Something I became aware of via Josh Marshall is the path of cronyism snaking its way within the Bush administration, or at least one particular snake.

Bush hired cronies to run FEMA. FEMA is now contracting out to Kenyon, a disaster management firm from Houston. Kenyon is a wholly-owned subsidiary of SCI (Service Corporation International), a “death care” industry provider.

This is where the territory starts to become familiar. SCI has strong Bush links. So we have Bush hiring cronies who hire even more cronies. And this happening even after Bush has been criticized openly for cronyism. I guess its their nature, like the scorpion riding on the fox’s back.

But the kind of crony we’ve found underneath other levels of cronies is of interest. Remember back in the 1990’s, when Clinton was in office, and according to Republicans, his big crime was lying under oath? How that was an impeachable offense?

Well, guess what then-Texas-governor Bush did for SCI? I’ll give you a hint: he did it under oath.

That’s right. He lied. Under oath. Supposedly an impeachable offense, and then the GOP turns around and puts in place as their presidential candidate a guy who lied under oath as governor just recently.

And it was not lying under oath about sex, either. Here’s how it went down: SCI was run by Robert L. Waltrip, a long-time Bush family friend. Waltrip had donated between $100,000 and $250,000 to Bush Sr.’s presidential library, had paid the elder Bush tens of thousands of dollars in speaking fees, and had given at least $45,000 to Bush Jr.’s political campaign to be Texas governor.

In 1996, Eliza May was appointed as director of the Texas Funeral Service Commission, and she didn’t fool around. She immediately started going after funeral homes that were committing illegal practices. The TFSC had been criticized for a decade for being lax on enforcement; in fact, May’s predecessor had been jailed on charges of aggravated perjury and witness tampering. May changed all that, cracking down on the funeral home industry. The problem was, she wasn’t supposed to do that: the funeral home industry was in tight with the Bushes. In early 1998:

… May’s staff uncovered evidence that some SCI funeral homes were using unlicensed or inexperienced embalmers. In March 1998 she issued subpoenas for documents to 23 SCI mortuaries, prompting the company to complain bitterly to state officials.

The details are incredibly gory, and I won’t recount them here; see the linked sources at bottom for that information. Soon after May did nothing but her job serving the public, Waltrip and an SCI lobbyist visited Governor Bush’s Chief of Staff Joe Allbaugh.

Remember Allbaugh? President Bush’s first crony pick as head of FEMA, before Allbaugh roomie Michael “Brownie” Brown got assigned? Yep, that’s the one. May was soon called into a meeting between Allbaugh, Waltrip, and others on that side of the Bush crony fence, demanding that May close the investigation. After May fined SCI for violations, Bush’s people started looking for dirt on her. The following February, May was fired because the commission “lost confidence in her.” SCI eventually never paid the fines, and more Bush cronies later set aside the charges.

May filed a whistleblower lawsuit. In that lawsuit, Bush would have been subpoenaed to testify, during which time he would undoubtedly be asked about his connections with SCI. Desperately wishing to avoid this, Bush’s lawyers had Bush sign an affidavit under oath, which read in part that Bush:

… had no conversations with Texas Funeral Services [sic] Commission officials, agents or representatives concerning the investigation of SCI by the Texas Funeral Services Commission or any dispute arising from it. I have had no conversations with SCI officials, agents or representatives concerning the investigation or any dispute arising from it.

Note the language: “no conversations,” with either SCI or TFSC officials. However, neither was true. Bush had, in fact, had conversations with both. Bush had spoken to Waltrip in Allbaugh’s office, and Bush had also met with Dick McNeil of the TFSC during a Bush campaign visit. While Bush’s people claimed that neither conversation was “substantial,” it was revealed that Bush had, at the very least, discussed the case in passing with McNeil. That in itself, no matter how Republicans play it down, was enough to demonstrate that Bush had, in fact, lied under oath–an impeachable offense, remember.

