Conservative Revolutionary American Party III

Sunday, June 03, 2007

The Progress Report:

KATRINA

Weathering the Storm

Occurring only 18 months after Hurricane Katrina, the devastating tornadoes in Greensburg, KS this month again prompted the question of whether our government can adequately respond to another Katrina-like storm. For residents of New Orleans, that question will be particularly pressing this summer, as the hurricane season officially begins this Friday. Hurricane prediction experts expect a "very active" tropical storm season for 2007, estimating "the probability of a major hurricane hitting the Gulf Coast at 49 percent, compared to last century's average of 30 percent." To prepare for another Katrina, the federal government needs to develop an adequate response system, including the rejuvenation of a shattered emergency response network in New Orleans. Unfortunately, the government has failed to provide this system, leaving the residents of New Orleans again woefully unprepared for the active hurricane season on the horizon.

AILING PUBLIC SERVICES: Nearly two years after Katrina, much of New Orleans's public infrastructure is under reconstruction and stretched dangerously thin. General infrastructure repairs, "which by law are to be funded by federal sources, continue to be mired in red tape." As of April, 298 "essential public buildings" remain unusable, as "bureaucratic hurdles impede the dispersal of allocated federal funds." For example, 70 public schools remain closed, crippling the ability of families to regain their footing. The area is struggling with only 64 percent of health care facilities open and no state-licensed hospitals reopening since Oct. 2006. The effects of a broken health care system permeate the city. With psychiatric hospital closures since Katrina causing overcrowded emergency rooms, Terry Ebbert, director of the New Orleans's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, sees "a crisis in emergency mental health care." "Of the 200-plus psychiatric beds that existed in the city prior to Katrina, only 20 are in service at the moment." Police and ambulance drivers now must wait "hours" with these patients to bring them adequate emergency care, "depriving the city of essential crime fighters and first responders." Subsequently, the murder and violent crime surged in the last year, "clearly outpac[ing] the city's population growth."

IRAQ LIMITS EMERGENCY RESPONSE: "To put it bluntly, the members of the Guard cannot protect us here if they are fighting over there," said Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Lawrence Korb this week. "Countless lives were lost" waiting for help when Katrina struck in 2005, as "the combat brigades of Louisiana and Mississippi and their equipment were in Iraq and Afghanistan." While most of the state's National Guard will remain at home for this hurricane season, Iraq has absorbed vehicles and equipment necessary for hurricane response in New Orleans. Come storm season, "the Louisiana National Guard still lacks hundreds of military troop trucks that can forge high water. ... [T]he 256th Infantry Brigade's yearlong combat tour in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 gets the blame for the vehicle shortage." With a shortage of 200 to 300 vehicles, "We're below 50 percent for authorized equipment" said Lt. Col. Pete Schneider, Louisiana Guard spokesman. "Do I have enough for a major event? No. For a smaller event, yes." And the federal government "still lacks a formal structure for coordinating a national response," said Coast Guard head Adm. Thad Allen yesterday. According to Allen, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is still "reworking its national response plan to incorporate the lessons of Katrina and other incidents." To train and equip the necessary units, "the president should ask the Congress to increase the budget of the DHS by at least $10 billion, the cost of one month's operations in Iraq."

STILL UNREADY TO HANDLE THE STORM: According to a recent investigation from National Geographic, "flaws in New Orleans' repaired levee system could leave the region vulnerable to another disastrous breach." Even a less powerful storm than Katrina "could breach the levees if it hit this season." In rebuilt levees by the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet ship channel, which broke in more than 20 places during Katrina and led "to devastating flooding in the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish," engineers found several areas where storms have eroded the newly constructed levees. The engineers also found that, currently, "water appears to be seeping under the stout new floodwall erected along the Industrial Canal to protect the Lower Ninth Ward." A recent report from the Government Accountability Office revealed that water pumping systems installed by the Army Corps of Engineers in 2006 would only be operating -- at best -- at 82 percent of maximum capacity, with the total capacity still not meeting the "drainage needs to keep the city from flooding during a hurricane." One engineer who works with the corps said "that in the next big storm the [flood gates and pumps] may be 'doomed to fail' as the gates lack any mechanism to remove debris that could keep them from closing in advance of a storm. The corps is currently depending on divers to clear obstructions."

