Geraldo Does it Again

Keith Olbermann tonight on Countdown on MSNBC said Geraldo made some elderly, hurting, starving 79 yr old refugee and her dog do multiple "takes" of her being faked rescued by Geraldo.

BTW, for some odd reason, I caught some of Imus this morning - something I don't do. Boy, Donny did everything but call Bush words that would get bleeped. He was rip roading made about Katrina and ridiculed anyone who voted for Bush (which I actually assume(d) Imus had done).

Fuck Impeachment

">Daily Read at Trailing Edge Blog points us to two excellent posts elsewhere on NOLA and Bush. The first is from Shakespeare's Sister.

There are those now calling for Bush’s impeachment. Fuck impeachment. The whole lot of them—every last conservative ideologue who has advocated “starving the beast,” every last one of those selfish, soulless, anti-American bastards—ought to be rounded up and sent to the Superdome to live in the river of shit and piss until every single refugee has been provided safe sanctuary and a warm meal. Then Bush and his gang of cretins can clean up the trail of scattered corpses. Let the blood that belongs on their hands be a literal lesson for these pitiless pieces of human refuse. It’s long overdue.

Mr. Natural at Left Edge North has posted an excellent round-up of more eloquent comments put together by Shakespeare’s Sister.

"Blowin' in the Wind"

Karlo at SwerveLeft points us to a site offering some good protest songs in MP3 format. If you like some of the music you hear on interludes on Democracy Now, etc., then you might like some of these.

The (UK) Guardian: The Failure to Save New Orleans Shows America's "Hidden" Begotry and "Lie" of Equal Opportunity

This piece by Gary Younge is very powerful.

Comments?

Snippet:

Katrina did not create this racist image of African-Americans - it has simply laid bare its ahistorical bigotry, and in so doing exposed the lie of equal opportunity in the US. A basic understanding of human nature suggests everyone in New Orleans wanted to survive and escape. A basic understanding of American economics and history shows that, despite all the rhetoric, wealth - not hard work or personal sacrifice - is the most decisive factor in who succeeds.

In that sense, Katrina has been a disaster for the poor for the same reason that President Bush's social security proposals and economic policies have been. It was the result of small government - an inadequate, privatised response to a massive public problem. And if there was ever any bewilderment about why African-Americans reject such an agenda so comprehensively at every election, then this was why.

"No one would have checked on a lot of the black people in these parishes while the sun shined," Mayor Milton Tutwiler of Winstonville, Mississippi, told the New York Times. "So am I surprised that no one has come to help us now? No."

The fact that the vast majority of those who remained in town were black was not an accident. Katrina did not go out of its way to affect black people. It destroyed almost everything in its path. But the poor were disproportionately affected because they were least able to escape its path and to endure its wrath. They are more likely to have bad housing and less likely to have cars. Many had to work until the last moment and few have the money to pay for a hotel out of town.

Nature does not discriminate, but people do. For reasons that are particularly resonant in the south, where this year African-Americans celebrated the 40th anniversary of legislation protecting their right to vote, black people are disproportionately represented among the poor. Two-thirds of New Orleans is African-American, a quarter of whom live in poverty

(LA) Times-Picayune Points Finger for Rescue Failure Straight at the President

From Ed and Pub:

While the angry barbs and finger pointing continue to assign blame for the horrendously poor response to the Gulf Coast hurricane catastrophe, Jim Amoss, the editor of The Times-Picayune in New Orleans -- now publishing out of Houma, La. -- is mincing no words. The feeble response, he says in an interview, is “ultimately his failure, and it is a colossal one that may have cost lives.”

On Sunday, an angry Times-Picayune published an "open letter" to the president -- which E&P was first to reprint on this site that morning, drawing wide national attention to it. Since then it has been republished by the Seattle Times and on CNN.com, read in full on MSNBC, and quoted in hundreds of other newspapers. Among other things, it called for the firing of Michael Brown, head of FEMA, and other top officials involved in fumbling the crisis.

Now Editor Amoss, in an interview with The Oregonian in Portland, has explained why the paper wrote it: "We needed to address the president directly .... We felt that this is ultimately his failure, and it is a colossal one that may have cost lives, and certainly much physical damage to our community."

