Just kill me now

Bush’s FEMA Director During Katrina Criticizes Obama For Responding To Sandy Too Quickly

Song of the day

The delay of the Republican National Convention by Tropical Storm Issac is due to God's punishment of Republicans for their "legitimate rape"/"forcible rape" ideas, their policy against same-sex marriage, and a pact they signed with the devil said no liberal pastor ever.

How they got here

1. I couldn't figure out why this old post from three years ago

‘Katrina Kids’ Sing ‘Congress, Bush and FEMA…Have Come to Rebuild Us’ at White House Egg Roll
was getting so many hits the last few days until I started seeing this story on a few blogs.

I still like the poster:


(Click on image for larger version)
(Keyword searchs: "katrina kids sing to laura bush" "katrina kids with laura bush" "katrina kids sing about bush")


2. I couldn't be prouder that when folks google image "Michele Bachmann" this



is the third image that comes up. It's from the post:

Michele Bachmann prepares to make her next pronouncement

3. Actually I could be prouder because when you google "ron paul sucks" the first two results are:

Ron Paul Sucks (in a really racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic way)!

and

Ron Paul Sucks
Better still, I love the way that Paulites google "Ron Paul Sucks" to TROLL the Internet looking for a fight and end up yelling at me for something that I posted TWO YEARS AGO (and only read the comments there every six months or so). Keep those hits coming!

BWA-HAHAHAHA!
.

Four Years Ago Today

As many of us mourn the passing of Senator Ted Kennedy let's not forget the passing of nearly 2000 Americans on this date.


Four years ago today Katrina made landfall as a category 4 hurricane. Later that same day the levees were breached in New Orleans. This was just the beginning of tremendous devastation made worst nightmare by government inaction and ineptitude.

While Sen. Kennedy, thankfully, died in his bed surrounded by loved ones, four years ago others drowned in their attics or were simply swept away.

Kennedy was a champion of the best of what government could do for the people. The aftermath of Katrina was the outcome of what believing that government is the enemy will get you.

Katrina timeline here.

Some photos of victims here (which were kept from the public via the Bush Administration and the mainstream media).

Proof that the tragedy which Bush officials claimed that no one could have predicted was already concerning little liberal bloggers -- and others -- the day before Katrina hit.

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Happy Birthday John McCain!

Today is Senator John McCain's birthday. He was born today in seventy-two years ago (in 1936) on a Naval Air Base in the American-controlled Panama Canal Zone.

Happy Birthday, John McCain!

You know what else happened on August 29?

• Lenny Henry, the great British comedian was born on this day in 1958
• In 1833, the UK abolished slavery in its empire
• The Beatles perform their last (paying) concert in San Francisco in 1966

Oh, yea - I forgot one. This is the day that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. While John McCain and his best bud George Bush were photo opping with that cake above, the Bush administration through sheer incompentance, was letting a great American city drown. More than 1,800 died. Billions of dollars in damage.

Happy Birthday John McCain!

More On McCain and Hagee

From Talking Points Memo:

Barack Obama got seriously tripped up for apparently not sufficiently denouncing an 'endorsement' he didn't solicit from someone he has no connection with. John McCain solicited the endorsement of a complete nut who's got this long history of slurs against the Catholic Church and a lot else. McCain's sticking with Hagee and he's getting a complete pass.

Josh Marshall pointed to the second example on the clip (it's about 2:25 in):

US policy explicitly supports a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine. Hagee says that because is supporting that policy God is going to punish America by sending Muslim terrorists to America create a bloodbath in our streets.

Then there's the whole "Katrina is punishment for New Orleans' sin" thing.

Hagee: All hurricanes are acts of God because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God. And they are, uh, were recipients of the judgement of God for that. The newspapers carried the story in our local area that was not carried nationally that there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the, uh, Katrina came. And the, uh, promise of that parade was that it was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other gay pride, uh, parades. I believe that the judgement of God is a very real thing. And I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was in fact the judgement of God against the City of New Orleans.

Host Terry Gross: You think that the whole city was punished because of things like the forthcoming gay pride parade?

Hagee: This is true. All of the city was punished because of the sin that happened there in that city.

Luckily we know where Senator John McCain was when God was punishing New Orleans for its sins:

He was having cake with his new BFF, Dubya.

Happy Birthday, John McCain!

FEMA - Still Doing a Heckova Job!

From today's Washington Post:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency since early 2006 has suppressed warnings from its own field workers about health problems experienced by hurricane victims living in government-provided trailers with levels of a toxic chemical 75 times the recommended maximum for U.S. workers, congressional lawmakers said yesterday.

A trail of e-mails obtained by investigators shows that the agency's lawyers rejected a proposal for systematic testing of the levels of potentially cancer-causing formaldehyde gas in the trailers, out of concern that the agency would be legally liable for any hazards or health problems. As many as 120,000 families displaced by hurricanes Katrina and Rita lived in the suspect trailers, and hundreds have complained of ill effects.