CELEBRATING DANGER: The federal government is more concerned with fanfare and glitz rather than real preparedness for the vigorous storm season ahead. National Hurricane Center director Bill Proenza said recently that the administration is "spending millions of dollars on a publicity campaign that could be used to plug budget shortfalls hurricane forecasters are struggling with." The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is spending up to $4 million to publicize a 200th anniversary celebration while the agency has cut $700,000 from hurricane research, Proenza said. "No question about it, it is not justified. ... It is using appropriated funds for self promotion." "It's part of our responsibility to tell the American people what we do," a NOAA spokesman said in defense. "It's inaccurate and unfair to just characterize this as some sort of self-celebration."

Back From the Dead and Facing Life - Trial Recalls Horrors of the Klan

By Ewen MacAskill
The Guardian UK

Wednesday 30 May 2007

Ex-policeman, 71, accused of 1964 race killings. Victim's brother traced suspect said to be dead.

Thomas Moore is looking forward to finally coming face-to-face with James Ford Seale, a Ku Klux Klansman who came back from the dead. "I want to look at him," he said. "I want to tell him about the pain he caused me and my family."

Mr Moore, 63, a retired sergeant-major, recalled the day he found out that Mr Seale was still alive. "I was so happy. We thought he was dead - and so did everyone else."

The trial opens here today of Mr Seale, 71, a former worker in a paper plant, crop-duster and policeman, accused of kidnapping and conspiracy in relation to the murder of two black teenagers in 1964, one of them Mr Moore's brother. According to the indictment, the two 19-year-olds, Charles Moore and Henry Dee, were kidnapped by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, tortured and dumped in the Mississippi, Moore tied to a jeep engine block, and, according to an FBI informant at the time, still breathing.

The killings marked the beginning of a summer of madness, as the KKK responded to the civil rights movement with the fiery crosses, church bombings and murders depicted in Alan Parker's 1989 film Mississippi Burning.

The Seale prosecution could be among the last of the KKK trials. Although the justice department has promised to re-open cases, witnesses are dying off and files have been lost.

Now living in Colorado, Mr Moore had been brought up in Franklin County, one of the strongholds of the White Knights. He returned in 2005 with a Canadian film-maker, David Ridgen, to investigate the murders. Pulling up at a petrol station for an egg and sausage sandwich, he met by chance a distant cousin, Kenny Byrd.

Mr Moore explained why they were there and said it was a pity that Mr Seale, who had been one of the main suspects, was dead. His family had been saying so since 2000. The local Clarion-Ledger had reported it as fact: so too had the Los Angeles Times. Mr Byrd replied: "Hell no, he lives over there."

Mr Moore traced lost files, spoke to potential witnesses, harassed former Klansmen, mobilised the African-American community and successfully campaigned to have the FBI re-open the case.

Mr Seale is expected to plead not guilty in a trial expected to last about a fortnight. If found guilty, he faces life sentences.

Mississippi is different these days, at least on the surface. It is evident to anyone arriving at the airport at Jackson, now called Jackson-Evers International in recognition of the civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, who was assassinated in 1963. It is evident, too, in the fact that the judge who will try the case is African-American, Henry Wingate.

But Heidi Beirich, deputy director of intelligence at a Jackson-based civil rights group, the Southern Poverty Law Centre, which investigates hate crimes, cautioned that although the KKK and institutionalised racism is mainly a thing of the past, Mississippi still has problems. She noted that when the state voted in 2002 to retain the Confederate flag, a symbol of hate for African-Americans, the divide was on racial grounds. African-Americans in the state continue to live in the poorest areas, with the worst schools.

"As far as the Klan is concerned, its heyday is definitely in the past. It hit its peak in the 1920s at 4 million. The number of Klansmen is way down: we estimate 5,000-6,000. It is not a cohesive organisation any longer: it is fragmented. They are no longer capable of the kind of terror they rained down on the South in the 1950s and 1960s," Ms Beirich said.

But the sense of dread inspired by the KKK has not gone completely. Ridgen, who put together a documentary Mississippi Cold Case, said: "The psychological threat was always there. There was fear every time in Franklin County. We never took the same route. We never told anyone in advance about coming."

At the trial, the key witness is likely to be a former Klansman, Charles Edwards, a suspect at the time, who is expected to give evidence against Mr Seale in return for immunity. Former FBI agents who carried out a fairly thorough investigation at the time are also scheduled to testify. After their investigation in 1964, they handed the case over to the local justice department who, as was not unusual at the time, quickly dropped it.

