Help Haiti Today

.
You can help the people of Haiti. Huffington Post is building a comprehensive list. As one commenter there noted, you can make sure your money goes to a charity that will really help the people by checking charitynavigator.org.

In the early days of Prairie Sun Rising, I wrote "Let Them Eat Mud Cookies" about the dire everyday poverty of Haiti.

Now, the island has been devastated by an earthquake. For those who have so little, even a little contribution will go a long way. And it only takes a little time.

A Fargo group sponsored by Triumph Lutheran Church was already in Haiti on a service mission. They're okay. But they're going to be busy. I know of medical volunteer teams who have given of their own time to go over the years.

But the truth is, the need, the poverty, the circumstances of life in Haiti is so dire that these groups can't begin to do what needs doing alone. And now, the earthquake jolts us. We get caught up in our daily lives, the issues we care passionately about. But we can all help, even in the comfort of our own homes.

For the least of our brethren.... Remember? The lesson we were supposed to learn from Katrina?
.
crossposted at firedoglake's The Seminal

UPDATE: The President has spoken about Haiti and the massive logistical effort already underway overnight to lead our partners in the region and globally in the Haiti relief effort. Actions speak louder than sloganeering, now don't they. Information on how you can help at whitehouse.gov.

News coverage is heavy and fast moving, both at CNN and MSNBC. You'll find additional links on ways you can contribute at MSNBC.

How Many?

.
As the Democratic primary season drags on, enabled by the media lovin' the horserace ratings ad bucks narcissistic gasbaggery. As the presumptive Republican nominee McCain tries to distance himself from the fanatic fundamentalist Hagee. As the Current Occupant and his Rethuglican cronies try to stymie Jim Webb's 21st Century G.I. bill....

I have just one question.

To Hillary Clinton, John McCain, each and every one of their campaign surrogates, supporters and spokesmen. To Tim Russert, Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes and the rest of Faux News, George Stephanopoulus, Charles Gibson, Brian Williams, Katie Couric, Bob Shieffer, each and all of the print media who allowed themselves to be co-opted, embedded, spun, propagandized, b-b-Qued. To Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, the rest of your ilk.

How many of the lives sacrificed for Bush's Iraq bamboozlement do you take responsibility for? How many deaths in action? How many maimed? How many permanently PTSD-ed? How many suicides? How many who've been made monsters of torture?

How many? One? Ten? A thousand?

Because it's on all of you. Just as it's on me, and enabling, or blowing it off, or saying well, after November... just doesn't cut it. Cut the lies. Stop lying to us. Tell us the truth. So that we may clean and bind up our wounds as a nation, healed, but never unscarred.

And let us never forget. Never.
.
.
UPDATE: Was just steered to an interview on Democracy Now with Mary Tillman, mother of Pat Tillman. During that, a clip of Jessica Lynch was played, and she had this to say:

I’m still confused as to why they chose to lie and try to make me a legend, when the real heroics of my fellow soldiers that day were legendary: people like Lori Piestewa and First Sergeant Dowdy, who picked up fellow soldiers in harm’s way, or people like Patrick Miller or Sergeant Donald Walters, who actually did fight until the very end.

The bottom line is the American people are capable of determining their own ideals for heroes, and they don’t need to be told elaborate lies. I had the good fortune and opportunity to come home and to tell the truth. Many soldiers, like Pat Tillman, they did not have that opportunity. The truth of war is not always easy. The truth is always more heroic than the hype.

.
.
h/t to commenter LS at emptywheel

Welcome to America

.
Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.

Emma Lazarus

An old man, tired, weary, a Baptist minister, flees danger in Haiti and comes to America, seeking political asylum. Instead of freedom, America greets him with a detention center, and, when he falls ill, deficient medical care, and finally, hospitalization, where he dies alone.

His family here in America are not permitted to visit him.

A young woman from Somalia, fleeing a country where her family were killed, comes to America, seeking political asylum. Instead of freedom, she is detained and put on heavy duty antipsychotic medicine until a human rights group can arrange for her care and release.

Watching Scott Pelley's 60 Minutes report last night, the old man's niece recounting his last days, the frustration, and ultimately the sorrow, I wondered again, what have we allowed America to become?

60 Minutes collaborated with the Washington Post's singular genius reporter, Dana Priest, to report on the detention centers the Bush Administration has set up around the country to house warehouse immigrants seeking political asylum. They are not pretty places.

A middle-aged woman sits awaiting a life-and-death determination of whether she'll be deported. Since last August. Meanwhile, the lump in her leg continues to grow. From the Post:

Harvill is one of 33,000 immigration detainees in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE, on any given day. They are locked up in a patchwork of out-of-the-way federal detention compounds, private prisons and local jails. This unnoticed prison system was built for a quick revolving door of detainees -- into custody, out of the country. But often, people linger in detention for months or years.

These detainees, like other prisoners, are by law and regulation entitled to medical services if they are sick. But Harvill's journey through immigration detention provides a glimpse into a medical system that often fails those who need it most. It is an upside-down world where patients have no say, doctors and nurses on site have little power to administer timely treatment, and a managed-care system in Washington operates from a rulebook that emphasizes what is not covered rather than what is.

Immigrants...detainees...the line is blurring as the bureaucracy and the social compact of this country breaks down under the combined weight of the Bush Administration/Republican way of governance, its policies and incompetence.

"You know that there are people watching this interview who are saying to themselves, 'Castaneda was an illegal immigrant. He had a drug conviction. The people of the United States owed him nothing,'" Pelley remarks.

"I'm sure there's people out there that think that," Doyle acknowledges. "But that's not what the law is. And that's not what a civilized society does. And you know, if it's true that you judge the degree of civilization in a society by entering its prisons, the United States has a long way to go on this particular issue."

It would be too quick, too easy to say "after 9/11, everything changed." Because really, 9/11 long since has ceased to be an event and instead become an enabling excuse. The Bush/Republican way of governance was etched in stone long before those Twin Towers crumbled that morning. That was just the shock and awe that gave Bush and his neocon Big Oil war machine cronies an opportunity to rape, pillage and plunder this country in a manner so brazen it is stunning.

Well, yes, but what does it matter, Prairie, if a few sick people who aren't even real Americans don't get medical care?

What does it matter, indeed. In a similar context, I wondered that earlier last week at the report that the Indiana voter fraud blocked a group of real desperadoes from voting—nuns in their 80s and 90s.

And another poem filled my mind:
They came for...

You know it. If you don't, google Niemoller, it's past time you did.

But after watching 60 Minutes last night, and musing on this whole business of Sundays, and Mother's Days, and then reading Dana Priest's first in a series "Careless Detention," another mother came to mind.

A young girl, pregnant, unmarried, forced to travel from one land to another to be counted. And the child she bore. Oh, there are loads of self-righteous fauxes who call themselves "Christian" and "compassionate conservative" and.... And they rule this land right now, they're entrenched in the bureaucracy of the government and the tony addresses on K Street, and the gleaming white bastion of SCOTUS.

And their prisons and their detention centers define them. And the rest of us. Never forget that. They define us, too. As Barack Obama has noted, "the fierce urgency of now"...it compels us all to be better than we have been.

Because, whatsoever ye do unto the least of my brethren, ye do unto me.