Despite the spreading horror in New Orleans (Mayor Ray Nagin said earlier today that the number of deaths in the city had probably already gone into the thousands), there are a few signs of the city’s quirky and indomitable sprit still in view. Check out this item from the Times-Picayune’s invaluable newsblog, posted this afternoon:

In the garden behind St. Louis Cathedral on Royal Street lies an incredible tangle of zig-zagging broken tree trunks and branches, mixed with smashed wrought iron fences. But right in the middle, a statue of Jesus is still standing, unscathed by the storm, save for the left thumb and index finger, which are missing.The missing digits immediately set off speculation of divine intervention.New Orleans has a long history praying to saints for guidance and protection in times of great peril. In fact it was Our Lady of Prompt Succor who was said to be responsible for saving the Ursulines Convent in the French Quarter from a raging fire that consumed the rest of the city centuries ago.Since then, New Orlenians have prayed to the saint for protection from natural disasters. On Saturday, Archbishop Alfred Hughes read a prayer over the radio asking for Our Lady’s intervention to spare the city a direct hit by Hurricane Katrina. Many in the Quarter are now saying it was the hand of Jesus, the missing digits to be precise, that flicked the hurricane east just a little to keep the city from suffering a direct blow. And the search is one for those missing fingers.Shortly after Katrina passed, several men went to Robert Buras, who owns the Royal Street Grocery and told him they know who has the finger. Buras said he’d give them all the water and beer they need if they bring him the finger. They told him they’d find it and asked to be paid upfront. But Buras told them he wouldn’t take it on credit. “I’m going to find Jesus’ finger,” Buras said. ”I’ve got a lead on it.”

The Royal Street Grocery, BTW, has remained open through the whole saga, so far at least, though the owner has to toss goods to purchasers through an upstairs window where’s he’s stored his most valuable wares.Here’s another tale of French Quarter imperturbability from the T-P newsblog:

Johnny White’s Sport Bar on Bourbon Street at Orleans Avenue didn’t close Tuesday night, and had six patrons at 8 a.m. drinking at the bar.“Monday night, they came by after curfew and wanted us to close,” bartender Perry Bailey, 60, said of officers then patrolling the French Quarter. But all we did was shut the doors and stayed open.”

Unfortunately, most of this anarchic good cheer will soon have to come to an end with the Governor’s mandatory evacuation order. Current estimates are that the city may be shut down for three to four months. New Orleans truly needs the Hand of God to provide a future that’s anything like its past.

I should be getting some real work done, but I’m finding it hard to stop thinking about what’s happening in my favorite city right now, and trying to follow developments through the news media.Unfortunately, media coverage is at best spotty. To some extent that’s understandable; after all, there are very few “on the scene” reporters, and information on key issues like progress towards plugging the gaps in the levee system is hard to come by. Still, Atrios has a very good point about the inability or disinclination of the media to provide basic explanations of the horrific images they keep showing:

It’s a shame that from what I’ve seen in the media they don’t seem to understand the importance of maps. Disaster footage is flashed randomly on the screen, devoid of any genuine geographic context. Maps appropriately scaled for the location of the footage would provide actual useful information. Otherwise, it’s mostly just disaster porn.

If you know a little bit about the geography of New Orelans and its many wonderful neighborhoods, these random images are maddening, since a flooded house in Bywater pretty much looks like a flooded house in the Irish Channel. Most viewers probably don’t care, and in the end, it doesn’t matter what I know when, but some effort to match images with words if not maps would be helpful. Even nightmares need scripts.

