E Wayne Ross

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Canadians have been donating money and providing help on the ground in NOLA.

An urban search and rescue team from Vancouver rescued 30 people in St. Bernard Parish on Saturday. The Vancouver team has been designated to the lead the rescue effort in St. Bernard Parish, where 30,000 homes have been flooded.

In a story in today’s edition of The Province Tim Armstrong, the team leader, reported that there was no rescue effort in the parrish prior to their arrival on Friday.

But some Canadians have also been critical of the Bush administration’s response to the disaster in NOLA, particularly in relation to Bush’s imperial war in Iraq. For example, The Province ran two letters today, including one from Sheila Louise of New Westminster, BC, which expressed sympath for the victims of Katrina, but asked,

“…why do U.S. politicians seem able to get food and water to other countries in need but not to their own? Now would be a good time to bring home every military person overseas so they can serve their country in their country. The people of Iraq do not want them, so ship them home now and rescue your own people. Charity begins at home. There is more need at home for these military people and that is where they belong.”

In a second Province letter, Brian Lander of Surrey, BC said Canadians should do what they can to help in terms of providing expertise, but said

“If the United States needs money then maybe it can start by not sending millions to tin-pot dictators who squander it on themselves…Or it can hold off building hugely expensive killing machines…There is always money around. What is more important, killing or saving lives?”

Letters to the weekend edition of The Globe and Mail pointed out that the collapse of civil society in post-Katrina NOLA is at least partly a function of the neo-conservative social policies that stripped way the social safety net. “What we see today is what happens in ghettos when the armed police force that replaced these programs [welfare, unemployment insurance] loses control” (Judy Rebick, Toronto).

In reference to Doug Saunders’ G&M article on Friday (“Nasty, Brutish — Society’s Net Snaps”), Hall C. Hartmann of Vancouver wrote that despite the rhetoric of egalitarianism in the US it is

“probably the least egalitarian of all established industrial democracies. This is due to a failure to recognize adequately that humans are fundamentally social animals and that the nation’s insitutions and policies should be structured with a stronger bias for a common good.”

Hartmann continues,

“there is a misplaced frear, much fostered by the privileged minority who stand to gain in the historical short run, that [to] do so would curtail freedom and individualism. As a result, the net has meshes so wide as to render it ineffective both in terms of helping unfortunate individuals and holding toether society. Add to this a president whose lack of enlightenment and leadership is reflected throughtout his government and you get what you see now, with more to come.”

Barry Devonald of Vancouver but it this way, “Would we see dead and dying white folks on our TV screens pleading for help?”

Neil Hrab of Toronto, compared the US response to Katrina to the USSR’s response to Chernobyl, noting that the latter was a key event in the delegitimazation of the Soviet elite and hastened the fall of the Soviet Union.

In addition to Saunders’ column for the The Globe and Mail, I thought Margaret Wente’s piece on how “America’s Third World Hell Hole” came into being worth reading too.

Wente closes the column thusly,

This isn’t the way an American storyline is supposed to go. You get the sense almost everyone — the media, the public and certainly the President — was gearing up for just an average storm. A little hardship; a little tragedy; a lot of happy stories about the triumph of the human spirit. But the aftermath of hurricane Katrina has shown the world America at its very worst. It has embarrassed and shamed the entire nation. And it has shattered America’s own image of its plucky, caring, can-do self.

The real storm has just begun.

[Keep reading for Wente’s full column.]The real storm has just begun
How did a piece of America become a Third World hellhole?

By MARGARET WENTE
Saturday, September 3, 2005 Page A23
E-mail Margaret Wente

The devastation of New Orleans was perfectly predictable. Everyone in authority knew the city was a bull’s-eye, and everyone knew what the consequences of a major hurricane would be.

After hurricane Betsy in 1965, when the floodwaters reached the eaves in some neighbourhoods, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a system of levees around the city. In 1998, when hurricane Georges grazed the city, the waves reached to within a foot of the top of the levees. Hurricane Georges was only a Category 2 storm.

