Don't forget, Roberts' Sup Ct hearings start tomorrow

From Kos Read the rest of this post...

Today's AMERICAblog visitors, by country

How cool is this? New feature, I love this. This is a list of countries where today's visitors to the blog came from, in order of number of visits. I know this shouldn't be surprising, as the Internet is everywhere, but it still surprises me - I mean, Syria? Wow.

United States
Canada
United Kingdom
Unknown
Japan
Australia
Germany
Netherlands
France
Switzerland
Denmark
New Zealand
Sweden
Mexico
Spain
Belgium
Finland
Ireland
Italy
Singapore
Korea, Republic of
Thailand
Norway
Hong Kong
Costa Rica
Austria
Malaysia
Brazil
Hungary
Satellite Provider
Taiwan
Virgin Islands, U.S.
Philippines
Slovenia
Oman
Greece
India
Puerto Rico
Saudi Arabia
United Arab Emirates
Argentina
Guatemala
Indonesia
Turkey
Panama
Pakistan
Russian Federation
Bahamas
Jamaica
Israel
French Polynesia
Trinidad and Tobago
Dominican Republic
Zimbabwe
Portugal
Romania
Bolivia
Peru
Syrian Arab Republic
Czech Republic
Poland
Iceland
Egypt
Barbados
Bulgaria
Cambodia
Qatar
Palestinian Territory, Occupied
Ukraine
Venezuela
Luxembourg
Palau
Bermuda
Croatia
Kenya
Cote D'Ivoire
Iran, Islamic Republic of
Senegal
Tanzania, United Republic of
Nepal
Maldives Read the rest of this post...

Rummy is planning nationwide Sept 11 wargasms next year?

Yeah, that's if Bush hasn't been forced to resign by then.

Can these guys ever just let it go? September 11 happened, I was there, it freaked me out, ok, I get it. Let if fucking go.

From Salon

Rumsfeld took the microphone to rally the crowd to march again next year. "This is our first March for Freedom and by the size of the crowd, I suspect it will not be the last," he said. Department of Defense materials said organizers will try to hold marches next year in all 50 states.

Read the rest of this post...

What if you threw a wargasm and nobody came?

Now, I don't want to claim that the Pentagon's September 11 wargasm party they threw today, to try to help Bush's sagging approval ratings, was a complete bust, but...

Joe in DC and I decided to hit the fete and see exactly how many hundreds of thousands of patriotic Amurikans joined in the by-registration-only "sterile" event (they had the entire event, from the Pentagon to the mall (a few miles away), fenced in for safety or something).

Well, Joe and I arrived there at 2, just off of the Lincoln Memorial and Korean War Memorial, and here's what we saw:



A whole lot of nothing.

So we walked closer.



And we saw young kids putting away tables, or something, in an empty field. Ok. So we walked a bit farther (further?)



And there we saw a nice empty stage and a handfuls of empty chairs. Joe and I found this a bit odd, since the event began at the Pentagon, where they had some ceremony, and then folks had to walk to the Mall, a good couple of miles. How did they all get here, party, and leave so quickly? Not to mention, there wasn't a speck of litter on the ground - either these people were uncommonly neat, or there weren't that many of them. Nor was the "sterile" party area very large.

I went up to some guy on the soundstage and asked him when this all began. He told me 11am, as soon as people started arriving. How many were there, I asked him. 15,000 to 18,000, he told me. Yeah, right. The Washington Post says "thousands" and another story online simply says "droves."

I've seen a lot of marches on the mall in my 20+ years in Washington, but I've never seen one where 15,000 people arrive between 11am and noon, and are all gone, and everything's cleaned up, two hours later.

Methinks the Freedom March, Patriot Party, or whatever, was a bit of a bust. Clearly Bush didn't get the September 11 war-fest he wanted. And my suspicion is that after Katrina, and all the criticism of every other event the president ran to instead of focusing on Katrina, the White House wrote this thing off.

And good riddance.

Can we now move past September 11, finally? Read the rest of this post...

The mute button has been turned off, George

Fabulous metaphor

NBC's Brian Williams says the lasting legacy of Hurricane Katrina for journalists may be the end of an unusual four-year period of deference to people in power.

