Nearly three weeks after Hurricane Katrina cut its devastating path, FEMA - the same federal agency that botched the rescue mission - is faltering in its effort to aid hundreds of thousands of storm victims, local officials, evacuees and top federal relief officials say. The federal aid hot line mentioned by President Bush in his address to the nation on Thursday cannot handle the flood of calls, leaving thousands of people unable to get through for help, day after day.there's more...
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While the agency has redoubled its efforts to get food, money and temporary shelter to the storm victims, serious problems remain throughout the affected region. Visits to several towns in Louisiana and Mississippi, as well as interviews with dozens of local and federal officials, provide a portrait of a fragmented and dysfunctional system.
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The president of St. Tammany Parish, Kevin Davis, is praying that it does not rain in his sweltering corner of Louisiana, because three weeks after the storm severely damaged his drainage system, FEMA has yet to give him approval to even start the repairs.Up north in the poor parish of Washington, residents are sleeping in houses that were chopped in half by oak trees. The promised wave of government inspectors have not shown up to assist them.
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In Tangipahoa Parish, the parish president, Gordon Burgess, said he called FEMA officials daily to ask when they would arrive to assist residents with housing. Mr. Burgess said the federal workers say, " 'I'll get to you next week,' and then the next week and then you'd never hear from them again."James McGehee, the mayor of Bogalusa, a small Louisiana city near the Mississippi border, could barely contain his rage in an interview on Thursday.
"Today is 18 days past the storm, and FEMA has not even put a location for people who are displaced," he said. "They are walking around the damn streets. The system's broke."
Bush's America is gone with the wind. It lasted just short of four years, from Sept. 11, 2001, to Aug. 29, 2005. The devastation of New Orleans was the watery equivalent of a dirty bomb, but Hurricane Katrina approached the homeland with advance warnings, scientific anticipation and a personal briefing of the president by the director of the National Hurricane Center, alerting him about a possible breaching of the levees. It was as predictable as though Osama bin Laden had phoned in every detail to the television networks. No future terrorist attack would or could be as completely foreseen as Katrina.
Bush's entire presidency and reelection campaign were organized around one master idea: He stood as the protector and savior of the American people under siege. On this mystique he built his persona as a decisive man of conviction and action. In the 2004 election, a critical mass of voters believed that because of his unabashed patriotism and unembarrassed religiosity he would do more to protect the country. They also believed that his fervor must be strength. The criticism of Bush that he was overzealous, simplistic and single-minded only served to reinforce his image.
The deepest wound is not that he was incapable of defending the country but that he has shown he lacks the will to do so. In Bush's own evangelical language, he revealed his heart.
Overnight, the press disclosed a petulant, vacillating president it had not noticed before. It was as if there were a new man in the White House. Time magazine described a "rigid and top-down" White House where aides are petrified to deliver bad news to a "yelling" president. Newsweek reported that two days after the hurricane, top White House aides, who "cringe" before the "cold and snappish" president, met to decide which of them would be assigned the miserable task of telling Bush he would have to cut short his summer vacation. "The [hurricane's] 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."
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Poverty, previously unmentionable, has increased about 9 percent since Bush assumed office. The disparity between the superpower's evangelical mission to democratize the world and its indifference at home is a foreign policy crisis of new dimension. Can Iraq be saved if Louisiana is lost? Bush's credibility gap is a geopolitical problem without a geopolitical solution. Assuming a new mission, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wears her racial identity to witness for Bush's purity of heart. So long as Bush could wrap himself in 9/11 his image was shielded; he could even justify Iraq by flashing the non sequitur to his base. But once another event of magnitude thundered over his central claim as national defender, the Bush myth crumbled. It would take another event of this scale to begin to restore it. But it would also require a different set of responses from Bush. Now his evocation of 9/11 only reminds the public of his failed promise.
