Monday Reads

Good Morning!!!

Hopefully, you had a great weekend!  The weather’s been nice here but we’re mostly focused on all that water coming down the Mississippi towards us.  The Bonnet Carrre Spill Way opened today at 8 am to release some of the river water in to Lake Pontchartrain.  The Corps has requested that the Morganza Spillway be opened too.  The last time it was opened was in 1973 when Nixon was still president. That’s more controversial because it will flood farms and land but will help maintain the levees in Baton Rouge and New Orleans.  We’ll have to see who wins that one.

If granted, the Corps plans to open the Morganza Thursday.  This could create water up to 25-feet deep in spots.

In Terrebonne Parish, low-lying areas in the Western end are vulnerable to flooding, up to five feet.  Parish president Michel Claudet tells FOX 8 he’s worried people don’t realize what could happen.  Claudet says there’s a plan to sink a giant barge in Bayou Chene.  Essentially, it would serve as a temporary dam to reduce the backflow of water into St. Mary and Terrebonne Parishes.  Bayous and creeks are already filling up and public works crews were out, looking for low areas to reinforce.

Opening the Morganza Spillway would require the evacuation of people and livestock in the Atchafalaya River Basin.  About 30 miles Northwest of Baton Rouge, West Feliciana Parish is bracing for the worst.  If the Morganza opens, the Corps projects possibly 25-feet of water in some areas.

“We’re going to do what we can you know,” said Brad Smith of St. Francisville.  He was rushing to his Cat Island hunting camp to shore it up, hoping he can get it higher than the water.  “I mean you have money invested in a camp, you know your heart’s there, and you want to save it,” said Smith.

Friday, residents in the Stephensville-Belle River area North of Morgan City built walls of sandbags around their properties.  Saturday, they were being urged to self-evacuate.

Governor Jindal believes that the flooding is certain anyway.

Land and structures in the Morganza Spillway will flood, even if the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers does not open the gates, Commissioner of Agriculture Mike Strain and Gov. Bobby Jindal said today.

“It is inevitable that Morganza will flood and the system will top, regardless of whether they open the system,” Strain said at a press conference at the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security.

Jindal said he has asked the Corps of Engineers to provide maps of areas that are anticipated to flood, with and without opening the gates. He said he wants people who would be affected to be able to prepare before the water starts rising.

“Even without opening the spillway, folks can expect flooding comparable to 1973,” the governor said. “If they decide to open the spillway, it will be more water.”

This will be historical either way.  I remember when they had to open the Bonnet Carre Spillway last spring because the river was so high.  I live a few blocks from the Mississippi.  The river was so high the boats were riding on the river at about the same level as the street.  It look like the oil tankers were traveling on the next road over.  I usually only see the very tops of these ships.  It’s a strange  feeling to think you’re sharing the road with huge ships.

So, since we’re talking about the Nixon years, I might as well offer up the Daily Mail’s first glimpse at the biography of Vanessa Redgrave. In part 2 of a three-part excerpt from the book, the Mail covers Redgrave’s political career.

Vanessa Redgrave as a Workers Revolutionary Party parliamentary candidate in 1974

The article’s interesting title is Vanessa Redgrave and the red sex slaves: How her bid to start Marxist revolution plunged her into bizarre scandal.

Never a shrinking violet, Vanessa Redgrave knew exactly what to do when she found a listening device in an electrical socket at her home. She called a Press conference.

It was common knowledge, she told the world in thrilling theatrical tones, that the internal security service MI5 had been bugging her conversations since she’d been a member of a Trotskyist organisation called the Workers Revolutionary Party.

Well, she wasn’t going to stand for it. So she was making a formal complaint to the European Commission, claiming that MI5 had violated her human rights.

Unfortunately, her grand gesture fell flat. Not only did the EU maintain that bugging radicals such as Vanessa Redgrave was ‘necessary in a democratic society’ — but it turned out that the bug had nothing to do with MI5 in the first place. It had been planted by a rival Left-wing faction.