There were so many angry, even incredulous, questions put to Bush administration officials about the response to Katrina that the Salon Web site compiled a "Reporters Gone Wild" video clip. Tim Russert, Anderson Cooper, Ted Koppel and Shepard Smith were among the stars.

The mute button seemingly in place since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has been turned off.

"By dint of the fact that our country was hit we've offered a preponderance of the benefit of the doubt over the past couple of years," the "Nightly News" anchorman said. "Perhaps we've taken something off our fastball and perhaps this is the story that brings a healthy amount of cynicism back to a news media known for it."

Read the rest of this post...

New Orleans doctors reportedy euthanized patients before leaving

Geez Read the rest of this post...

Landrieu slams White House

Well, well, well...hasn't she gotten feisty:

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said officials at all levels eventually would share blame for an inadequate response, but she cited only the administration for the finger-pointing that followed the killer storm.

"While the president is saying that he wants to work together as a team, I think the White House operatives have a full court press on to blame state and local officials whether they're Republicans or Democrats. It's very unfortunate," she told CBS' "Face the Nation."

She said Washington was obligated to support local and state officials, "particularly in times of tragedy and stress, not to pile on them, not to make their suffering worse."

The key White House talking point has been to say this is not time for "the blame game." One of the White House flacks actually said "It's not the time for blame" in response to Landrieu. Meanwhile, as Landrieu noted, the Bush Administration and the GOP are blaming everyone else for their colossal failures.

The other day, I quoted Jon Stewart, and I will again today, "When people don't want to play the blame game, they're to blame." Read the rest of this post...

Open Thread

The Newsweek story is truly amazing...seriously, could Bush be a bigger idiot? Read the rest of this post...

NEWSWEEK: Bush didn't know the Hurricane damage was bad until THURSDAY AFTER IT STRUCK

Newsweek has just published a horrifying story entitled "How Bush Blew It." This is must-read for everyone, and this story must be shared widely. Bush should resign, now. He is the worst president in modern history. This is criminal what he did.

What we learn in the Newsweek story.

1. Bush's aides are SO afraid of telling him bad news that they practically drew straws to see who would have to tell him, on TUESDAY, that the hurricane was so bad he'd need to come home.

2. Even on Thursday AFTER the storm, Bush didn't realize how bad the storm was:

President Bush knew the storm and its consequences had been bad; but he didn't quite realize how bad.

The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.

So Bush didn't realize how bad the storm damage was until Thursday night, almost the fifth day AFTER the storm hit. Good God. He was going to watch the weekly news Friday for the FIRST TIME to get a sense of how bad things were.

3. No one wanted to tell Bush the truth

When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job and that the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn't act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority.

4. Rumsfeld opposed sending in troops as cops.

5. "Bush created a disaster within a disaster."

A NEWSWEEK reconstruction of the government's response to the storm shows how Bush's leadership style and the bureaucratic culture combined to produce a disaster within a disaster.

6. Washington just wouldn't listen

A man in a blue FEMA windbreaker arrived to brief them on his helicopter flyover of the city. He seemed unfamiliar with the city's geography, but he did have a sense of urgency. "Water as far as the eye can see," he said. It was worse than Hurricanes Andrew in 1992 and Camille in 1969. "I need to call Washington," he said.... The FEMA man found a phone, but he had trouble reaching senior officials in Washington. When he finally got someone on the line, the city officials kept hearing him say, "You don't understand, you don't understand."

7. 8pm on Monday, the day of the storm, the governor asked Bush for everything he's got.

Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a motherly but steely figure known by the nickname Queen Bee, knew that she needed help. But she wasn't quite sure what. At about 8 p.m., she spoke to Bush. "Mr. President," she said, "we need your help. We need everything you've got."

8. Instead of helping New Orleans Monday night, Bush went to bed.

here are a number of steps Bush could have taken, short of a full-scale federal takeover, like ordering the military to take over the pitiful and (by now) largely broken emergency communications system throughout the region. But the president, who was in San Diego preparing to give a speech the next day on the war in Iraq, went to bed.

9. Wednesday morning, while Bush was STILL on vacation, he wouldn't take the governor's call for help

Early Wednesday morning, Blanco tried to call Bush. She was transferred around the White House for a while until she ended up on the phone with Fran Townsend, the president's Homeland Security adviser, who tried to reassure her but did not have many specifics.