For years, everyone has known that a slightly stronger storm on a slightly different course would wreck the city. There were elaborate computer models that showed exactly how. Three years ago, the New Orleans Times-Picayune published a series of investigative reports about the threat. “Hundreds of thousands would be left homeless, and it would take months to dry out the area and begin to make it livable,” it said. “But there wouldn’t be much for residents to come home to. The local economy would be in ruins.” The Red Cross predicted the death toll could reach 100,000. The picture painted of the devastation was eerily prescient. “Some people will be housed in the Superdome. . . . But many will simply be on their own. . . . Survivors will end up trapped on roofs, in buildings or on high ground surrounded by water, with no means of escape.”

At the time, experts put the economic devastation at $50-billion. There was a way to protect the city: a massive, decades-long engineering project to raise the levees, at a cost of $10-billion to $15-billion. Another proposal was to restore the coastal wetlands that protect against storm surges. The price tag on that was $14-billion. Nobody was prepared to foot the bill — not a succession of federal administrations, not the dirt-poor state of Louisiana, and certainly not the citizens of New Orleans.

So people focused on evacuation and rescue operations. Last year, the Federal Emergency Management Agency conducted an elaborate disaster-relief simulation. Afterward, it declared that the exercise had been very useful. Nobody came clean with the people of New Orleans about how vulnerable they really were.

A month ago, William Gray, perhaps the foremost hurricane forecaster in the world, issued a revised forecast. He predicted this would be one of the most active hurricane seasons on record — perhaps the worst since the 1930s, when coastal regions of the U.S. were battered by storm after devastating storm. Dr. Gray warned that, this time, the toll in lives and damages would be far worse.

The scene was set for the perfect storm.

Yet, nobody predicted what came next. The social collapse. The anarchy. The armed gangs of looters, the scenes of predators and prey, the tales of rape and murder. The stories of snipers firing on doctors trying to move their sickest patients. Dead babies floating in the water. And, most of all, the stark correlation of class and race and survival. The white people got out. The poor blacks did not.

“They’re drowning in their living rooms and their bodies are rotting where they drowned,” said an angry Anderson Cooper on CNN. “And there are corpses in the street being eaten by rats, and this is the United States of America.”

The President kept promising that help was on the way. Meantime, a piece of the United States of America had become a Third World hellhole. That is what nobody will forget or forgive.

Of all the places in the United States, Louisiana is about as close to the Third World as you can get. One of the poorest states, it is notorious for its history of corruption and rule by kleptocracy. (Several state officials were recently indicted as a result of an investigation into the theft of last year’s hurricane funds.) It remains a class-ridden, deeply segregated society.

With a murder rate 10 times the national average, New Orleans is among the most violent cities in the United States. Its police force is trying to overcome a reputation for corruption and brutality. (When its members were finally deployed to restore law and order, 20 per cent of them did not show up.) Its economy has been stagnant for decades, and a third of its people live below the poverty line. Many of those who refused to leave the city had no place to go, no way to get out, and no money. It was the end of the month, and they were afraid of missing their next welfare cheque.

These were the people the disaster planners forgot. Brian Wolshon, an engineering professor at Louisiana State University who served as a consultant on the state’s evacuation plan, told The New York Times that little attention was paid to moving out the city’s “low-mobility” population — the elderly, the infirm and the poor without cars. How would they be moved? At disaster planning meetings, he said, “the answer was often silence.”

And now the finger-pointing and scapegoating have begun. No doubt much of it is well deserved. The Bush administration is being blamed for gutting FEMA for the sake of homeland security; for sending national guards to Iraq instead of keeping them at home; for cutting funds to fix the levees. Some environmentalists, including Robert Kennedy Jr., are blaming the hurricane on George Bush and global warming (even though Dr. Gray, the hurricane expert, says global warming isn’t a factor). FEMA is being blamed for incompetence. Black leaders are blaming the media for broadcasting inflammatory scenes of looting.

There’s plenty of blame to go around. And yet, you could have learned what was likely to happen in The Times-Picayune. Three years ago, it predicted that rescue teams would have trouble reaching the flooded city because so many roads and bridges would be damaged. It predicted how hard it would be to pump out the water. It predicted that many of the homes that people had abandoned would be destroyed or uninhabitable.