No real explanation has been given for the killings. Klansmen at the time told the FBI that Mr Dee had been peeping at one of their wives while others alleged gun smuggling into a black church. The indictment suggests otherwise: "The White Knights ... targeted for violence African-Americans they believed were involved in civil rights activity in order to intimidate and retaliate against such individuals."

Mr Dee's sister, Thelma Collins, who now lives in Louisiana, said yesterday she could not remember him being involved in any civil rights activity. "He was quiet, never said much," she recalled. She is saddened that the case has taken 43 years to come to court: "It is pitiful that those boys were killed and no one did anything about it."

Like Mrs Collins, Mr Moore will be given his chance to make a victim's statement in court. He said: "I want to tell how it is to go without a brother, my son without an uncle, how Charles never had the opportunity to make mistakes, to live his life."

Backstory

The reopening of racist murder cases from the 1960s in the South began in 1990 when a white supremacist, Byron La Beckwith, was indicted and eventually jailed for the assassination in 1963 of Medgar Evers, then chairman in Mississippi of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. This encouraged the FBI and local justice departments to look again at unsolved cases. Since then, there have been six prosecutions in Mississippi, including Mr Seale's today. Authorities in seven states have re-examined a total of 29 killings and made 29 arrests, leading to 22 convictions.

One of the most prominent was the trial and jailing in 2001 of Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry for the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four young girls. The revulsion created by the bombing helped turn public opinion behind the civil rights movement. In 2005, Edgar Ray Killen, 80, was jailed for the murder of the three civil rights activists depicted in Mississippi Burning. But the reality is that there may not be many more cases brought to court: elderly witnesses are dying off and records of crimes have been lost.

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Lawyer: Cheney Visitor Logs Not Recorded

By Pete Yost
The Associated Press

Tuesday 29 May 2007

Washington - A lawyer for Vice President Dick Cheney told the Secret Service in September to eliminate data on who visited Cheney at his official residence, a newly disclosed letter states.

The Sept. 13, 2006, letter from Cheney's lawyer says logs for Cheney's residence on the grounds of the Naval Observatory are subject to the Presidential Records Act.

Such a designation prevents the public from learning who visited the vice president.

The Justice Department filed the letter Friday in a lawsuit by a private group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, seeking the identities of conservative religious leaders who visited Cheney at his official residence.

The newly disclosed letter about visitors to Cheney's residence is accompanied by an 18-page Secret Service document revealing the agency's long-standing practice has been to destroy printed daily access lists of visitors to the residence.

Separately, the agency says it has given Cheney's office handwritten logs of who visits him at his personal residence.

Because of pending lawsuits, the Secret Service says it is now keeping copies of all material on visitors to Cheney's residence. According to the Secret Service document, Cheney's office has approved the agency's retention of the records, while maintaining they are presidential records subject to Cheney's control.

"The latest filings make clear that the administration has been destroying documents and entering into secret agreements in violation of the law," said Anne Weismann, CREW's chief counsel.

Regarding visitor information, the Secret Service "shall not retain any copy of these documents and information" once the material is given to the office of the vice president, says the September 2006 letter by Shannen Coffin, counsel to the vice president.

"If any documents remain in your possession, please return them to OVP as soon as possible," the letter added.

The vice president's lawyer wrote the letter as The Washington Post sought copies of Cheney's visitors at his residence. The Post requested the records under the Freedom of Information Act. The newspaper subsequently dropped a lawsuit seeking the information.

The letter regarding the vice president's residence was in addition to an agreement quietly signed between the White House and the Secret Service a year ago when questions were raised about visits to the executive compound by convicted influence peddler Jack Abramoff.

That agreement, which didn't surface publicly until late last year, said White House entry and exit logs were presidential records not subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

When the agreement was signed in May 2006, a number of private groups and news organizations had filed FOIA requests with the Secret Service in an effort to identify how many times Abramoff or members of his lobbying team visited the White House.

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For the Love of Whales

By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Environmental Editor

Wednesday 30 May 2007

Once again, in what has become an annual rite, Japan, Iceland and Norway will try, at the meeting of the International Whaling Commission this week, to overturn the international ban on hunting whales, while a global coalition of whale lovers urges governments to stand firm against the move.

