Bless his heart, I hope they nail the fucker to the wall:

DeLay indicted, could face 2 years in prison for criminal conspiracy.

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Via the good folks at Lawyers, Guns, and Money:

Title of my 23rd post was “Republicant III: The refusal to see the consequences of one’s own actions when it comes to disparaging government”

Fifth sentence was : ” Among others, ‘the government’ means:

a.) Fire-men and -women (the heroes of Sept. 11th),
b.) Police Officers (the other heroes of Sept. 11th),
c.) Public School Teachers (’the real heroes’ according to a billboard here in Texas), and
d.) Members of the Armed Forces (laying down one’s life for one’s country is a darn good definition of a hero, if you ask me) .”

Yeah, I can still stand by that statement.

1. Go into your archive.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.

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Turns out the assault was just your everyday, garden-variety Texas home invasion:

http://www.statesman.com/search/content/metro/stories/09/22assault.html (sign-in may be requried: precis: definitely a robbery, probably a hate crime, probably not related to the amendment).

Nothing to see here, folks. Just move along. The authorities will take care of everything. Don’t worry your pretty little head about anything.

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So, one of the ways I spend my spare time (hah!) is to go around speaking to pastors about this infernal amendment. I am, to put it succinctly, one of the “faith outreach” people for the campaign. It’s my way of enlivening my faith with deeds.

It has not been as heavy a burden as some folks think (my fellow gay politicos apparently think that I’m some sort of Daniel venturing into the lion’s den). Most of the time the pastors I speak with are personable, basically gay-friendly, and scared shitless to say anything on the matter from the pulpit. But I’ve been happy to do it, and while I haven’t really believed that I was making all that much difference, it seemed like a relatively easy and probably at-least-not-unuseful thing to be doing.

My view on the matter changed today. I received a phone call from a friend of mine in the campaign. Evidently the state “faith coordinator” down in Austin was the victim of a home invasion last night and was severly beaten.

Now, maybe this was just your garden-variety example of everyday Texas violence. You know, of the “gee, Barney, want to go bust some black people today?” “Naw, Jimmy, let’s go mess with the faggots instead. My pastor said I should be nice to black people from now on. ” “Okay, Barney, I’ll bring my bat and be over in five.”

Or maybe he was targeted. Hard to say. But more to the point, I don’t care. Either way I have got to get the fuck out of dodge.

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I had another one of those “ya know… ya just can’t make this shit up” moments last night.

My partner and I were out at BF, one of the four gay bars here (one for the girls, one for the boys, one for the trannies, and one for the married men. It’s a segregated town, doncha know.). We were out to register new voters; an absurdly complicated process, because you know we have to worry here in Texas about “fraud.” For heavens sake we can’t have too many people voting. I mean, what do you think this is? Some kind of socialist utopia? We were also out to sign people up to oppose this infernal amendment. All of that was going precisely as planned when the drag benefit began.

See, BF, being a community-minded sort of place, functions as the next best thing to a gay center that this town has. So, in addition to allowing the Stonewallers to register voters and engage in whatever consciousness-raising we can hope to do among the boozy and the maudlin on a Texas Saturday night, BF also functions as the premier venue for the Imperial Court de Fort Worth/Arlington. And last night, the drag queens – Empress Amber Diva Daniels and all her assembled courtesans – were out in force, raising funds for Hurricane Katrina refugees.

Now understand — normally drag in this town is awful. It consists of every pathetic queen who sat around after school in 10th grade, leafing through the yearbook and thinking to hisself “who’s the coolest person in the whole wide world? The most beautiful, most appreciated person I know? The person that, deep down in my heart, I wish I could be? Oh look, the HOMECOMING QUEEN, that’s who!”

So imagine an entire evening’s worth of entertainment where the guys you felt most sorry for in high school — I won’t name names, we all know who I’m talking about here — get up, on stage, and pretend to be Winter Evasdottir, Tennesssee Cantstopzemadness, and Beeko “I scored 520 combined”. For money.