John Ellis Bush, the youngest son of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, was arrested early Friday and charged with public intoxication and resisting arrest, law enforcement officials in Texas said.
The 21-year-old nephew of President Bush was arrested by the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission at 2:30 a.m. Friday on a corner of Austin's Sixth Street bar district, said spokesman Roger Wade.
It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces - the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment's notice.
There. Catch that last sentence? It summarizes everything Bush really has to say about the situation.
1. It repeats the "I was hampered by legalities" excuse, implying that he didn't act because (insert your favorite latin legal phrase) restrained him.
2. It spreads the blame to state and local governments that knew they were out of their depth and had already begged for federal assistance.
3. The power grab. This is the real heart of the thing -- "requires greater federal authority." Bush will now use the Katrina disaster as a means to gather still more power to his administration.
To see how this will work, you have only to look at the response to 9/11. Everyone directly involved agreed that the government had not been hampered by law or institutional barriers, but had only failed through plain old government inertia and because the Bush administration was not paying enough attention to the problem. Even so, the immediate response of the Bush administration was to use 9/11 as an opportunity to grab more power to themselves, and to erode civil liberties.
Now that pattern is repeating itself. The situation in New Orleans had nothing to do with legal restrictions which kept the federal government out. However, Bush will now use Katrina as an excuse to gather more powers to himself.
* Expect new legislation that makes it the decision of the president, not the governor, when to send in the troops.
* Expect new legislation that makes it easier for the president to declare martial law.
* Expect new legislation that makes it easier for the president to take control of national guard troops, including units within their home state.
* Expect this new legislation to be used much more broadly than in the case of nation disasters.
In effect, expect Bush to use this excuse to overturn Posse Comitatus as it now stands, and to rework the National Guard as an extension of the federal executive. For everyone on the right who ever used the "well, the federal government doesn't have a national police force" meme -- Bush is about to solve that problem for you.
I am duty-bound to report the talk of the New Orleans warehouse district last night: there was rejoicing (well, there would have been without the curfew, but the few people I saw on the streets were excited) when the power came back on for blocks on end. Kevin Tibbles was positively jubilant on the live update edition of Nightly News that we fed to the West Coast. The mini-mart, long ago cleaned out by looters, was nonetheless bathed in light, including the empty, roped-off gas pumps. The motorcade route through the district was partially lit no more than 30 minutes before POTUS drove through. And yet last night, no more than an hour after the President departed, the lights went out. The entire area was plunged into total darkness again, to audible groans. It's enough to make some of the folks here who witnessed it... jump to certain conclusions.
It was not a normal hurricane -- and the normal disaster relief system was not equal to it.
Bush repeated a hotline number, 1-877-568-3317, for people to call to help reunite family members separated during the hurricane. Moments later, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., criticized Bush, saying "Leadership isn't a speech or a toll-free number."
"No American doubts that New Orleans will rise again," Kerry said. "They doubt the competence and commitment of this administration."
As soon as New Orleans gets back to normal, I plan on volunteering to go down there and help drink their economy back on its feet.
Survivor rescued 16 days after the hurricane
A human foot arching at an odd angle was visible through the front window of a locked and dark home.
The National Guard team of searchers was about to call in a "DB," or dead body, at 1927 Lopez St. in the Broadmoor district when Lt. Frederick Fell decided to investigate.
In the past few days, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has ordered searchers not to break into homes. They are supposed to look in through a window and knock on the door. If no one cries out for help, they are supposed to move on. If they see a body, they are supposed to log the address and move on. (snip)
But Fell broke the rules and ordered his men to bash open the door, launching a series of events that would save a man's life and revitalize California Task Force 5 from Orange County. In the past two days, the 80-member task force had identified seven dead bodies in the same neighborhood, and they had rescued no one.