This year the meeting takes place in Anchorage, Alaska, where Japan has introduced a new twist to the debate. Japan is asking the IWC to approve a quota for traditional cultural whaling along its coasts, similar to the quotas in place for traditional subsistence whale hunts in Alaska.

Japan has also announced that it will be going after a self-administered quota of 50 humpback whales in the Southern Ocean next year. Japan began a program of so-called "scientific" whaling in 1987 after the IWC imposed the ban on commercial whaling. Japan kills around a thousand whales every year under this program, mostly the smaller minke whales.

Targeting humpback whales is winning Japan no friends. Humpbacks are one of the most charismatic whale species. Known for their enchanting songs and acrobatic displays, they are a whale watcher's delight.

Australian Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull called Japan's plan to kill humpbacks "needlessly provocative," and warned Japan that its whaling practices have a negative impact on public opinion in Australia.

New Zealand Conservation Minister Chris Carter said, "World opinion is on the side of conservation, and the vast majority of people on Earth don't want to eat whales; they want to protect them at a time of global climate change. You know, killing whales shouldn't be happening."


	Trish and Wally Franklin at their home in Byron Bay, Australia. Trish and Wally have studied the humpback whales of Hervey Bay for the past fifteen years. They are the founders of Oceania, a whale conservation and education project. (Photo: Kelpie Wilson)

Trish and Wally Franklin run a whale conservation group in Byron Bay, Australia called Oceania. Fifteen years ago, they set out to study the humpback whales of Hervey Bay, a protected inlet on the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef. The Franklins spend four months each year with the whales in Hervey Bay. They also run several different educational outreach programs with the goal of protecting the whales.

I visited the Franklins at their home, and I asked Trish what prompted her to devote so much of her life to whales and dolphins. She said that initially she had been inspired by a story a friend told to her about a mythic journey with dolphins. She said, "I have devoted so much of my life to Cetacea because I cannot envisage a world without them. The planet would suffer one of the greatest losses in all of human history, and would have to live with the weight of the void left in their absence."

Trish Franklin is not alone in her feelings, as the Franklins have discovered through their years of work with the humpbacks of Hervey Bay.

One of the interesting things about humpback whales is that their tail flukes have unique markings on them that make it possible to identify individuals. The Franklins helped to start the Humpback Whale Icon project that has encouraged towns and communities on the east coast of Australia to adopt a whale of their own, picking an individual from the Franklins' catalog of images and tracking its history through the couple's annual expeditions.

Many towns wanted to adopt an unnamed whale so they could name it themselves, Trish said. Before she studied whales, Trish had studied Australia's aboriginal people, and she was pleased that the communities were contacting aboriginal groups in their areas to find a name from their languages. Many of the first people had whale myths or dreamings - even, according to Trish, people who did not live near the coast.

The Franklins have been amazed at how popular the Icon project has become. Some of the communities have asked their town councils to write to sister cities in Japan to tell them how much the whales mean to them. The Japanese whaling fleet could end up killing a town's adopted whale once the humpbacks leave Hervey Bay on the annual migration to their Antarctic feeding grounds.

Wally Franklin claims that most Japanese people don't know about the Japanese government's whale-killing program and wouldn't condone it if they did. As for the issue of cultural whaling, while Japan did have a traditional coastal whale hunt at one time, the modern Japanese whaling fleet is fully industrialized. "The Japanese never did pelagic or deep ocean whaling before World War II," he said.

But in Japan, as in the rest of the world, the culture is changing. Most Japanese don't eat much whale meat any more, and whale watching has become quite popular. Japan makes more money from whale watching tours than it does from selling whale meat. Some former whale hunters have already transitioned to work as whale watching guides.

According to the Franklins, the real reason why Japan is being so "provocative" about its whaling program has much more to do with larger fisheries issues than with a cultural desire for whale meat. The Japanese government is worried that if they concede on the issue of whales, tuna could be next. The tuna fishery worldwide is in collapse. Tuna stocks have declined by 90 percent over the last 100 years. Out of those remaining stocks, Japan takes about 30 percent of the annual catch. The Japanese have a huge need for marine life because it is part of their staple diet. As fisheries continue to decline, Japan is in a precarious position.