I profoundly wish my last post had been accurate about New Orleans’ close brush with catastrophe. As I’m sure you know, today has brought forth scenes of ever-growing horror in the Crescent City, as a large breach in the levees protecting the city from a swollen Lake Pontchartrain developed, pouring water into the Central Business District at a rate that is overwhelming the city’s pumping system. Mayor Ray Nagin estimated earlier today that 80 percent of the city is already flooded, and it’s not clear how efforts to plug the levee gap are progressing.This levee breach is exactly the “doomsday” scenario that so many in New Orleans have long feared. The only good news is that it happened after about four out of every five residents were evacuated. But that still leaves well over a hundred thousand people there as waters rise and food and water supplies begin to run out–more than 10,000 of them, including patients from flooded hospitals, taking shelter in the Superdome, fast becoming a sweltering nightmare. Yesterday’s widespread looting led to a declaration of martial law in three parishes in the area, though I would guess today’s flooding has put the kibosh on all but the hardiest thieves.Even if the levee breach is plugged, and the waters subside without major loss of life, New Orleans’ will be in trouble for some time, given the huge health hazards associated with contaminated water, toxic wastes and disease. Having once worked on a flood recovery project in Georgia (of a much smaller dimension), I can tell you that floods are the nastiest of natural disasters, and that public health problems really emerge when the big water’s all gone.All we can do now is watch, pray, and send what we can to the Red Cross.When it’s all over, we should all renew our faith in this wonderful city, even if it’s just by heading down there and helping revive its heavily tourism-based economy. If nothing else, perhaps those who just think of New Orleans as the French Quarter and jazz clubs will understand this is a living, breathing city with problems as immense as its charm.UPDATE, late Tuesday night: another levee breach has developed; efforts to close the first one have so far failed; and in general, the situation in New Orleans continues to deteriorate. The best single source of first-hand reports from the city is the blog-style coverage being offered by the Times-Picayune, which has provided sporadic but vivid stories of the disaster and its effects on people and their neighborhoods.

I’ve just returned tonight from a quick weekend trip to Prince Edward Island, a delightfully remote corner of Canada, but all the talk while I was there was of the USA.Like Americans, Canadians have been riveted by the incredible destructive power of Hurricane Katrina, and particularly the predictions that New Orleans might finally be wiped out by catastrophic flooding. (Since New Orleans is my favorite place, I was frantic yesterday and today to get the news, and only after sitting through a long CNN feature about the impact on oil refinery capacity at the Charlottetown airport did it become apparent that massive loss of human life did not occur in the Crescent City, though Biloxi was less fortunate).But the news item that competed with Katrina across much of Canada involved America in a far less sympathetic story. Canadians are absolutely livid about a cavalier rejection by the Bush administration of a NAFTA-sponsored arbitration decision declaring U.S. duties on Canadian softwood lumber illegal under the agreement. In fact, under heavy public pressure, Prime Minister Paul Martin is reportedly thinking about calling a special session of Parliament to take retaliatory measures against U.S. exports.This hasn’t exactly been big news in the States, but Canada is America’s biggest trading partner, and the longstanding U.S.-Canada partnership on trade policy is the linchpin not only of NAFTA, but of hemispheric free trade efforts generally. And the long-simmering dispute over Canadian lumber is now leading a variety of voices north of the border to call for a reconsideration of that partnership, and of NAFTA itself.It didn’t help that Bush’s ambassador in Ottawa, David Wilkins, responded to outrage over the U.S. decision to ignore the lumber ruling by lecturing Canadians to eschew “emotional tirades.” Bush himself, of course, is vastly less popular in Canada than his predecessor, and Wilkins’ comments reinforced every available perception about the administration’s general disdain for the opinions of long-time allies.This incident also shines a bright light on the Bush administration’s generally bumbling and inconsistent stewardship of trade policy, which follows few clear principles other than solicitude for domestic business interests with political clout.In any event, it was fascinating to spend a few days among our neighbors whose love-hate relationship with the U.S. was illustrated by their worries over a hot wind from the south roaring into the Gulf Coast, and their willingness to launch a cold wind from the north towards Washington.

