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Democratic Presidential hopeful John Edwards has spoken eloquently about the plight of the poor in America, saying that “poverty is the great moral issue of our century.” In his 2004 speech to the DNC, he said:

John Kerry and I believe that we shouldn’t have two different economies in America: one for people who are set for life, they know their kids and their grand-kids are going to be just fine; and then one for most Americans, people who live paycheck to paycheck.

As the official “John Edwards ‘08 Blog” put it recently:

Income inequality means more than 40 million people lacking health insurance or millions more having insufficient health insurance that does not cover preventive care. The gap between the income or wealth of those with the highest ammount (sic) of money in a society and those with the lowest can be a source of disease in itself.

[...] For instance, one study showed that a young man living in Bangladesh where poverty was severe but fairly uniform had a higher life expectancy than a young man living in Harlem, in the USA, a land where income disparity is the worst of any of the so called first world nations.

In the mean time, John Edwards has just purchased a 28,000 square foot mansion on an estate outside Chapel Hill NC, having sold his previous mansion for $5.2 million. The new Edwards estate is expected to be valued at over $6 million.

The main house itself is a mere 10,000 square feet or so. The rest of the floor space is in the recreation room—or rather, the 15,600 square foot recreation building. I can already picture Christmas with the Edwards family; perhaps the kids will play charades on one of the two stages, while John practices his speeches from the other. If they have guests for Christmas and run short of space, the master bedroom is 600 square feet, so they’ll always be able to put 10 extra king size double beds in there.

Of course, last month when John Edwards announced his intention to run for President, he didn’t do it from his home. No, he went to New Orleans, and helped a few poor people renovate a house that is probably smaller than the roofed walkway connecting the two sections of his own humble abode.

For some unaccountable reason there has been a little carping from the peanut gallery. People seem to think that the Edwards lifestyle is a little out of keeping from someone who says he’s so upset by income inequality. Me, I have no doubt that John Edwards cares deeply about the plight of the poor, and I’m sure he’ll be employing a dozen or so to sanitize his toilets, vacuum his rugs, clean his pool, and polish his basketball court. And his squash court. And his four storey observation tower.

Once again, reality is all too eerily reminiscent of a story from The Onion.

So it’s a total disaster in New Orleans. Three levees are breached, one of them has a hole over 150 meters across. 80% of the city is under water up to 6 meters deep. The entire city is without electrical power or water supply. It’s estimated that it will be 9–12 weeks before they can even get rid of the water, much less get the city habitable. Interstate 10 is broken chunks of floating concrete; there’s no route into the city for trucks and other major vehicles. Mississippi reports at least 110 dead; Louisiana hasn’t even begun counting—but there are bodies floating in the water-and-sewage filled streets. It’s estimated that up to 100,000 people were unable or unwilling to leave the city. The death toll could be in the tens of thousands by the time it’s all over. The official message is simple: everyone must leave New Orleans.

The Red Cross has around 40,000 people in emergency shelters. Another 25,000 are going to be sleeping in the Houston Astrodome. They won’t be going home any time soon, as once the water is drained from the streets every building will have to be checked for structural soundness and shored up; every sewer line will need to be inspected. Then, of course, there will be the electrical infrastructure to replace, and the leaking gas lines to fix. In the mean time, some of the people left alive in the city are looting. Police are finding it hard to stop them, what with meters-high piles of debris that they have to cut through with chainsaws even to be able to patrol on foot.

So the residents of New Orleans who evacuated might get to go home to a ruined shell of a home with no electricity, by Christmas if they’re lucky. But right now, the water’s still rising… the Army engineers who were trying to repair the levees have been forced to abandon the city. The National Guard is facing the problem that most of its members were shipped out to Iraq to make up for low troop numbers, so the city is basically lawless at this point.

The New Orleans aquarium is gone; sealions are wandering the empty space where it used to be. The President’s Casino is missing too. The public library is paper maché. Boats weren’t safe either, with an 8 meter wall of water hitting the coast.

It’s not just New Orleans either. The BBC have a photograph of an oil rig that was smashed into the Cochrane Bridge in Mobile, Alabama. Most of Mobile is apparently without electricity too. Biloxi, Mississippi is without electricity, water and sewerage.

Damage estimates so far are around $25 billion, it’ll probably be the worst hit for the insurance industry ever. Since the worsening storms over the last few years had already brought many insurance companies close to bankruptcy, I imagine a few will collapse this year.