Wally Franklin said, "Japan has brought its fisheries problem to the table of the International Whaling Commission. They have abused the process. The real issue for Japan is fisheries, and whales are just a red herring - excuse the pun. The Japanese see an advantage in keeping whaling under discussion."

Love for whales may take different forms in different cultures. An Eskimo hunter may pray to the spirit of the whale he kills to feed his family. An American child may pray that a lost mother humpback and her calf make their way safely out of the Sacramento River and back to the ocean. A town in Australia may pray that the Japanese whaling fleet does not take the community's adopted icon.

But what the Japanese government is doing - using whales as a pawn in an international resource dispute, seems to have no connection with either love or culture.

The Franklins have found that their campaign to save whales is growing wildly and organically. Trish described a recent slide show presentation to kindergartners. "The teachers quieted the children and told them, 'now don't you speak unless it is to ask a question.' But as soon as it got dark, they started talking, saying things like: 'I've been a whale.' 'I've been swimming with whales.' And they kept talking about their imaginative experiences, either in dreams or just their imagination of what they knew about whales and dolphins. We hardly got to make our presentation, they had so many stories."

Trish Franklin has more than 35,000 photographs of whales and hundreds of hours of video. Because "so many children have never seen a whale," the Franklins are involved in a new project that will make these archives available to the public. Their son Mark, who is a sound and video engineer, is editing the video into short clips. The project is called iWhales.

My favorite clip is called "The Girl and the Whale." It is a lovely meditation on interspecies communication. The reason I love whales and want to see them protected is because they themselves have language and culture. They are fellow sentient beings, and the planet would be lonelier without them.


Yumbalehla's tail. Yumbalehla is an Australian-born whale who has been adopted by the city of Byron Bay. (Photo: Trish Franklin / The Oceania Project / iWhales.org)

Trish Franklin left me with one last story about humpback whales, and an image, which I share with you here.

Yumbalehla's Tale
By Trish Franklin
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

Wednesday 30 May 2007

I would raise this one image of the journey of these great sentient beings to those who hunt down whales and kill dolphins with no understanding of the connectedness of all life.

Imagine a female humpback reaching the age of sexual maturity. She is five to six years of age. Her name is Yumbalehla (meaning "always on the move" - an Australian Northern Rivers Aboriginal word). Yumbalehla travels with her fellow humpbacks from the icy waters of Antarctica to the warm waters of the Great Barrier Reef lagoons, where she and all of her group were born. She is returning home.

Yumbalehla has had many years of training to reach this important stage in her life. Her mother was successful in giving birth to Yumbalehla, in feeding her fat rich milk at the cost of her own health, in training Yumbalehla to learn how to breach and lob-tail, to be so in tune with her mother that she learns to remain still at her side in the presence of male humpbacks and learns to slip over her mother's back away from danger, as she too will need to train her offspring in the coming years.

Yumbalehla travels in silence past Byron Bay, the most easterly part of Australia. She knows the journey well through the teachings of her mother and the group as a whole. Turning in a northeasterly direction around Byron Bay, she heads towards the Great Barrier Reef to mate.

Yumbalehla willingly takes on the challenge of mating and her eleven-month pregnancy. Knowing now all the dangers of shark nets along the coast, and the presence of orca further off shore, she remains steadily vigilant until she reaches her destination.

She is aware that she will need to conserve her energy during the 10,000-kilometer migratory journey from the Barrier Reef breeding grounds to the Antarctic feeding grounds before returning to give birth.

Will Yumbalehla have a successful pregnancy? Will she be able to avoid the shark nets or other forms of entanglement from man-made fishing equipment? Will she make it back down to the great southern ocean to feed on swarms of krill, fattening herself up in readiness for the return journey home to her birthing place?

Yumbalehla has heard tell of a further threat. She has heard tell of the threat of the intent once again of her kin being hunted and killed. "It's only fifty of her kind," they say. "What impact will killing a few humpbacks have on her kind?"

Yumbalehla travels in silence, listening to her kin singing the dreaming tracks to and from the southern ocean. She continues her life's journey, "always on the move."

The loss of Yumbalehla would be a human tragedy, disconnecting us still further from life. The challenges that Yumbalehla faces every moment of her life, and the threats to the survival of her kin and culture, continue to engage my attention in raising awareness about whales, dolphins and their ocean environment.

