Category: Uncategorized

In case you’ve ever wondered about the anal sex patterns of your fellow Americans, the CDC now has the dish. (The answer: 34 percent of men and 30 percent of women 15-44 have had heterosexual anal sex.)
I’m very glad our government is on top of this issue. So to speak.

Today’s Wilmer-Hutchins story (and it’s a good one):
A baritone horn from a pawnshop. A $7,700 set of murals. A pizza crisper, cookie-dough scoops, and a Queen Anne loveseat for the principal’s office. According to state auditors, those are some of the ways Wilmer-Hutchins officials spent more than $270,000 in federal education funds – money that was supposed to pay for reading and math instruction for the district’s weakest students.
Including one of the best quotes I’ve had the privilege of typing:
“I don’t care if they have to sell a kidney, they need to pay this money back,” [said former W-H trustee Joan Bonner of the folks who misspent the district’s money]. “We know they don’t have a heart or a brain, but a kidney might be usable.”
(Several of you who know me well are chortling knowingly right now.)

Animal-loving types have to be told to stop flooding FEMA offices with phone calls because “the barrage of phone calls is now hampering [Gen. Honore’s] humanitarian missions, rather than helping.” Some folks on this site have apparently been posting Gen. Honore’s phone number and telling people to call it repeatedly so they can tell him…I don’t know what, really. “Worry about the puppies”?
As I said: I like animals too, but I’d like to think I know better than to flood an already-stressed emergency-management system with “save the kitties” calls. This isn’t your congressman before a vote — this is a disaster area. Priorities, people.

Two Wilmer-Hutchins stories in recent days: this ‘un and that ‘un. Another (more fun) one will probably be in tomorrow’s paper.
Also: Dallas-area readers, I’m having a party this Saturday night. Email me (jbenton at toast dot net) if you want an invite.
Also: The new Connie Price and the Keystones album kicks so much ass that I am now nearly assless. Instrumental funk at its finest. Here’s a link to sound samples in iTunes.

Not new, but: The House of Cosbys. Awesome.

For the record: I have nothing against animals. I generally find them cute. (And tasty!)
But sometimes animal types go too far.
Take this story. A friend of mine, DMN photographer Tom Fox, took this awesome photo of a poor little dog covered in oil and muck down in St. Bernard Parish. (Tom’s down there doing great stuff on Katrina.) It was a sad photo, obviously, and readers responded. (About 100 times more than they responded to photos of individual humans in distress, but that’s neither here nor there.)
Anyway, two days later, Tom saw the same dog and arranged to have it taken in by some animal rescuers. Thanks to Tom making the call, the dog is fine and waiting to be reunited with its owner (if he/she is still alive) or adopted.
A nice story, eh?
Actually, a bunch of clowns have decided to attack Tom for a variety of crazy reasons.
First: The Fake Dog Theory. Some folks are arguing that the dog Tom actually saved was a surrogate dog, that Tom was deviously involved in a tear-jerk dog-swap. (“I would be disapointed [sic] if the media were misleading everyone,” says one clown.) One person suspects Tom swapped the dog with another oil-covered dog two towns over.
Second: The Rude Photographer Theory. Several folks say Tom’s a war criminal because he didn’t immediately adopt the dog the moment he saw him, smother him with kisses, and rescue him right that minute. One fellow says there should be a law requiring reporters to immediately aid any animal they see in distress.
Are these people on Mars? There are packs of roving dogs all over Katrinaland. Tom is supposed to rescue them all? Even though he, I don’t know, has a job to do? And in any event, haven’t these people been watching TV? There were hundreds of thousands of people — actual human beings — in conditions worse than this dog. Did they get outraged then? Or is it just a puppy that leads to this sort of insanity?
In any event, it turns out that Tom did give the dog water and food, and probably would have done more if it hadn’t bitten one of his colleagues. He did call animal rescue the first time he saw the dog, but they didn’t respond immediately. Which is why the dog was still around a couple days later, when Tom saw him again and took matters into his own hands.
So, to recap: Tom is 100% responsible for getting this poor dog saved — and he’s still taking shit for it. Some people are just crazy.
In case it needs stating: Reporters and photographers working in Louisiana have all seen literally thousands of people who need help. And they’ve probably all seen hundreds of animals who need help. They can’t help them all, and it’s not their responsibility to.

Here’s my book review in Sunday’s paper. It’s of The Shame of the Nation, Jonathan Kozol’s luridly-subtitled new book. Have already gotten a few emails calling parts of my review “insulting,” which makes me think I’m doing my job.
I’ve forgotten to link to several of my stories recently. No worldbeaters in the bunch, but for the record: Baylor delays vote on chief, Wilmer-Hutchins High to house hurricane evacuees, and Houston, D/FW districts relaxing admission rules.

