Just Powers

There are crazy house-renovation goings-on in my world. Mike and I are working on the house he still owns in Pennsylvania, in an effort to get it ready to sell. I haven’t talked about it much because it is mostly incredibly boring. This past weekend however we put in a new tile floor in the kitchen that I just MUST tell you about.

We knew we had to replace the beat up white and gold linoleum with diamonds on it, but we weren’t sure exactly what to put in its place. Then on one of our many trips to Lowe’s we came across EDGE tile.

The miracle of modern technology! EDGE is basically pre-fabricated tile. No glue required, no spacers, and it is practically fool-proof. Two ceramic tiles are mounted on backerboard that locks together. You just lay out a foam underlayment, place the panels of tile on top and lock them together. When the whole thing is finished, grout with their cheese-whiz-like cans of grout, and voila! A new tile floor that you can walk on in an hour!

Now, to be fair, it took Mike and I six hours to do the 5′x9′ kitchen, and getting the panels of tile to line up perfectly was tricky at times. But overall, I think the time required was less and the fights we had were fewer than we would have had with traditional tile. We are so proud of ourselves we can hardly stand it.

Dick Cheney got a taste of his own medicine this morning during an interview with reporters. His response was to make a joke about it: “Must be a friend of John…, er, ah - never mind.” Maybe not the BEST time for a joke dick…

How did this help? (Via Boing Boing and Radar Online)

Found this on Annatopia, who doesn’t know where it came from. Nevertheless, it rocks:

I am not a huge fan of Titanic, but I was watching it last night as I fell asleep and I got this weird feeling of deja vu. After thinking about it, I realized that The Titanic disaster is similar in a lot of ways to Katrina and the government response failure of the last 8 days:

• The folks who ran the Titanic had been warned there were icebergs in the area, but chose to ignore the warnings because getting to New York as fast as possible meant selling more tickets. The Bush Administration had been warned that the levees in New Orleans were going to need repair to withstand a category 3 storm or higher, but chose to ignore the warnings because they and their rich buddies needed a tax break, and Halliburton needed a nice rebuilding contract in Iraq.

• The Titanic held 3,547 passengers but there were only enough lifeboats on board to hold 1,178 of them, and no lifeboat drill was ever discussed or practiced. When New Orleans residents were told about the mandatory evacuation, the “shelter of last resort”, the Superdome, couldn’t hold all of them, and no evacuation plan beyond “Get out” was discussed or rehearsed.

• The steerage passengers, those in the lower class, were not told about the crisis until the lifeboats had been almost filled with first and second class passengers, at which point they had to fend for themselves as the ship went down. We know what happened in New Orleans.

Just found this post on Factesque that says it better than I can:

It’s hard to think of the imagery of the past week - the rising flood waters, the drowning victims, the separated families, the evacuees stuffed into and later even locked into domed holding pens and left to fend for themselves in the ensuing chaos - without thinking of the Titanic. (read more)

So even with all of our technology and “progress”, humanity has apparently learned nothing in the past 100 years. We are as focused on class as we ever were, and it continues to be fatal to be poor no matter what century you are living in.

The level of failure around Katrina, as even Europeans have expressed, is astounding. It’s hard to get your head around actually. Everyone knows that when catastrophe strikes, there are going to be things out of the control of those in charge. This is accepted and understood. What is so stunning is the number of things that have gone wrong with this disaster that were within the control of our leaders.

They knew - they have known for years that New Orleans was vulnerable. They knew last week that a huge hurricane was about to hit. They knew on Tuesday that a catastrophe was occuring and people were dying.

And yet, budgets to shore up the levees were repeatedly cut, no planning was done prior to the hurricane hitting, and after it hit, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Dennis Hastert and Andrew Card, among others, remained on vacation and attended campaign fundraisers.

This is not about Republican or Democrat - poor leadership is not only the domain of one party - but it most definitely is about politics. It is about who we elect as our leaders, the choices they make on our behalf, and whether we are paying attention to the job they are doing before it is too late.

Not everyone is meant to be a leader. A good leader is able to respond to crisis in ways the rest of us are not. A good leader does not get caught up in what is best for their career, but what is best for those they lead. They know that whatever despair and distress the people around them experience is their own. A good leader is selfless and sacrificing, giving up vacations and whatever else is required to fix what is broken. A good leader is not interested in covering their ass when they don’t do a good enough job. They admit they screwed up and figure out how not to do it again. A good leader knows that the way to spread hope is not to fly over, but to walk through.

Most of our leaders have failed us. In the days and weeks and years before the disaster of Katrina they just didn’t care enough to prevent what is happening now, and in the days since the hurricane hit they are too busy covering their asses to fix it. These are not leaders, but small, pathetic men and women who don’t have the courage to admit they screwed up, choosing instead to pretend they are doing the best they can.

The only person in this entire debacle who we deserve to have as a leader is the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin. His words during this radio interview were those of a man who didn’t care about reelection or which fellow politicians he pissed off, only how to help the people he has been charged with leading.

Because Americans are rarely faced with situations like this one, I think we forget why we elect leaders in the first place. We get lulled into thinking their only job is to sit in their white castle and debate issues that don’t affect most of us, so who cares who wins or loses elections? The complete lack of leadership around this disaster has reminded us what our leaders are for. I hope we remember it next time an election rolls around. There are people out there who can lead, we just aren’t electing them.