This isn’t the way an American storyline is supposed to go. You get the sense almost everyone — the media, the public and certainly the President — was gearing up for just an average storm. A little hardship; a little tragedy; a lot of happy stories about the triumph of the human spirit. But the aftermath of hurricane Katrina has shown the world America at its very worst. It has embarrassed and shamed the entire nation. And it has shattered America’s own image of its plucky, caring, can-do self.

The real storm has just begun.

mwente@globeandmail.ca

The Globe and Mail‘s Christie Blatchford has written one of the best pieces I’ve read on the “unequal toll” of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

While race remains the “back story” in the MSM, Blatchford puts to words what the images out of NOLA have been screaming all week…white folks got out of town, poor black folks didn’t (and the initial reponse of the government has been to treat the those remaining firstly like criminals and secondly like refugees).

Katrina’s unequal toll
‘Miss, with great respect for your race, I don’t see no white people here,’ Christie Blatchford is told in New Orleans

By CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD
Saturday, September 3, 2005 Updated at 1:59 AM EDT
From Saturday’s Globe and Mail (September 3, 2005)

Ernest (Dutch) Morial, after whom the New Orleans Convention Center was named, was the first African-American to graduate from the Louisiana State law school and later became the state’s first black assistant district attorney.

He necessarily must have been a proud, brave man.

On the small bronze plaque erected in his honour at one end of the sprawling building, which, for days now, has housed upward of 10,000 hurricane refugees, Mr. Morial is called “The Man of Firsts.”

Well, this week has marked another first, one that might have enraged and tormented him.

It is Mr. Morial’s people — African-Americans — who in the main as of late yesterday were still living in this battered city’s most appalling conditions and who, despite reports to the contrary, are weathering them with a terrible grace.

The people crowded into the convention centre are overwhelmingly black, yet the Big Easy is — was? — a relatively diverse city, with about 62 per cent of the population black and 28 per cent white. Yet rare are the white faces to be seen among these folks who have suffered so dreadfully, and rare are the white faces who even dare enter the fetid, revolting building.

As Autherine Algere said yesterday, as she took Globe and Mail photographer Fred Lum on a tour of the centre, past the foul, overflowing latrines, in one of which sits the body of a disabled woman who died in a handicapped stall; past the quiet area where the world’s maddest unofficial paramedic, Derrick Trahan, has set up a makeshift first-aid station; past J Section, which, unbelievably, because people will often self-segregate if it is not forced upon them, houses the Little Saigon part of the convention centre and is exclusively Vietnamese.

“Miss, with great respect for your race, I don’t see no white people here. Where they at? I live here, I know there’s plenty of white folk in New Orleans.”
Ms. Algere, who clutched her Bible in her right hand, looked upward to beg the Lord’s forgiveness for what she was about to say. “It was to hell with us Negroes.”

It was the closest to overt recognition, let alone complaint, of what television reporters call the “back story” of this horrific natural disaster: As the American South was once divided into slave and master, so was the aftermath of hurricane Katrina clearly divided along racial lines. The white folks in the main got out of town; the black ones didn’t — not, as they are quick to tell you, because they didn’t want to go, but because they couldn’t.

Donelle Deffina and Davonna Good, a couple from Eldorado Hills, Calif., near Sacramento, were two of the rare white faces still in the convention centre yesterday. Tourists who were booted out of their hotel after the storm hit, they were brought here Tuesday about noon, when the cavernous place was virtually empty, occupied only by the families of local police officers (who, the women say, were shortly afterward taken out).

“Last night,” Ms. Deffina spat furiously, gesturing at all those collapsed on the hard concrete floor all around her, “these people were told by a Louisiana state trooper that in four hours, 300 buses would be here.

“Well, they put their elderly and their sick up front, all neat, and the babies. They cleaned up their own areas and then they stood in line until well after midnight. Not a single bus came.

“We’ve been here four days and we have not seen one person of authority. No FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Authority]. No Red Cross. No National Guard. No one.