10. FEMA improved under Clinton, then was hurt under Bush

Once a kind of petty-cash drawer for congressmen to quickly hand out aid after floods and storms, FEMA had improved in the 1990s in the Clinton administration. But it became a victim of the Iron Law of Unintended Consequences. After 9/11 raised the profile of disaster response, FEMA was folded into the sprawling Department of Homeland Security and effectively weakened. FEMA's boss, Bush's close friend Joe Allbaugh, quit when he lost his cabinet seat.

11. Bush wanted to hear good news, so that's all they gave him until Friday.

Bad news rarely flows up in bureaucracies. For most of those first few days, Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were doing. Bush likes "metrics," numbers to measure performance, so the bureaucrats gave him reassuring statistics. At a press availability on Wednesday, Bush duly rattled them off: there were 400 trucks transporting 5.4 million meals and 13.4 million liters of water along with 3.4 million pounds of ice. Yet it was obvious to anyone watching TV that New Orleans had turned into a Third World hellhole.

The denial and the frustration finally collided aboard Air Force One on Friday.

12. It took local officials ripping Bush a new one on Friday for him to finally wake up - a full 5 days after the disaster.

The denial and the frustration finally collided aboard Air Force One on Friday. As the president's plane sat on the tarmac at New Orleans airport, a confrontation occurred that was described by one participant as "as blunt as you can get without the Secret Service getting involved." Governor Blanco was there, along with various congressmen and senators and Mayor Nagin

Read the rest of this post...

Saturday in New Orleans with Kyle, our on-the-ground correspondent

The Corner of Bourbon and 82nd (Airborne)



An 82nd airborne soldier stands watch during a routine patrol in the French Quarter. The city is essentially now made up of media and relief workers who are kept safe by the military and hired gunmen.

Five-fingered Discount



This formerly was a gas station off of I-610. Now, it looks like an apocalyptic wasteland. A full six pack of Corona bottles sat between two pumps around the corner.

Lake George Boat ramp



Above is an exit ramp off of I-610 in New Orleans. Those two giant army patrol boats on the incline were new additions to the search fleet. The men in the blue shirts are rescue workers from Riverside, California. They had just finished a full day of going house to house looking for people and bodies.

Detox

A Riverside Fire Department rescue worker gets his boots cleaned off after working in toxic water all day. The detox process involved washing their boots with soapy water and light bleach solution followed by general use of common anti-bacterial soaps.

Read the rest of this post...

Bush's bodies

CONTINUED UPDATES FROM OUR ROVING REPORTER, KYLE SHANK, ON THE SCENE IN THE GULF:



We went back into New Orleans this afternoon. Macon was driving, Lindsay was riding shotgun, Bob and I were in the back. We spotted the body just off of Humanity Drive, caught on a street post. The Lake George boat ramp was located just 300 meters away yet the body continued to bloat. The neighborhood was not ravaged by the storm; it was destroyed by the flood.

Read the rest of this post...

Is Rove losing his magic touch?

Or so seems to intimate Howard Fineman from Newsweek . First:

Photographers rarely are allowed into the forward cabin of Air Force One, but consigliere Karl Rove and other aides summoned them so they could snap pictures of the Boss gazing out the window as the plane flew over the devastation. Republican strategists privately call the resulting imageBush as tourist, seemingly powerless as he peered down at the chaosperhaps among the most damaging of his presidency.

Then this:

Rove sent press secretary Scott McClellan into the media maw to decry "the blame game," but even Frist called for a swift investigationthough not the independent commission demanded by Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Could it be that the media is on to Rove? Rarely has there ever been criticism of him by the media.

Maybe they don't want to be his patsy anymore. We'll see. Read the rest of this post...

BET: Saving OurSelves

All the networks aired that one hour telethon on Friday, but BET did its own program lasting 2 and a half hours. Just working my way through it now. No surprise that even a reference to Kanye West elicited cheers -- no doubt where the black community stands on his comments. What struck me above everything else was the title:

S.O.S. -- Saving OurSelves.

No doubts there either -- they know Bush abandoned them, they know Bush and all his top cronies stayed on vacation, they know what Barbara Bush said, and they know they have to save themselves without depending on the federal government. Sad but true. Read the rest of this post...

