed and failed to follow established procedures, particularly from 2004 to 2005, when security training was led by Gen. David H. Petraeus, who now commands all U.S. forces in Iraq. (Emphasis mine -- R21.)

The Pentagon did not dispute the GAO findings, saying it has launched its own investigation and indicating it is working to improve tracking. Although controls have been tightened since 2005, the inability of the United States to track weapons with tools such as serial numbers makes it nearly impossible for the U.S. military to know whether it is battling an enemy equipped by American taxpayers.

"They really have no idea where they are," said Rachel Stohl, a senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information who has studied small-arms trade and received Pentagon briefings on the issue. "It likely means that the United States is unintentionally providing weapons to bad actors."

One senior Pentagon official acknowledged that some of the weapons probably were being used against U.S. forces. He cited the Iraqi brigade created at Fallujah that quickly dissolved in September 2004 and turned its weapons against the Americans.

Stohl said that insurgents frequently use small-arms fire to force military convoys to move in a particular direction -- often toward roadside bombs that target troops and vehicles. She noted that the Bush administration frequently complains that Iran and Syria are supplying insurgents but has paid little attention to whether U.S. military errors inadvertently play a role. "We know there is seepage and very little is being done to address the problem," she said.

What is truth? Whatever neocons say it is.

I think this is all you need to know about neoconservatism and how the United States got into the pickle we're in. From American Enterprise Institute "Freedom Scholar" Michael Ledeen's blog at Pajamas Media:

My friend potkin azarmehr, whose blog is one of the very best, calls our attention to American complicity in the death of an Iranian dissident.

Majid Kavousifar, seen in these pictures before being hanged, left Iran for Abu Dhabi two days after the assassination of one of the corruptest and most repressive judges in the Islamic Republic. Judge Moghaddas who was assassinated by Kavousifar and his nephew, was responsible for handing out long sentences to many political activists. Moghaddas sometimes even boasted that he sentenced the accused without even reading their files!

Kavoussifar had introduced himself as the killer of Moghaddas to the American Embassy in Abu Dhabi, where he had applied for asylum. The embassy guards handed him over to the Interpol, which informed Islamic Republic’s authorities of the incident.
I thought it was just the Homeland Security at the US airports who were the thickest officials in the world!

Here, Majid Kavousifar is seen smiling and saying his last goodbye. Why are so many victims smiling in these latest round of public executions? Perhaps if there is any after life, it will be better than living under the mullahs.

We all know what the government lawyers will say: he was a known killer, his name was on the Interpol list, we really can’t give asylum to someone who has murdered a judge. All true. And yet he killed a killer and torturer, an instrument of mass repression. When is homicide justifiable?

I’m not sure I know the answer to that one, but I do think we should have taken him in, and if we felt obliged to have him tried, we could have tried him in America, where a jury could have heard the whole story. By turning him over to the mullahs, we validated their death warrant on the poor man.

YOU KNOW, I am certain the Iranians would say the same thing about President Bush as Ledeen said about the dead Iranian judge, that he's "a killer and torturer, an instrument of mass repression. When is homicide justifiable?"

And they'd be right about some of it.

So what would Michael Ledeen say about the Iranians if they granted asylum to, for example, an American Islamist who managed to blow Bush's brains out , then somehow escaped the dragnet, got out of the country and made it to the Iranian Embassy in Venezuela?

WOULD LEDEEN and his neocons cronies understand the mullahs' -- even if they tried the assassin in Iran -- reluctance to "validate" the Americans' "death warrant on the poor man"? Somehow, I think not.

It must be a great thing to be a neoconservative and believe in will and power as the drivers of morality and truth.

"What is truth?" indeed.

Perhaps Ledeen ought to bone up on what St. Thomas More thought about the law . . . and due process. Here's the famous dialogue from A Man for All Seasons:

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

IT SEEMS TO ME that neoconservatives in high places have been cutting down a forest of morality and law to get at the devil. And now the devil is turning 'round on us . . . and the winds are starting to blow.

