The Blame Game (cont.)

With Brownie gone, it's time to move on up the ladder of responsibility. The Wall Street Journal reports that "internal documents and emails from FEMA and other government agencies dating back to Aug. 31 and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show the extent to which the federal government bungled its response to the hurricane. The documents highlight serious deficiencies in the Department of Homeland Security's National Response Plan, a post-Sept. 11 playbook on how to deal with catastrophic events. Mr. Chertoff activated the National Response Plan last Tuesday by declaring the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina an 'Incident of National Significance'" AND . . .

"Some Homeland Security officials are already starting to acknowledge significant weaknesses in the national response plan, which was completely disregarded at times during the crisis.

'We at the department are not well prepared, and unfortunately, recent history has shown that that's the case,' Lee Holcomb, the department chief technology officer told a breakfast meeting of Information Technology executives on Wednesday in Washington."

Specific failures cited by WSJ include delays in activating health and safety workers, delays in coordinating with the NIH, ordering the wrong number of buses . . . Chertoff, Chertoff, bo bertoff . . .

It's For You

When the federal government can overlook entire cities, don't count on them to worry about the smallest citizens. Who is overseeing the childcare in the emergency shelters set up around the country to aide NOLA evacuees? I certainly hope it's not FEMA. Monica reminds us that someone needs to make sure the kids are alright.

Welcome to the blogosphere!

The Blame Game


The Administration doesn't want us to play "the blame game," but with such a catchy tune at the ready it's impossible to resist. So when they ask who's responsible for the Katrina Catastrophe be sure to sing out loudly:

Brownie, Brownie bo brownie
Bush’s crony, fo frownie
FEMA phony mo mownie
Brownie

Let’s do Chertoff:

Chertoff, Chertoff, bo berthoff
Banana fana fo fertoff
Bush appointed this Jerk-off
Chertoff

Let’s do Bush:

Bush, Bush bo bush
He’s to blame! fo fush
Let’s impeach him! mo mush
BUSH!

The Blame Game . . .

Yet More Houston

Kate's down in Houston and working hard.
Lot's to read over at Broken Windows. I was going to excerpt some but I think you should go ahead and read everything. It sounds like the nitty gritty stuff is being done by volunteers and there are a ton of those.

Meanwhile one interesting side effect of the belated dispatch of troops in New Orleans is that journalists are now being denied entry into the area.

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.

It's a shocking scene to contemplate and very emblematic of how the administration sees this crisis. The media is their pet gone rabid and they must put it down somehow. Which isn't to say that media coverage has been flawless, but it has been postively breathtaking to watch Paula Zahn, Ted Koppel, hell even Joe Scarbourough call out Bush, Cheney, Brown, and Chertoff for gross incompetence. One would think that if the prospect of tens of thousands of people dying couldn't stir Bush to action, the prospect of those tens of thousands of people dying on television could. The fact that Rove could not anticipate this kind of thing happening is illustrative of how dangerously superficial the business of governance is to these people. Some of us knew that already.

Above all, spend no money

It strikes me that one possible explanation for the feeble FEMA response is that the directive from within Homeland Security was for FEMA to sit on the sidelines showing itself ever at the ready (so many mre's shipped, blah, blah, blah) until local and state resources were exhausted. The FEMA guys would come in only for targeted events when the cameras were rolling. That's one way to understand "Brownie's" injunction in his memo to his staff before Katrina hit to ``convey a positive image of disaster operations to government officials, community organizations and the general public.''

While all the rest of us were thinking that Homeland Security was funded to direct and coordinate first responders in the case of an attack or catastrophe, Chertoff and Brownie saw themselves as backups whose first job was to keep federal expenditures as low as possible (how else are you going to justify further tax cuts?) even as FEMA patches and t-shirts were prominently displayed. Now the people in the Mississippi & Louisiana gulf have paid dearly--and so will we all.

Update from Houston

Ceds called back. Some medical staff were attacked a convenience store near the Astrodome. Baylor has requested that the first-years not return to volunteer until there's a bit more oversight. At least the volunteers can leave. There's still not enough security for the refugees.

