Treading the boards on a perfect set.

Well, I don’t know about you guys but I am completely buying this with no further questions. https://t.co/Y92gosc4vZ

— Dave Smith (@ComicDaveSmith) January 3, 2025

"Authorities say Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, from Houston, had an ISIS flag strapped to the rented Ford F-150 Lightning EV truck he used to carry out an act of premeditated terror on New Year’s Day...."

"In a YouTube video he posted in 2020 for his real estate business, a clean-cut Jabbar described himself as a reliable, trustworthy native Texan who spent 10 years in the military, which taught him 'the meaning of great service.' But when he carried out the terror attack — one of the deadliest since 9/11 — Jabbar lived in a squalid trailer park on the outskirts of Houston that is home to mostly Muslim immigrants.... Jabbar traveled to Egypt for 10 days last year, officials told the Post...."

From "Inside terrorist Shamsud-Din Jabbar’s squalid home where sheep and goats roam his yard — after his financial ruin" (NY Post).

From the Washington Post, there's this: "FBI says driver may not have acted alone in New Orleans attack that killed 15": "During a news briefing Wednesday afternoon, Alethea Duncan, an FBI assistant special agent in charge, said investigators 'do not believe that Jabbar was solely responsible.' Authorities did not elaborate... The FBI said investigators found an Islamic State flag in the vehicle used in the attack, along with additional weapons and a possible improvised explosive device. Other potential IEDs were located elsewhere in the city’s French Quarter...."

I note the discrepancy about the placement of the ISIS flag. Was it "strapped to the rear" or "in the vehicle"? 

Authorized artist paints over the work of an unauthorized artist, and the unauthorized artist comes in with a roller and white paint and obliterates the authorized work.

The whole story is in that video, but if you prefer to read it: "Artist heartbroken after painting destroyed in front of her/'He blamed me for his painting being destroyed and he wanted to hurt me because he felt that I hurt him. He felt that I disrespected him'" (4WWL). 

"I’m floored. I’m thrilled to hear President Biden would call out the Claiborne Expressway as a racist highway."

Said Amy Stelly, an architectural designer, who is "part of a growing movement across the country to take down highways bored through neighborhoods predominantly home to people of color."

From "A woman called for a highway’s removal in a Black neighborhood. The White House singled it out in its infrastructure plan" (WaPo).

"Mark Normand's Bad-Ass New Orleans Trans Nanny."

"Everything seems to go to seed along the Gulf: walls stain, windows rust. Curtains mildew. Wood warps. Air conditioners cease to function."

"In our room at the Edgewater Gulf Hotel, where the Mississippi Broadcasters’ Convention was taking place, the air conditioner in the window violently shook and rattled every time it was turned on. The Edgewater Gulf is an enormous white hotel which looks like a giant laundry, and has the appearance of being on the verge of condemnation. The swimming pool is large and unkempt, and the water smells of fish. Behind the hotel is a new shopping center built around an air-conditioned mall, and I kept escaping there, back into midstream America."

A passage from a book I'm reading that came back to me as we were talking about the South in the middle of the night. The book is "South and West: From a Notebook" by Joan Didion. A new reprint came out last month, but it tells the story of a road trip through the Gulf South that she made in 1970 (and a second trip in the west in 1976).

Here's another passage:

In New Orleans in June the air is heavy with sex and death, not violent death but death by decay, overripeness, rotting, death by drowning, suffocation, fever of unknown etiology. The place is physically dark, dark like the negative of a photograph, dark like an X-ray: the atmosphere absorbs its own light, never reflects light but sucks it in until random objects glow with a morbid luminescence. The crypts above ground dominate certain vistas. In the hypnotic liquidity of the atmosphere all motion slows into choreography, all people on the street move as if suspended in a precarious emulsion, and there seems only a technical distinction between the quick and the dead. 

"We have placed this memorial here, in the campus crossroads, at the center of the school, where everyone travels, where it cannot be missed."