Louisiana . . . they're trying to wash us away

What has happened down here is the winds have changed
Clouds roll in from the north and it started to rain
Rained real hard and it rained for a real long time
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline

Louisiana, Louisiana
They're tyrin' to wash us away
They're tryin' to wash us away

Louisiana, Louisiana
They're tryin' to wash us away
They're tryin' to wash us away

POOR STATES, like poor people, just can't catch a break. If you're not doing yourself in -- usually through some of the same pathologies that helped impoverish you -- the fatcats are using you for target practice, either for sport or in the name of "bettering" society.

Louisiana is a poor state, and a relatively uneducated one, too. New Orleans is a basket case, and the state is hemorrhaging educated and skilled people . . . not to mention political clout.

Louisiana 2007 is a lot like Louisiana 1927. And the little fat men with notepads in their hands would just as soon have the Gulf of Mexico wash it away. So would their boss, President George W. Bush.

President Coolidge came down in a railroad train
With a little fat man with a notepad in his hand
The President say, "Little fat man isn't it a shame what the river has done
To this poor cracker's land."

After the federally misconstructed levees broke during a glancing blow by Hurricane Katrina two years ago, almost wiping out New Orleans, President Bush made some big promises after his FEMA minions left thousands of people stranded and starving for days after the storm.

"Tonight so many victims of the hurricane and the flood are far from home and friends and familiar things," Bush said on national television, standing before a spotlighted St. Louis Cathedral (thanks to the floodlights and generators the White House shipped in for the live shot). "You need to know that our whole nation cares about you, and in the journey ahead you're not alone. To all who carry a burden of loss, I extend the deepest sympathy of our country. To every person who has served and sacrificed in this emergency, I offer the gratitude of our country."

BY THIS TIME, the words "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" had been bitterly burned onto all our brains, and we were reaching for the hip waders. And the Lysol. But then . . . le deluge.

"And tonight I also offer this pledge of the American people: Throughout the area hit by the hurricane, we will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives," Bush said. "And all who question the future of the Crescent City need to know there is no way to imagine America without New Orleans, and this great city will rise again."

The president and his administration have spent the last 23 months proving to Louisianians, expatriates and sympathetic fellow Americans what a load of bull excrement that pledge was.

Every proposal that could have addressed big needs comprehensively somehow managed to get shot down or denuded because it was "too expensive." This at a time when we're in the process of flushing $1 trillion -- with a "T" -- down a toilet called Iraq.

AND NOW, it seems the president and his Beltway goons are trying to make sure what's left of a hard-case, hardscrabble state literally washes away. From The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune:

In a sharp and unexpected blow to Louisiana, President Bush threatened Wednesday to veto long-awaited legislation that would enhance hurricane protection along a Gulf Coast still struggling to recover from the devastating storms of two years ago.

House and Senate negotiators struck a bargain late last week on a $21 billion reauthorization of the Water Resources Development Act, with about 20 percent going to projects in Louisiana. The measure has broad support and is expected to get final passage this week before lawmakers leave for the monthlong August recess, and is expected to pass by veto-proof margins.

In a strong bipartisan vote, the House passed the bill 381-40.

But in a letter to key lawmakers, Bush's Office of Management and Budget said the price tag is too high. The administration also said the bipartisan deal shifted too much of the cost of new projects onto federal taxpayers and that it improperly green-lighted projects outside the jurisdiction of the Army Corps of Engineers.

"This is not how most Americans would expect their representatives in Washington to reach agreement, especially when it is their tax dollars that are being spent," OMB Director Rob Portman and John Paul Woodley, the assistant Army secretary over the Corps of Engineers, said in the letter.

Among other things, the bill would authorize a 72-mile system of levees and floodwalls to shield Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes from storms sweeping in from the Gulf of Mexico and up to $1.9 billion in Louisiana coastal restoration work. It would fortify New Orleans-area levees to withstand a 100-year storm and authorize $100 million for hurricane protection in Jean Lafitte and lower Jefferson Parish.