Are You Fucking Kidding Me?!

No.

The Navy has hired Houston-based Halliburton Co. to restore electric power, repair roofs and remove debris at three naval facilities in Mississippi damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

Amidst anarchy, negligence, and carnage Halliburton manages to pull a profit. I can't believe these people. By now I should know better but I can't believe it.

The View from Houston

Sometime blogger, full-time sister, and first-year med student Ceds is in Houston and spent the day volunteering at the Astrodome. She says that it's pretty grim. A lot of people are going to get sick from wading in raw sewage with open wounds. It's crowded and dirty. Security is scarce. There are reports of theft. People are restless and fights are breaking out. She says she's never seen anything like it. Today she washed out the cuts of a four-year-old boy who was trapped in an attic for two days. He doesn't know where his parents are. Another man had a broken collarbone, and received painkillers but nothing else. He also has no idea where his family is. That's what she heard over and over again. Everybody there is searching for family. The one thing they have is medical attention due to the promixity of Baylor Medical Center. But the sense of disorder is pervasive. Nobody know's who's in charge. People wander around aimlessly.

Things that they need ASAP are:

Toothbrushes
Tampons and pads
Hand sanitizer and baby wipes
Batteries (AA and AAA)
Socks
Underwear (kids and adults)
Toys

Here's a link for where to drop stuff off in Houston. Meanwhile Ceds is going back tomorrow. She's tired, she's shocked, she's a little frightened, but she's going back. Everybody hope that she stays safe.

Unbelievable

Can we for a moment stop talking about the looting and talk about something truly criminal?

Hundreds of Katrina evacuees who fled to Tallahassee seeking refuge from the storm have been politely told by their hotels and motels to leave this weekend to make room for a football game: FSU vs. Miami.

Hotel space is traditionally scarce any time the Florida State Seminoles take on the University of Miami Hurricanes, one of the choicest tickets on the college football schedule.

But with hotels packed with families from Louisiana and Mississippi, and room space booked for Monday's game for months, hotel operators say they are trying to accommodate the evacuees but have no choice but to nudge them out.


''We have to let them know what's going on in town and they're going to have to leave,'' said Angie Rayman, manager at the Howard Johnson. ``Many of them are trying to get closer to home anyway.''

Jesus
While this is happening...

The evacuation of patients from Charity Hospital was halted Thursday after the facility came under sniper fire twice.

A physician at the hospital said that despite the incidents staff members and patients were eager to get out after three days with no water and electricity and sparse food rations.

...and this...

That official told me they were able to take a couple of people out. One woman so desperate that she actually handed up her 2 month old baby and said take my child. I can't get on this bus, but you've got to try to save this child. She didn't even know the woman's name.

..Condi was doing WHAT?

Just moments ago at the Ferragamo on 5th Avenue, Condoleeza Rice was seen spending several thousands of dollars on some nice, new shoes (we’ve confirmed this, so her new heels will surely get coverage from the WaPo’s Robin Givhan). A fellow shopper, unable to fathom the absurdity of Rice’s timing, went up to the Secretary and reportedly shouted, “How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!” Never one to have her fashion choices questioned, Rice had security PHYSICALLY REMOVE the woman.

There's got to be a special corner in hell where this kind of callousness is punished. I hope when Condi gets there, she's wearing those shoes so Satan can shove them down her throat.

.

It's nice to know that something has finally gotten Junior to cut short his vacation.

President Bush will cut short his vacation to return to Washington on Wednesday, two days earlier than planned, to help monitor federal efforts to assist victims of Hurricane Katrina, the White House said Tuesday.

"We have got a lot of work to do," Bush said, referring to the damage wrought by the hurricane along Gulf Coast areas.

