And, yes, I DO take it personally: 09/04/2005 - 09/11/2005
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"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."
- Noam Chomsky
o-o-o-o-ok... and brownie's on the job... not to worry...
Tropical Storm Ophelia strengthened into a hurricane again Saturday as forecasters said that a landfall somewhere along the southeast Atlantic coast appeared more likely.
Asshole Bush exploits political opportunities of Katrina
"it's not the time for politics" is the refrain bushco has repeated over and over, ad nauseam while continuing to seize every opportunity to shove their own political/ideological agenda down the country's throat... you'd think that exploiting something as horrendous as hurricane katrina and the ensuing and ongoing tragedies would be over the top... not for this crowd...
By any standard of human decency, condemning many already poor and now bereft people to subpar wages - thus perpetuating their poverty - is unacceptable. It is also bad for the economy. Without the law, called the Davis-Bacon Act, contractors will be able to pay less, but they'll also get less, as lower wages invariably mean lower productivity.
every time i think it's not possible for me to become more disgusted than i already am, bushco surprises me with something even more outrageous and unbelievable...
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Mr. Brown, who was removed from his Gulf Coast duties on Friday, though not from his post as FEMA's chief, is the first casualty of the political furor generated by the government's faltering response to the hurricane. With Democrats and Republicans caustically criticizing the performance of his agency, and with the White House under increasing attack for populating FEMA's top ranks with politically connected officials who lack disaster relief experience, Mr. Brown had become a symbol of President Bush's own hesitant response.
of course, if you watched chertoff's disingenuous performance at the news conference where the announcement was made, the "spin" was that "brownie" had done such a good job that he is needed back in d.c. to oversee the whole enchilada rather than being stuck down south just tending to the leftovers of katrina... now, don't you find that comforting...? let's just suppose another monster storm roars in or, god forbid, there's a terrorist attack and "brownie" is still sitting on the top of the dogpile... makes you feel kind of all warm and fuzzy inside, doesn't it...?
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i have registered this blog with the group of blogs that are supporting the impeach bush effort - the Impeach Bush Coalition... the coalition was started in the past week by the bloggers who publish the blogs, The Bulldog Manifesto and The Martian Anthropologist, respectively... please visit...
imho, impeachment would be a very costly, time-consuming process that has little likelihood of being upheld even if it was to be initiated by congress which i think is also highly unlikely... it also would have the effect of exacerbating the already serious polarization of the country... my preference, which may be equally delusionary, is to stir up such massive public awareness of the criminal actions of the bush administration that the call for the resignations of key members of the bush administration, including of course, bush himself, would become overwhelming... i do, however, support any and all efforts to rid the united states of the most destructive administration this country has ever seen...
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there's simply no other way to view it... one of the reasons bushco was loath to prop up the airlines financially after 9/11, particularly the big carriers, was that they saw an opportunity to rid them of their unions by passively standing by while the carriers wrung every last drop out of the unionized workforces until there was virtually nothing left... it's working at united... it's working at northwest... it's working at american... and it's working at delta... of course, then there's usair which has already completed screwing its employees to the wall, the last screw being its merger with americawest...
Northwest declined to confirm the new savings target, but the airline has said soaring fuel costs could force it to ask for more givebacks from the 4,400 workers represented by the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association.
Bob Rose, president of AMFA Local 5 in Detroit, said the airline issued the proposal to union negotiators on Thursday, the day the two parties resumed talks. AMFA ended previous talks when its members walked off the job on August 20, saying Northwest was asking for unreasonable concessions.
The updated proposal stands even less chance of being ratified by members than Northwest's previous offer, which would have granted the airline USD$176 million in savings. That proposal would have cut about half of its AMFA-represented jobs and imposed hefty pay cuts on the remaining workers.
"How can they get 75 percent of the people to vote themselves out of a job?" Rose said. "It's absolutely ridiculous."
well, of course, 75% of the people aren't going to vote themselves out of a job... so, what's the alternative...? hmmmmmmmm...??? think about it...
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President Bush's job approval was at 39 percent, the first time it has dipped below 40 percent since AP-Ipsos began measuring public approval of Bush in December 2003.
Just over half, 52 percent, disapprove of Bush's handling of hurricane relief.