While the bill does not pay for the projects, it gives lawmakers the authorization to appropriate the money, something Louisiana has been waiting for since the last renewal of the Water Resources Development Act seven years ago. The clamor for action grew exponentially after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita damaged 90,000 square miles along the Gulf Coast and sent more than 2 million people fleeing from their homes in 2005.

"WE WILL DO WHAT IT TAKES." Right. Don't pee down our legs and tell us the levee broke . . . again.

It seems the present American preoccupation with deciding what lives are unworthy of life -- from the unborn to the unwell to the unfortunate -- has been extended to entire unwell and unfortunate states by this "pro-life" administration.

Looks like George Bush and those Washington hands of a like mind already have Louisiana's coffin picked out for it. All they need to do now is to create a corpse with a witch's brew of pretty words and malign neglect.

Well, maybe we can't stop what is starting to look inevitable -- though we can try like hell so long as life remains. But while we're doing that, we also can throw a nice jazz funeral for Louisiana.

That's what we're doing with this week's episode of the Revolution 21 podcast.

We can celebrate its life and treasure its culture. We can hold tight its memory in our hearts, and if it's going to go down -- maybe another good chunk washed away with the next Katrina or Rita -- at least it can go down with a song on its lips.

Louisiana, Louisiana
They're tryin' to wash us away
They're tryin' to wash us away

Louisiana, Louisiana
They're tryin' to wash us away
They're tryin' to wash us away
They're tryin' to wash us away
They're tryin' to wash us away

I didn't do it; nobody saw me do it . . . Satan did it!

The Internet Monk notes today that Christian comboxes have been filled with discussion about what God's purpose might be in allowing the I-35W bridge to crumple into the Mississippi River between Minneapolis and St. Paul.

And he rightly wonders what up with that?

The questions I have this morning aren’t about divine causation or Satanic mischief or even evangelistic opportunity. My questions are more earthly minded.

Where did inspections go wrong?

How much of our urban infrastructure is in similar condition?

Is the blame shifting that’s sure to come going to solve the problem?

How much security can we expect in urban life?

Ultimately, how much risk do we engage in that would be unacceptable if we “knew the score,” so to speak?

Does it do any good to talk about who is responsible?
What are families going through?

Where there enough first responders? Who is caring for them?

One of the things that bothers me about religion in general and evangelical Christianity in particular is a tendency to change the focus of ordinary things to religious things. “So heavenly minded, they are of no earthly good” is a valid criticism. It makes me feel good when Baptists and Catholics send disaster relief teams into these situations to just help out. Blessings on those people.

What should happen with a God-centered mind is a redemption and elevation of the ordinary. God is pleased when engineers, politicians and road inspectors have a Christian testimony. He’s also pleased- just as pleased, but in a different way- when the engineer designs a safe bridge, when the politician funds a sufficient infrastructure and when the inspector is thorough and rigorous.

There’s a time to ask theological questions, but there is a time to ask important, humanly significant ordinary Christians. There’s a time to judge a movie by the faith statements of the creators, and a time to judge a movie by the standards of good movie making. There’s a time to evaluate work by its potential for evangelism, but there is also a time to judge work by pragmatic standards.

Christians are sometimes shoddy thinkers, shoddy workers and shoddy creators. That’s usually accompanied by all the expected scripture quoting, testimony giving and God/Satan chatter.

There’s a time for theology, and there’s a time to talk about why bridges fall and what we can do about it.

MY PROBLEM with that kind of thinking exactly reflects IMonk's problem with that kind of mindlessness . . . that it's mindless, and it compromises Christian compassion and the Christian witness. There's something seriously messed up about people whose first reaction to a horrific tragedy is to ponder supernatural causes when their first reaction ought to be praying for the victims, praying for the souls of the dead . . . and rolling up their sleeves and getting their hands dirty being the hands (and strong backs) of Christ on earth.

I've experienced that kind of supernatural fatalism first hand and, for my money, it's nothing more than a conscious or subconscious effort to absolve oneself of responsibility for things going wrong by blaming it on God . . . or the devil.

