Books! Actual books!
"A rollicking ride of intellectual discovery and emotional growth... his comic timing never fails"
-- The Wall Street Journal
"Pulls you in like a good sports story"
-- The New York Times Book Review
"Endearingly frank... jubilant... lighthearted and fast-paced"
-- New York Newsday
"A surprisingly touching memoir"
-- Entertainment Weekly
"Snappy and informative"
-- Associated Press
"Effortlessly funny and informative... tender, human, and very wise... A must for anyone who loves Jeopardy!, or has ever seen it, or is breathing."
-- Joss Whedon, creator, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
"I haven't seen Jeopardy! since I was a kid, and yet I was charmed and amused by Bob Harris's fascinating and surprisingly suspenseful book. Through sheer force of personality, he takes this brainy TV show and makes it funny and easy to relate to."
-- Ira Glass, creator and host, This American Life
"A surprisingly intimate, entertaining book."
-- Orson Scott Card, 4-time Hugo Award winner, author of Ender's Game
"Funny, enlightening -- and just might help you win a million bucks on Jeopardy!"
-- A. J. Jacobs, author of The Know-It-All
"A masterful job of describing the feel of Jeopardy! in the heat of battle... I knew Bob was a great guy and a fantastic Jeopardy! player. Now I've found that he's also a wonderful writer. I think I'm starting to hate him."
-- Brad Rutter, top money-winner in Jeopardy! history
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“Revelatory... Harris's sly wit and infectious curiosity make understanding world chaos fascinating... witty, horrific, and necessary.”
— Boston Globe
"Brave... irreverent... charges into the thick of the globe's myriad simmering wars... hilariously relaxed."
— New York Observer
"Only Bob could make a user’s guide to our increasingly hostile world this absorbing, this breezy, and—ultimately—this hopeful.”
— Ken Jennings, author of Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs
“Fascinating, enlightening, and surprisingly: NOT TOTALLY DEPRESSING. A gimlet-eyed look at the world we endure that’s also suitable for enjoying with a gimlet.”
— John Hodgman, author of The Areas of My Expertise
and correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
"All three [presidential] candidates should read all three of these [recommended] books, but McCain gets first crack at Bob Harris's "Who Hates Whom“... a lighthearted overview of the insurrections and civil wars in the world today."
— Steven Pinker, author of The Stuff of Thought, in the New York Times Book Review
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Main  Riverbend
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Bush and Katrina: so many outrages, so little time |
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Tuesday, 06 September 2005 |
The horror unfolds, worst-case after worst-case. I can't even feign
the ability to write a coherent summary. So here's just a list of
stuff I've come across while surfing the Lake George region in the last few days.
• Bush actually opened Tuesday's photo-op Cabinet meeting by claiming
with a straight face that "This administration is not going to rest
until every life can be saved."
This, after Bush himself stayed on
vacation while many thousands of Americans were dying and tens of thousands were in need of rescue and relief.
To Bush's left, Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld joined Bush in California in attending a Padres baseball game the night after the levees were overtopped.
To his right was Dick Cheney, who has only just now returned from vacation, and whose official website at this writing still does not even acknowledge Katrina, more than eight days after landfall.
To Cheney's right was Condi Rice, who considered attending "Spamalot" more important than doing her job and went shopping for Ferragamo shoes even after the levees had broken. As I write these words, the receipt of international aid by Condi's State Dept. is still extremely disorganized. And people are still dying.
• It turns out Bush stuffed the leadership of FEMA with political flunkies and gofers, virtually none of whom had any actual experience in, um, managing emergencies.
The Chief of Staff was a Bush event planner. The Deputy Chief of Staff
was a media flak who had produced Bush campaign commercials.
The head of FEMA, Mike Brown, previously ran not a relief organization but the International Arabian Horse Association,
of all things, where he seems primarily remembered for his remarkable
incompetence. Brown's only real qualification seems to be his college
friendship with Bush's former campaign manager -- who was himself the previous unqualified director of FEMA. Under Brown's direction, FEMA has already admitted
to sending over $12 million (and reportedly much as $30
million) in fraudlent claims to Miami-Dade county in the wake of
Hurricane Frances; supposedly nobody at FEMA noticed that the storm
actually struck over 100 miles to the north.
The wire services are now reporting that Brown waited until after the storm struck
-- days after receiving a briefing on the likelihood of utter disaster
-- before sending Homeland Security employees to the region. And he
gave them two days to get there.
• Not surprisingly, the Bush team is back in full-on spin mode, arranging staged photo ops which have delayed relief operations and diverted resources so the president can play TV Victim Tag, steering two unusually clean and telegenic young disasterees toward the nearest camera.
If that sounds harsh, a team of 50 volunteer firefighters from across the country, all of
whom rushed eagerly to risk their lives while people were still dying,
were assigned by FEMA to fly to Louisiana -- not to help rescue
victims, but to stand at Bush's side for the TV cameras.
That we're allowed to see. The bodies of the thousands of victims, however -- those, the Bush administration are already trying to hide, just like the bodies returning from Iraq.
A key component of the bullshit is the claim that Gov. Blanco
didn't ask for federal assistance. This is a lie. She declared a state of emergency on August 26th; the White House's own website confirms this with Bush's corresponding federal declaration of emergency on August 27th. Note that the White House's own statement
explicitly authorizes the DHS and FEMA to "coordinate all disaster
relief efforts... [s]pecifically, FEMA is authorized to identify,
mobilize, and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources
necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency." That is,
after all, what the federal government is supposed is do. That is,
after all, what the federal government failed to do.