Blacks were especially upset with Bush; 78 percent of blacks blamed the president for the poor response, compared to 49 percent of whites.
Mr Powell said he could not understand why more preparations had not been made, in an interview to be broadcast on US television on Friday.
A new opinion poll by the Pew Research Center suggests two-thirds of Americans think President George Bush could have done more in the disaster aftermath.
US Under-Secretary of State Karen Hughes backed the president's response.
She said allegations that he was not doing all he could to help were heartbreaking to him.
[...]
Mr Powell said so many African-Americans were left unprotected because they were poor, rather than because they were black.
It "should have been a blinding flash of the obvious... that when you order a mandatory evacuation, you can't expect everybody to evacuate on their own", he said.
no duh, colin... boo-hoo, karen... and, btw, karen, don't worry about george... he hasn't got a heart to break and even if he did, nobody's gonna give a shit...
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So, the overriding question has become: Is this awakening too late, is there still time to stop Bush and his allies from consolidating their political control over the federal government?
i know how i answer that question... it's the same answer i've been putting out on this blog until i'm sick of typing it and readers are probably sick of seeing it...
Michael Brown... S-u-u-u-re... He's S-O-O-OO qualified...
Top U.S. disaster official Michael Brown, under fire over the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, cited prior emergency-management experience in an official biography but his duties were "more like an intern," Time magazine reported.
Brown's biography on the Federal Emergency Management Agency Web site says he had once served as an "assistant city manager with emergency services oversight," and a White House news release in 2001 said Brown had worked for the city of Edmond, Oklahoma in the 1970s "overseeing the emergency-services division."
However, a city spokeswoman told the magazine Brown had actually worked as "an assistant to the city manager."
"The assistant is more like an intern," Claudia Deakins told the magazine. "Department heads did not report to him." Time posted the article on its Web site late on Thursday
. if the bush administration was in the business of manufacturing and selling bullshit, it would have already cornered the world market...
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September 11, 2001 represented not only a dark day for New York City and its citizens, but all of America and indeed the world. In retrospect, the gravest damage inflicted by that act of terrorism wasn't the human suffering and material loss, but rather the serious assault on the very soul of the United States by those who used the horrific events of 9/11 for political purpose.
This “assault” came in the form of actions on the part of the Bush administration, a cowed Congress, and a compliant media that worked hand in glove to spin the events of September 11, 2001 into a storm of hype and fear that exploited an already traumatized people. This conditioned them to accept at face value any characterization of events, no matter how far removed from fact, as well as any remedy put forward as a solution, no matter what the cost to fundamental notions of liberty and justice as set forth by the Constitution.
[...]
Hurricane Katrina has stripped away the many layers of deceit, deception and misinformation that have been peddled to the American people by the White House, Congress and the mainstream media regarding the true state of our national security. With the dead still uncounted in New Orleans and the Gulf States, Americans are coming to grips with the fact that the Bush administration, Congress and the Department of Homeland Security have been asleep at the wheel when it comes to protecting the citizens of the United States from the true threats facing us as a nation.
For the first time in a long time, the mainstream media broke ranks with the spin doctors in Washington D.C., the all too real face of human disaster compelling them to sort fact from myth, truth from hype. Finally, when the American people turn on their television sets, they are watching and listening to reporters and commentators who seem shocked and alarmed by the callous attitude and cavalier behavior of those entrusted by the American people to lead and protect them.
THIS AWARENESS MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO DIE, MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO BE SPUN INTO YET ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY TO FURTHER EXPLOIT THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AND CONTINUE THE RAPE AND PILLAGE OF THE UNITED STATES AND EVERYTHING WE STAND FOR...
Argentina - something to be proud of in spite of tough times
argentina is a plucky country... the crisis they faced with the currency meltdown in 2001 was devastating to millions, wiping out life savings, tossing people out of work, and throwing many into deep poverty... they're still not out of the woods and there's plenty of work left to do but it's good to get news like this...
Argentina’s ranking as 34th in the 177 countries surveyed [the latest human development report released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)] leaves it much closer to Norway at the top than to Niger at the bottom. The report cites Argentina as having the best quality of life in Latin America (even if that region is singled out as having the worst income inequalities in the world, even ahead of Africa) — moreover Argentina achieves this regional supremacy even though the data input for the report largely stems from 2003, a year when the country had barely started to emerge from its 2001-02 meltdown.