"Our school was founded with wealth generated though the profoundly immoral institution of slavery. We should not hide that fact nor hide from it. We can and should be proud of many things this school has contributed to the world. But to be true to our complicated history, we must also shine a light on what we are not proud of."

Said John F. Manning, the Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Professor of Harvard Law School, at the uncovering of a plaque affixed to a small boulder. Manning is quoted in Harvard Law Today. The plaque reads (in all caps):

In honor of the enslaved whose labor
created wealth that made possible
the founding of Harvard Law School

May we pursue the highest ideals
of law and justice in their memory

We're told the text was "drafted by [Annette] Gordon-Reed, the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and Professor of History on the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 'The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.'"

Gordon-Reed observed that memorials usually name people. In this instance, she said, we will never know the names of all the Africans enslaved in Antigua whose labor created wealth that helped start the Law School. “The words [inscribed on the plaque] are designed to invoke all of their spirits and bring them into our minds and our memories with the hope that it will spur us to try to bring to the world what was not given to them: the laws [sic] protection and regard, and justice.”

On the idea of a memorial to persons whose names are unknown: There is a worldwide tradition of tombs to "the unknown soldier." And there is a "Tomb of the Unknown Slave" in New Orleans:

Resting next to one of the walls of the St. Augustine Catholic Church of New Orleans is a rusting cross made of thick chains. Medieval metal shackles hang from the length of it, while smaller crosses are planted in the ground around their larger brethren....

While no one is actually (officially) buried beneath, the cross is a constant and haunting reminder of the legacy of oppression that led to America’s modern prosperity. It may not be the most uplifting memorial in the land....

The Harvard plaque is, visually, much more discreet, and the text is very carefully composed to be uplifting.

ADDED: Here's the NYT review, by the historian Eric Foner, of "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family":

Gordon-Reed acknowledges that it is almost impossible to probe the feelings of a man and a woman neither of whom left any historical evidence about their relationship.... But Gordon-Reed is determined to prove that theirs was a consensual relationship based on love.... She sets up a series of straw men and proceeds to demolish them — those who believe that in the context of slavery, love between black and white people was impossible; that black female sexuality was “inherently degraded” and thus Jefferson could not have had genuine feelings for Hemings; that any black woman who consented to sex with a white man during slavery was a “traitor” to her people. She cites no current historians who hold these views, but is adamant in criticizing anyone who, given the vast gap in age (30 years) and power between them, views the Jefferson-Hemings connection as sexual exploitation.

As a black female scholar, Gordon-Reed is undoubtedly more sensitive than many other academics to the subtleties of language regarding race. But to question the likelihood of a long-term romantic attachment between Jefferson and Hemings is hardly to collaborate in what she calls “the erasure of individual black lives” from history. Gordon-Reed even suggests that “opponents of racism” who emphasize the prevalence of rape in the Old South occupy “common ground” with racists who despise black women, because both see sex with female slaves as “degraded.” This, quite simply, is ­outrageous.

ALSO: The plaque on a rock seems to invite cries out for the response that a plaque on a rock is not enough.

Surely, the law professors at Harvard realize this.

The rock offers a place to stand. I cannot believe that students will not take to standing on the rock and haranguing passersby — in this prominent location — about the insufficiency of a plaque on a rock.

But maybe that's the genius idea of a plaque on a rock. It's a performance-art piece that finds completion in its use over the years.

I'm assuming there's no rule at Harvard against standing on rocks that have plaques.

AND: "We have placed this memorial here, in the campus crossroads, at the center of the school, where everyone travels, where it cannot be missed." Cannot be missed, but it's off to the side. Along the way. They should have put it right in the path, made it a veritable stumbling block.