Here's a concrete example for you. I used to work for a Catholic radio station hereabouts, and the whole culture of the place oozed looking for a "spiritual warfare" explanation for every single, blessed thing. A garbage truck accidentally backs into our transmitter shack and almost destroys the transmitter? Satan drives for Deffenbaugh.

The sewer line keeps getting clogged up underneath the station's rest room in the aging strip center in a bad part of town? Satan is harassing us to disrupt the spreading of the gospel.

The cheap, broken-down equipment in the control room and production studio keeps . . . well . . . breaking down? We're being attacked.

ONE TIME, during a station fund raiser, my boss was having a (ahem) devil of a time getting a telephone guest onto the air from her perch in the production studio. I asked whether she'd done A, B and C.

Yes, yes, yes. OK, let me check it out.

When I walked into the production studio, I found her commanding "Be gone, Satan!" Upon inspecting the control board and phone interface, I found the problem wasn't Telco Satan.

Despite her protestations, my boss had not done A, B and C. I pressed a button . . . et voila!

Just call me St. Michael, slayer of phone demons.

IF ONLY I HAD THE POWER to slay the Interstate bridge demons. But that, I think, will be up to the State of Minnesota.

Tragically, it will come dozens of dead motorists too late. Lord, have mercy.

Please.

Too little, too late to save my home state?

There's a new public-interest group that's grown out of the business community in my home state, Louisiana, and it's setting out on what -- to these jaded eyes -- looks like a Sisyphean quest, pressuring "statewide and legislative candidates to endorse sweeping policy changes in ethics, education and road funding to try to remake Louisiana."

As the article in The (Baton Rouge) Advocate put it:

Officials of the group, called Blueprint Louisiana, also said they are prepared to spend $1 million this year for television advertising and other expenses to convince political contenders to get behind the push.

“We are capable of so much more as a state,” said Maura Donahue, vice-president of a Mandeville firm and a member of the organization’s steering committee.

WELL, YEAH . . . so what? Louisiana has been capable of so much more as a state since, oh, 1812. The problem has been in 300 years of underachievement, lack of initiative and low expectations since Iberville and Bienville established a French colony there.

Most states -- indeed, most countries -- would give anything to have the natural resources and mild climate found in the Gret Stet. Most states -- indeed, most countries -- would settle for a crappy climate if they could just tap into the oil and natural-gas reserves sitting under Louisiana and off its coast.

On the most basic level there is, no one should ever go hungry in a state where the climate lets you plant both spring and fall vegetable gardens. But we know that's not the case. We know too well that Louisiana has one of the nation's highest poverty rates, including 23 percent of children under 18 . . . of which 13 percent live in "extreme poverty."

We also know that the state has an abysmal high-school dropout rate and ranks 44th in its graduation rate. Overall, 21 percent of Louisianians have less than a high-school diploma or its equivalent, including almost one-third of African-Americans.

And in 2000, only 22 percent of adult Louisianians had college degrees.

I REALIZE you have to start somewhere, and I'm not saying Blueprint Louisiana's efforts aren't desperately needed or will be futile. But the chronic nature of the state's disastrous poverty and educational-attainment statistics point to problems that lobbying some politicians can't touch.

The underlying problems in Louisiana are cultural ones, and they go back a long, long way. And unless Blueprint Louisiana can wave a magic wand and make Louisiana into an authoritarian state governed by enlightened and generous despots with the power to interrupt the deviant cycle of stupid does as stupid is -- and then force the unknowing and unwilling to educate themselves whether they want to or not -- I fear the groups' leaders have a long and frustrating row to hoe.

To be really blunt about it, a deviant (in sociological terms) population, given free will and universal emancipation, is apt to install a pretty damned deviant government (in political terms). I think Louisiana has borne that out for generation upon generation -- giving its citizens a genuinely biracial kleptocracy that, in 1991, almost ended up being headed by an ex-Klan-wizard, ex-neo-Nazi governor.

Pardon my French but, ladies and gentlemen, that's one seriously f***ed up political system.

Like I said, long row to hoe. Extremely frustrating.