[...]
[T]he richest fifth of the population has over half the national wealth while the poorest fifth has barely three percent. The report also points out that by 2003 the population below the poverty line had more than trebled since the start of the century. The natural reaction to such figures might be a burst of egalitarian zeal but studying the report’s statistics for the rest of the world should warn against the illusion that levelling everything downwards might make a country poorer but at least everybody will be more equal — on the contrary, the income gaps in basket case Niger are almost eight times higher than in opulent Norway. There is thus no alternative to levelling upwards with sustained and shared growth — especially looking at the countries with which Argentina was often compared a century ago, Australia and Canada, whose world rankings this year are respectively third and fifth.
"levelling upwards..." now THERE'S something that the u.s. should be working towards but, sadly, is going in the opposite direction...
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when we had presidents that had any integrity or moral character or decency or humanity or anything resembling compassion, they accepted responsibility for what happened on their watch... the sign on harry truman's desk, "the buck stops here" being a prime example... john at americablog reminds us of that important fact as we watch the incredible and disgusting display of scapegoating - brown, chertoff, blanco, nagin - ANYBODY but the one who has the ultimate responsibility and accountability for the miserable, half-assed, criminal botching of disaster response in the first days after katrina - our president, george w. bush...
The reason we have incompetents like Brown in the administration, the reason thousands of people died last week in New Orleans, the reason we just lost an entire American city, and the reason for so many other lies and deaths piled at the door of this White House is that we have an imbecile as president. And after five years, you can only hide a powerful idiot's mistakes so long before they compound and reach critical mass.
personally, i do not believe bush is an idiot... i believe he was acting on the advice of rove, appointing those who had been faithful, mindlessly faithful, to the party and had proved their undying loyalty to george bush... forget any professional credentials or experience... those were the only credentials that mattered...
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President Bush blithely announced at a photo-op cabinet meeting that he, personally, was going to "find out what went right and what went wrong." We can't imagine a worse idea.
No administration could credibly investigate such an immense failure on its own watch. And we have learned through bitter experience - the Abu Ghraib nightmare is just one example - that when this administration begins an internal investigation, it means a whitewash in which no one important is held accountable and no real change occurs.
i'm gonna pound on this point until i'm hoarse and exhausted... bush is a FAILED PRESIDENT... he is an outrage and an affront to any concept of leadership and needs to resign along with cheney and all members of his cabinet...
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"It is a matter of public record that in the final weeks of the process the newly arrived U.S. ambassador (Zalmay Khalizad) took an extremely hands-on role," Justin Alexander, legal affairs officer for the office of constitutional support with the United Nations Assistance Mission to Iraq (UNAMI) told IPS. "Even going so far as to circulate at least one U.S. draft."
Alexander, who oversaw the recent proceedings in Baghdad added: "This involvement was highly inappropriate for a country with 140,000 soldiers in country."
i heard just this morning on cnni that poll results show that only 13% of the american people place any blame on bush for the katrina disaster...
WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE, PEOPLE...!!!
while there isn't a damn thing the bush administration could have done to prevent the hurricane, THERE IS ONE HELL OF A LOT THEY COULD HAVE DONE TO LESSEN ITS IMPACT before, during and immediately after it hit...
BEFORE, THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION COULD HAVE:
built up and strengthened the levees precisely as every report on new orleans had recommended for years
insured that an effective evacuation plan was in place that included ALL residents of ALL possible affected areas and that the plan was effectively executed
developed a serious wetlands restoration and insured that it was effectively implemented to reduce the possibility of catastrophic devastation
that emergency personnel, supplies and other resources were staged, positioned and ready to go
that all federal, state and local officials were on call and ready to go where needed at a moment's notice
that a command post and a disaster operations chief had been identified and was ready to go
that a back-up plan was in place to deal with unanticipated contingencies
DURING, THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION COULD HAVE:
insured the evacuation plan had been followed
brought relevant officials from all levels of government together in a centralized command post under a single commander
authorized and identified credible spokespeople and put them in place in strategic locations to provide current and accurate information to the media
had key government leaders strategically and visibly placed and well-informed to boost public confidence in disaster operations
AFTER, THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION COULD HAVE:
once it was obvious that pre-planning had been deficient, activated the back-up plan and begun dealing IMMEDIATELY with unanticipated contingencies like levee breaches and the Super Dome and Convention Center "shelters of last resort"
IMMEDIATELY created a centralized command post and identified a command post chief
stationed key public leaders VISIBLY as close as possible to the most critical areas to lend support and encouragement and to remove bureaucratic obstacles
this is far from an expert or even a comprehensive list but IT'S ALSO NOT ROCKET SCIENCE, FOLKS...!!!