2004’s hurricane season was close to the worst ever. This year’s hurricane season is only half over and has already surpassed it. It appears that the severity of hurricanes may be directly linked to global warming, while the frequency of them is rising with the natural periodic rise in ocean surface temperature. Combine the two and you have a deadly combination. Katrina was more than 300 km across, and meteorologists say things could have been much worse. If you think the Kyoto protocol would harm the US economy, that’s nothing compared to what a decade of steadily-worsening hurricanes will do to it.

Now let’s set the wayback machine to February 2005:

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has identified millions of dollars in flood and hurricane protection projects in the New Orleans district.

Chances are, though, most projects will not be funded in the president’s 2006 fiscal year budget to be released today.

In general, funding for construction has been on a downward trend for the past several years, said Marcia Demma, chief of the New Orleans Corps’ programs management branch.

In 2001, the New Orleans district spent $147 million on construction projects. When fiscal year 2005 wraps up Sept. 30, the Corps expects to have spent $82 million, a 44.2 percent reduction from 2001 expenditures.

Of course, all the levee construction in the world wouldn’t have saved New Orleans from this disaster—but it might have reduced the death toll and damage a bit. But hey, at least we all got our wartime tax cuts, right?

Will this tragedy be enough to silence the people who say that everything is OK, that global warming is a myth, that it’s a good idea to send the National Guard to Iraq, that we should keep cutting spending on infrastructure and emergency planning so we can finance a war and still have tax cuts?

I’m betting it won’t. They’ll keep shrieking their denails, and ultimately they’ll get away with it because their beliefs are so much more palatable than the unpleasant reality. I predict that the Climate Change Science Program and NASA’s studies of climate change will still get their budget cut next year. Why even study whether global warming might be causing these disasters, when you can just choose to believe it isn’t?

And remember, this is not a partisan issue. Democrats supported the major budget cuts for the US Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans, and the cancellation of a study into what would happen if a hurricane hit the city. Democrats voted for the war in Iraq. When the Senate voted 95-0 against the Kyoto protocol on the grounds that it would result in economic harm to US industry and would exclude some nations (Senate Resolution 98 in 1997), those voting included John Kerry and Ted Kennedy.

New Orleans in particular is a problem people have known about for a long time. It was just waiting to happen, like the big earthquake in San Francisco, or Mount Rainier showering Seattle with ash and red hot debris. The big question in my mind is whether people will learn, or whether they’ll carry on as before and build a New New Orleans right where the last one was. Either way, I never got to see New Orleans, and now I never will.

“Unfortunately, independent efforts by the NAACP, America Coming Together, John Kerry for President and the Capri Cafaro for Congress campaign have been illegally registering people to vote and apply for absentee ballots. [...] Please be advised that if you were registered in this capacity that you will not be able to vote until the next election.”

—Text from fraudulent letter sent to Ohio Democratic voters

They say John Kerry is a master of debating skills. I believe it. I know he is, because watching the first presidential debate I actually found myself wanting to believe him, to trust him. He said some great things, and for a moment I actually believed that he might act on his promises.

And then I remembered the well-documented lies and U-turns that have made up his career, and I thought “No, you can’t believe him. I know you want to believe that he really thinks the Iraq war is wrong, I know you want to believe that he’ll pull us out of it…but dammit, that’s only been his clearly articulated position since last week.” Before that, of course, his position was that it was quite legitimate for the USA to invade a country that presented no threat to it, on the grounds that it might one day be a threat. Yes, Kerry felt it was a perfectly acceptable war—he just felt he’d have done a better job of it than Bush.

But that position failed to resonate with anyone who might actually vote for him, so like so many times in the past, Kerry slowly shifted to something more popular. Which is why I can’t let myself believe anything that comes out of his mouth; it’ll be as big a disappointment as Bill “NAFTA and no healthcare” Clinton.

Of course, I’d still have to hold my nose and vote for him, because Bush has been a colossal fuck-up on every level, is promising more of the same, and means it. I’ll take someone who might potentially do almost anything, over someone I know for sure will do the wrong thing. If you have to play Russian Roulette, play it with a revolver, not a shotgun.

But of course, that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Every time the DNC supporters accost me in the street, it’s all I can do to avoid subjecting them to a lengthy rant which wouldn’t do any good. And it doesn’t make any difference anyway, because there’s no democracy here, I can’t vote.