“Don’t you believe what you’ve been hearing,” she said fiercely. “These people are great. They were brought here, as we were, by the authorities, lots of them rescued from rooftops, and they haven’t received any medication attention, any water, or one word of encouragement.”

Earlier this week, the convention centre was the site of some of the worst rioting New Orleans has seen since the levees burst and almost 80 per cent of the city was flooded. And there was truth in those widely reported stories, as people will tell you in the most awful straightforward way.

Two young girls were apparently raped in one or another of the bathrooms; there are reports a 13-year-old boy was also raped, his throat slit; and two days ago, when the felicitously named Regina Hamilton was parking her car on the second floor of a downtown garage, to keep it safe, she was carjacked by an armed man who then began to paw her. “Please,” she whimpered, “not after everything else.” He grabbed her hard on one arm, rape his clear intent, and Mrs. Hamilton slipped from his grasp and jumped to the ground below, snapping both ankles in the process.

She was crawling, painfully, back to the convention centre when two young men in a golf cart saw her and came to her rescue.

As of yesterday, reunited with her 19-year-old daughter Kelley, Mrs. Hamilton had not yet received even an Aspirin for the pain; her pleas for medical help to the police officers outside fell on ears that were, if not deaf, numb.

Not until Mr. Traham, who relying on a high-school first-aid course, appointed himself the convention centre medic five days ago, came to pick her up on the little flatbed wagon he drives throughout the centre, did she even receive any quasi-expert medical attention.

Everyone from President George W. Bush on down is now talking cheerfully about all the aid pouring into the New Orleans area.

But virtually none had arrived by day’s end yesterday — only heavily armed reinforcements for the local New Orleans police, much-praised by the refugees here for their kindness, if not their ability to do anything.

The new show of force has served to quell the lawlessness and looting, but it is also intimidating. When there was an explosion (a fire, it turns out, down by the pier) on Wednesday night, Ronate Walker, who is 24, decided he’d had enough and decided he had to get his extended family — wife, sister, her husband, two grandmas and one grandpa and his own three little daughters — out of Dodge.

He found a parked car with the keys in it, drove around the block (so he’d be on the side closest to his relatives) and tried to corral his gang. But they wouldn’t leave; they were too afraid.

So Mr. Walker parked the car where he’d found it, keys where he’d found them, and found himself surrounded by armed police, telling him he was lucky the jails were closed. “The ground was shaking,” he said tearfully. “I was just trying to look after my family.”

Everywhere Fred and I went yesterday, people came running up to us. They knew, by Fred’s cameras, we were press. They knew we couldn’t help. But they were so grateful that their story might be told (and, I believe, to see a couple of white people who were not afraid of them because of their skin colour) that they embraced us like friends.

Most of them were brought here, or told to come here, from the safe high ground of local highways where many of them spent days waiting for buses and help, after they were rescued from roofs and attics.

Nothing happens. Nothing changes. And yet as each new rumour arises of an army of buses on its way, they line up, orderly-like, their old people and babies up front and wait.

“They’re treating us like animals,” Rozz Smith, a 44-year-old motivational speaker, said yesterday. She also gave us a tour, hobbling because of the toe she broke when she was trampled in a stampede over something — gunshots in the night, rumours of food or buses, I forget which now. “Every night they say the buses are coming. They never come.”

The medic, Mr. Traham, said nine people have died in the centre named after Dutch Morial. They’re kept in what everyone calls “the fridge.” They were taken there, not by any authorities, not by police, but by the people who watched them die and wither away, and who now can hardly bear to remember that for a few days here, these strangers were family.

The Gallup Organization has just released a comparison of public opinion trends regarding the current war in Iraq and the Vietnam War. There are some interesting findings, here’s the summary:

Although public support for both the Vietnam and the Iraq wars was strong as each conflict began, at least as measured by Gallup’s “mistake” question, opposition to the latter has escalated much more quickly. Within a year and three months of the Iraq war’s inception, a majority of Americans said it was a mistake. It wasn’t until over three years after the inception of the Vietnam War that a majority called it a mistake.