If you want to know why the ever-burgeoning Jack Abramoff network of meta-scandals really matters to people other than those he defrauded, check out Susan Schmidt’s front-page article in the Sunday Washington Post.The headline focuses on shadowy dealings between Abramoff and a Deputy Secretary of the Interior who appears to have intervened in two separate cases to put roadblocks in front of Indian casino plans that threatened the financial interest of Abramoff clients–the clients he was at the same time massively ripping off. Turns out Abramoff was also trying to hire the guy for his lobbying firm.But the subplot that strikes me as equally significant is the role played in one of these cases, involving a Michigan tribe, by a woman named Italia Federici, who headed an organization called Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy. Here’s what Scmidt says about this group:

Federici’s group, CREA, was founded in the 1990s by conservative anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and Gale Norton, now secretary of the interior. It has received financial backing from chemical and mining interests, leading some environmentalists to brand it a front for industrial polluters. Abramoff directed tribes he represented to donate $225,000 to CREA from 2001 to 2003.

Federici jumped into the Michigan case to demand an environmental impact statement for the proposed casino that Abramoff wanted to stop, after getting an “urgent email” from Casino Jack himself. And the ploy worked for quite a while, slowing the project down until this year.So you’ve got bogus environmentalists who’ve benefitted from Indian Casino money (not to mention Abramoff’s brother-in-arms Grover Norquist) asking for a bogus environmental impact statement from a department headed by one of its founders–a statement insisted upon by a deputy from that department whom Abramoff was trying to lure into a incredibly lucrative lobbying gig. Federal investigators are now looking into the whole mess, but whether or not indictments even come down, this case shows how incredibly incestuous a network Republicans set up linking high–level policymakers, far-right ideologues, and shakedown artists and influence-peddlers like Jack Abramoff. This billowing ring of smoke suggests a ring of fire that could burn down the whole conservative ascendancy if Abramoff’s hijinks were the rule rather than the exception in the ethical standards of the GOP. And so far, we aren’t seeing much evidence that anybody in authority in Washington thought Abramoff was anything other than an absolute prince.

Over at TAPPED yesterday, my man Matt Yglesias took the occasion of Gary Hart’s op-ed on Iraq in the Washington Post to dismiss the idea that the McGovern campaign (which Hart ran), and its antiwar message, was the pivotal moment in the demise of the New Deal Coalition. No, sez Matt:

The truth, which lots of left-of-center people of various stripes seem to have a hard time dealing with, is that the old, dominant Democratic Party was dependent on white supremacist voters for its majority. Take a look at the 1960 electoral map and ask yourself how far John Kennedy would have gotten without this bloc. Nowadays, naturally, the Democrats can’t just bring that coalition back, and the party’s troubles in the South are rather different, but it was Lyndon Johnson’s embrace of civil rights, not the McGovern campaign, that killed the Democratic Party.

Well, that’s maybe half-right. Matt forgets that (1) McGovern managed to lose 38 of 39 states outside the Old Confederacy, including many where the 1968 Wallace vote was negligible; and (2) Jimmy Carter won in 1976 on a pro-Civil Rights platform with near-universal African-American support, along with most of the old Wallace voters, who must have been motivated by something other than racism to return to the Democratic Party. Sure, Watergate, and in the case of the South, regional pride enormously helped Carter. But let’s don’t forget that Carter, despite his quasi-pacifist image today, also ran a campaign that emphasized his tough-on-defense views and background as an Annapolis grad and nuclear sub officer. Carter supported Scoop Jackson in 1972, and never really came out against the Vietnam War. That legacy, along with his open religiosity, helped him among many Democrats who defected in 1972, and actually hurt him in some upscale WASPy areas where he ran behind McGovern. No–repeat, no–I am not arguing for the point of view that anti-Vietnam War views generally, or George McGovern specifically, “killed” the old Democratic majority. But nor was it simply the Civil Rights Act, either. What happened in the 1960s and 1970s was the acceleration of long trend beginning in the New Deal of the realignment of the two major parties as ideological rather than regional and ethnic-group coalitions. This involved a wide range of issues, international and domestic, and it happened in fits and starts, not really culminating in rigorously left-of-center and right-of-center parties until 1980 at the earliest, and 1994 at the latest.Ideological realignment helped and hurt both parties with particular constituencies. The Democratic civil rights commitment obviously alienated many white southerners and quite a few ethnic white Catholics elsewhere, but also created a remarkably durable bond with minority voters, along with a significant share of previously Republican white liberals. Similarly, the late-Cold War realignment of “hawks” towards the GOP and “doves” towards Democrats drove voters in both directions, too. But overall, realignment benefitted Republicans more, due to the enduring numerical advantage of conservatives over liberals. In our party, we are all still arguing over how to deal with ideological polarization, but as Matt suggests, it’s important to understand how it actually developed.