Anyone else might have been utterly humiliated at making a fool of themselves, but not Vanessa. As her daughter Natasha once said, it never bothered her that she wasn’t liked — because being disliked gives her enormous freedom.

This is one celebrity biography that I can’t wait to read.

I first got the OBL kill news via CNN breaking news.  The NYT is trying to claim the credit for the story.  The truth is that it broke on twitter and was leaked by an aide of Donald Rumsfeld.  Here’s the tick tock according to Felix Salmon.

Brisbane is the NYT’s ombudsman, and today he describes the way that the paper broke the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death. Well, he can’t do that, because the NYT didn’t break the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death. But he ignores the people who did break the news, and just tells the story of how the official NYT machine worked. His story starts at 10:34 last Sunday night, when a source told NYT reporter Helene Cooper that Osama had been killed. By 10:40, an alert was up on nytimes.com. Then, by Brisbane’s account, Twitter got involved:

One minute after Ms. Cooper’s news alert was posted on the Web, Jeff Zeleny, The Times’s national political correspondent, posted on Twitter: “NYT’s Helene Cooper confirming that Osama Bin Laden has been killed. President to announce shortly from the White House.”

At virtually the same time, Jim Roberts, an assistant managing editor, sent a similar Twitter message. Next to come was an automated Twitter post generated by NYTimes.com, regurgitating the original news alert.

Those links are all Brisbane’s, by the way, including the rather hilarious link to the homepage of the very site his column is on. All of the links are internal; none are to the actual tweets in question. But here’s the first tweet that Brisbane mentions, from Zeleny. As Brisbane says, it was posted at 10:41pm.

For a very different look at how the Osama news broke check out SocialFlow’s exhaustive analysis of 14.8 million tweets on Sunday night. As far as Twitter is concerned, the news was broken by Keith Urbahn at 10:24pm. But it really got momentum from being retweeted at 10:25pm by NYT media reporter Brian Stelter, who added the crucial information that Urbahn is Donald Rumsfeld’s chief of staff. Urbahn, here, gets the goal, but Stelter absolutely gets the assist …

The first real interview of the president on the OBL operation was seen Sunday Night. If you want to see the 60 Minutes Interview with President Obama that covers the OBL kill operation you can see it here.

Dr. Doom–Noriel Roubini–says “We haven’t see the last  of financial crises per the UK Independent.  I agree with the statement but wonder about the Churchill quote given below.

Dr Roubini then lists a series of things that could possibly go wrong in the world economy; a list far more terrifying than anything Derren Brown and his ilk could ever conjure up. The crises in the eurozone he believes will persist and it is a matter of “if, rather than when” there is a Greek default. Greece has, he believes, “crossed the threshold”. In the next year or two, he thinks the eurozone will probably hold together and the issue will be of orderly restructuring of unaffordable debts – Greece first, then perhaps Ireland and Portugal, if their Plan As fail. On a five-year time frame, he thinks it perfectly possible that political pressure in some peripheral economies: Greece, Ireland, Portugal, could see them exit the eurozone rather than endure “permanent stagnation or recession”. He is more pessimistic about Spain than the markets generally, thinking them “probably complacent” about the chances of her falling into trouble.

Meanwhile, America has failed to come up with a credible plan to address her $1tr-a-year budget deficit and he believes that, with gridlock now, deeply-divided parties and an election next year, the next US president – “he or she”, intriguingly – won’t be able to do so until 2014. Whether what he calls the “bond vigilantes” will allow the US to delay that long is debatable: “I think it was Winston Churchill who said the United States ends up doing the right thing after she has tried every other alternative. So the US will do the right thing, the question is whether it is too late,” he said.

Here’s another one that makes you really, really wonder about what some state legislatures are up to. “Minnesota state Rep. Gruenhagen: ‘Perverted’ men made abortion legal” via The Raw Story. Where do these people come from?