had katrina been a serious terrorist attack, half the gulf coast would now be TOAST... instead, we had a catastrophic hurricane and half the gulf coast is now TOAST...
bush and his crew have had SINCE SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, TO PREPARE THE UNITED STATES FOR DEALING WITH A DOMESTIC CATASTROPHE... BUSH HAS SAID REPEATEDLY THAT WE MUST BE ABLE TO DEFEND OURSELVES FROM DISASTER AND THAT, AS PRESIDENT, HE WAS INSURING THE NATION'S ABILITY TO DO JUST THAT... HIS LEADERSHIP IN THE FACE OF CRISIS WAS THE KEY FACTOR HE CITED IN WHY WE SHOULD RE-ELECT HIM AND WAS A KEY FACTOR IN WHY HE WON THE ELECTION...
BUSH AND HIS TEAM HAVE FAILED MISERABLY...!! BUSH HOLDS AT LEAST PARTIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND, MORE IMPORTANTLY, ACCOUNTABILITY FOR LIVES LOST... HIS REFUSAL TO ACCEPT EITHER IS CRAVEN, COWARDLY AND DESPICABLE...
if we, as american citizens, let the bush administration get away with this CRIMINALLY NEGLIGENT BEHAVIOR AND, WORSE YET, TO BLAME IT ON OTHERS, i don't think there's much hope left for the united states...
yeah, while the entire world is preoccupied with the unbelievable stinking mess you made out of the federal response to katrina, while your asshole buddy, karl, is creating yet another strategy to save your worthless political ass, while all your bought-and-paid-for cabinet members are out there trying to make you look good, let's see how fast we can rush roberts' nomination through... we were going to have a careful, deliberate discussion of his qualifications but, now that you've kicked him upstairs before he was EVEN CONFIRMED, let's do it REAL FUCKING QUICK...
President Bush nominated John G. Roberts Jr. yesterday as the 17th chief justice of the United States, promoting his nominee for associate justice to lead the Supreme Court and the rest of the federal judiciary even before Roberts was confirmed for the first assignment
. it's so far beyond the realm of comprehension how outrageous bush's behavior is, in 100 years, no one is gonna be able to comprehend it or how we let it continue to happen...
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as you can imagine, there are some interesting cultural transitions when traveling from buenos aires to london to sofia, bulgaria...
i managed to survive two days of tube-riding in london and didn't see any evidence of diminished energy or looking-over-the-shoulder behavior you might expect... i don't mean to say that folks aren't paying attention but they are also getting on with their lives in one of the greatest cities in the world...
in the "it's-an-incredibly-small-world" department, i had dinner last night in london with several of the folks that i had worked with from macedonia who just so happened to be in town at the same time...
i just got back from walking around the center of sofia, bulgaria, my first time here... impression...? very favorable... my other balkan city experiences in skopje, macedonia and belgrade, serbia didn't prepare me for the level of energy, the bustling shopping district and the overall cleanliness i've seen in just a few hours in sofia - and it's a national holiday...!! on a national holiday in skopje, they roll up the sidewalks...
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With no idea how to improve a situation, government, instead of assuming a responsibility for resolving it, turns a blind eye. [...] New Orleans has existed under the not-so-watchful eye of benign neglect for decades.
[...]