Haranguer on the Rock: You're only looking at this rock because I'm standing on it, forcing you to look. They put this rock out of the way, so they could say they took notice, and it's in an important place, but you'll only look straight in front of you or at your slave-made iPhone, not at this rock. I demand that the rock be relocated right in the center of the path, where you'll have to pay attention so you don't trip and fall on your face and break your iPhone that was built for you by slaves. Look it up. On your iPhone, that you can read without tripping because the stone was put over here where you wouldn't have to look if I weren't saying look. Look it up....

Who would spray paint "Tear It Down" on a statue of Joan of Arc in New Orleans?

I'm reading this story at PJ Media  — which misquotes the graffiti in the headline and makes it sound as though the graffiti was on the statue when it's actually on the base. So let's switch to The Times-Picayune (which is linked at PJ Media):

The phrase "Tear it Down" was hastily sprayed in black paint across the base of the golden Joan of Arc statue on Decatur Street in the French Quarter sometime earlier this week. It has since been removed, with only the vaguest traces of the paint remaining.

The "Tear it Down" tag would seem to relate to the debate surrounding the city's ongoing removal of four Confederate monuments. But the statue of Joan of Arc, a 15th-century military leader, martyr and Catholic saint, hasn't been mentioned in the controversy to this point.

Now, wait a minute! This article is from last May, and the PJ Media article went up yesterday and doesn't mention that the defacing of the Joan of Arc monument predated the current uproar over the removal of Civil War monuments. But there was a "Take Em Down NOLA" movement at the time that — as the Times-Picayune tells us — aimed at the local Confederate monuments (and this group denies targeting the Joan).

Anyway, who would spray paint "Tear It Down" on a Joan of Arc monument? Do you leap to assume that some idiot believes that Joan of Arc has to do with the Confederacy? Maybe that's how you have fun. At PJ Media, the author (Tom Knighton) does not assume it was ignorance about Joan of Arc. At the end of his piece he says:

It's also possible that this was the result of someone being intentionally ridiculous. After all, while removing statues of Confederate leaders is the big thing, there are also movements to remove a Thomas Jefferson monument from outside of Columbia University and a Teddy Roosevelt from outside of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. So maybe someone is just trolling these lunatics.

Yes, that theory fits the facts better than the theory that some idiot thought it was a pro-Confederacy statue.

But it could also be anti-Catholic. Speaking of ignorance of American history, it's ignorant not to know that the KKK and other nationalists have been virulently anti-Catholic. Here's a Wikipedia article, "Anti-Catholicism in the United States."

Here's some KKK artwork from 1925:

You see the tear-it-down enthusiasm.

There are people who would want to take down a statue of a Catholic saint. Quite aside from the KKK, what about people who want the strict separation of religion and government? Why is there a religious monument in the public square?

Scott Adams — wearing his Pope hat to make a moral ruling — says that the Confederate statues should come down.

The brand is "America" and it's working against your brand — even if only 20% of the people are feeling offended and excluded. It doesn't matter that you think it doesn't.

Scott Adams tells talks about racist statues https://t.co/3bpiyhxZdQ

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) August 15, 2017

He didn't really need his Pope hat for that, because he's not talking about his own moral vision. He's taking a businesslike, corporate view, discussing a branded product called America and noticing the moral opinions of the consumers of the product.

There's also some interesting discussion in there about the internment of persons of Japanese descent during WWII and whether statues of FDR should come down. If I understand Adams's standard correctly, if 20% of Americans are offended — based on serious reasons — then Americans as a group should want to update the American brand and remove the monument, which is just decoration.

ALSO: Pope-hatted Adams makes the moral ruling that the mob's pulling down of a statue of a Confederate soldier is "a moral gray area." There was no violence against persons, only property, and it "comes very close to free speech." It's destructive, but only of "a racist symbol." I'll give this post the "civil disobedience" tag. Adams doesn't use that term, but he briefly acknowledges that the destruction is against the law and that the protesters probably need to be arrested and prosecuted and given a light sentence. In standard civil disobedience thought, the disobeyers accept the legal consequences.