The Minnesota House passed legislation that would prevent taxpayer money from paying for abortions for low-income women on state-funded medical programs. The bill was passed by a 80 to 44 vote Friday.

“Let me just remind you, especially ladies, it was seven men that made abortion legal,” he continued. “Not seven women. Now what’s the significance of that? Men, a certain percentage, have developed a perverted view of women and what abortion tells men is they can use women and lose them.”

The state’s House also approved legislation that makes it a felony for any doctor in Minnesota to perform an abortion after 20 weeks of gestation.

“Then on top of that we have the state showing up and paying for the sexual exploitation of women,” Gruenhagen said. “Ladies, let’s put a stop to this. Let’s put a stop to sending a message to men that they can use you and leave you with the consequences and have the government pick up the tab for that.”

Both abortion bills are expected to be vetoed by Governor Mark Dayton.

And yet, another one from Florida that’s also from The Raw Story.

A pending law in Florida would make it illegal for pediatricians to ask families whether guns are being safely kept in their patients’ homes. Supporters of the NRA-backed measure insist that questions by doctors and other health care professionals amount to an invasion of privacy and a violation of their Second Amendment rights.

Pediatricians routinely ask parents about safety concerns in the home like whether or not the family has a pool, if the child wears a bike helmet, or rides in a car seat. To gun advocates, however, questions about the presence of firearms in a child’s environment are intrusive and go too far.

“We take our children to pediatricians for medical care, not moral judgment, not privacy intrusions,” says NRA lobbyist Marion Hammer. “This bill is about helping families who are complaining about being questioned about gun ownership, and the growing anti-gun political agenda being carried out in examination rooms by doctors and staffs.”

Pediatrician Dr. Louis St. Petery says that questions about safety are part of what physicians call “anticipatory guidance”. Doctors routinely assess the safety environment of patients and parents in order to more accurately advise them on how to avoid accidents and injuries.

Guess every sperm is sacred but every child is on their own.

Then there’s this bit of compassion in Florida from ThinkProgress: Florida Cuts Unemployment Benefits To Pay For Corporate Tax Cut .  Getting screwed by your state government is no more pleasant than being screwed by the Federal Government, is it?

In the last few months, conservatives in several states have moved to limit unemployment benefits, even with the national unemployment rate at 9 percent and more than 40 percent of the unemployed having been out of work for six months or more. Conservative lawmakers in Utah falsely claimed that cutting jobless benefits would be “motivation for people to get back to work,” while Michigan gutted its unemployment insurance systemdespite having one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation.

Florida Republicans this weekend also succeeded in reducing their state’s unemployment benefits, sending a bill to Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) for his signature…

It just doesn’t seem right that your constitutional rights and the amount of respect or grief you get is dependent on your geography now, does it?

Chas Bono is the subject of a documentary on Transgends that was featured in the NYT.  The documentary will be aired on the Oprah’s cable channel.  I was especially struck by her description of being transgen has having been born with a birth defect.  This film was first shown at Sundance.

At age 13, Chaz told me, he knew he was attracted to women, and assumed he was a lesbian.

“I knew my whole life something was different,” he said. “As a small kid, I could be one of the boys, playing sports, fitting in. When I hit puberty, I felt like my body was literally betraying me. I got smacked everywhere with femaleness. That was really traumatic.”

Realizing that he should be male took years of deduction.

“Around 2001, I started analyzing lesbians. I started to realize that even really butch-acting or -dressing women still had a strong female identity that I never had.”

Though emboldened by seeing transgender people in the media, he still thought of gender-transition as the last resort of the suicidal: “I thought, transgender people are much worse off than I am. That’s why they’re willing to risk everything to be who they are. But the older I got, the harder it got to stay in my body.”

Several scenes in the film are interviews with Cher, who I assumed would act as a guide and interpreter through this signal event in her family. Yet Cher struggles throughout the film and never quite offers a sound bite of unequivocal support for her transgender son.

Okay, well, that’s some interesting bits and pieces to get us started. What’s on your reading and blogging list today?