.. and cancels his appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman, apparently because he has to rescue the economy from "cratering." Asked Letterman: "What are you going to do if you’re elected and things get tough? Suspend being president? We’ve got a guy like that now!"
What’s going on? The Christian Science Monitor speculates.
This morning I began day twelve without electricity and as usual found myself feeling hot, mildly grumpy, anxious and a bit more dispirited by the failure of Center Point Energy to restore power at our corner of the street. After my morning cup of tea (the hot water was obtained from a neighbor’s kitchen last night and stored in a thermos), I began the daily routine – making and receiving calls from neighbors asking whether there was any new information. There was none. A bit later, around 8 O’clock, a utility company bucket truck, suitable for transformer repair came by and stopped before our home. I was thrilled to see it. Then it disappeared never making it to the back of the homes where the faulty transformer is located. (It hasn’t returned) After that I made the first of my two daily calls to the power company and got the old and predictable "we are doing the best we can" message. For the second time in twelve days since Ike roared through here, I lost my temper. I didn’t quite yell but did not mince my words regarding what I thought of the company’s performance. The young woman at the other end of the line was unfazed and sternly asked me to be "patient and logical." Oh well.
Some sense of camaraderie and "There by the grace of God.." is restored every day on reading the morning paper and realizing that there are many like us camping out in their own homes with the help of extension cords, others who cannot borrow electricity from a neighbor because entire neighborhoods are out and still others who must live in shelters or with friends and relatives because their homes are unlivable. Amidst the news of despair and frustration, there are also reports of people dealing with their predicament with the occasional humor. They are painting funny signs on their devastated property, joking with reporters and neighbors, blogging or writing to the editors of newspapers with their take on storm interrupted lives.
Houston’s excellent mayor, Bill White (a Democrat whom I wish to see run for governor) has been in the news a lot lately. Most reports are laudatory for the calm and efficient job he has done in keeping things under control in this huge city of several millions after a major catastrophe. One recent news item however was about the usually unflappable mayor getting into a spat with some female FEMA workers over the distribution of relief items. White is reported to have used harsh words, some of them expletives. The awful governor of Texas, Rick "Good Hair" Perry tut-tutted and advised White to keep a civil tongue. Most Houstonians found that laughable. They are squarely behind White for showing his impatience with inefficiency. And no one found his salty language objectionable.
So it took a hurricane for most Houston’s citizens to learn that Mayor Bill White has a temper. After all, he not only rarely raises his voice in public, he rarely changes tones. But those who have worked with him know him to be a man whose patience is short and who is more than ready to express his annoyance when people have not done the job he thinks they should have.
Some were surprised, however, to learn that he had used language unfit for Sunday school to express his anger last Tuesday at finding trucks loaded with ice, water and food sitting at the Reliant Center while thousands of people waited in lines for the supplies for hours at Points of Distribution (PODs).
One city official recalled seeing him "eviscerate" employees with perfectly printable words with such force that "I’m sure they would have preferred to be cussed out." Another said, "He is capable of breaking arms over the telephone." …..
….White [is] a Democrat. That is relevant only because other local Republicans had been discussing what they saw as White’s misbehavior, and at least one Republican official mentioned it to a reporter. In addition, somehow the Republican governor of Georgia got worked up enough to send a complaining letter to the Republican governor of Texas, Rick Perry — though not to White.
Perry wrote an unctuous letter of apology back and released it — something that could possibly be seen as an early move in a possible governor’s race between Perry and White.
But any political advantage sought by publicizing White’s behavior seems to have backfired. A story on the flap by my colleague Brad Olson drew more online readers and more comments than any other story yesterday, overwhelmingly in White’s favor.
White’s Facebook page is lit up with "attaboys," though not just on the outburst.
Here is another example of a citizen expressing his solidarity with Mayor White in today’s Houston Chronicle.