It’s clearly time for Pat Robertson to retire from politics altogether. Having committed a gaffe that rose to the level of a diplomatic problem for the United States (calling for the assassination of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez), Robertson issued a couple of “clarifications” that made the whole thing worse. First off, he tried to pretend he hadn’t said anything about actually murdering Chavez; the phrase “take him out,” said Pat, might mean a kidnapping or something. Yeah, right. Informed he actually used the word “assassination,” Robertson finally recanted, but then negated the gesture by comparing himself to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who was executed for his role in a plot to assassinate Hitler. This is an old and very disreputable ploy for members of the Christian Right, posing as persecuted victims of those they attack; identifying their enemies as Nazis; and identifying themselves with the Confessing Church resistance to Hitler. James Dobson has made a real habit of this kind of self-glorifying series of lies, and now here’s Robertson doing the same thing instead of admitting his mistake and simply apologizing.As my colleague The Moose pointed out today, Robertson has a long history of outrageous statements. Maybe it’s finally time for him to retire from punditry and engage in a little prayerful reflection on his attenuated connection with the faith he has dragged into the political mire.

One of the perils of fundamentalism, in any scripturally-based religion, is the temptation to treat Sacred Text, because it’s “all true,” as a cook book for whatever secular causes you want to find in this or that verse, pulled out of context and blown way out of proportion.Among Christian fundamentalists, this temptation is generally illustrated by the determination to treat the Bible as a treatise whose main message to today’s world is to condemn feminism, abortion and homosexuality–even though none of these themes is anywhere even remotely close to central to the Bible’s main preoccupations.But it gets worse. As Stephanie Simon of the Los Angeles Times reports, fundie activists have gotten deeply involved in policymaking in Tom DeLay’s Congress, targeting congressional staffer with efforts to plumb the Bible for conservative talking points. Indeed, they meet in the House Speaker’s Dining Room:

Nearly every Monday for six months, as many as a dozen congressional aides — many of them aspiring politicians — have gathered over takeout dinners to mine the Bible for ancient wisdom on modern policy debates about tax rates, foreign aid, education, cloning and the Central American Free Trade Agreement.

Personally, as a Christian, I cannot imagine anyone really thinking there is definitive wisdom in the Bible about tax rates, cloning or CAFTA. The scriptural guidance offered on the more general subjects of foreign aid and education is not likely to comport with conservative ideology.So the question remains, as always with fundamentalists: are you obeying the Bible, or are you cooking the Good Book to impute divine support for your secularist cultural and political prejudices?A lurid example of how conservative Christians claiming to submit to Scripture have made Scripture submit to them is on display right now in Pat Robertson’s fatwah calling for the murder of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.Jesus wept.