But Tuesday, 16 days after Hurricane Katrina smacked this aging community in the face, an unconscious and emaciated man identified as Edgar Hollingsworth, 74, was rescued. The man is expected to survive. (snip)Medics from California Task Force 5, which had been searching in the same neighborhood, were eventually able to get intravenous fluids through a vein under the man's clavicle in an intricate curbside medical procedure that may have saved the man's life. (snip)
"They were surprised at the hospital that anyone in his condition would still be alive," Czuleger (one of the medics, an emergency-room doctor at Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo) said. "In 24 hours, he would have been dead.
"I think the young Army guy that found him saved his life."
Afterward, the Guardsmen, like the members of Task Force 5, were excited to have finally saved someone. (snip)
The rescue pumped up the spirits of Task Force 5, which has been mostly marking the locations of bodies for the last week. Earlier, they had been frustrated when FEMA delayed their deployment for four days, housing them in the Hyatt Regency in Dallas.
They were frustrated further when they were given the FEMA order that they weren't allowed to force their way into houses to search them. They hope Hollingsworth's rescue will coax FEMA to rethink its directive.
Can you hear that? That low scraping moan, that painful scream, that compressed hissing wail like the sound of an angry alligator caught in a vice?there's more...
Why, it's the GOP, and they're screaming, "No, no it can't be, oh my God, please no, this damnable Katrina thing is just an unstoppable PR disaster for us!"
After all (they wail), who woulda thought dissing all those poor black people and letting so many of them die in filth and misery in the Superdome while our pampered CEO president enjoyed yet another vacation would cause such an ugly backlash, such harsh criticism of the glorious, rich-über-alles GOP creed?
Who knew it would lay bare our deeply inbred agenda of social injustice and civil neglect, and our systematic abuse of the country? This storm thing is so not the thing we need right now because, oh my God look, just look! We've been so golden! We've had the run of the candy store! We have been gods among swine!
As a bunch of Average Americans living from paycheck to paycheck, we feel frustrated that our President is spending more of his time restricting the fundamental rights that our nation is founded on than fixing the economic woes we face. And, as Average Americans, we're doing what any red-blooded patriot would do when things seem their darkest — we're Mooning.
We think that Mooning The White House is a powerful example of political speech, protected by our cherished First Amendment, that will send a message to President Bush and his pals. The message: get your priorities straight, bub. America is about freedom, not about blindly following the lead of a corrupt and inbred executive branch. Bub.
Our votes may not count, but our butts will. Help us reach the White House by donating a dollar or more to the cause.
President Bush is balancing a harried schedule of diplomatic duties - from Iraq to China and the United Nations - while working to stay on top of hurricane recovery efforts that most Americans say should be his No. 1 priority.Joe in DC sez: if you have to say you can do more than one thing at a time, you probably can't.
"I can do more than one thing at one time," the president assured Monday on the first of two planned visits this week to the Gulf Coast. He's fitting those in between meetings with world leaders who came to the United States for a gathering of the United Nations in New York, where he planned to publicly thank world leaders for their contributions to storm relief.
From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE...
Please help the real victims of Hurricane Katrina...
Those poor "fiscal conservative" Republicans. They Approved $54.4 billion for the Iraq War (enacted in April 2003)...plus $70.6 billion (enacted November 2003)...plus $21.5 billion (passed as part of regular appropriations for the Department of Defense for fiscal year 2005)...plus $58 billion (enacted April 2005). Our war of choice is costing us $5.6 billion per month and that's just peachy.
They rammed a $530 billion Medicare bill through Congress in the middle of the night and that felt soooo goooood. (the original price tag, you might remember, was $400 billion. But what's $130 billion among friends?)
This was nice: a $14.5 billion energy bill that, according to the president, doesn't do a damn thing to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, but does give financial hoochie-koochies to the oil companies which they can stack on top of their record-breaking profits. Suh-weeet!
How about $2.2 trillion with a T in tax cuts for the rich---during wartime even! Or a pork-laden, $286 billion transportation bill. That's orgasmo-tastic!