So Some 200-400 Schoolbuses Were Abandoned...

when one of the disaster plans called for using them to round up citizens to get them out,

Had the plan been followed and these buses used, as many as 13,000 people could have been taken to safer ground much sooner or, as in too many cases, their deaths averted.

Unfortunately, I've never bought the line that first dozens, and then hundreds, and then thousands and now, today ten thousand, human bodies will be found in the city and its suburbs. While I expect authorities - especially the Bushies - to hide large counts, I believe that more likely 20 or 30,000 may have died.

Now that number is a guess-timate based on neighborhood populations and demographics, including age, income, extended family, etc.

Bush: No One Could Have Predicted a Levee Failure

Except a report that came in just before went on his 5+ week vacation, and one six months before that, and many dozens before that and... according to Slate... other reports going back as far as 1832.

Barbara Bush Again Doesn't Want to Bother Her Beautiful Mind with Images of the Dead and Dying

Editor and Publisher is on the case of the woman from whom our (cough) president got his compassionate conservatism (cough cough cough):

Accompanying her husband, former President GeorgeH.W.Bush, on a tour of hurricane relief centers inHouston, Barbara Bush said today, referring to thepoor who had lost everything back home and evacuated, "This is working very well for them." ...

"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them."

I've always thought Barbara Bush was much worse than her public image. Now, since Iraq, she's kept proving me right over and over again.

"...she chuckles slightly..."

Fuck You, Poor Blacks Er... Disaster Management Cheney and Rove Style

Where oh where is the Dick?

Anyway, BillMon takes a careful look at FEMA, and "rescue" Cheney and Rove style here.

Pesky Little Point

For all the president saying basically that despite the millions and millions and millions we pour into emergency preparedness, help for NOLA will come from the rest of the country donating, I notice Halliburton expects to be paid - and most lucratively - for their effort. And they just got a HUGE tax break, too.

Must be nice.

Halliburton and Bush's Campaign Man Look to Cleanup on Katrina Contracts

Also from Think Progress:

The AP reports that Kellogg, Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary that came under fire for its reconstruction work in Iraq, “has begun tapping a $500 million Navy contract to do emergency repairs at Gulf Coast naval and Marine facilities that were battered by Hurricane Katrina.”
Under fire for mistreatment of whistleblowers and under investigation in Nigeria, France, and the U.S. for allegedly paying kickbacks and performing a variety of other corporate misdeeds,

Halliburton’s past performance raises serious concerns about whether they’re the right company to help pull the Gulf Coast out of what may end up being the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history.

The appropriation of hurricane recovery funds also highlights Halliburton’s special interest connections to the White House. On February 1, 2005, The Allbaugh Company, under the name of M. Diane Allbaugh, registered to lobby for Kellogg, Brown & Root. The lobbying registration form lists Joe M. Allbaugh, former 2000 Bush campaign manager and former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), as KBR’s official lobbyist.

Another Lovely Move

The feds have decided that they will NOT give food or water to anyone intent on staying in New Orleans.

They leave these people to fend for themselves for over a week, and then, when they've been stuck there this long, they can't even get a glass of water from the feds.

Heartbreaking

The heartbreaking moments just keep coming in the wake of Katrina, not the least of which is the feds' criminally poor response, but for those of you who have not heard this tape from the president of Jefferson County Parish about a mother in a nursing home who drowned because no help was available, you should.

It's at Crooks and Liars... scroll down down and down. Look for the name Aaron Broussard.

Think Progress offers the text:

The guy who runs this building I’m in, Emergency Management, he’s responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, “Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?” and he said, “Yeah, Mama, somebody’s coming to get you.” Somebody’s coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Friday… and she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night! [Sobbing] Nobody’s coming to get us. Nobody’s coming to get us… read on

Can you even imagine the sense of abandonment as is stretches on to a week and more?

CNN Poll

More than 80% of those responding agree with Bill Clinton: the government failed NOLA.

The only surprise there is: what the hell are the other 20% thinking or do they just happen not to think very often?

So Why, in a Time of Grave Emergency, is the GOP Prez Refusing to Communicate with the Dem Gov of LA?

Four guesses and the first five don't count.