Parenthetical point
I’m sure Mayor Bill White wished he had used more politic language with those Georgia Forestry Commission workers, but I say, you (expletive) go, brother! The same issue of the Chronicle showed people standing in line for hours — some camping out overnight — in the (expletive) heat for food stamps. My family is one of the unlucky few without power for 11 (expletive) days now (despite CenterPoint’s estimate of a Monday restoration). It’s a (expletive) mess here. So thank you, White, for expressing some of our (expletive) frustration. Most of us have no one to vent to who isn’t in the same (expletive) mess. And if those workers didn’t expect to find tired and frustrated people here, then they (expletive) well should have.
SEAN PARKER
Humble
For more storm related photos of Houston, Galveston and vicinity, see here.
Who’s your candidate? Take the test. I scored once for McCain – on immigration.
(Today is day 11 without electricity in my home)
Yesterday was day nine without electricity in our home. Only four houses on our street remain unplugged. All the other neighbors had their power restored the Sunday after the storm. As I have mentioned in previous posts and comments, although not having our own electricity is proving to be very cumbersome, we have until now managed to stay in our home with the help of our neighbors by borrowing electricity to run a few appliances and getting hot water for tea and coffee as needed. Yesterday I did a load of laundry in a friend’s house. So there is no pile of dirty clothes in my utility room waiting for the washer & dryer to come back to life.
Not everyone in Houston has the good fortune to share the amenities of their neighbors’ homes because there are still several neighborhoods where all the houses are in the dark. The situation with the power supply has been an entirely random affair – wealthy and poor neighborhoods have been equally affected. There are less affluent areas who have had their electricity restored and some of the ritziest addresses in Houston are languishing in the heat and the dark. Given the right climatic conditions, the rich and the poor get equally sweaty and designer clothes need washing just as much as a faded t-shirt. As a result, Houstonians from widely different social backgrounds are bumping into each other for brief but amicable interludes in the area laundromats, which in Houston, mostly go by the name of "washeterias."
This week has been pretty bad for Sen John McCain’s presidential campaign and for the GOP.
McCain has made it amply clear that he has no clear grasp of economic issues. President George Bush came out of hiding to make a cameo appearance ostensibly to calm the jitters resulting from the avalanche of bad news emanating from the financial world. The rest of the Republicans, including McCain, are running from Bush’s record of the past eight years and the only prescription in their medicine chest is "tax cuts."
During a McCain – Palin joint appearance (Sarah Palin is still not trusted to campaign by herself), Palin referred to a Palin-McCain administration. She also repeatedly refers to the big man on the top of the ticket as her "running mate." McCain needs to get a food taster if the duo is elected in November.
Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, McCain’s good friend (make that ex-friend) and fellow Vietnam vet chided his campaign for making "dishonest" and "nonsensical" claims.
In a radio interview in Miami, McCain rained on Spain – specifically on its prime minister, Jose Luis Zapatero, who had criticized the Bush administration’s misguided adventure in Iraq. Also not clear was whether McCain thought Zapatero is the leader of a Latin American nation – some have speculated that he did not recognize the Spanish prime minister’s name until reminded by the interviewer. It is worth noting that although Spain withdrew its troops from Iraq , it still has soldiers fighting in Afghanistan (some people seem to know where the real hub of terrorism is). Let us also not forget that other than the US, India and the UK, Spain is one of the few countries which was targeted for a large scale attack by terrorists aligned and sympathetic to Al Qaida.
As for the "diversity free" Republican Party, its political poo-bahs have suddenly become concerned about reaching out to minority communities. And they have found a spokesperson with a sterling record of sensitivity for the job – no monkey business here.
Request to Senator McCain and the GOP : Please carry on exactly as you are doing – with blinkers on your eyes, wax in your ears, mush in your brain and no rein on your ignorant tongues. That way, the other slightly less clueless party might win in November for a change.