SO, SHORT OF "Shape up or we'll shoot you," how do the Blueprint Louisiana folks aim to change the underlying civic culture that tolerates extreme poverty, extreme corruption, extreme racism (in both directions, I might add) and extreme disinterest in educational attainment? That's the linchpin to defeating the Dumbass Insurgency, and it's a quagmire not unlike the one we face in trying to "stabilize" Iraq.

At least we can thank God that insurgent Cajuns aren't setting off fresh-shrimp-truck bombs next to busy thoroughfares.

I'm asking here, because I don't know whether I have any good answers. I hope the Blueprint Louisiana leaders and other long-suffering good-government types do.

I TAKE THE LIBERTY of saying what I do, as bluntly as I do, because -- as I said -- I was born and raised in Baton Rouge, coming from an exceedingly working-class background and the beneficiary of a dirt-cheap, reasonably thorough college education from Louisiana State University. I was fortunate to go to college when $400 a semester would cover my tuition and fees, and I reckon I have to give thanks for at least that portion of the Long dynasty's populist legacy, one that gave generations of Louisianians so much that was so good . . . and so much that was soooooooooo bad.

As anyone who regularly reads Revolution 21's Blog for the People knows, I write a lot about my home state in Katrina's wake. And I mean a lot.

Odd, I suppose, being that I've lived in Nebraska the last 19 years. My wife and I left searching for greener, less dysfunctional pastures in 1988, and we ended up in Omaha, her hometown.

And here, as I'm wont to say, people generally care and government generally works. Schools are good, crime is relatively low and the city doesn't look like a Third World backwater. Yes, property taxes are pretty high, but then again, schools are good, crime is relatively low and the city doesn't look like a Third World backwater.

Generally, you get what you pay for.

Likewise, I'm fairly sure that many -- hell, probably most -- Louisianians would be horrified by our local property-tax rates. I'm also sure they'd be horrified by our gasoline tax and by the property- and wheel taxes we pay every year to get our cars licensed. Then again, Nebraska has very little oil revenue and our highway system isn't the worst in the nation, like some other state.

No, there's no oil in Omaha . . . but there are four Fortune 500 companies here. And there is a downtown that has been utterly transformed in the time we've lived here, as well as a citywide design and development plan that stands to transform whole swaths of this old market- and cow town on the Missouri River.

What is happening in Omaha today is what is possible when you have good schools, business involvement and a strong civic culture. We're harvesting the bounty of a Midwestern work ethic coupled with a generally progressive political culture and enough civic insecurity to push people to look at bigger cities and cultural centers and ask, "How come we can't be like that?"

LOOKING FROM UP HERE back toward Down There, I find I have developed the perspective of someone with a foot in each world . . . and Nebraska and Louisiana are different worlds. And I see that the tragedy of Louisiana -- the reason the good people of outfits like Blueprint Louisiana have their work more than cut out for them -- is that Uncle Earl (former Louisiana Gov. Earl Long) knew his state and was, oh, so right when he said "Someday Louisiana is going to get good government. And they ain't gonna like it."

Good government. Stuff like this, as reported in the Advocate piece:

Organizers said they will ask statewide and legislative candidates to sign pledges to support legislation in 2008 that would:

-- Enact the nation’s best ethics law, including detailed personal financial disclosure on employment, investments, property and liabilities for legislators, statewide elected officials, candidates for those offices and their spouses.

-- Allow every 4-year-old in the state to attend public school classes, up from about 60 percent who do so now.

-- Increase annual state aid for roads and bridges by nearly $570 million per year, mostly by moving money that now finances a wide range of state services to one that pays for roads only.

-- Reshuffle nearly $1 billion in state health-care spending so that the money follows patients rather than state-run hospitals

-- Make community and technical schools the center of efforts to improve Louisiana’s work force.

Employers often complain that they cannot find trained workers for top-paying jobs, many of which require two-year degrees.

Sean Reilly of Baton Rouge, vice chairman of Blueprint Louisiana, insisted that the plan is no pie-in-the-sky quest.