The president had been scheduled to return to the nation's capital on Friday, after spending more than four weeks operating from his ranch in Central Texas. But after receiving a briefing early Tuesday on the devastation Katrina unleashed, the president decided that he needed to be in Washington to personally oversee the federal effort, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

Yup a natural disaster. Because it's not enough to have a mounting body count in Iraq. I'm guessing it's hard for a man who believe's he has the Almighty at his beck and call to ignore evidence of His wrath. I wonder if there's anyway we could use this to our advantage and convince him to end the war or face locusts next.

One Foot in the Grave

Sergeant Thomas J. Strickland was killed in Iraq on Aug. 15. He posted the following two days before he was killed:

The insurgency is on the rise in our area, with a most impressive coordinated assault on one of my sister FOBs (St. Joe) under their belt. ...

What the fuck has my chain of command been doing? We were winning somewhat when I left. And now we're being pinned down in our own fucking homes? Insurgents are pushing locals out of their homes and taking over my area at will? What kind of fucktarded plan have we been half-assedly executing? Obviously the kind that neglects sound contact with locals. Obviously the kind that gives further distance to unbridged gaps between soldiers and locals. Obviously the kind that has shown enough weakness when confronted by the insurgency that it has been encouraged to grow.

Back home (the USA kind) I have no home, no job, and my commander in chief is on vacation (he's about 20 days behind Ronald Reagan right now in the race to become the most vacationing president ever. Hey W! we all got our fingers crossed! Here's to you and two more years of presidency...er vacationing!). Luckily pretty much everything that is important to me can fit into the back of a truck. Luckily I just paid off one of those.

In their fear to build relationships and get out of their hiding holes the FOBbits above me have fucked my friends and I.
We've just completed the first 1/4 of our tour. we've sent 4 of 24 members of this platoon home with injuries.

Thankfully we're not like another who has sent 8 home in body bags...but we got 9 months to go.

Stay true lambs,
REV

This breaks my heart.
Thanks to Tim for the link.

Homeward Bound

It has very much been A Long Hot Summer, without the benifit of a shirtless Paul Newman on my balcony. Moving twice in three months takes a lot out of a person. Mix in trying to apartment hunt and job hunt together, add a dollop of financial aid panic, and voila. Mini nervous breakdown ensues. So in the interest of not blowing a gasket right at the start of my second year of grad school I am taking a mental health break and heading back to Chicago for a few days. The good news is that life seems to be finally winding down a bit and as of yesterday I am fully internet active thanks to a couple of maverick installation guys.

So I hope to be blogging more. Thanks to red rabbit and the professor for keeping up the place.

Insidious Design

Back in the 1990s when the Culture Wars appeared to be centered in English Departments on college campuses, Gerald Graff, a professor of English, urged his colleagues to “teach to the conflicts.” Graff reasoned that an undergraduate population increasingly unable to see any point in studying, say, Romantic poetry, might be energized if their professors introduced them to the competing ideologies that were roiling the pages of academic journals. By clarifying the disagreements among literature teachers we just might be able to teach our uncomprehending and uninterested undergraduates why reading and interpreting poetry was a matter that should concern them.

Now, as the front in these wars seems to have migrated to high school science classes, proponents of “intelligent design” are urging public schools to “teach the controversy” between intelligent design and evolution. But while they’ve stolen a page from Professor Graff’s playbook the differences between the two slogans are more instructive than the similarities.

By changing the key term from conflict to controversy, intelligent design proponents are doing more than hiding their debt to Professor Graff. They are, inadvertently, revealing their intent to mystify rather than clarify. A controversy involving science does not always indicate the existence of two credible scientific positions. To take one example, recall from this past spring the issue of removing Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube that preoccupied the nation. The case was certainly controversial. Yet from the standpoint of the medical science involved, there was no conflict. None of the physicians who examined Schiavo disagreed about her level of brain activity or about the likelihood of her recovering any significant level of brain function. Nonetheless it was difficult for many of the people who followed the public discussion in the media to find out this basic truth. Part of the intended outcome of making the issue a national controversy was to create the impression that the argument against removing Ms. Schiavo’s feeding tube rested on as solid ground, medically, as the argument for its removal.