(cartoon: Toles in Washington Post)
Update: Despite all the evidence of incompetence, hypocrisy and ignorance of the McCain-Palin ticket, why Obama may still lose. (via Leiter Reports)
Dear Democrats,
What I want most for Christmas is a structural change to American politics. Not Sandy Levinson’s new constitutional convention (although I would not object to that). But similar to the problem with the antidemocratic "two senators per state" rule is the role of Iowa and New Hampshire in the presidential-candidate-nomination process.
The campaigns start with corn (see numerous posts on this blog about the problems posed by corn ethanol to understand why that’s not a good thing) and other farmer issues. And in New Hampshire, well, I don’t really know what people there care about, unless it’s being told how delightfully "independent" they are. In both cases, though, the state’s population is very white and very rural. And once Iowa and New Hampshire make their decisions, media coverage becomes about who’s winning and losing the race, and substantive issues are completely gone.
So anyhow, while I would like to see Barack Obama beat Sarah Palin and her decrepit running-mate John McCain in the upcoming election, I would much more like to see the Democratic Party make California the first state to get a say in who will be the Democratic nominee. For one thing, there are about 5 trillion more Californians than there are Iowans and New Hampshirites (is that a word?) combined. The population is much, much more diverse, in terms of race, sexuality, lifestyle, and economic status. It is much more representative of Americans as a whole. We might even see candidates talking about something more important than how best to subsidize corn-farmers! For example, access to education, health care, and equal rights; or crime and the institutional racism that is the "war on drugs." You know, nonsense like that that plays little or no role in determining who the two contestants for the presidency will be (or in unusual cases, where one candidate is so pathetic that everyone cares more about his VP-in-Tina-Fey-glasses, three).
I’m even willing to compromise. Bring it to Michigan or Ohio, if you must. But that, Democrats, is what I want for Christmas.
Yours,
Joe
In my home and at the Large Hadron Collider.
Today is the sixth consecutive day that our house is without electricity. We are minimally functional with borrowed electricity from our neighbors through an extension cord. After six days, I am getting used to it and learning to improvise around the limited access to electricity – a situation which would otherwise have been a debilitating handicap. All of us can imagine the difficulty of leading a normal daily routine in which almost every household implement comes on with the flick of a switch or the push of a button. But those who are really "plugged in" will appreciate this article by a young and thoroughly wired person. No, the lament here is not for hot food, hot tea or coffee, not even light or air conditioning. Some people, (that also includes adults like my husband), feel most hampered by their electronic gadgetry going dark and silent.
My life, and maybe yours, is bathed in a blue-green electronic glow. When the flat-screen TV isn’t on, the laptop is. The BlackBerry goes everywhere, and so does the iPod. My books are loaded onto an electronic reading device, a Kindle. I Twitter.
I check my friends’ progress on Facebook. Many of the people I Twitter or have as Facebook friends I’ve never met, probably never will meet. But I follow them going to work, unable to sleep, angry in traffic, naming new babies. They’re part of my life.
Unplug me and I die a little.
During Ike, the rules changed. Sure, some of us tried to plan ahead for electronic catastrophe, charging the cell phones, buying wrong-size batteries and trying to dig up that totally retro non-cordless phone, but sometimes even that wasn’t good enough.
After the storm, cell phone service was at best spotty, at worst nonexistent.
Sure, there was battery life in the laptop good enough for a DVD or two, but who remembered that the wireless router was electric too? (Not me.) A camera wasn’t much good with an uncharged battery. Cock your ear, and you could hear the collective keening of tweens whose Nintendo DS or PSP had run out of juice.
I noticed that the writer of the piece mentions some old-fashioned gizmos which came in awfully handy during our marooned hours right after Ike blew by. Most households these days have cordless or cell phones (many of the younger generation don’t bother with land lines at all). The former doesn’t work without electricity and the latter is useless when the cell towers are hit. Ike, like other big storms, damaged both. But our land phone line didn’t go down during the rampage. I found a fifteen year old corded phone in a closet (the type you can’t use while walking around the house) which proved to be the life line during the 24 hours after the storm and continues to be so in our lengthy "powerless" state. We also found an old shortwave radio in my son’s room. It worked for a while on batteries but then broke down. My husband spent better part of last Saturday in the garage, sitting in the car listening to the radio and charging his lap top.