Good god! Hasn't this administration screwed over the victims of Hurricane Katrina enough? I guess drowning the city of New Orleans was only a start. Let's expose 'em to formaldehyde!

Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) decried what he called FEMA's indifference to storm victims and said the situation was "sickening." He said the documents "expose an official policy of premeditated ignorance" and added that "senior officials in Washington didn't want to know what they already knew, because they didn't want the legal and moral responsibility to do what they knew had to be done."

Hey, weren't these folks calling themselves "Compassionate Conservatives" a few years ago?

What's compassionate (or, to be fair, conservative) about forced indifference to formaldehyde exposure to people who lost everything?

Yep, our dubya's doing a heckova job. Heckova job.

Sunday. Jack Kelly. Again.

My favorite right-wing nut case, Jack Kelly, missteps again. This time he's writing about the Virginia Tech massacre.

More precisely, he's writing about the media mishandling of the massacre. He makes some good points as he chastises the media for getting some of the facts wrong in the reporting. But then, for some unknown reason, he writes:

The trouble is there is very little hard information to report in the early hours of a crisis, certainly not enough to fill all that air time. So it is filled with rumor, much of it false, and speculation, much of it nonsense. Virtually everything reported initially during Hurricane Katrina, for instance -- especially about the alleged murders in the Superdome -- turned out to be false.

You'd think that a guy who'd gotten so much wrong on Katrina himself would steer clear of such an analogy. The mistakes in his first Katrina column were so big, he had to issue his own correction a week later:

I wrote "The levee broke Tuesday morning," referring to the 17th Street Levee, which was what was being reported at the time I wrote the column. In fact, the break occurred mid-morning Monday. And the Industrial Canal was breached on Monday morning as well.

I took the figure 2,000 for the buses available to Mayor Ray Nagin from a column written by another journalist without checking it myself. The actual figure is closer to 600.

Finally, I knew Hurricane Andrew struck in 1992, but inexplicably wrote 2002. I regret the errors.

But note, even his corrections could have used some corrections. It was reported that the 17th Street Levee broke on August 29. In fact news of the levee breach reached the regional FEMA office at 8:30 am on August 29. Hardly "mid-morning." Unless he was writing his 9/11/05 column more than a week prior to its publication (which is doubtful), he can't be guilty of anything other than shoddy research himself.

Hey, I just noticed something. In our coverage of this (back in March, 2006) I quoted J-Kel as writing:

People who read the post below may wonder why I did not report on the good things the 2nd Brigade Combat Team of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard has done in Iraq. The reason is I've been fired as the national security writer. I've been forbidden to write news stories about national defense.

But he's still listed as "national security writer" on his P-G column. Anyone have any idea why? Drop me an e-mail. Confidentiality is assured.

But Jack, my man, if you gotta be more careful. If you're going to rant about how the media gets things wrong (even when they do) you have to make sure you don't shoot yourself in the foot by pointing the Google-armed among your readers (myself included) to some of your own bad fact-checking.

Next thing you'll be saying that the WMD were flown out of Iraq o Syria and so really Saddam DID have them after all!

No wait, you already said that.

UPDATE: Got an explanation from the P-G today. John Allison (he's an editor over there) wrote to me to say this is just a matter of institutional inertia. They've been IDing Kelly as simply a columnist sometime last year however the "national security" tag that's used on-line has, according to Allison, to be fixed "in the bowels of the system." He said he was looking to fix it today. Given how tight things are over there - sources tell me stories of staff shortages with the people left working there doing multiple jobs - it's not that difficult to believe.

Katrina Aftermath: The Pictures That Bush (Rove) Will Not Let YOU See

This post is not for the squeamish -- that is to say that it is not for those who want to believe that the following is still a functioning principle by which this country operates:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The Pentagon has banned the media from taking pictures of military caskets returning from war since 1991. The Pentagon imposed the ban on images at Dover shortly before the invasion of Iraq last March, saying it continued an order from the Clinton administration in November 2000.

“America knows full well that our men and women are serving and serving brilliantly both in Iraq and around the world. ... America is aware this is a war against terrorism,” said Trent Duffy, a spokesman for Bush. But, he said, “the message is [that] the sensitivity and privacy of families of the fallen must be the first priority.”

This policy, of course, also serves to keep any graphic reminders from the public that our troops are dying daily in a war which the American public has turned against. The Bush Administration has also fought tooth and nail the release of additional photos and videos of the abuse of Abu Ghraib prisoners.

The media, it must be said, is largely complicit in keeping reality and the public at arms length. While the phrase, "if it bleeds, it leads" is certainly true, there's also a maxim that you don't want to turn off your audience by showing anything too gruesome as they may turn off the TV. The idea being that people do not want to see anything too nasty during the dinner hour that may upset the proper digestion of their meals.