To be sure there were real ethical, social, and political matters hanging in the balance, and these were indeed matters where discussion would have proved quite useful. Unfortunately the lion’s share of the public debate centered on people’s responses to video images of an apparently responsive, smiling Terri Schiavo.

Something similar has happened with intelligent design. Plenty of controversy, but again, from the standpoint of mainstream science, no real conflict. Sure, some scientists are pushing intelligent design, but the overwhelming majority of scientists working on the origins and development of life are not spending any time whatsoever trying to repudiate the findings of intelligent design—largely because there aren’t any.

But as with the Schiavo case, focus on a largely nonexistent controversy among scientists has obscured the real conflict, which exists among those Americans who declare themselves people of faith and who have to contend with the ever-increasing power of scientific explanation. We’ve seen among these Americans a range of responses to scientific discovery, including attempts to repudiate it, to coexist with it, and, now, to reconcile it with religious belief. These are interesting conflicts and perhaps worthy of discussion, but they are debates among people of faith, and have no place in science classrooms.

In fact, the logic of the issue goes in a direction exactly opposite that assumed by intelligent design proponents: If people of faith are to understand the implications that scientific findings and methods have for their beliefs, they have to be taught science in the first place. And while our current understanding of the wall between church and state may prevent us from insisting that religious schools teach their students evolution, we can at the very least insist the public schools don’t shirk their responsibilities in this area.

Physically Fit or Just Plain Vain?
In the film "Welcome to Mooseport," a former president played by Gene Hackman erroneously believes himself to be a pretty good golfer because, unknown to him, Secret Service agents have always hidden themselves around the course and tossed his errant drives back onto the fairway. From everything I've heard, the current resident is a much better cyclist than Hackman's character was a golfer, but the recent attention devoted to W's cycling exploits has drawn out at least one similarity--both men are allowed to believe that carefully controlled situations are the same as reality. Bush can declare himself the leader of the pack even as the Secret Service instructs his fellow riders that under no circumstances are they to pass the self-deluded little chimp. Likewise, he pats himself on the back for his optimal blood pressure and low cholesterol level even as he enjoys the kind of publicly funded health care that his policies deny to a nation suffering from an epidemic of obesity and Type II diabetes.
By contrast back in 1961, a physically limited, but nonetheless quite active, President Kennedy created the President's Council on Physical Fitness, which urged schools to adopt fitness guidelines. (I can still remember receiving my certificate in the second grade.) One does not need to romanticize the Kennedy presidency to see how successful the Right has been at choking off the government's commitment to providing for public health and welfare.
Although Hackman's character, as is generally the case in films, is brought around to seeing himself and the world around him without the protective lenses of his administration's handlers, there's no chance that Bush is ever going to see the light. The real issue is whether or not those of us among the Administration's opposition can build an effective movement that produces real alternatives for our domestic and foreign policies.

The Madness of King George

Roads were shut down Wednesday and residents living in nearby apartments between Dooley and Ruth Wall Roads were warned not to look out of their windows Wednesday. School busses from Grapevine-Colleyville ISD formed a perimeter around the site where President George W. Bush was scheduled to land. No one was going to get a glance of the president on his way to the Galylord Texan Resort and Convention Center.

Is he traveling naked these days? What the . . .? Residents were warned not to look out of their windows??? With a warning comes a threat. What were residents of Grapevine, TX risking by looking out of their own windows? Would they be arrested? Turned into a pillar of salt?

Ohio election fraud story making a comeback?

Ok, this makes me crazy. Here is a journalist who, by his own admission, ignored the Ohio voter fraud story of 2004, dismissed those of us who were spitting blood angry as psycho liberal conspiracy theorists. The cognitive dissonance of wanting to slap him with one hand and welcome him back to the angry leftist fold with the other is making my head hurt. I suppose his piece may reach other scoffers like himself with the added weight of his late conversion. I will add it to my long list of proof that there really is a great rightwing conspiracy hellbent on taking over the world.