While the above article is lighthearted in an Erma Bombeck kind of way, the following one by Richard Parker, professor of journalism at UT Austin, takes a somber look at what a storm the size of Ike really costs a huge city like Houston, located so close to an ever warming body of water.
An excerpt:
Every few months, along with the water bill, I receive a little brochure from the water company that assures me that the level of coliform and fecal bacteria in the water that flows through the taps has been tested at well below required levels. Ditto for the amounts of lead and other heavy metals and nitrates. One important missing category, however, is the residues of pharmaceuticals which have been dumped or excreted into the water sources.
This article gives an indication of the effects of these pharmaceuticals making it into the water supply:
Pharmaceuticals have since been found in treated sewage effluents,
surface waters, soil, and tap water, though at very low levels (parts
per trillion, ppt). These levels are unable to induce acute effects in
humans, i.e., they’re far below the recommended prescription dose, but
have been found to affect aquatic ecosystems. To date, most attention
has been focused on hormone disruption in fish due to pharmaceutical
estrogens present in the environment, and the rise of bacterial
pathogens resistant to conventional antibiotic treatment due, in part,
to their exposure to sub-lethal levels of antibiotics in their
environment. Antibiotics and estrogens are only two of many
pharmaceuticals suspected of persisting in the environment either due
to their inability to naturally biodegrade or continued prevalence as a
result of continuous release. Other studies have shown antidepressants
to trigger premature spawning in shellfish while drugs designed to
treat heart ailments block the ability of fish to repair damaged fins.Recent monitoring studies fail to address one question: Are the
levels of pharmaceuticals in the environment significant? At first
glance, one would say ‘no’ since levels found in the environment are
six to seven orders of magnitude lower than therapeutic doses in spite
of the fact up to 90 percent of an oral drug can be excreted in human
waste. Low and consistent exposures wouldn’t likely produce acute,
notable effects but rather subtle impacts such as behavioral or
reproductive effects that could very well go unnoticed. The good news
is any threat to human health is probably not imminent but rather
long-term.
So it’s not merely the direct route from adulteration of food products such as melamine in pet food and now, Chinese infant formula and milk, or the long-term effect of Bisphenol A used in polycarbonate plastics that is associated with an increase in heart disease and diabetes, apart from phytoestrogenic effects.
Wonder chemicals and drugs are the double-edged sword of modern life. There is probably little we can do to reduce our exposure to these, no matter how hard we might try to avoid it by going ‘green’, switching to bottled water (bisphenol exposure, anyone?) or switching to organic/hormone free food only.
…only one thinks she needs a private tanning bed. (These things cost up to $35,000). The dog would settle for someone willing to rub his belly every once in a while.
Thanks Sujatha, for putting up the post about Ike – that was very accurate reporting. Thanks also to everyone who had called or emailed to enquire after our safety – many of them fellow bloggers.
I have access to the computer today. So a quick update on Ike and Me. Most of you have seen the devastation on TV or read about it in the papers or on the Internet. The damage is vast and cost of recovery is going to be extravagant. Houston area city officials and Texas state authorities have to be congratulated on the methodical and timely preparation before Ike came barreling through here and the quick response in its destructive aftermath.
We are actually very much better off than many, particularly those who evacuated from the coastal region. In fact, most of our neighborhood is up and running, with electricity restored in homes. Our problem is that the transformer that feeds our house is blown due to a neighbors tree branch falling on the lines. With only 4 homes affected by that, we are now at the back of the line for repairs – the utilities company must get to the big problems first. No saying when our electricity will come back. So we are thinking of checking into a hotel and fortunately have found a Holiday Inn (most hotels in the Houston area are either damaged or booked solid with people whose homes are unlivable due to storm damage) close by which has a room available from Thursday onwards. Until then we must make do in our home which is otherwise unharmed.