“If the citizens lead, then legislators will follow,” Reilly said. “You can adopt this agenda and win.”

BLUEPRINT LOUISIANA wants to bring the state good government. Louisianians ain't gonna like it. I mean, since when have voters there ever led -- at least led legislators toward any long-term commitment to good government?

That's the problem. What to do?

As I said earlier, I have found myself writing a lot about Louisiana here. Why?

Obviously, because I still love the place -- perhaps in a warped love-hate relationship at times, but love nonetheless. Louisiana has defined who I am and how I interact with the world, both good and bad. It is home, and I can't change that.

And no matter how fine a place Omaha is (which it is), and no matter how much I like it (which I do), and no matter how proud I am of what it has become (which I am), it isn't home. To some degree, I am and will always be an outsider here.

To some degree, I will always feel like a fish out of water here on the edge of the Middle West and the cusp of the Great Plains. Maybe it's just me, but when you're a Louisianian in a land of practical, understated Midwesterners, you sometimes get this feeling that people are sizing you up and deciding that you're Borat with a drawl.

Or that if your drawl isn't thick enough for what someone thinks a Louisiana native's ought to be, you're causing a disruption in the Region-Stereotype Continuum.

All this is to say I miss home. Despite all home's dysfunction and crookedness and poverty and crippling fatalism -- and may the phrase "Well, dat's Louisiana for you" be forever banished, amen -- I often feel that, not being home, I'm not quite right.

ON MANY LEVELS, particularly since The Thing (otherwise known as Katrina), I want to go home. I want to live out my days (pray God, many more) at home. I want to die and be buried back home.

But I look at what remains "The Poor Man of America" -- and in some ways is even more so -- and I think twice. I think hard.

I look at the seeming futility of changing a culture warped by long history and bad governance, and at the parochialism and insularity of Louisiana. I look at the distrust of "outsiders," and I wonder whether now I have become one.

I look at all this and wonder whether Thomas Wolfe was right, that, indeed, "You can't go home again." I wonder whether you don't just suck up your ennui and not even try.

I speak on the phone with my 84-year-old mother, a product -- actually, more a victim -- of all the screwed up crap that's gotten Louisiana, over generations, into the damn fix it's in now, and I feel like an able-bodied man who jumped off the Titanic and into a lifeboat, leaving the women and children behind. I am living up here in Omaha, by God, Nebraska, where people generally care and government generally works, while my functionally illiterate, widowed mother lives in Dystopialand, in her home in a declining Baton Rouge neighborhood, dependent on the kindness of my cousins.

And I know that after 84 years of knowing nothing but South Louisiana, and being as insulated as insular gets, moving her up here would be a cultural shock that just might kill her. Assuming that I ever could get her to leave Louisiana.

Likewise, I know that Louisiana isn't exactly a dream destination for people like my wife, born and raised in the Midwest and unconvinced that the cultural richness of the Bayou State outweighs the damn tough slog that living there (and knowing better) can be.

I AM COLLEGE EDUCATED. I'm also a creative person; I know what good government and a decent civic infrastructure look like, and I'm not over the hill yet. From what I've heard and read, I know that folks like those who created Blueprint Louisiana are desperate for folks like me to move -- or move back -- to the Gret Stet.

My heart tells me to go home. That's the only thing that does, because there's no rational reason -- generally speaking -- for me or anyone else to move to Louisiana.

We're not all burgeoning Rhett Butlers -- blockade runners and riverboat gamblers who've "always had a weakness for lost causes once they're really lost." And the confluence of history, recent events and never-changing statistics do little to convince Americans, or even natives like me -- particularly jaded natives like myself -- that Louisiana is anything but a lost cause.

What do Louisiana boosters say to people like me, folks whose hearts ache but, alas, do not have the last say?

What do Blueprint Louisiana types say to sympathetic folks with no Louisiana roots, those who have sympathy for your plight and might be open to a challenge but who must be practical as well?

What can the best-intentioned Louisianians do to change a civic culture that does not work up to First World standards, by and large, and hasn't for a long, long time . . . if it ever did?