Here's the thing about Ohio. Until you really look at it, you won't understand its significance, which is this: the techniques used in this particular theft have the capacity to alter elections not by dozens or hundreds or even thousands of votes, but by tens of thousands.

Obviously people who have followed this story before know the basic facts already, but for those who ignored Ohio until now, here's a very brief greatest hits of Ohio irregularities:

* As was the case in Florida, the secretary of state (Kenneth Blackwell, in Ohio), who is in charge of elections, was also the co-chair of the state's Bush-Cheney campaign.

* In a technique reminiscent of the semantic gymnastics of pre-Civil Rights Act election officials, Blackwell replaced the word "jurisdiction" with "precinct" in an electoral directive that would ultimately result in perhaps tens of thousands of provisional ballots--votes cast mainly by low-income residents--being disallowed.

* Blackwell initially rejected thousands of voter registrations because they were printed on paper that was, according to him, the wrong weight.

* In conservative, Bush-friendly Miami County, voter turnout was an Uzbekistan-esque 98.55 percent.

* In Warren county, election officials locked down the administration building and prevented reporters from observing the ballot counting, citing a "terrorist threat" (described as being a "10" on a scale of 1 to 10) that had been reported to them by the FBI. The FBI made no such report. Recounts conducted during this lockdown resulted in increased votes for Bush.

* In Franklin County, 4,258 votes were cast for Bush in a precinct where there were only 800 registered voters.

Better late than never, I suppose.

Harold and Kumar Go to Gitmo

Do you ever feel like you don't recognize your country anymore? Maybe the moment came for you when five Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court handed a presidential election to one of their own. Maybe it came when the president took America to war based on pretenses that turned out to be false. Maybe it came when you saw those photographs from Abu Ghraib, or when you learned that the man who helped orchestrate America's torture policies would become its attorney general. Maybe all of those things built up in your mind until your idea of America started to seem a long way off from the reality around you.

I used to work with Tim Grieve at the Stanford Daily a lifetime ago. You can read him in the War Room over at Salon. He will introduce you to Abu Bakker Qassim and A'del Abdu al-Hakim whose story could be the screenplay for Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle as written by Franz Kafka. Two friends fleeing religious persecution in China, arrested in Turkey on suspicion of terrorist activity, turned over to the U.S. and delivered to Guantánamo Bay three years ago.

Although Qassim and al-Hakim were cleared in March, the United States didn't bother to share that fact with anyone outside Guantánamo. And having been denied contact with their lawyers or their family members, the men had no way to spread the word themselves. So for four more months, they sat in Guantánamo, cleared but not freed.

The U.S. says it can't send the men back to China because it fears they'll be persecuted there, and it hasn't found any other country that is willing to take them. Why not release them into the civilian population at Guantánamo until something better can be arranged? Can't do that, either, the government says. "They have been detained in here with some very bad people, under some very bad influences," Guantánamo spokesman and Army Maj. Jeff Weir tells the Globe.

TWAT by any other name

It's hard to understand why the White House and the Pentagon would waste time and money to come up with a new slogan for our invasion of Iraq. Until you see that the acronym for "a global struggle against violent extremism," or GSAVE replaces TWAT, or "the war against terror."

You just know that a memo came down the pike at some point entitled "Talking Points to strengthen support for TWAT" and some WH staffer thought it was referring to Bush.

Ohbladi

Loyal readers may have noticed the spareseness of posts around here this summer. This is mainly due to the fact that being poor in New York and potentially homeless has a way of putting blogging on the back burner. The good news is that both poverty and homelessness* have been averted. The bad news is that said new home is also a in new building that hasn't been configured for internet access. So ultralite posting will unfortunately continue throughout August. Red Rabbit has been granted administrator status since she has done such an admirable job of keeping things from going to seed around here (also she was very much instrumental in averting my potential homelessness so the least I could do was give her a lil more clout). So things will continue as they have. And don't worry I'm still here.

*Yes I am exaggerating but only slightly.