Not to mention the fact that the lying under oath aside, this case reeked of cronyism, bribery, and corruption. One would have to be hopelessly naive to think that Bush was not involved in the SCI matter, and even if the affidavit were true, it would be at best a weasel wording, because Bush’s Chief of Staff Allbaugh was deeply involved, and to imagine he was doing so without Bush’s knowledge or involvement strains credulity well beyond the limits. This might not be admissible as evidence against Bush in a court of law, but that does not lessen Bush’s corruption; he’s simply spent a long time engineering clever ways to break laws and get away with it.

The May case settled out of court in 2001, and long before that, after Bush was elected the news media lost all interest in the case. But now, even as Bush’s cronyism is proving to have cost hundreds if not thousands of lives, Bush and his cronies are still hiring yet more cronies and paying them off with taxpayer dollars.

Though Bush himself ran several businesses into the ground and never earned an honest dollar, it seems that the soundest investment of all was in giving Bush your money and joining the crony bandwagon. For SCI, it’s been paying off for years now, as it is paying off for other Bush cronies and financial backers.

Meanwhile, grieving families in Texas, gruesomely horrified by botched SCI embalmings, received no justice; Texas’ funeral commission presumably has slipped back into its quiet corruption; and in reward for taking care of Bush’s dirty work, Allbaugh got rewarded with a juicy government resume-padder and as a result hundreds and possibly thousands of people died in the path of Katrina.

Sources: The Washington Post and The Austin Chronicle.

I just glanced at the time, and it read 9:11, by chance. Got me thinking about what to comment on in light of the 4th anniversary of 9/11. Should we still be memorializing 9/11? My answer is “no,” because it has lost its true meaning.

Bush is still using it endlessly as an excuse for every screw-up and bad policy move he keeps making. He’s still milking it for every PR dollar its worth, including a Washington D.C. “Pentagon march” instituted by Donald Rumsfeld purportedly to honor 9/11 victims, but which has highly visible allusions to both 9/11 and Iraq–a clear political attempt to link the two.

And this is one of the reasons I’m not big on commemorating 9/11. Not because I don’t sympathize with the families, not because I’m not patriotic–but because Bush & Co. have turned it into one everlasting campaign commercial for whatever policy they want to boost this week, and that usually means Iraq. If you truly want to memorialize and respect the victims of 9/11, then do so with a moment of silence today with your family at the dinner table; then take out your checkbook and donate to the victims of Katrina in the name of the 9/11 victims. That’s a way to respect the dead–not to join in some political parade.

Another reason, close in importance to the first, is the same reason why in four years no one will be commemorating the survivors of Katrina–because the event will have passed, mourning will have been done, and life goes on. The victims of 9/11 have been grieved for more than just about any other disaster in memory, and it’s good enough. Time to move on.

Katrina has shown that the government has not taken homeland security seriously at all, and it’s time America woke up and realized that terrorism isn’t the great threat that we’ve been led to believe–at least it’s no more of a threat than it has ever been, and will forever be. Time to reclaim reason, stop allowing politicians to use 9/11 to get us to approve anything they want, and get back to where we were in the late 90’s before this nightmare began.

Mourning has passed. All that remains is politics.

[Note: sounds should open in a new window when clicked. For full effect, play them all in sequence.]

Well, now that the election is over, hopefully now all the noisy political campaign loudspeaker trucks will stop crisscrossing the neighborhood all day long until 8:00 in the evening. But that’s little relief, because just as the loudspeaker trucks and vans vanish into the night, the Star-Trek-Phaser-on-Overload insects are startup up. I swear, they sound just like phasers about to blow up, a constant, incredibly loud, piercing high-pitched whistle. And then at sunrise, the other bugs, including the annoying “MEEEE, ME-ME-ME-ME-MEEEEEEE!!” cicadas and the Bone-Chilling-Wail-Eminating bugs, get started for the day. That along with the morning crows and partridges, and the afternoon bulbuls. But that only lasts through the summer. When they stop, it’ll be just in time for the Kerosene-sellers to weave through every single parking lot in the neighborhood at 5 kph, with their loudspeaker-enhanced mind-numbing electronic note song: “DO-doo … do-Do-DOO-Doo-do … do-Do-DOO-DOO-do-do-DO-do-do-DOO-DOO!!” Now. Repeat that. ONE… HUNDRED… TIMES.