How do you fix a failed state? How do you interrupt a death spiral? How do you cajole the smart and talented not to flee, and how do you convince the industrious and productive to move in?

The Blueprint Louisiana agenda is a start. And even if it's enacted, defying the long odds against it, are you ready for what lies beyond those first few steps of a thousand-mile journey?

I want to go home. I don't know whether I dare try.

It's official: The Dark Ages are back

A culture in which Paris Hilton can make a living is, by definition, problematic.

A culture in which you have a "horror rock opera" about buying replacement human organs "on the installment plan" (subject to being repo'd if you can't pay) co-starring Paris Hilton just screams "Abandon all hope ye who enter here."

Well, abandon all hope ye who are stuck in this culture, in these times. Paris will share the big screen with Paul Sorvino and Alexa Vega in Repo! The Genetic Opera. It starts shooting in Canada next month.

Now, if George Bush were looking for a good reason for preemptive war, this might be it. Quick! Somebody put a bug in Dick Cheney's ear: Nuke Canada -- next month.

Here are the ghastly details on Repo! from The Associated Press:

The horror rock opera, based on a stage musical, is set in a plague-ravaged future where people can purchase new organs on the installment plan from a corporation called Geneco. The catch is that if the payments stop, the organs are repossessed.

Hilton will portray the fame-seeking daughter of Geneco’s owner (Sorvino).

“We saw many actresses for the role, and Paris sang it better than all of them,” producer Carl Mazzocone told the Hollywood trade paper Daily Variety in Monday editions.

The director, Darren Lynn Bousman, also praised Hilton.

“I have auditioned at least 30 actresses for this role — Paris came in and owned it,” he told Variety. “She is this role.”

OH, THE GLORIES of typecasting, eh? Imagine, Paris is perfect for a role about a fame-seeking daughter.

Still, one would think you'd still have to have some talent even to play yourself. I guess they're rolling the dice on that one.

But this statement by the producer that “We saw many actresses for the role, and Paris sang it better than all of them,” frankly, beggars creduilty. I think the unspun version of what Mazzocone was trying to say is, "Holy crap! This is Hollywood Freakin' California, and we couldn't get 30 actresses who could outsing a hyena undergoing electroshock treatments? Well, maybe Paris can camp it up and get by . . . but she's definitely gonna have to get naked in this movie."

And so it goes in a culture where, pretty soon, the only words anybody knows will be F*** and Duh.

Maybe D'oh!

Hurt me! Hurt me! It hurts so gooood!

Click on the photo for full-size image.

From the Radio and Internet Newsletter, here's a story that begs the question, "Then why in the world do record labels send scads of free promo copies of albums and singles to radio stations? Not to mention willingly play the payola game with broadcasters?" Read on:

Recording artists and a member of the U.S. Copyright office were among witnesses who argued today in a Congressional hearing that the promotional value of broadcast radio insufficiently compensates artists for their work, and asked Congress to impose a new performance royalty on broadcast radio.

Much of the testimony heard today by the Committee for the Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property, a subcommittee of the House Committee on the Judiciary, challenged the broadcast industry's longstanding exemption from paying a performance royalty.

Sam Moore, part of the best-selling Stax recording act Sam & Dave and founding member of pro-performance royalty coalition musicFIRST, argued in his testimony that, "without a huge promotional budget and massive marketing support, radio does absolutely nothing to promote sales of my records."

AND WHILE I'M ON A ROLL, if radio so sucks as a promotional vehicle for musicians and labels, why do artist websites routinely exhort their "street teams" to call radio stations (even listing all the appropriately formatted ones by city and state, then listing their E-mail addresses and request-line numbers) and DEMAND that they play the singer's or band's single du jour?

Hello? Is this K-Puke? Dude, can you ruin MetalDeth's CD sales and, ultimately, wreck their career by playing Nookie Na-Na Rawwwwwwwk? You can!?! EXCELLENT! The guys are really hosed now!

UM HMMMMMMMM. . . .