At the same, Americans much more quickly perceived that the Vietnam War was a major problem facing the United States, with over two-thirds naming it as the nation’s most important problem within the war’s second year. By contrast, even today, some two years and five months after the Iraq war began, only a little more than a fourth of Americans say it is the nation’s top problem.

In short, Americans have been quicker to oppose the Iraq war, but less likely to consider it the top problem facing the nation.

With all of this, it is worth remembering that a good deal of the significant societal impact of the Vietnam War did not take place until long after the war’s two-and-a-half-year mark (essentially where the Iraq war is today). Vietnam continued to be a major factor in American life as late as the presidential election of 1972 — some seven years after it began. And — as noted above — the cost of the Vietnam War in terms of human lives was ultimately many degrees higher than the cost of the Iraq war so far. But the fact that a majority of Americans already say Iraq was a mistake, and that it has become perhaps the most significant issue facing the Bush administration today suggests that comparisons between the two situations are not totally unreasonable.

The Media Research Center—the folks you trust to track down all that liberal media bias—rang the CyberAlert alarm bells today about a NBC News report on Tuesday night.

As part of a story comparing the wars in Iraq and Vietnam, NBC reporter Jim Miklazewski oberved that “while there are marked differences between the wars in Iraq and Vietnam, the rhetoric, at least, is beginning to sound much the same.”

Miklaszewski noted that “Rumsfeld ignored the latest polls which indicate a majority of Americans now think it was a mistake to go to war in Iraq.” [on screen: CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll “Iraq war a mistake?” Yes: 54%]

The Rumsfeld confirmed that he could care less about what Americans think: “I think it will have the support of the American people, and it will be sustained and we will be successful.”

So what does the Bush Administration do? Well, send more troops to Iraq. Can anybody say LBJ?

The Globe and Mail has an interesting story on Rev. Pat Robertson’s call for the assissination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, which includes statements from US government officials “distancing” themselves from Robertson’s “doctrine of assassination.”

The self same government responsible for the 1963 slaying of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and several attempts to kill Fidel Castro. In 2001, George W. Bush gave the CIA an explicit go-ahead to carry out covert missions to assassinate Osama bin Laden and his supporters around the world, effectively lifting a 25-year ban on such activities. (See the list below of US-back assassination plots since World War II.)

According to some reports, the US government which was closely involved the failed coup in Venezuela last year had plans “neutralize” Chavez if he was reelected (which he was, of course).

Oh, but now the US has Executive Order 12333, which says “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” So I guess Hugo doesn’t have to worry about the toxin-spiked cigars, exploding conch shells, even a wet suit slathered with fungus spores, all of which the US government tried to use against Chavez’s buddy Fidel.

The most hilarious response was from war criminal and US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: “Our department doesn’t do that kind of thing, it’s against the law.” I guess Rummy draws the line at the torture of prisoners, killing of civilians, and leading illegal wars.

The most stupid response to the affair had be from Senator Richard Lugar, who accused Chavez of creating the network to spread his left-wing message across the continent. Duh!

In response to Robertson’s rant, Hugo, said, “I don’t even know who this person is.”

Chavez then offered to help needy Americans with cheap supplies of gasoline. “We want to sell gasoline and heating fuel directly to poor communities in the United States,” he told reporters at the end of his Cuba visit.

The Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA owns Citgo, which has 14,000 gas stations in the United States.

Just for the record, here’s a list of prominent foreign individuals whose assassination (or planning for same) the United States has been involved in since the end of the Second World War. The list does not include several assassinations in various parts of the world carried out by anti-Castro Cubans employed by the CIA and headquartered in the United States. (Source: <a href=”http://www.powells.com/biblio/72-1567512534-0″Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II by William Blum.)

To find the latest on America’s favorite war protesting mom check out Truthout.org’s “One Mother’s Last Stand.”

The billionaire Rev. Pat Robertson—Yale Law School grad, former Republican presidential contender, founder of the Christian Coalition of America and the Christian Broadcasting Network, and host of the “Christian” talk show “The 700 Club”—has declared that under a “doctrine of assassination” US agents should assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez…

“I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war,” Robertson said. “And I don’t think any oil shipments will stop. But this man is a terrific danger and the United … This is in our sphere of influence, so we can’t let this happen.” On Monday, Robertson said on the Christian Broadcast Network’s “The 700 Club”: “We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability.”