Another "reader suggested" t-shirt, available now

On sale now in the AMERICAblog shop. Read the rest of this post...

Open thread

And check out Americablog's Big Hits Of The Week, a rundown of our most popular postings. Read the rest of this post...

Texas GOP governor says it's possible God sent Katrina to purge the gays

Oh yes.

Gov. Rick Perry spoke at two private events this week where a Texas minister wondered if God sent Hurricane Katrina to purify the nation of sins, including homosexuality.

The GOP leader didn't object at the gatherings in San Antonio and Houston on Thursday.

Gubernatorial spokesman Robert Black, contacted Friday, said: "The governor does not agree with that. But far be it for the governor to try to divine the will of the Almighty.

He went to TWO events where this happened. In other words, after the first time this bigot made these comments, the governor could have, should have, told his staff he wasn't going to appear with that guy. But he didn't. Then there's his spokesman suggesting that perhaps God did try to kill the homos, who knows?

I think what we're seeing here is not a purge of homosexuality in New Orleans, but a purge of homosexual rumors that have been swirling about Texas Governor Perry for years. Perry figures if he lets his preachers and his spokesman bash the fags, maybe people will assume he isn't gay.

Didn't work. Read the rest of this post...

More on Drownie, and it ain't pretty

From Kevin Drum. Read the rest of this post...

Another attack? We are so screwed

We know now that the Bush Administration sucks at natural disasters. No surprise, but looks like we're screwed if there's a terror attack, too.

Today's Washington Post has a front pager: "Terrorism could Hurl DC Area into Turmoil." Basically, it recounts how the area is not ready for an attack:

In all, federal, state and local governments have spent more than $2 billion to protect the Washington area since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Despite these efforts, security officials in the region concede that they fear another major terrorist strike would result in the kind of chaos and confusion seen along the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina.

Chances are any American city newspaper could write a front page article today saying their city is unprepared for a disaster. That begs the question: What the hell has the Bush administration been doing for the past four years?

Not much:

"For four years, we've been hearing from the feds that they are going to take charge so we can respond to any catastrophe that comes our way," said Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan (D). "And here's the first major test, and it's a failure. . . . I've lost confidence in [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] to come in and be part of the solution.

"We've got to take all the plans that relied on the federal government and throw them out and start over again," Duncan said.

For Bush, it was a campaign issue. That's it. And the media and the American people bought it.

Now, we know for sure we aren't any safer than we were four years ago. And, just remember, Bush and Drownie are still in charge of your safety. Read the rest of this post...

Open Thread

September 11th. How many ways will Bush try to exploit this day? Read the rest of this post...

Out a CIA agent, keep your job but talk to the media and you are fired

Poor Karl was embarrassed after the Washington Post wrote an article last week about his tax and voting status in DC and Texas. The long and short of it is that Rove was getting a tax break for his DC house which was technically not allowed since he claimed Texas to be his primary residence. The Texas address that he uses as his primary residence is actually a rental property and locals have never seen him there. The end result was that Rove had to pay some back taxes and Elizabeth Reyes, an attorney for the Texas Secretary of State, suggested that such a case could be considered voter fraud.

Reyes was then terminated by the state of Texas for speaking with the media, claiming that she violated the media policy of the department. So the lesson to be learned here is that it's perfectly OK to out a CIA agent and work for the president though telling the truth about Rove will get you sacked. Hmm. Read the rest of this post...

CNN picks up White House cronyism and pork story

Josh Marshall has talked a lot about Joe Allbaugh, former FEMA director and friend of Bush and Brownie on TPM but finally CNN is also picking up the ugly story about the close ties between the White House and lucrative government contracts. Allbaugh quit FEMA to cash in on Iraq contracts and now has jumped to the front of the line for government contracts for rebuilding NOLA. It's interesting to see that these so-called fans of democracy and freedom have also removed the minimum wage laws for the hurricane area, making me wonder how locals are supposed to pick themselves up with their bootstraps, when there aren't any bootstraps available. Maybe they're once again not interested in hiring locals though because if Iraq is the model, cheap labor will be hired from around the world to take the jobs that will have no benefits or protection while locals only look on wondering about jobs and unemployment.

Some group of patriots we have, isn't it? Read the rest of this post...