The first act was really the best. I didn’t catch Miss Thing’s name, but her act was not to be missed. She entered, draped in a more-than-usually languid manner on the arms of a rather, ahem, bearish gentleman attired in a tuxedo jacket and – lord love him – shorts. Miss Thing was frocked in white, with hair teased so high she must have had her own personal hole in the ozone layer. And of course, lips rouged up so loud she would stop traffic on the expressway, with eyes lined and shadowed better than a chiaroscuro. She was – and of course I mean this in the nicest possible way – the painted whore personified.

She and her escort shuffled to the center of the stage, the escort’s right arm cradling the drag queen’s limp but bejeweled and elegant hand in his, while his left arm was around her waist. She, swaying slightly and with her head down near unto her commodious bozoom, was led by him to the center of the dance floor, where sat one sturdy chair in the spotlight. Mr. Escort then sat his wide butt down, and Miss Thing sat on his lap (I detected an audible creak from the chair in protest at their combined weight). With the escort’s left hand around the back of her neck, the illusion was thus revealed: she was his marionette, his Charlie McCarthy, his puppet on a string.

And when the CD began to play, the audience erupted into cheers: for what poured forth from the diva’s mouth was, of course, the words of the one, the only, that Canadian singular sensation:

Celine Dion, singing “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now.”

It was all there: the throaty schmaltz, the wooden gestures, the fluttering and deliriously tremulous hand, the flappy arms of everybody’s favorite silk-bedecked Quebecois jack-in-the-box. To a _T_. And the audience roared. The crowd lined up and _threw_ dollar bills into the waiting tubs, happy to help a good cause in return for such an estimable performance that (it being Celine) went on and on (yes, Celine, we understand that you remember a great romance. Can we move on, please? To, say, the moment where he leaves you _again_, remembering what a fucking repetitious bore you really are?). We laughed, we cried, it was better than Cats.

Or rather, in the words of one middle-aged, silver-haired, cigar-munching, poured-into-her-black-denim-jeans BD,

“That girl done took it to a whole new level.”

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President Bush said today that race had played no part in the pace of federal storm-recovery efforts that have been widely criticized as too slow…

Mr. Bush also said it was “preposterous to claim that the engagement in Iraq meant there weren’t enough troops here.”

Race played no, I repeat, no part in the federal government’s efforts to clean up after Katrina. Yup, RACE PLAYED NO ROLE.

So, um, are you thinking what I’m thinking?

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Sorry, I can’t let RBL shoulder the burden of truthtelling by himself, especially in the face of such deadly incompetence coming from the White House. Here’s my two cents:

It’s fitting that on this 9-11 day of remembrance George W. Bush has plunged head first through the 40% floor in terms of approval rating. While four years ago he flew so high, held aloft by the unconditional support of a traumatized America, he stands today as one of the most unpopular men to hold the presidency, having dropped from an inflated 90% approval rating to a more realistic 38%. The most recent Newsweek poll shows that for the first time in the four years since 9/11, more Americans disapprove of Bush’s handling of terrorism and homeland security than approve of it. It took most of the nation four years to start figuring it out, but for all of us it was four years too late. He was criticized early on for being incurious, puerile, and flippant, but so many of us thought that he’s the kind of person we would want to have over for dinner and that that somehow made him a more appropriate choice for President. Good call. We’ve got him for three more years, but when the door finally shuts on his undeserved and disgraceful eight years in office, his broken, half-baked policies will remain like a yoke around this country and its people. What’s more is that many of his elected and appointed cronies will still be around like the bacteria-infested ooze that’s clinging to everything as black water is being pumped back into Pontchartrain.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL):
Asked whether it made sense to spend billions rebuilding a city that lies below sea level, Hastert replied, “I don’t know. That doesn’t make sense to me.” Not satisfied with kicking the Crescent City while it was down, he added a final stomp: “It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed.”

Congressman Richard Baker (R-LA) on the destruction in New Orleans:
“We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”

Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) on those who couldn’t evacuate as Katrina approached, including the 30 (now dead) elderly patients of one New Orleans nursing home:
“You have people who don’t heed those warnings and then put people at risk… There may be a need to look at tougher penalties on those who decide to ride it out.”

Former First Lady Barbara Bush, doyen of the Bush regimes (1989-1993; 2001-present), on Katrina’s refugees:
“What I’m hearing is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality . . . And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this this is working (chuckles slightly) very well for them.”