“We don’t need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator,” he continued. “It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.” His comments came on the same day that Hugo Chavez traveled to Cuba to meet with Fidel Castro.

If you didn’t realize it before, religious extremism is out of control in the USA and while most Americans don’t believe it, Christian extremism is potentially much more harmful to the world than Isalmic extremism.

In October 2003, Robertson suggested that the US State Department should be blown up with a nuclear device. (BTW, he was not arrested as a potential terrorist for saying: “If I could just get a nuclear device inside Foggy Bottom, I think that’s the answer.”)

At the Republican National Convention in 1992, Robertson said that that feminism encourages women to “kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

He agreed with “Moral Majority” founder and Southern Baptist preacher Jerry Falwell that the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were caused by “pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians, the ACLU and the People for the American Way.”

In light of his past comments, the suggestion that the US should assasinate the democratically elected leader of one of the world’s major oil suppliers is not that suprising. The failed coup in Venezuela was backed by the US, so Robertson is merely voicing the current thinking of the Bush Administration?

Here’s a sampling of other public opinions Rev. Robertson has expressed:

“There is no such thing as separation of church and state in the Constitution. It is a lie of the Left and we are not going to take it anymore.” (November 1993 during an address to the American Center for Law and Justice)

“That [separation of church and state] was never in the Constitution, however much the liberals laugh at me for saying it, they know good and well it was never in the Constitution! Such language only appeared in the constitution of the communist Soviet Union.” (The 700 Club, Jan 22, 1995)

“If anybody understood what Hindus really believe, there would be no doubt that they have no business administering government policies in a country that favors freedom and equality. … Can you imagine having the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as defense minister, or Mahatma Gandhi as minister of health, education, and welfare? The Hindu and Buddhist idea of karma and the Muslim idea of kismet, or fate condemn the poor and the disabled to their suffering. … It’s the will of Allah. These beliefs are nothing but abject fatalism, and they would devastate the social gains this nation has made if they were ever put into practice.” (The New World Order, page 219) [Sounds a lot like the US to me.]

“Presbyterians are the spirit of the Antichrist.” (The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, p. 85)

“The public education movement has also been an anti-Christian movement… We can change education in America if you put Christian principles in and Christian pedagogy in. In three years, you would totally revolutionize education in America.” (The 700 Club, September 27, 1993)

“Satan is a tool of God’s love in the sense that he forces us to see God’s loving patience.” (Answers to 200 of Life’s most Probing Questions)

“If the widespread practice of homosexuality will bring about the destruction of your nation, if it will bring about terrorist bombs, if it’ll bring about earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor, it isn’t necessarily something we ought to open our arms to.” (The 700 Club, June 8, 1998)

“Many of those people involved with Adolf Hitler were Satanists, many of them were homosexuals – the two things seem to go together.” (The 700 Club, January 21, 1993)

By his own words Robertson is clearly a warmonger, promoter of religious intolerance, and hate among other things. In Caracas, pro-Chavez legislator Desire Santos Amaral accused Robertson of shedding his Christian values.

“This man cannot be a true Christian. He’s a fascist,” Santos said. “This is part of the policies of aggression from the right wing in the North against our revolution.” Well, think I’d have to agree with that.
__________________________
Aug 23, 12:21 PM EDT
Televangelist Pat Robertson Calls for Assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez

By SUE LINDSEY
Associated Press Writer

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (AP) — Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson has suggested that American agents assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to stop his country from becoming “a launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism.”

An official of a theological watchdog group on Tuesday criticized Robertson’s statement as “chilling.”

“We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability,” Robertson said Monday on the Christian Broadcast Network’s “The 700 Club.”

“We don’t need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator,” he continued. “It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.”

Chavez has emerged as one of the most outspoken critics of President Bush, accusing the United States of conspiring to topple his government and possibly backing plots to assassinate him. U.S. officials have called the accusations ridiculous.