And while we're at it, let's not forget Social Security privatization, which would toss at least another $1 trillion onto the pile.
But...funding for relief efforts to help victims of the worst natural disaster in our nation's 229-year history? Well...that's cause for grave concern by Republican "fiscal conservatives":
"We have to be there for the families and the communities, but we also have an obligation to the rest of the American people and to future generations," says Rep. Mike Pence (R-Indiana). "We're going to have to put a real sharp pencil to the budget, sharper than we have ever had to do before," says Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Illinois). "When figures start flowing up to $200 billion, I have concerns. $1 billion is a lot of money," says Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama).
Clearly, "fiscal conservative" Republicans need our support more than ever in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. They're suffering and no one seems to feel their pain. Please show you care and donate as much as you can by placing (non tax-deductible) donations into the ExxonMobil baseball cap in the lobby. God Bless You...and God Bless the Fiscally Conservative United States of America!
If gas prices are driving you to drink, here's the place to go: the Handlebar, 2311 W. North.
Under its Inverse Petrol-O-Matic Beer Pricing Scheme, beer prices will fall as gas prices rise.
So with gas at $3, a pint of Goose Island 312 ale is also $3. When gas hits $4, the beer's $2. Five-dollar gas gets you beer for a buck and if gas hits $6 the beer's free.
Oil companies came under new fire yesterday when it emerged that ExxonMobil's profits are likely to soar above $10 billion this quarter on the back of the fuel crisis.
That's $110 million a day, and more net income than any company has ever made in a quarter. It's also a stunning 69 percent increase over the same period a year ago and a 34 percent jump from the $7.6 billion Exxon made just last quarter.
"Do you realize President Bush has just given a tax break to ExxonMobil?'' thundered Rep. Ed Markey (D-Malden). "Of all the companies in the history of the world that needed a tax break, this month, ExxonMobil should be at the bottom of the list.''
The law gives incentives to producers such as Exxon to expand production, such as for drilling for new wells in deeper waters in the Gulf of Mexico.
Even oil company shareholders were critical. Hub fund manager Lee Forker, the head of New England Research & Management, said the profits reflected a failure of oil companies' leadership to invest in future production. "They're maximizing present cashflows and ignoring the future,'' he said.
ExxonMobil is spending about $5 billion a quarter buying back its own shares.
Forker says the oil companies bear responsibility for recent shortages, because they have held back on investment in new production for years due to a fear of a price collapse. ``It could just be a big scam – `Let's just restrict the supply along with the OPEC countries and we'll all get rich together' '' he said.
WASHINGTON, Sept 12 (Reuters) - President George W. Bush on Monday named David Paulison, a top official in the Homeland Security Department, to replace Michael Brown on an acting basis as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Bush moved quickly to put Paulison in charge of FEMA after Brown resigned the position under fire for the slow federal response to Hurricane Katrina that killed hundreds and displace 1 million people.
On Tuesday, less than 24 hours after U.S. Fire Administrator David Paulison described a list of useful items, stores in the greater Washington, D.C. area reported a surge in sales of plastic sheeting, duct tape, and other emergency items.
Walter Maestri had dreaded this call for a decade, ever since he took over emergency management for Jefferson Parish, a marshy collection of suburbs around New Orleans. It was Friday night, Aug. 26, and his friend Max Mayfield was on the line. Mayfield is the head of the National Hurricane Center, and he wasn't calling to chat.
"Walter," Mayfield said, "get ready."
"What do you mean?" Maestri asked, though he already knew the answer.
Hurricane Katrina had barreled into the Gulf of Mexico, and Mayfield's latest forecast had it smashing into New Orleans as a Category 4 or 5 storm Monday morning. Maestri already had 10,000 body bags in his parish, in case he ever got a call like this.
"This could be the one," Mayfield told him.
Maestri heard himself gasp: "Oh, my God."