Meanwhile, we are surviving by using our neighbors’ kitchens to boil water, fry an occasional omelette and by raiding their coffee pots. We can at least go out to eat now as restaurants are opening up one by one. Also, we have run an extension cord from our neighbor’s house and can run a fan, the freezer and a few other gadgets as necessary. The weather in Ike’s wake has been marvelously cool. Sleeping with the windows open has been not uncomfortable for the past two days. We also have hot and cold water in the faucets, so showering is not a problem. But this can’t go on for more than a couple of days – "borrowing" our neighbor’s electricity and the house covered with extension wires. So we must leave on Thursday for the hotel if the power is not back up on by then.
Ike was a monster storm. Its eye passed over our area. I have never experienced anything like this before. I am amazed that our house and all others around it are still standing relatively unscathed.
I will get back to blogging as soon as I am feeling a bit less distracted. Meanwhile readers must depend on the kindness of my co-bloggers.
I just spoke briefly with Ruchira a short while ago.While they are currently without power, there’s no structural damage to the home and the water is still on. It may be a few days before Ruchira gets back online, though.
She said that it was a very bad storm, the worst that she has ever been through. The power was restored relatively quickly to most of her neighborhood, except for her house and a couple of neighbors, who had downed trees near power lines that caused a blown transformer near them. She is not sure when the utility people will get to them, because other areas are currently higher priority. It could be a few days or even weeks depending on how bad the situation is in the worst affected areas. They may move to a hotel room if any become available, if the power isn’t restored soon.
I feel like it’s almost irresponsible of CNN to publish this article.
A new study
finds that many Americans have that same kind of faith. In the study,
57 percent of randomly surveyed adults said God’s intervention could
save a deathly ill family member even if physicians said treatment
would be futile.However, just under 20 percent of doctors and other medical workers said God could reverse a helpless outcome.
The study was published last month in Archives of Surgery and is one of
many to show a "faith gap" between doctors and patients."Patients are scared to death to talk to their doctors about this
issue," said Dr. Harold Koenig, co-director of the Center for
Spirituality, Theology and Health at Duke University.Given this
gap, how can you discuss God with your physician? We asked advice from
Koenig and two other physicians who study faith and medicine.1. It’s OK to ask for a doctor who also has strong religious convictions
Koenig suggests this approach when talking to a physician: "I would
say: ‘My religious beliefs are very important to me and influence my
medical decisions and the way I cope with illness, and I want a doctor
who has those same convictions. If you don’t come from that
perspective, do you know a doctor you can refer me to?’ "If you’re a Christian, you might find a like-minded doctor through the ZIP code search at the Christian Medical and Dental Associations.
It sure reads as if CNN is advocating that patients make medical decisions influenced by religious belief. First, isn’t that a contradiction in terms? That is, if a treatment (or nontreatment) decision is guided by religion, it is necessarily not a "medical decision." But second, here’s why I think this is irresponsible. Yes, people have a right to their religious beliefs, but a so-called "news" source shouldn’t be encouraging them to go to hospitals, only to discount science and medicine in favor of faith. "Are you a Christian? Here’s how you can get a Christian doctor!" "Are you Tom Cruise? Here’s how you can find a doctor who also won’t believe in or treat your psychiatric disorders!"
And on a slight tangent, why do 20 percent of "doctors and other medical workers" believe that God will intervene with miracles in medically hopeless cases? I hope that most of that 20 percent is comprised of janitors working in hospitals and telephone receptionists, and not the physicians who actually treat patients! And given that so many people do die and have horrible things happen to them, why are only some patients getting miracles? I wonder how these people answer that. "Well, if you pray really, really hard…"?
Accidental Blogger 