Jimmy Carter has written a letter to Zell Miller, who treated us all to rabid anti-Kerry rantings at the Republican National Convention last week:

Perhaps more troublesome of all is seeing you adopt an established and very effective Republican campaign technique of destroying the character of opponents by wild and false allegations. The Bush campaign’s personal attacks on the character of John McCain in South Carolina in 2000 was a vivid example. The claim that war hero Max Cleland was a disloyal American and an ally of Osama bin Laden should have given you pause, but you have joined in this ploy by your bizarre claims that another war hero, John Kerry, would not defend the security of our nation except with spitballs. (This is she same man whom you described previously as “one of this nation’s authentic heroes, one of this party’s best-known and greatest leaders—and a good friend.”)

Choice statistics from last week’s CBS poll of the average American:

• 61% disapprove of Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq.
• 65% believe the country is heading in the wrong direction.
• 81% think the torture at Abu Ghraib was unjustified.
• 51% think the Pentagon tried to cover it up.
• 20% think the Bush administration has increased jobs, 49% think they’ve decreased jobs.

There’s more in this week’s poll:

• 80% thought Bush was either “hiding something” or “mostly lying” in his statements on Iraq.
• 55% think the war in Iraq has created more anti-American terrorists.
• Only 13% think America is safer as a result of the war.

And rounding off a fairly solid victory for reality, only 29% of people have a favorable opinion of John Kerry.

John Kerry raised more money from paid lobbyists than any other Senator in the last 15 years. His wife earned $5.1 million in 2003, and has a $500 million fortune. They own five homes, valued at over $30 million, and a 42′ powerboat worth $700,000 for casual fun. Kerry also raked in a cool $57 million in campaign contributions during Q1 2004.

In short, John Forbes Kerry is rolling in it. The idea of anyone on a normal income feeling the need to give him even more money is a sick joke. Added to that, he’s a fully paid-for corporate special interest candidate who knows exactly how to get cash hand-over-fist, and he’s a lying two-faced weasel.

Sure, he’s slightly less of a liar and less of a corporate whore than Bush. Great. In fact, the only reason anyone seems to be able to come up with to vote for Kerry is “He’s not Bush”. You don’t need a major advertising campaign to get that message out to the people. They’re already working it out for themselves.

If the Democrats wanted my time and money they’d have picked Howard Dean.

Guardian today:

A new poll suggested yesterday that Ralph Nader’s independent presidential bid represented a serious threat to the Democratic candidate, Senator John Kerry.

The New York Times and CBS News poll revealed a tight two-man race for the White House between President George Bush and Mr Kerry. Mr Bush had a narrow lead of 46% over Mr Kerry’s 43% — within the poll’s margin of error.

But when Americans were asked about a three-man race including Mr Nader, the 70-year-old consumer activist attracted 7% support, mostly at the expense of the Democrat. In that contest, Mr Bush led Mr Kerry by 46% to 38%.

Mr Nader’s poll ratings are higher than at this point in the 2000 election. […]

Yesterday’s New York Times/CBS poll made bleak reading for the senator for Massachusetts for other reasons. […] Fifty-seven per cent said “most of the time he says what he thinks people want to hear”, while only a third thought he stayed true to his beliefs.

So there we have it. The fact that Kerry is a lying two-faced weasel is so painfully obvious that the voters have already worked it out, and he’s doing even worse than Al Gore. He’s so awful that people would rather vote for Ralph Nader’s pointless ego-trip than support Kerry. The Democrats have chosen self-destruction once again; get ready for four more years of Bush.

“I’m the only person in the United States Senate who has been elected four times who has voluntarily refused to ever take one dime of political action committee, special interest money in my elections”

—John Kerry

AP continues the story:

Kerry collected more than $470,000 directly from companies and unions in 2002 [just before those types of donations were outlawed] for his Citizen Soldier Fund, and spent large amounts of it sowing goodwill in key primary states just before Congress banned the use of such “soft money” donations, according to records his group filed with the IRS.

More than $100,000 of those donations came from telecommunications and Internet companies that have had a direct interest in the work of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee on which Kerry serves.

For instance, nearly every major cellular phone company donated to Kerry’s committee, including AT&T Wireless ($7,500), Nextel ($5,000), Verizon Wireless ($5,000), T-Mobile ($5,000), and Cingular ($5,000). The head of Internet publishing giant International Data Group gave $50,000, while the chairman of the Google Web site chipped in another $25,000.

Supporters of weaselly John Kerry decided to emulate Howard Dean, and used the Internet to organize a meetup of Kerry supporters in Boston. Seven people turned up.