“You know, I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it,” Robertson said. “It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war … and I don’t think any oil shipments will stop.”

On Tuesday, critics objected to Robertson’s statements.

“It’s absolutely chilling to hear a religious leader call for the murder of any political leader, no matter how much he disagrees with such a leader’s policies or practices,” said the Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

David Brock, president of Media Matters, a liberal media watchdog group, said the remarks should discredit Robertson as a spokesman for the religious right.

Robertson, 75, founder of the Christian Coalition of America and a former presidential candidate, accused the United States of failing to act when Chavez was briefly overthrown in 2002.

A Robertson spokeswoman, Angell Watts, said he would not do interviews Tuesday and had no statement elaborating on his remarks.

A call seeking comment from the U.S. State Department was not immediately returned Tuesday.

Chavez was believed to be in Cuba, but his whereabouts were unknown and no media access was announced.

In Caracas, pro-Chavez legislator Desire Santos Amaral accused Robertson of shedding his Christian values.

“This man cannot be a true Christian. He’s a fascist,” Santos said. “This is part of the policies of aggression from the right wing in the North against our revolution.”

Santos said she thinks U.S.-Venezuelan relations could still improve but comments by “charlatans and fascists” like Robertson only get in the way.

Venezuela is the fifth largest oil exporter and a major supplier of oil to the United States. The CIA estimates that U.S. markets absorb almost 59 percent of Venezuela’s total exports.

Venezuela’s government has demanded in the past that the United States crack down on Cuban and Venezuelan “terrorists” in Florida who they say are conspiring against Chavez.

Robertson has made controversial statements in the past. In October 2003, he suggested that the State Department be blown up with a nuclear device. He has also said that feminism encourages women to “kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

—

© 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Today’s New York Times has a couple of interesting articles on the so-called “evolution debate” (there is no debate among mainstream scientists).

First, in his “On Language” column in the NYT Magazine William Safire scrutinizes “creationism,” “evolutionism,” “neo-creos,” and the PR firm for ID, The Discovery Institute, which just happens to be the subject of the page one story “Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive” of the newspaper.

As part of on ongoing series called “The Evolution Debate”, the article by Jodi Wilgoren examines the Discovery Institute, which is the propaganda machine behind the idea of “intellegent design.” The Seattle-based Discovery Institute (founded in 1990 as a branch of the right-wing Hudson Institute) is funded, not surprisingly, by the same right wing Christians who backed Bush in recent elections, which explains why W. is mouthing their stance on the evolution v. ID “debate.” But the Discovery Institute also gets mainstream backing, including $1 million a year from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.

The Times reports that “since the presidential election last fall, the [intelligent design] movement has made inroads and evolution has emerged as one of the country’s fiercest cultural battlefronts, with the National Center for Science Education tracking 78 clashes in 31 states, more than twice the typical number of incidents. Discovery leaders have been at the heart of the highest-profile developments: helping a Roman Catholic cardinal place an opinion article in The New York Times in which he sought to distance the church from evolution; showing its film promoting design and purpose in the universe at the Smithsonian; and lobbying the Kansas Board of Education in May to require criticism of evolution.”

The Discovery Institute also pushed the Ohio Board of Education to adopt a “teach the controversy” approach and helped design a curriculum to support it, according The Times. Institute talking points almost made it into the No Child Left Behind Act, too. “A watershed moment came with the adoption in 2001 of the No Child Left Behind Act, whose legislative history includes a passage that comes straight from the institute’s talking points. “Where biological evolution is taught, the curriculum should help students to understand why this subject generates so much continuing controversy,” was language that Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, tried to include.”

According to The Times “these successes follow a path laid in a 1999 Discovery manifesto known as the Wedge Document, which sought “nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies” in favor of a “broadly theistic understanding of nature.”

A couple of sidebars…

One of the “Ads by Google” posted on The New Times on the Web version of the Discovery Institute article was:

“Believe in Jesus?
We’ll pay you $75 right now to complete a simple survey!
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And, as Signe Wilkinson illustrates in this cartoon for the Philadelphia Daily News, it’s too bad W. hasn’t come up with an intelligent design for Iraq.