I suppose I can at least thank God that they don’t all come at once, all the time. But what I would like to ask is, what happened to that famous Japanese neighborhood “wa” that we heard about? Okay, so we can’t control the bugs or the birds, but what’s with all the loudspeaker trucks? I want some wa, dammit!

Newsweek has Bush at 38%.

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On the whole Bush-hates-blacks thing:

The right-wing defense of this is that liberals are claiming that Bush consciously held back, that he looked at black faces on TV and said, hey, they’re mostly black there, so I’ll just let them suffer for several days.” Which of course, is not even close to the real accusations.

Consider it this way: you’re in an office on the 24th floor of a building when you hear news that down the street, there has just been a major accident with considerable damage, and rescue crews will not be able to make it there for some time. You think that you could go down there and help out, but more likely you figure that the job is being handled and you can stay put.

Now consider the same story, with one difference: you hear that among the victims were your own family members. Without doubt, you will instantly jump out of your seat, race down to the accident site, and move heaven and earth to get the job done yourself.

That you would not have had this instant, strong reaction in the first scenario does not mean that you actively decided to let the people suffer, it just means that you didn’t have the connection to the disaster that made you get off your ass and make sure that things were getting done. It’s someone else’s problem, and things will get done. It’s more of an unconscious distinction, not a thinking one.

This is the dichotomy we saw in action when it came to New Orleans. A good president and good public administrators will consider all Americans to be their family and will react accordingly. They will have that gut reaction which spurs them to put fire under everyone’s asses. That is the reaction Bush would have had if it were Kennebunkport or Houston that got hit. You think that if a white, affluent community were being hammered by a natural disaster that Bush would stay on vacation, strum a guitar, or have cake with John McCain? Don’t be ludicrous.

It’s not that Bush said to himself, let the black people suffer. It’s rather that they weren’t his people, and so he had no gut response, and didn’t light any fires under anyone to get the lead out. Now, maybe if he hadn’t been busy dismantling FEMA and stacking its administrators with cronies so he can pay them off for favors done, then things might have actually been handled well without Bush getting on their backs about it. But because he did screw up FEMA, and he did not jump out of his chair when Katrina hit, that’s his fault, his responsibility.

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Okay, enough with the comparison between Giuliani vs. Nagin, because it’s not even close to fair. Everybody talks about Giuliani and his hero moment, walking down the street calmly and giving orders, reassuring the people, and how we haven’t seen that from Nagin. You want to know why? Giuliani was not neck-deep in water with corpses floating by and the news media miles away. Giuliani had to deal with a relatively small area of Manhattan under fire, but most everywhere else was OK, structurally at least. He could talk to people. Emergency vehicles could go places. Not to belittle 9/11, but in the limited scope of Manhattan, it was a far more manageable crisis than Katrina. Had Giuliani been surrounded by floodwaters, his communications knocked out by a storm, the TV cameras unable to record his “Giuliani-moment” hero shot, and the federal government letting him rot for five days, I have a feeling he wouldn’t have fared quite as well. He’d be screaming for help and mad as hell, too. 

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New Rule: you can’t attack Nagin with buses. The right wing has found their favorite graphic image, that being the school buses sitting in a flooded bus yard in New Orleans. They adore it. It’s everywhere on the right-wing blogosphere, and now the media is beginning to pick up on it. The idea is that the buses could have been used but were not, and that Nagin is to blame for it. That’s the web-wide right-wing talking point. They tack on the idea that Nagin waited too long for the mandatory evacuation, and they’re in glee for someone to shift the blame to, and off of their dear leader Bush–as if Nagin making any errors means that Bush didn’t, or that Bush’s errors are now okay.