In July 2004, Maestri had participated in an exercise called Hurricane Pam, a simulation of a Category 3 storm drowning New Orleans. Emergency planners had concluded that a real Pam would create a flood of unimaginable proportions, killing tens of thousands of people, wiping out hundreds of thousands of homes, shutting down southeast Louisiana for months.
(snip)
That Friday, as Maestri prepared for the Big One, he had known that his region's survival would depend on the federal response. After Hurricane Pam, FEMA officials had concluded that local authorities might be on their own for 48 or even 60 hours after a real storm, but they had assured Maestri that the cavalry would swoop in after that, and take care of the region's needs.
"Like a fool, I believed them," Maestri said last week.
We're proud to be a Louisiana Company and brewing beer is what we do best. We have created Fleur-de-lis Restoration Ale to raise funds for those whose lives have been torn apart by Hurricane Katrina. Be on the look out for this golden ale which will hit store shelves the week of October 3 and buy a bunch of six packs. $1 from every six-pack will go to the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation.
Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, the singer and guitarist who built a 50-year career playing blues, country, jazz and Cajun music, died Saturday in his hometown of Orange, Texas, where he had gone to escape Hurricane Katrina. He was 81.
Brown, who had been battling lung cancer and heart disease, was in ill health for the past year, said Rick Cady, his booking agent.
Cady said the musician was with his family at his brother's house when he died. Brown's home in Slidell, La., a bedroom community of New Orleans, was destroyed by Katrina, Cady said.
"He was completely devastated," Cady said. "I'm sure he was heartbroken, both literally and figuratively. He evacuated successfully before the hurricane hit, but I'm sure it weighed heavily on his soul."
A staff attorney with the Texas secretary of state said yesterday that she was fired this week for violating press protocols when she spoke to a Washington Post reporter who was working on a story about presidential adviser Karl Rove.She was fired to talking to a reporter about Karl Rove, who was not fired for talking to a reporter about the identity of an undercover CIA agent.
Sept. 19, 2005 issue - It's a standing joke among the president's top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of the president of the United States, or, as he is known in West Wing jargon, POTUS. The bad news on this early morning, Tuesday, Aug. 30, some 24 hours after Hurricane Katrina had ripped through New Orleans, was that the president would have to cut short his five-week vacation by a couple of days and return to Washington. The president's chief of staff, Andrew Card; his deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagin; his counselor, Dan Bartlett, and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, held a conference call to discuss the question of the president's early return and the delicate task of telling him. Hagin, it was decided, as senior aide on the ground, would do the deed.You know how much he likes his vacation.
Reuters is reporting on the coven of Bushco vampires swooping down upon the Gulf Coast. Their Dark Master has already assured that nothing will stand in their way as they feed upon the misery of the helpless peasants in this godforsaken land.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Companies with ties to the Bush White House and the former head of FEMA are clinching some of the administration's first disaster relief and reconstruction contracts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.At least two major corporate clients of lobbyist Joe Allbaugh, President George W. Bush's former campaign manager and a former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have already been tapped to start recovery work along the battered Gulf Coast.
One is Shaw Group Inc. and the other is Halliburton Co. subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root. Vice President Dick Cheney is a former head of Halliburton.
Bechtel National Inc., a unit of San Francisco-based Bechtel Corp., has also been selected by FEMA to provide short-term housing for people displaced by the hurricane. Bush named Bechtel's CEO to his Export Council and put the former CEO of Bechtel Energy in charge of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.
Read it all...
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.
How this could be—how the president of the United States could have even less "situational awareness," as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century—is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace.
(snip)
After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him. 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.
(snip)
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.
(snip)
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.
(snip)
Late last week, Bush was, by some accounts, down and angry. But another Bush aide described the atmosphere inside the White House as "strangely surreal and almost detached." At one meeting described by this insider, officials were oddly self-congratulatory, perhaps in an effort to buck each other up. Life inside a bunker can be strange, especially in defeat.