Kelpie Wilson is Truthout's environment editor. Trained as a mechanical engineer, she embarked on a career as a forest protection activist, then returned to engineering as a technical writer for the solar power industry. She is the author of Primal Tears, an eco-thriller about a hybrid human-bonobo girl. Greg Bear, author of Darwin's Radio, says: "Primal Tears is primal storytelling, thoughtful and passionate. Kelpie Wilson wonderfully expands our definitions of human and family."

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An Interview With David Iglesias

By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/053007J.shtml

Wednesday 30 May 2007

Last week, a day after Monica Goodling testified before Congress about her role in the US attorney scandal, I sat down for an exclusive, wide-ranging interview with David Iglesias to discuss the implications of that testimony.

Iglesias, the former US attorney for New Mexico, was one of eight US attorneys fired in December for reasons that appear to have been motivated by partisan politics. Goodling is the former White House liaison for the Justice Department.

Iglesias discussed Goodling's testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, and how what she had told lawmakers about the scandal might lead to a criminal investigation against Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty. Goodling had accused both men of misleading Congress during their testimonies earlier this year. Iglesias told me the Congressional investigations might lead to a criminal probe that could net Gonzales and McNulty on perjury and/or obstruction of justice charges.

McNulty has announced that he will resign later this summer.

Iglesias told me that, while we still do not know how he and his colleagues were placed on the termination list, he does believe a "smoking gun" exists that will lead directly to Karl Rove and blow the scandal wide open.

"I believe somewhere on an RNC computer - on some server somewhere - there's an email from Karl Rove stating why we need to be axed," Iglesias told me in an hour-long interview.

Iglesias said Rove, former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and perhaps other officials are likely responsible for placing his name and the names of his colleagues on a list of US attorneys to be fired, because he had refused to launch federal investigations and prosecute individuals purely for partisan reasons.

"If the Justice Department didn't have anything to do with placing presidential appointees such as me and my colleagues on a list to be terminated, the only other possible place would be the White House," Iglesias said. "Harriet Miers, Karl Rove or some of their underlings."

Iglesias also told me that, beginning in 2005, his office had come under pressure when a close confidant of Karl Rove had alleged there was widespread voter fraud in New Mexico. Iglesias said he had investigated those allegations tirelessly and found zero evidence to back them up. He added that, based on evidence that had surfaced thus far and "Karl Rove's obsession with voter fraud issues throughout the country," he now believes GOP operatives had wanted him to go after Democratic-funded organizations in an attempt to swing the 2006 midterm elections to Republicans.

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In Defense of Cindy Sheehan [VIDEO]

Posted by Adam Howard at 1:28 PM on May 29, 2007.

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks says that there should be statues all across America in Cindy Sheehan's honor.

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Uygur makes a couple of really good points here. First off, Sheehan is another example of progressives tearing down one of their own icons and secondly, regardless of what you think of what Sheehan said from time to time, her voice and her actions were incredibly important in advancing the anti-war cause in this country. I'm not sure about his bit about the statues, but I do think that Sheehan deserves our respect and our admiration for what she did. Check out the video to your right for more.

Tagged as: uygur, sheehan, anti-war

Adam Howard is the editor of PEEK.

The Rosie O'Donnell Effect

Posted by Guest Blogger at 2:07 PM on May 29, 2007.

Amanda Guinzburg: Rosie O'Donnell's fights with Elisabeth Hasselbeck did nothing if they did not wake us up.

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This post, written by Amanda Guinzburg, originally appeared on The Huffington Post

Every time Rosie O'Donnell would walk on stage during The View's opening, she made a gesture of feigned shock that there were all these people wildly applauding for her. She would turn her hands upwards and furrow her brow in exaggerated confusion and then as she'd continue out towards the table (trailed by the other consistently waving co-hosts), her open Irish face would break into a bright wide smile. She was, it seemed from the very start, saying to everyone who watched: I am going to take you with me now, into the land of bright lights, quick touch-ups and major league pretend.

But doing that while still following the rest of the rules of network television proved ultimately an impossible balancing act for a woman who has remarkably balanced a great deal. Or rather a task whose compromises, not just of time away from her beloved family (a family, it can safely be said, she made a natural part of morning conversation despite the fact that it is unconventional by traditional -- and it would seem now, in large part thanks to her -- almost archaic standards) but of her fiercely held moral standards of what is right and what is real.