W. Bush on a tour of the Katrina aftermath in Mississippi:
“Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott’s house — he’s lost his entire house — there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch.”

W. Bush paying tribute to New Orleans as it slid into chaos:
“I believe that the great city of New Orleans will rise again and be a greater city of New Orleans. I believe the town where I used to come from, Houston, Texas, to enjoy myself — occasionally too much — will be that very same town, that it will be a better place to come to.”

W. Bush in Biloxi, Mississippi to recently-recalled FEMA director Mike Brown:
“Brownie, you’re doin’ a heck of a job.”

Republican operative Jack Burkman on how shit happens:
“I understand there are 10,000 people dead. It’s terrible. It’s tragic. But in a democracy of 300 million people, over years and years and years, these things happen.”

In ‘06, let’s just make sure that we give W. and his gang a collective swift kick to send them into exile once and for all.

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Happily stepping forward to, in George II’s words, “play the blame game,” I am going to make an argument several versions of which are already circulating in the blogosphere.

There are some things for which only the government should be responsible.

One of those is national security. Another is internal security. A third is natural disaster [in fact, I would make the theoretical argument that the third is a special sub-case of the first; only the enemy is nature, not another sovereign state or “terrorist network”].

If you accept this basic point – and if call yourself a “libertarian” then you should not accept this basic point, and surely your hackles will have already been raised – then what happened in New Orleans should disgust and frighten you.

For just as I will not worship a God so callous and mean that He would destroy innocent lives for the sake of sticking it to the sodomites, I most definitely do not want to live in a feudalized society where security – from the whims of mother nature, from the meth-driven criminal urges of addicts, from the murderous designs of religious fanatics – is to be bought and sold like fucking soybeans on the commodities exchange.

For what happened in New Orleans was more than simply the gross incompetence of a squad of elected and appointed officials, Democratic and Republican, from Ray Nagin all the way up to George II himself.

It was the expected and predicted outcome of years of rhetorical denigration of the notion of the common good – of the out-of-hand dismissal of the tragedy of the commons. It was the expected and predicted outcome of cut after cut in basic government infrastructure and emergency management services – most especially in the Army Corps of Engineers and FEMA. It was the expected and predicted outcome of the rising arc of that corrosive notion that government is always the problem and never the solution.

If you want to see what Grover Norquist’s starved beast looks like — drowned in a bathtub of toxic waste, just to embroider the point — look no further than New Orleans. When crisis strikes and the apparatus of our democratic state is simply not there; when public officials are not held personally responsible for their failure to plan, to lead, and to administer; when the civic order dissolves – this is what you get. Chaos, blood, death, and the brutal war of all against all.

A “tidal wave of compassion” won’t repair the breach in the goddamned levee, George. Only the Army Corps of Engineers should be responsible for that.

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Canto III

This way to Dallas, the sign read.
This way to Midland and beyond.
This way to Houston and points now lost.

Liberty and free government were my founding words,
My makers were Dave Burnet,
Sam Houston and Mirabeau Lamar

Before me naught but slave and free
And I made my everlasting choice between the two.
Abandon all hope, you who have arrived here.

These words – we passed by too quickly to read well – I saw
Inscribed on a highway overpass, and said,
D… where are you leading us?”

And he to replied, as one who always knows his way;
“When driving in this city one must never hesitate;
Here cowards are run down by drunk UT-ites.

And at that point we passed the convention center;
Where gathered such a host of misery and less
Tossed up upon this chalky, dusty land.

And when with sadness on my face
I placed my hand in his, and we
Drove slowly past the refug’ed throng

Here sad laments and angered cuss
Echoed in the cloudless muggy heat
And seeing them, I wept.

Strange accents, profanities galore
Hostility and ire, suffering of the shrill
And faint and even a pathetic fist-fight.

And all this tumult looked like nothing ‘cept
The bats, twirling screeching in the twilight
Of the Congress Avenue Bridge

And I – dismayed at the horror ‘rayed before me
Said, “D… what is this?”
Who are these people beaten down in pain?”

And he to me: “You know as well as I
What sorry souls these be; the quiet desperation
Of the lately-praised city of NO.

They are surely are commingled with those coward angels
Former cops and EMS, who in rebellion
Walked away and left their badges.