AND: Adams is very funny talking about the notion of gathering America's Confederate statues in a museum: "It would be the world's worst museum." You'd be saying "There's a statue of Robert E. Lee" and then "There's a statue of Robert E. Lee," etc. I'd just note that the sculpture was designed to fit in a park, so how about something outdoors, something like Grūtas Park (AKA "Stalin's World)(discussed in this post of mine from last May (about the removal of the Jefferson Davis statue in New Orleans)).

AND: Let me repeat something from that May post, this image "The Sons of Liberty pulling down the statue of George III of the United Kingdom on Bowling Green (New York City), 1776":

"Crews, wearing masks to cover their faces, worked under a heavy police presence starting at 3 a.m. to dismantle the statue..."

... of Jefferson Davis, in New Orleans.

[The city spokesperson] said the law enforcement officials took extra precautions because of “consistent threats, harassment and intimidation tactics” surrounding the removal.

Some protesters carrying Confederate flags shouted “cowards” and “totalitarianism” as it was removed....

Other works expected to be removed are a bronze statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee that has stood in a traffic circle, named Lee Circle, in the city’s central business district since 1884, and an equestrian statue of P.G.T. Beauregard, a Confederate general. Because of the threat of violence, the city would not release details on the timeline for when the remaining two statues would be removed.

ADDED: The statues are not getting destroyed. They're being warehoused, potentially to be displayed at some point in a museum setting, buffered by contextualizing historical materials. So this is not like the Taliban blowing up the Bamiyan Buddhas. Nor is it a case of a court dictating that a monument must come down. (My thoughts drifted back to Justice Breyer's decision against requiring the removal of the 10 Commandments monument on the Texas statehouse grounds.)

In New Orleans, we have the political branch of government making a decision about the design of shared public space. The people, acting through government, have the power to redesign their spaces to express their current values. Those who object to the new decisions have a right to protest (but not to commit or threaten acts of violence). They lost elections. Let them try to win in the future by arguing that the statues should be moved out of the warehouse and back to the public square (or simply that a dignified and accurate historical museum should be built).

We've talked before on this blog about removing statues from public places. We've seen it done for aesthetic reasons (where the honored person looked ugly), and we've seen it for political reasons:

Iconoclasm. If you're inclined to reach back into history, you will, perhaps, find it everywhere. From the Wikipedia article "Iconoclasm," here are "The Sons of Liberty pulling down the statue of George III of the United Kingdom on Bowling Green (New York City), 1776":



And I can't look at that and not think about the statue of Saddam Hussein that our military tore down in Bagdhad in April 2003. And what of all those monumental statues of Vladimir Lenin that came in for destruction when the Soviet Union dissolved. Would you like to see them all removed?

I know there's at least one still standing, because the NYT, just a couple days ago, ran a story cooing over an aging American couple who are using Airbnb to live in various European cities and the slideshow features the man, dressed in shorts, like a child, and standing, like a child, knee-high to "this statue of Lenin in Lithuania." The hand of the smiling child-man reaches out to encircle the index finger of Soviet dictator. In another photo, the woman, in a short skirt, poses at the feet of a giant Stalin. This one too is "in Lithuania." We're told there's "a sculpture garden." Isn't that nice?

I need to do my own research to find out about "Grūtas Park (unofficially known as Stalin's World...)... a sculpture garden of Soviet-era statues and an exposition of other Soviet ideological relics from the times of the Lithuanian SSR."

Founded in 2001 by entrepreneur Viliumas Malinauskas, the park is located near Druskininkai, about 130 kilometres (81 mi) southwest of Vilnius, Lithuania.... Its establishment faced some fierce opposition, and its existence is still controversial.... The park also contains playgrounds, a mini-zoo and cafes, all containing relics of the Soviet era. On special occasions actors stage re-enactments of various Soviet-sponsored festivals.

So there's an alternative to iconoclasm.

New Orleans needs its Grūtas Park.

"Every sculpture needs space. That is the nature of sculpture. If you put something else there, it changes it."