Here's the start of a post by Armando at Daily Kos but go read it all:

One of the charges (READ "lies") Republicans make to excuse Bush's criminal incompetence is that Louisiana governor Blanco had not filled out the right form, or said the right magic incantation or had not ceded jurisdiction to the feds and thus had prevented the sending of troops into New Orleans. Their claim is that the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prevented such a deployment without the ceding of jurisdiction by the State.

There is also this by Josh at TalkingPointsMemo:

As noted, the Washington Post got burned today by a "senior Bush official" who told them that Gov. Blanco of Louisiana had never declared a state of emergency in the site -- a claim the Post printed as fact. Yet the claim was demonstrably false and by late afternoon the Post had been compelled to print a correction.

This week's Newsweek contains the same false claim -- and though their recital of the anecdote is unsourced, common sense suggests that someone or some operation fed them both the same line, which neither organization checked out before running.

Monday's Times, not surprisingly, confirms that the White House damage control operation is being run by Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett.

Add it up.

And who will report this out?

Mayor to NOLA Residents

The city is destroyed; do not come back. There are no homes or jobs to return to.

Can you imagine at anytime in American history these words being uttered? Except, of course, under Mr. Bush's watch.

More than 500 NO cops have not appeared for duty, or about a quarter of the force. This is in addition to the two have committed suicide.

More Bush Faked Photo Ops

Posted by Laura at War and Piece:

There was a striking dicrepancy between the CNN International report on the Bush visit to the New Orleans disaster zone, yesterday, and reports of the same event by German TV.

ZDF News reported that the president's visit was a completely staged event. Their crew witnessed how the open air food distribution point Bush visited in front of the cameras was torn down immediately after the president and the herd of 'news people' had left and that others which were allegedly being set up were abandoned at the same time.

The people in the area were once again left to fend for themselves, said ZDF.

Raw Story

Lots of important stories there.

Bush Faked Levee Repair for Photo Op

Posted by John at AmericaBlog:

From a press release LA Senator Mary Landrieu sent out today:

But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast - black and white, rich and poor, young annd old - deserve far better from their national governmeent.

"Fallujah Floods the Superdome"

Frank Rich today in The Times:

AS the levees cracked open and ushered hell into New Orleans on Tuesday, President Bush once again chose to fly away from Washington, not toward it, while disaster struck. We can all enumerate the many differences between a natural catastrophe and a terrorist attack. But character doesn't change: it is immutable, and it is destiny.

As always, the president's first priority, the one that sped him from Crawford toward California, was saving himself: he had to combat the flood of record-low poll numbers that was as uncontrollable as the surging of Lake Pontchartrain. It was time, therefore, for another disingenuous pep talk, in which he would exploit the cataclysm that defined his first term, 9/11, even at the price of failing to recognize the emerging fiasco likely to engulf Term 2.

After dispatching Katrina with a few sentences of sanctimonious boilerplate ("our hearts and prayers are with our fellow citizens"), he turned to his more important task. The war in Iraq is World War II. George W. Bush is F.D.R. And anyone who refuses to stay his course is soft on terrorism and guilty of a pre-9/11 "mind-set of isolation and retreat." Yet even as Mr. Bush promised "victory" (a word used nine times in this speech on Tuesday), he was standing at the totemic scene of his failure. It was along this same San Diego coastline that he declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln more than two years ago. For this return engagement, The Washington Post reported, the president's stage managers made sure he was positioned so that another hulking aircraft carrier nearby would stay off-camera, lest anyone be reminded of that premature end of "major combat operations."

This administration would like us to forget a lot, starting with the simple fact that next Sunday is the fourth anniversary of the day we were attacked by Al Qaeda, not Iraq. Even before Katrina took command of the news, Sept. 11, 2005, was destined to be a half-forgotten occasion, distorted and sullied by a grotesquely inappropriate Pentagon-sponsored country music jamboree on the Mall. But hard as it is to reflect upon so much sorrow at once, we cannot allow ourselves to forget the real history surrounding 9/11; it is the Rosetta stone for what is happening now. If we are to pull ourselves out of the disasters of Katrina and Iraq alike, we must live in the real world, not the fantasyland of the administration's faith-based propaganda. Everything connects.