There is no miminum wage and the waiters and dishwashers propping up the tourist trade are not well rewarded.. [...] The suggestion has been that the breakdown of society witnessed in New Orleans could not happen elsewhere. Wrong. The city has extreme problems of violence and deprivation, but the economic apartheid inflicted on America is a wrong turn away in most cities. Go west of Constitution between central Washington and the RFK Stadium, walk the length of Broadway, get lost in Detroit. The all-consuming civilisation that America wishes to export globally is no more than a pretty theory. Like Marxism, in practice it mutates horribly.
oh, man... this is enough to GAG A MAGGOT...!! Bush is gonna investigate HIMSELF...?
puh-l-e-e-e-e-eze... i just saw him on cnni, sitting with cheney on one side and rummy on the other, saying "we're gonna find out what went right and what went wrong and especially to understand the relationship between the federal and the state and the local governments..." (quotes approximate...) what's to understand...? you've had since 9/11/2001 to get things totally squared away... you've spent gazillions of dollars, created a new cabinet level department, talked tough, talked trash, squirted your testosterone all over the place like a male cat in heat and what'd we get for it...? NOT A GODDAM THING...!! do the honorable thing, george, for the first time in your sorry-ass life... submit your resignation and insist that cheney and your cabinet do the same... you're a pathetic man and you've lost whatever right you may have had (and it was pretty friggin' small) to lead the u.s... i don't wanna hafta see your disgusting face ever again...
George is pushing faith-based organizations, exploiting a tragedy to gain political points with his base...
scotty mcclellan, who long ago sold his soul in order to be able to continue to defend george without vomiting on camera, just finished his press briefing where he talked about how his slime-bag boss is flogging faith-based organizations and their key role in disaster relief... but, as we all know, george would NEVER, EVER resort to using something as tragic as katrina as an opportunity to gain cheap political points... i'm disgusted with myself for even CONSIDERING such a base motive... Now, Rummy's talking...
boy, bush is trotting 'em all out... from zero, zip, nada, zilch - bush playing guitar, cheney kicking back in wyoming, condi blowing a wad on ferragamo shoes and yukking it up at a broadway play, and rummy god-knows-where, they're now ALL OVER THE MEDIA... rove must be REALLY WORRIED...!
Q: Why did it take days to move National Guard troops into the area?
Rumsfeld: It didn't.
rummy, you are a FUCKING LIAR...! this administration lies in its sleep... and, even worse, he's USING the military to lie for him...
Q: There have been comments that the involvement of National Guard troops in Iraq limited the response to Katrina.
this highly emotional statement from jefferson parish president aaron broussard in new orleans is making the rounds of the blogs but it deserves the widest exposure possible...
The president of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans, Aaron Broussard, just issued an emotional appeal on NBC’s Meet the Press. By the end, he was completely broken down, sobbing uncontrollably:
We have been abandoned by our own country. Hurricane Katrina will go down in history as one of the worst storms ever to hit an American coast. But the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will go down as one of the worst abandonments of Americans on American soil ever in U.S. history. … Whoever is at the top of this totem pole, that totem pole needs to be chainsawed off and we’ve got to start with some new leadership. It’s not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now.
Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever by a president during a dire national emergency. What we witnessed, as clearly as the overwhelming agony of the city of New Orleans, was the dangerous incompetence and the staggering indifference to human suffering of the president and his administration.
if george&co get away with this one, the u.s. will have lost me... if my fellow citizens can't or won't respond to this massive failure of an already failed presidency, i'm not sure we're gonna make it as a country... sitting here at the moment in london where, god knows, tony blair is no prize (and he's taking shit as well for not getting british diplomats on the stick faster in new orleans to find and communicate with the over 100 brits missing there), and even with tony's own lying performance regarding iraq, the uk STILL has its shit together better than the u.s...
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FOR GOD'S SAKE, FORGET THE POLITICAL FALLOUT & TRY LEADERSHIP FOR A CHANGE
if they spent a tenth as much frickin' time working on behalf of the people of the united states instead of shoring up their sorry asses, we wouldn't be seeing what we're seeing in the gulf coast...
Under the command of President Bush's two senior political advisers, the White House rolled out a plan this weekend to contain the political damage from the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina.
It orchestrated visits by cabinet members to the region, leading up to an extraordinary return visit by Mr. Bush planned for Monday, directed administration officials not to respond to attacks from Democrats on the relief efforts, and sought to move the blame for the slow response to Louisiana state officials, according to Republicans familiar with the White House plan.