So the Government bans and censors and the media self-censors and everyone is spared anything that may upset our delicate sensibilities -- like a bloody war waged in our name or, now, the deadly results of criminal inaction on the part of our Government in the case of Hurricane Katrina:

U.S. agency blocks photos of New Orleans dead
07 Sep 2005 00:56:29 GMT
Source: Reuters

NEW ORLEANS, Sept 6 (Reuters) - The U.S. government agency leading the rescue efforts after Hurricane Katrina said on Tuesday it does not want the news media to take photographs of the dead as they are recovered from the flooded New Orleans area.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, heavily criticized for its slow response to the devastation caused by the hurricane, rejected requests from journalists to accompany rescue boats as they went out to search for storm victims.

An agency spokeswoman said space was needed on the rescue boats and that "the recovery of the victims is being treated with dignity and the utmost respect."

"We have requested that no photographs of the deceased be made by the media," the spokeswoman said in an e-mailed response to a Reuters inquiry.

How does this ban work you may ask? The National Press Photographers Association reports:

New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter Gordon Russell witnessed gunfire between police and civilians that he says "left one man dead in a pool of blood." Afterwards police slammed Russell and the photojournalist against a wall and threw their equipment to the ground when the duo got out of their SUV to cover the scene. Russell says afterward they retreated to the reporter's home where they hid, and plan to flee the city Thursday evening.

Toronto Star staff photojournalist Lucas Oleniuk was taken to the ground by police in the Spanish Quarter after he photographed a firefight between looters and police, and police were then reportedly "beating on" a looter. A coworker at the Toronto Star told News Photographer magazine tonight, "The cops saw him and put him down, and took his gear. At first they were going to take all of his cameras, but he talked them into only taking the memory cards and letting him keep the cameras."

And Brian Williams blogs the following on MSNBC:

At one fire scene, I counted law enforcement personnel (who I presume were on hand to guarantee the safety of the firefighters) from four separate jurisdictions, as far away as Connecticut and Illinois. And tempers are getting hot. While we were attempting to take pictures of the National Guard (a unit from Oklahoma) taking up positions outside a Brooks Brothers on the edge of the Quarter, the sergeant ordered us to the other side of the boulevard. The short version is: there won't be any pictures of this particular group of guard soldiers on our newscast tonight. Rules (or I suspect in this case an order on a whim) like those do not HELP the palpable feeling that this area is somehow separate from the United States.

At that same fire scene, a police officer from out of town raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media... obvious members of the media... armed only with notepads. Her actions (apparently because she thought reporters were encroaching on the scene) were over the top and she was told. There are automatic weapons and shotguns everywhere you look. It's a stance that perhaps would have been appropriate during the open lawlessness that has long since ended on most of these streets. Someone else points out on television as I post this: the fact that the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention Center and Superdome) is a kind of perverse and perfectly backward postscript to this awful chapter in American history.

And this from A NOLA blogger:

We are in Jefferson Parish, just outside of New Orleans. At the National Guard checkpoint, they are under orders to turn away all media. All of the reporters are turning they’re TV trucks around.

Things are so bad, Bush is now censoring all reporting from NOLA. The First Amendment sank with the city.

These reports would seem to suggest (if not SCREAM) that photos of the dead are not the only thing being censored. While one can understand that a family member may not want to discover the death of a loved one by seeing their face splashed across a TV screen or newspaper, anyone who has Photoshop knows that identifying features can be blurred out while still conveying pictures that are worth a thousand words.

What is being censored is any news or photos which will raise the ire of the public -- anything which will remind the public that Bush screwed up BIG TIME.

Any moment now, FOX News and other Bush apologists will start asking, "Where are all the good (feel good) news stories from NOLA? Just as they constantly asked the same question for Iraq.

Indeed, the only stories and photographs that this administration and the GOP want you to see are pictures like this:


(Note that some 1,000 firefighters were given PRclasses by FEMAand then co-opted to function asprops in photo ops with Bush. Story here.)
We have heard estimates that there will be 10, 000 to 40,000 dead in the Gulf. The media has reported that there will be no autopsies (autopsies that could show if someone drowned or died of dehydration and if that occurred during the flooding or while they awaited for help that never came). Furthermore, family members will not have the chance to identify the dead before they are buried (though we are told that fingerprints and DNA sample will be taken at the morgue to create a data base that families may access at some unspecified time in the future).

So we have a catastrophic event with a likely death toll in the tens of thousands where numerous questions exist as to who contributed to this tragedy and THE MEDIA IS BEING SHUT OUT FROM DOCUMENTING THE DEVASTATION.

In light of this, I am publishing photos of the dead of New Orleans that have managed to make their way out of the city before the ban was imposed. I have blurred the faces of the deceased where appropriate. Many of these photos came from ogrish.com, others from the foreign press.

You can turn away from these pictures as Bush wants or you can look. But I believe that YOU should have the right to make that choice.




























Grieve for the dead and the families who grieve them, those whose lives have been destroyed, and the First Amendment to the Constitution -- and give to the Liberal Blogs for Hurricane Relief, the Red Cross or the charity of your choice.

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