"Fearless Girl" is “cute,” but “you don’t stand up for women’s rights at the expense of the artist’s rights. Each right is equally important. I am saying this as a woman.”

Said Gabriel Koren, an artist who made a statue of Frederick Douglass that is situated in Central Park, looking into Harlem. What if a second statute — a figure reacting to Frederick Douglass — were put close to it? Should Koren have final say about whether the second statue can be there? I'd say no, but I think she has moral power to influence the decision, and I think that would be enough to preserve the space around Frederick Douglas.

But that's in part because it's Frederick Douglass...



.... not a charging bull. There's a debate to be had about whether things should be put near other things, but the first thing to go up shouldn't become a tyrant. Sometimes putting things together makes a dialogue that benefits the people, who, after all, have our space cluttered by all sorts of art and art-like junk. And sometimes the first thing that goes up is kind of bad or an incomplete statement, and continuing the "conversation" with something else is an improvement.

Considering the urge to take down statues that don't say what the public wants said, we ought to keep open the option of putting up another sculpture nearby and changing the meaning. For example, in New Orleans:

Statues of Confederate leaders Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis are targeted for removal in New Orleans, after a federal appeals court approved the city's plan to change how it treats symbols of its history. Opponents of the move vow to keep fighting it in court....

In addition to the statue of Lee, [Mayor Mitch] Landrieu and other city officials want to take down a statue honoring Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard and a monument to the paramilitary White League, which launched a Reconstruction-era rebellion against the integrated Metropolitan New Orleans Police Force....

"[A] class-action lawsuit against the criminal district court [in New Orleans], alleging that judges and court officials have been running an 'illegal scheme' in which poor people are indefinitely jailed if they fall behind on payments of court fines, fees and assessments..."

"The suit describes how fees are imposed with no hearing about a person’s ability to pay, and how nearly all components of the local criminal justice system — the judges, the prosecutors, the public defenders — benefit financially to some degree...."

“As budgets have grown tighter, jurisdictions and politicians have balked at tax increases,”[said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice]. “So the burden of revenue for this vastly expanding criminal justice system has been shifted to those who find themselves defendants in courts or inmates in prisons.”...

One of the plaintiffs is a man kept in jail for weeks for unpaid debts despite his protests that he had a job waiting that would have allowed him to earn the money. Another man spent six days in jail on a warrant issued in error, while a third was told by a collections officer to pay double every time he was late with a payment.

“It’s a failing system, and they know it’s a failing system,” said the third man, Reynaud Variste, 26, who was arrested in a police raid at his home one morning this year after he had fallen a few weeks behind in payments connected to a two-year-old illegal possession case.

"Unless the rapidly disappearing wetlands are made healthy again, restoring the natural defense, New Orleans will soon lay naked against the sea...."

"So, how does one reengineer the entire Mississippi River delta—one of the largest in the world—on which New Orleans lies?"

Three international engineering and design teams have reached a startling answer: leave the mouth of the Mississippi River to die. Let the badly failing wetlands there completely wither away, becoming open water, so that the upper parts of the delta closer to the city can be saved...,

Scientists worldwide agree that the delta’s wetlands disintegrated because we humans built long levees—high, continuous ridges of earth covered by grass or rocks—along the entire length of the lower Mississippi River... [that] prevented regular floods from harming farms, industries and towns along the river’s course... [but] would have supplied the brackish marshes with massive quantities of silt and freshwater, which are necessary for their survival....

If an open-casket funeral is acceptable, then what's wrong with posing the corpse in a sitting position?

2 recent examples, both in New Orleans:

"Mickey Easterling... causally [sic] sitting on an iron bench, wearing a magnificent hat with a glass of champagne in one hand and a cigarette holder in the other."

“She's in a Leonardo outfit,” says Sammy Steele who did Mickey’s hair and make-up. “And I actually dressed her tonight for the occasion.... It’s like something out a department store window in New York. On 5th Ave.... This is what she requested.  She's sitting in a garden scenery to depict her back yard. This is what she wanted.  No stone was left unturned for this memorial.”