More sketchiness on Michael Brown’s resume. Turns out our FEMA chief, he of the horse-contest resume, claims to have been “an assistant city manager” “overseeing the emergency services division” in Edmund, Oklahoma, from 1975 to 1978. Which would be sorta impressive, considering he’s 50 years old today, which means he would have been a 20-year-old assistant city manager.
Of course he wasn’t: he was actually an assistant to the city manager. As in, he fetched the city manager’s coffee during a college internship.
He also claims to have been named “Outstanding Political Science Professor” at Central State University. Of course, he was never a professor at Central State, much less an outstanding one.
And he claims that, for the last 23 years, he has been director of the Oklahoma Christian Home, a nursing home. Which would explain why no one there has heard of him. As one veteran employee put it: “He was never director here, was never on the board of directors, was never executive director. He was never here in any capacity. I never heard his name mentioned here.”
Oh, and his former law-firm boss described him as “not serious and somewhat shallow,” which is why he got canned.
This man is in charge of dealing with natural disasters and terrorist attacks on America.
(For the record, the asshole Michael Brown is not the Michael Brown who reads this site. Who, to my knowledge, has never faked his resume, been an incompetent lawyer, or fucked up the greatest cataclysm to ever hit the United States of America.)

I’d wondered why my site stats showed an unusual number of searches for Opal Covey, Toledo’s resident crazy lady. I’d forgotten that she’s running for mayor again.
From a candidate’s debate Tuesday: “Ms. Covey opened by calling herself ‘a prophetess of God’ and closed by forecasting Hurricane Katrina-sized consequences if voters do not elect her. ‘I’m warning you,’ she said, in a speech that drew loud boos, ‘if you don’t change this government to God’s government, destruction will come, just as it did in New Orleans.’”
Also: “‘I want to give you the key that’s going to … put Toledo back on the map,’ Covey said. ‘[God] gave me a prophecy to read to you today…[Toledo has] fallen so hard and so dangerously that no man can bring you out, save God…I have shown my servant the miracle it will take to bring Toledo back to prosperity. This is the amusement park installment.'” That would be her grand plan, voiced before, to turn downtown Toledo into one big amusement park.
She’s also got a loose grasp on metaphor. From a written candidate Q&A with the local alt-weekly: “Q. What keeps you up at night? A. Nothing. I’m a sound sleeper.”
Yep, she’s a winner.
I used to be the city hall reporter for the Toledo newspaper, so campaign season back in Ohio is usually of inordinate interest to me. It looks like Carty Finkbeiner is a shoo-in winner. Which is good for local media. Carty was the mayor I covered, and he was enormous fun to deal with. “Colorful” would be the complimentary way to put it. (His let’s move deaf folks to the airport idea has taken on a life of its own.)
I have never been called more unprintable words by anyone else I’ve covered — maybe anyone else ever — but I have to admit, I like the guy. He’s the sort of energetic populist that you see a lot in Louisiana politics. And I’m not surprised he’s killing the competition in early polling, including the incumbent mayor.
By the way, it looks like Opal has a challenger as most crazy mayoral candidate this year. A fellow named Don Gozdowski thinks the key to ending urban poverty is improved hygiene for black people. He wants to be mayor so he can “end world hunger.” He wears flame ties. In the most recent debate: “Mr. Gozdowski quoted ’60s-era rock band The Animals and the actor Denzel Washington. He closed by donning black glasses and singing ‘I’ve Gotta Be Me.’” From the local college paper: “Gozdowski also said that though he’s never even been to a city council meeting, he has the ability to recognize and appreciate the heart of man.”
His all-purpose apology: “You’ve got to understand that what comes out of my mouth might not be what I mean.”

More debate about use of the word “refugee”:
– Scott Libin at Poynter, in effect, chickens out. “I see no easy answers to any of these questions,” blah blah blah. His disguised point seems to be: It’s silly to ban the word, but enough people have bitched about it that we might have to.
– The National Association of Black Journalists says it’s bad, falling on the silly backing that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has a legal definition for the word that requires international border crossing. Well of course it does — that’s a legal definition tied to triggers in international law. Michael Chertoff doesn’t get to decide how we use language.
In any event, the appeal to international law is clearly not the issue here. That’s a front for the real reason people are opposed to the term — they view it as an insult. That’s why the head of NABJ calls it a “loaded” word. If it were just inaccurate in his mind, he wouldn’t call it “loaded.” He thinks it’s an insult to be called a refugee. I don’t think so. And I think that opinion is itself an insult to refugees around the world.
NABJ suggests, among other things, “survivor.” Ugh. This reminds me of the people who call the media whenever we refer to a “cancer patient.” They insist that, from the moment of diagnosis on, the correct term is “cancer survivor.” Look, call yourself whatever you want. But you can’t chip perfectly good words out of the English language because you want to play Orwell.
– Don Wycliff at the Chicago Tribune agrees with me. “I find myself astonished at the hubbub that has blown up around this particular word…if the implication is that Americans cannot be sent fleeing from fires, floods, famine and other disasters, natural or manmade, or from political oppression, then it is plainly untrue…It is particularly surprising to hear [Jesse] Jackson making the argument against ‘refugees’ in terms of American exceptionalism, because part of what has made him such an effective participant in this country’s political debates of the last few decades has been his ability to puncture notions of American exceptionalism.”
– This wire story details which news organizations have bought into all this. Killing “refugee” off: The Washington Post (disappointing), The Boston Globe, NPR. Keeping it alive: The New York Times, Associated Press.