This hurricane thing

Like everyone I've been watching, reading and thinking about this mess on the gulf coast. I was watching the Jim Lehrer New Hour tonight and he had his usual cast of thoughtful commentators on near the end of the broadcast. I thought Tom Oliphant summed up the situation perfectly when he said this: "I would say the fault lines are much deeper than that. I mean, on the one hand there is no question that we can see now with our own eyes the two Americas of which John Edwards began speaking a year and a half ago.

But deeper than that, I think, is the anger that is going to come from the realization that virtually all public policy -- state, local, federal, where this area is concerned, has been against the public interests for decades. And the realization that government is one of the reasons we have government has been violated by virtually everything government has done for decades."

You can bring that home to you. You can look around Charlotte and watch this nice southern town being destroyed by development. You can look at your Timewarner cable bill and wonder why you can't purchase two or three networks instead of a bundle. You can drive through a shitty part of town and wonder why the richest country in the world has violent slums while the president and his recent opponent are millionaires. You can drive down to Lancaster, SC and see how their beautiful downtown is half deserted while the Wal-Mart down the street is packed. And you can turn on the tube or pull up a news site on the internet and see how the poorest people of New Orleans were left to suffer and die. It's not about George Bush (although he does blow), it's about a system that allowed someone like him to rise to power. Now we are all going to have to pay because of the shortsightedness of the mindset that doing the right thing would be bad for business.

This is my blog and that is my opinion.