You don’t hear that much in the American media or the blogosphere about Darfur these days. Aside from the furor over Iraq, there are at least two other African crises (in Niger and Zimbabwe) taxing the limited interest of Americans in that continent. And even when it comes to Sudan, the renewed north-south civil war tremors emanating from the death of John Garang seem to be getting as much attention as the ongoing genocide to the west.That’s why I was pleased to hear Wesley Clark speak out on National Public Radio today, calling for a NATO/AU military mission to deploy the estimated 12,000 troops needed right now to stop the genocide.Think about that number: just twelve thousand peace-keeping troops to stop the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, with millions all told suffering homelessness, displacement, semi-starvation, and possible death–not to mention the value of finally showing the civilized world is willing to intervene to halt genocide. Yet the AU is struggling towards a deployment of just over 7,000 troops.As Clark argues, supplementing the AU force with a small NATO contingent, with full NATO logistical support, could work miracles. Sure, a U.N. authorized force would be even better, but that’s virtually impossible thanks to the pro-Khartoum posture of China and Russia.Given U.S. troop commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. contribution would have to consist of logistics and air cover, but these are critical given the remoteness of Darfur. That’s why the U.S. should pressure the U.K., France and Germany, who have shed many crocodile tears over Darfur, to step up to the plate with a small commitment of troops.The DLC came out for almost exactly the same plan back in April. But when it comes to humanitarian interventions, nobody has the authority of Wes Clark, who has actually carried out one successfully. I hope he keeps it up, and helps shame the Bush administration into action in the one arena where their increasingly ludicrous swagger might actually do some good.

My colleague The Moose, fresh from a forced-march family vacation in the Lone Star State, has drawn attention to the profile of Texas gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman by Dan Halpern in the current issue of The New Yorker. This is indeed a great read, which shows exactly how far the Kinkster is pushing the anti-political, political envelope beyond the far horizons established by Jesse Ventura back in 1998 (compared to Kinky, The Body was a fairly conventional candidate, as the former Ventura advisors now staffing Friedman have probably figured out).But the same issue of The New Yorker has another piece that I highly recommend: Peter J. Boyer’s article on Billy and Franklin Graham. (The article’s not available online, though the New Yorker site does offer an audio slide show about it).Boyer interprets Billy Graham’s rise as representing the emergence of Protestant Evangelical Christianity through the deliberate blurring of fundamentalism’s “rough edges,” most epecially doctrinal rigidity and hostily towards less-rigorous Christians. And he interprets Franklin Graham’s long and winding road towards a prominence rivalling his father’s as illustrating a more recent resurgence of fundamentalist theology bent on direct engagement with secular culture, and a recommitment to conservative and partisan politics.I found Boyer’s reporting on Billy Graham’s early career, and the hostility he generated among evangelical fundamentalists, fascinating and instructive. As it happens, I grew up in a conservative southern evangelical milieu, and had no idea Graham was considered a dangerous liberal by the fundies. Indeed, my wife and I have virtually identical anecdotes from our childhood about our deeply conservative Baptist grandmothers striding to the family television set (a major war-zone in those pre-cable days), changing the channel from a movie our fathers wanted to watch, and announcing: “It’s time for Billy Graham.” No one dared to switch the channel back.In the decades since those innocent days, the fundamentalists have indeed not only reconquered southern evangelical Protestantism, but appear to currently occupy the commanding heights of evangelical Protestantism around the country. Billy’s son, Franklin, is part of the backlash. And moreover, another famous son of a famous father, George W. Bush, is a key transition figure in the rightward turn of evangelical Protestantism.You probably know the story: Back during his impressionable thirties, W. left behind a casual affiliation with the Anglicanism of his forefathers, and perhaps a more intense attachment to the congregation of Jack Daniels, after a discussion with Billy Graham. And years later, of course, the younger Bush developed a close political alliance with the new fundamentalist-dominated Christian Right, including the younger Graham. Indeed, Franklin Graham probably achieved his greatest notoriety when protests broke out against his plans to become an administration-authorized dispenser of aid to war-ravaged Iraq despite a history of inflammatory statements about Islam as “evil.”In any event, the whole tale is fascinating, and worth the price of buying the print version of The New Yorker. You can read about Kinky for dessert.