“She looks wonderful,” says one bystander. “She looks just like Mickey.”

"[Miriam] Burbank’s daughters had a vision and presented it to funeral directors at Charbonnet Funeral Home...."

“They said they didn’t want a traditional religious type service,” Intern Funeral Director Lyelle Bellard said. “That she was just one of those people that just enjoyed life enjoyed living, just enjoyed people.”

Burbank is sitting at a table wearing Saints colors. Her fingernails are even painted black and gold. She’s got her Busch beer and menthol cigarettes....

“When I walked in, I feel like I was in her house and I didn’t hurt so much,” sister Sherline Burbank said. “Because it’s more of her, and it’s like she’s not dead. It’s not like a funeral home. It’s like she’s just in the room with us.”

Is this acceptable?
	I think the dead body should not be on view at all.
	A open-casket funeral is good, but this is undignified, terrible.
	Open-casket funerals help us see the dead as dead, and this is the opposite.
	My opinion is that my opinion is irrelevant. Let the family do what it wants.
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: They say nothing is certain but taxes and taxidermy.

"In New Orleans, major school district closes traditional public schools for good."

"With the start of the next school year, the Recovery School District will be the first in the country made up completely of public charter schools, a milestone for New Orleans and a grand experiment in urban education for the nation."

WaPo reports. 

For contrast, read this New Yorker article by Dale Russakoff: "Schooled: Cory Booker, Chris Christie, and Mark Zuckerberg had a plan to reform Newark’s schools. They got an education." Excerpt:

... Ras Baraka [the principal of Central High School, a city councilman, and post-Booker mayoral candidate] held a press conference in front of Weequahic High School, denouncing the plan as “a dismantling of public education.… It needs to be halted.”...

In late January, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, spoke at a school-board meeting at First Avenue School in Newark. Five hundred people filled the auditorium; another three hundred and fifty listened in the cafeteria, and more than a hundred stood outside, demanding entry. Weingarten pledged the A.F.T.’s support “until this community gets its schools back,” and declared, “The nation is watching Newark.”...

Shavar Jeffries [lawprof and mayoral candidate] believes that the Newark backlash could have been avoided. Too often, he said, “education reform . . . comes across as colonial to people who’ve been here for decades. It’s very missionary, imposed, done to people rather than in coöperation with people.” Some reformers have told him that unions and machine politicians will always dominate turnout in school-board elections and thus control the public schools. He disagrees: “This is a democracy. A majority of people support these ideas. You have to build coalitions and educate and advocate.” As he put it to me at the outset of the reform initiative, “This remains the United States. At some time, you have to persuade people."

That mayoral election took place on May 13th. Baraka beat Jeffries:

Was Ras Baraka’s win a referendum on Cory Booker?...

... Baraka and Booker are polar opposites. Booker is the Ivy-League and Oxford educated, suburban-bred son of IBM executives who brought a deracialized campaign persona, neoliberal policy proposals and tremendous national and international attention to the city. Baraka is the son of the late poet Amiri Baraka who brought his parents progressive, nationalist and activist sensibilities into formal politics. The only things these two men share are a common racial identification and birth year.

The ex-Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, guilty of taking $200,000 in bribes from businessmen who got favors and contracts worth $5 million.

He'll go to prison, for up to 20 years, CNN reports, quoting a local lawyer who says the trial was "too painful actually to watch," because Nagin "did a belly flop" and "just looked terrible," taking the stand in his own defense after the prosecutors had "just swamped him," with the businessmen — who'd already pleaded guilty — testifying about paying the bribes. 

"Lawyers and onlookers were stunned when videos were played in federal court here Tuesday that appeared to show..."