When Chertoff and Myers
and Bush all claim that levee damage and flooding could not
have been foreseen, they are lying their asses off. The flooding was an
explicit part of FEMA's own scenarios; the National Weather Service
repeatedly and explicitly warned of catastrophic city-wide destruction;
both Brown and Chertoff were directly briefed on the flood risk by the National Hurricane Center prior to Katrina's landfall; and the NWS reported at 9 AM on Monday -- mere hours after landfall -- that levees had already been overtopped in both Orleans and St. Bernard parishes.
Josh Marshall points out that the St. Petersburg Times has reported that Bush himself was briefed by the head of the National Hurricane Center on Sunday the 28th. If so, Bush was personally warned of likely floods three full days before lying about it on Good Morning America.
The lies are numerous, repeated, obvious, and easily documented.
Remember
what this is: these people are lying about negligent responsibility for
the unnecessary deaths of thousands of our fellow Americans.
This is nothing short of criminal.
• As you already know, much of the afflicted region's National Guard
contingent is thousands of miles away, fighting in Iraq. Meanwhile,
the Bush administration consistently cut funding
for New Orleans' levees year after year after year; this was explicitly
and repeatedly blamed on the Iraq war. Will Bunch points out that in
2004, Bush's budget actually included 12 times more funding for wetlands in Iraq as in the Mississippi delta.
• People may no longer be stealing food from grocery stores, but the real looting has just begun. Halliburton is already cleaning up to the tune of hundreds of millions of tax dollars.
• The increasingly overt hatred, class bigotry, and sheer callousness of many of the administration's defenders is descending into farce.
As is the stupidity. No, Senator Ted Stevens, the Gulf Coast is not "twice the size of Europe." The $1.3 billion in pork you've brought home since Bush was elected, however, is comparable to the entire GNP of several entire European countries.
Not surprisingly, GOP Senators Santorum and Kyl and Grassley are already looking for new ways to screw the victims of the disaster out of federal relief.
Meanwhile, the GOP-controlled Senate has only recently decided to
delay voting to abolish the estate tax. Until yesterday, they were
still planning on pushing a millionaires-only tax cut
amounting to a trillion dollars over the next ten years. Somebody must
have pointed out that doing so while corpses of the pour are piling by
the thousands would be a bit distasteful.
• The possible long-term effects of the disaster remain both staggering and little-discussed in the mainstream press.
In human health: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Laurie Garrett, who specializes in the study of teeny organisms which like to kill human beings, has compiled a rather frightening laundry list of boogers afoot
in Lake George and environs: a regional plague of disease-carrying
mosquitoes, gastrointestinal organisms, and a few dozen miscellaneous
infectious diseases. Merely pronouncing all the names could make your damn tongue swell up.
For the environment: all that spectacularly polluted, infectious,
dead-body-riddled water you keep hearing about in New Orleans is being pumped directly back into the surrounding environment. That might not be a good idea. And the water may be even more hazardous than we realize -- New Orleans also contained a major toxic waste dump.
In economics: the Bush administration is already running ludicrously unsustainable
deficits
with no end in sight. The few existing GOP plans (like the
trillion-dollar tax cut, above) only make the problem much worse. It's
hard to say when, but within our lifetimes this may well do to the
dollar and the economy pretty much what Katrina just did to the Gulf
Coast. And now Lake George will cost the U.S. another $100 billion or even $200 billion,
give or take. To boot, America now has up to a million displaced
people, many in severe economic, medical, and/or psychological need.
This will be costly to handle even if it is handled wisely, which of
course it will not be.
In domestic tranquility: when Kanye West said out loud the other day that "George Bush doesn't care about black people," that was not one man's opinion, contrary to NBC's excuse for censoring the rebroadcast. That's what a lot of folks
think now, and even if you disagree, it's not hard to see why they do.
Dark-skinned civilians -- the vast majority guilty only of being in the
wrong place -- have been killed by the tens of thousands in Iraq, locked up in Guantanamo (where Halliburton is also raking in millions) and abused with near-impunity at Abu Ghraib. Bush himself was the most active killer of prison inmates in U.S. gubernatorial history; most were, as one does come to expect, non-white. And Bush's new Supreme Court guy has made an entire career
out of pushing against civil rights laws, fair housing, affirmative
action, and the Voting Rights Act. Bush wants to make him Chief
Justice.
In national security: every terrorist on Earth can now see that the
U.S. is vastly less capable of providing for its own people than anyone
previously thought. I'm guessing here, but it doesn't seem a real
stretch to figure that the perceived effectiveness of (and therefore
incentive for) another attack has now leapt dramatically. (And Iraq
has sure been a peachy incubator of terrorists.) And even if nobody
does anything horrible anytime soon, every American living in a likely
earthquake, tornado, or hurricane zone -- which is to say, about
two-thirds of the population -- must now realize that if the shit
comes, you may just be on your own.
It is hard to find words to fully state the ongoing damage.
Bottom line: it is exceedingly likely that hundreds of people, if not thousands, have died
not from the storm but from the gross incompetence in handling the
aftermath.
Bush is not our king. He is our employee.
In most work environments, getting members of the owners' families killed usually gets you fired.
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Loan a Few Bucks, Change a Few Lives
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