Television has taken almost every ounce of reality away from the very genre so named. We are all supposed to be in on the joke now -- that everything we see is edited and manipulated to serve some larger narrative. To wit: the debauched kids on MTV's Real World: The Moon! (Not really, but they're seriously running out of places to house these drunken whores), the wrecked and weeping women riding away mascara-streaked in limousines after being dumped by the latest Bachelor, or the ever available desperados of afternoon talk shows. Jerry Springer is still perhaps the most extreme, and even he now has his own meta-show, The Springer Hustle where we see that guests are so heavily prepped by producers they're actually told at what point to physically attack their cheating spouse (when the lie detector or DNA test comes back positive) or racist neighbor (when he or she inevitably and often gleefully uses the "n" word)

For Rosie what is real is synonymous with the truth and the truth is as precious a commodity as it is rare, at least in the realm of show business. On her heavily trafficked website, she often writes about things like feeding geese, befriending squirrels, baby birds hatching in a corner of her roof, her wife's conservative family, her children's small triumphs and the ordinary people she encounters' various struggles to survive. She puts her money where her mouth is and consistently gives it away, threatening to fire her financial advisors should she ever wind up on a Richest Celeb list. But she's also fully recognized and taken advantage of the national audience she regained by joining The View this year, speaking out and devoting whole hours to issues like depression, autism, and the devastating illnesses now ravaging the 9/11 first responders.

Then there is The War. Rosie has relentlessly, with unmistakable rage and palpable grief refused, despite Barbara Walter's awkward discomfort with it, to stop speaking out about this criminal administration and the Iraq War it made up, dressed up, and sold to our nation. "WAKE UP, AMERICA!" Rosie has, for years now, commanded from within the sometimes-confusing typographical trenches of her blog. Despite the fact that the media's manipulations drove her from the very show she reinvented, Rosie's fights with Elisabeth Hasselbeck did nothing if they did not wake us up. They were riveting in their rawness and to the extent one side of them ever seemed prepped, Rosie made no attempt to hide her disgust with such executively borne machinations. On what O'Donnell has since called Nuclear Wednesday, Hasselbeck made an analogy about a deadline for pulling out of the war and a timed football pass. Nothing could have articulated more clearly what Rosie seemed to find so anathema about this woman's politics and ultimately her personal comportment. While Elisabeth appeared to almost relish the supposed gamesmanship of their political throw downs -- going off to do sound bytes for the nightly "entertainment" show after Wednesday's meltdown and assuring the public she wasn't "mad" and that they would most definitely remain friends, they wore Rosie O'Donnell so far down you could literally see it in her eyes. They grew distant long before that eventual (and perhaps inevitable) dénouement.

Rosie said it was the split screen that was the final nail in her View coffin. It makes sense. The split screen implied that these feelings and ideas Rosie holds so dear and was trying, so very hard it seemed, to communicate to Elisabeth (but also to anyone who had ever twisted her words to serve their personal agenda) about truth and justice and loyalty and humanity could be turned into an empty gesture of celluloid commercialism: Selling Rosie as the worst and most dishonest caricature of herself, one side of a two dimensional screen. Kind of like what the government has done to our nation. Every day veracity is under siege in America as the current administration tries to warp what's actually happening while the vast majority of our mainstream media remains complicit with their systematic airbrushing of the bloody facts.

We who compulsively tuned into the video blog she began a few weeks ago with her quirky long time producer-cum-mustache artist and giant-turkey-wing-eating hair stylist saw that Rosie was clearly far more at ease back stage, behind closed doors with a face naked of all concealers, singing along to Amy Winehouse or Tina Turner and answering some of the thousands of questions she gets daily than she ever would be out on that carefully orchestrated studio set.

I am confident, however, that Rosie will return. Not to The View, but to the unmatched power that is television. She'll don the necessary war paint and head out under the hot white lights and blinking audience signs. She may act more or less surprised that people still love her, despite and because of her rage. The fact is this: A steadfast quest to reveal what is really real requires Rosie stay out here, on the front lines of truth.

Tagged as: media, the view, o'donnell

Amanda Guinzburg is a freelance editor and award winning fiction writer living in New York City. She has written a film adaptation for DMC films and is currently working on an original screenplay, a television pilot and her first novel which will be published in 2009.