That lovely Crescent, lately laid so low
Has cast them out
And Houston won’t receive them all.”

And I: “Oh D… what have we done?
How has our nation failed so abjectly
That here are ones who cry out “refuge!”?

Those here have escaped death
But surely life in Texas is no picnic – and surely
They should envy those sent otherwise?

The world should look on us and see our shame
Our lack of prudence, justice, strength, and temper.
Where did we lose our virtue?

Looking yet again, I saw
Some ‘lectric sign that moved
Too quick to read at leisure.

And ‘neath that banner trailed
So long a file of people, I never should have thought
That weeping broken wheel had unmade so many homes.

I almost thought a recognized a face – maybe from news?
But no, ‘twas just the all-familiar face of sadness
Seen to many times on CNN or in the Times.

At once I understood the scope of tragedy.
This company contained the destitute, forlorn
Of God and feared by Texans.

These wretched ones, some surely just escaped from death
Sat haunched on filthy sidewalks
Swatting horseflies in the heat.

The sweat and tears of toil and loss
Streaked their faces, while stony-faced volunteers
Circled ‘bout with bottled water.

And then, looking beyond them, I could see
A crowd along the bank of a still and stagnant river;
At which I said, “and what is this?

“A festival? What law of decency has given these
Poor assholes fickle eagerness to cross the river and dance
In the feeble light of sunset?”

And he to me: “When we have stopped at our hotel,
Then mayhap we can go to down to Colorado-shore
And all these matters will be made plain.”

At that, with eyes ashamed and downcast, fearing
That what I said had given offence, I did not speak again
Until we’d reached the river.

And here, paddling ‘bout in the middle of the stream
An aged man – his hair was white and ‘baccy streaked
Was shouting “Bats! Bats! Water-taxi to see the bats!

Forget your hope of ever seeing them from shore:
Come out into the middle of the stream and see,
What nature and man hath wrought together!”

And picking us out from the crowd, he lifted hand
And pointing said: “You there, surely tourist!
Come out and see the wheeling scene!”

But when we made no move to go, he said,
“Perhaps you look for another craft, one larger
For two such sturdy gents as you!”

At which my companion snorted, saying,
“Thanks but no thanks, gentle friend.
We’ll stand upon the solid shore and see the view for free.”

But the pilot took no ‘fence, and paddling on,
Continued his wheedling cry,
While the sun sank ever lower ‘gainst the hills.

And other tourists, lazy and with dough to spend
Came down the bank, and signaling,
Bid for the boatman’s service.

While on the bridgetop still
A dancing, massy crowd of sweaty youth,
Forgetful of God, or refugee, or even Nature’s sights

Pressed up against the stage, set smack
Dab in the middle of Congress,
Grinding to the amplified beat

The dour pilot, surely worried
That the noise and light would scare away the sights
For which the tourists paid their tokens

Struck his oars so that his boat sailed
Gently out into the stream
And as the sun-set redly toward El Paso

One by one, then showering through the night
As leaves might fly when tossed by the wind
Whirling, twirling through the sky

And a cry went up from the crowd upon the bridge
And streamed they did, away from stage
And down unto the bank.

‘Til pressed we were, close by
The dark and fetid water, ‘til I
Could tell not stink of guano, mold, or sweat.

“For crap,” said D, speaking low to me
“I see now why we should have paid our fare
And risked a dousing.

For all around are so drunk and eager
That surely someone will take a spill
And wet themselves in this dank drink.

Surely we should take our leave
And find the folks we’re met for dinner
‘Scaping from this chaos scene.”

And forced our way through falsey breasts
And hollow-chested frat boys
We made our way up to the street

Where, streaked with sweat, we
Felt a gentle rush up from the lake,
And looking sky-ward saw

The black and teeming storm of bats again
Crackling leather wings made bare a sound
But high-pitched echoes, creaky-sounding

Chased us all the way in echoes up the street.

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That’s all I’ll say at the moment:

For the secular folk:
Red Cross

For the religious folk:
United Methodist Committee on Relief
United Church of Christ

If you’re willing, I suspect that there may be people who need a home for the next few weeks/months. Talk with your pastor/rabbi/imam/swami/priest and see if there’s any way you can help along those lines.

Just give.

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