The effort is being directed by Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, and his communications director, Dan Bartlett. It began late last week after Congressional Republicans called White House officials to register alarm about what they saw as a feeble response by Mr. Bush to the hurricane, according to Republican Congressional aides.
these people make me physically ill... george bush and his entire cabinet need to submit their resignations... right away...
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internik: "A righteous and purposeful indignation..."
over at kos, internik captures many of my own thoughts and feelings... i've already exploded and cried several times the past few days, both in front of friends and over the phone... bush needs to resign along with all his cabinet heads...
What I have experienced in the past week, and what the nation has experienced, is the utter collapse and failure of the Republican federal government. Their very philosophy lies in ruins, drowned for all to see at the bottom of Lake New Orleans. This goes beyond politics. This goes beyond partisanship. What we have seen is 100% absolutely unforgivable.
It's worse than the abstract injustice of cutting taxes for the wealthiest 1% of Americans or the allotment of lucrative no-bid contacts to Halliburton, a company that overcharges and under-performs by millions. It's worse than the bankruptcy bill numbers game that will hurt American lives. And it's even worse than sending American soldiers to fight in a trumped up war without adequate armor.
This is about people's lives and livelihoods being torn apart brutally and viscerally with an immediacy that is so obvious that it boggles the mind that the President of the United States was eating cake like Marie Antoinette and strumming a guitar like Nero while New Orleans was being destroyed.
i've seen the report on sen. landrieu going off several places... it needs to be broadly reported... what she describes is the entire bush administration in microcosm - a 5-year photo op...
George Bush's photo-op tour of New Orleans yesterday has apparently driven Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu over the edge. Today she blasted FEMA for its feeble response to Hurricane Katrina and Bush for his phony, stage managed promises of action:
I understand that the U.S. Forest Service had water-tanker aircraft available to help douse the fires raging on our riverfront, but FEMA has yet to accept the aid. When Amtrak offered trains to evacuate significant numbers of victims — far more efficiently than buses — FEMA again dragged its feet. Offers of medicine, communications equipment and other desperately needed items continue to flow in, only to be ignored by the agency.
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 and old — deserve far better from their national government
.
"phony" and "stage-managed..." yesterday i called it the mickey rooney, "hey, let's put on a show" government... what can you say when it goes beyond pathetic...?
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From Argentina to Zimbabwe, front-page photos of the dead and desperate in New Orleans, almost all of them poor and black, have sickened them and shaken assumptions about American might. How can this be happening, they ask, in a nation whose wealth and power seem almost supernatural in so many struggling corners of the world?
there are those who say i've been "off" for quite some time... be that as it may, i'm flying today from buenos aires to sofia, bulgaria, with an overnight in london on the way... i'll be getting around london by tube which oughta be an interesting experience after 7 july...
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the ugly underbelly of the u.s., the have-it-alls vs. the have-nothing-at-alls, is now on display for the entire world to see, courtesy of katrina...
The top fifth of earners in Manhattan now make 52 times what the lowest fifth make - $365,826 compared with $7,047 - which is roughly comparable to the income disparity in Namibia, according to the Times analysis of 2000 census data. Put another way, for every dollar made by households in the top fifth of Manhattan earners, households in the bottom fifth made about 2 cents.
Bush's "worst crisis...?" Such a genteel understatement...
the nyt has a bgo (B-linding G-limpse of the O-bvious)...
Faced with one of the worst political crises of his administration, President Bush abruptly overhauled his September schedule on Saturday as the White House scrambled to gain control of a situation that Republicans said threatened to undermine Mr. Bush's second-term agenda and the party's long-term ambitions.
what does it tell you that two countries we have been pissing on - one going back to jfk - cuba and venezuela, are offering aid and assistance in the wake of katrina... even mexico, who we have been seriously dissing ever since bush and fox met way back when, is stepping up... there are cuban doctors waiting at the havana airport for the green light... they are making us look like fools...
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first o'connor and now rehnquist... the perfect SCOTUS storm...
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist died Saturday night of the thyroid cancer he had battled for nearly a year, opening a second Supreme Court vacancy just days before Senate confirmation hearings were to begin to fill the seat being vacated by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
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