"... inmates in the Orleans Parish Prison using drugs, drinking beer and showing off a loaded pistol. The videos, which lawyers for the sheriff’s department said were filmed four years ago and had recently been found in a safe, were shown as part of a hearing to determine whether a federal consent decree is warranted to reform the city jail."

"Barack Obama in his old community organizer role," doing "what community organizers do... rub people's emotions raw to hype their resentments."

Thomas Sowell writes the pithiest thing that I've seen about the speech Obama gave on June 5, 2007. Remember, Obama told the predominantly black audience that the federal government — motivated by racial prejudice — would not waive the Stafford Act requirement that a city chip in 10% of the amount it would receive in federal disaster aid.

[L]ess than two weeks earlier, on May 24, 2007, the United States Senate had in fact voted 80-14 to waive the Stafford Act requirement for New Orleans, as it had waived that requirement for New York and Florida. More federal money was spent rebuilding New Orleans than was spent in New York after 9/11 and in Florida after hurricane Andrew, combined.

Truth is not a job requirement for a community organizer. Nor can Barack Obama claim that he wasn't present the day of that Senate vote, as he claimed he wasn't there when Jeremiah Wright unleashed his obscene attacks on America from the pulpit of the church that Obama attended for 20 years.

Unlike Jeremiah Wright's church, the U.S. Senate keeps a record of who was there on a given day. The Congressional Record for May 24, 2007 shows Senator Barack Obama present that day and voting on the bill that waived the Stafford Act requirement. Moreover, he was one of just 14 Senators who voted against -- repeat, AGAINST -- the legislation which included the waiver.

"In other cities, charter schools exist in spite of the system. Here they are the system."

Says John White, the superintendent of New Orleans public schools.

The results are encouraging. Five years ago, 23% of children scored at or above "basic" on state tests; now 48% do. Before Katrina, 62% attended failing schools; less than a fifth do today. The gap between city kids and the rest of the state is narrowing....

By 2013, New Orleans plans to have the country's first "all charter" school system. 

"If I invoked the Insurrection Act against her wishes, the world would see a male Republican president usurping the authority of a female Democratic governor by declaring an insurrection in a largely African American city."

"That left me in a tough position. That would arouse controversy anywhere. To do so in the Deep South, where there had been centuries of states' rights tensions, could unleash holy hell."

I was struck by that passage in Bush's memoir, "Decision Points." Bush, of course, ended up getting criticized for seemingly not "car[ing] about black people," so it's interesting to think that his delays — at least as he presents them now — had to do with the history of the South. But look closely as the 2 concerns that slowed Bush's imposition of federal authority in New Orleans:

1. Gender. Bush didn't like the image of the male pushing the female aside. He thought he'd be criticized for that.

2. "States' rights tensions." That's a strange way to evoke the history of racism in the south if you want to convey that you cared about the suffering of black people. "States' rights" was the cry of those who resisted federal efforts to advance integration. Bush was, in fact, being deferential to the Southern governor.

Bush, sensitive to potential criticism about sexism and states' rights, exercised restraint, which exposed him to criticism about race.

There was rapper Kanye West who told TV viewers: "George Bush doesn't care about black people." Jesse Jackson compared the plight of some survivors with being trapped in the "hull of a slave ship".

"Five years later, I can barely write these words without feeling disgusted. I am deeply insulted by the suggestion that we allowed American citizens to suffer because they were black... The more I thought about it, the angrier I felt. I was raised to believe that racism was one of the greatest evils in society," Bush writes. "I faced a lot of criticism as president. I didn't like hearing people claim I had lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefit the rich. But the suggestion that I was a racist, because of the response to Katrina, represented an all-time low. I told Laura at the time that it was the worst moment of my presidency. I feel the same way today."

He feels bad about this criticism and is contemptuous of those who expressed it, but: 1. His own words indicate that he put racism third on a list of 3 things he was worried he'd be criticized for, and 2. Jackson and West were speaking emotionally at the time when the suffering was going on.

Meanwhile, Kanye West cracked under pussycat questioning from Matt Lauer.