Of course, it’s total bull. The timeline shows that: Sunday morning 1 am, Katrina upgraded to Category 4 (anything less would not have triggered a mandatory evacuation), 9:30 am, Nagin calls for the mandatory evacuation, 6 am Monday morning, Katrina makes landfall. Now, you could fault Nagin for waiting eight and a half hours before making the evacuation order–what his reasons for waiting were, I do not know and will not guess–but the whole bus evacuation thing is idiotic, and the idea that he could have called the mandatory evacuation in time to do it right is also fiction. The plan requires two days to carry out. Katrina was not upgraded to Category 4 until 29 hours before it hit, so even if Nagin had jumped right to it the moment the upgrade came, he still would have been 20 hours too late.

Could Nagin have seen the possibility of Katrina hitting New Orleans specifically and being a Category 4 or higher 20 hours before it became official? Yes. However, city and state officials do not evacuate entire cities based on guesses.

About the buses: what if Nagin had mobilized them right away? First off, there were nowhere near enough buses to get even a sizable percentage of the people out within 29 hours. Second, the logistics would have been horrendous: you try to find 500 school bus drivers in a city where everyone is hightailing out of there. Could inexperienced drivers have been used? Sure, if you wanted a guaranteed percentage of accidents and screw-ups leading to several deaths and many more injuries. And last, but not least, given the time frame, even with the best of planning, most of those buses would have been stuck on roads out of New Orleans when the full force of Katrina hit, probably killing hundreds of people right there.

Walter Maestri, Director of Emergency Management in New Orleans, said in an interview with Bill Maher that the buses were, in fact, being used in the limited ways they could be used for, and were returned when all that could be done was done.

The fact is, the buses were used, as well as they could be, before Katrina hit, to get people to safety as well as could be done. That the people bused to the Superdome languished and starved and died was not the fault of Nagin or anyone else locally. It was the fault of the federal government, which could get rescue efforts to Indonesia within 48 hours but took more than twice that long to get things started up for New Orleans. Nagin sent people to the Superdome expecting the federal government to do its job. Bush fumbled the handoff.

So enough with the bus crap. Nagin probably did make his share of mistakes, and maybe some of those screw-ups cost lives, but it is just as likely that Nagin’s decisions and actions saved more lives. He cannot be blamed, at the very least, for the fact that he carried out plans with the expectation that the Bush administration would react and have help on the ground within 48 hours. If Bush had done things right, the majority of the horrors of the aftermath could have been avoided.

Deal with it.

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I haven’t seen much of the TV coverage of Katrina outside of CNN, but what I have seen in addition to the Internet and print media reinforces what I have stated before: that while the media is content to blame New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin directly, while they are content to blame Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco directly, while they are content to have at Michael Brown directly, there is a decided aversion in the mainstream press to name President Bush directly as someone responsible for the disastrous relief efforts. You’ll hear “government” being blamed, FEMA being blamed, and especially the local Democrats (but never, strangely, the Republicans in Mississippi though they had similar problems) being blamed, but rarely if ever, in a mainstream news story, will you hear or see or read that Bush was the one who screwed up.

Yes, the talking heads will go over it, the blogs will mention it, the op-eds will talk about it. But in the mainstream stories, while others catch heat, Bush is not among them. Do a Google News search for “Bush is responsible,” and you get mostly blogs or op-eds, but other than that just tame mainstream reports that “some allege that Bush is responsible,” or “a slew of partisans have already declared that George W. Bush is responsible,” more often than not refuting claims that Bush is responsible for anything.

In short, Bush is getting a major-league bye from the mainstream press on this disaster, despite the rather blatant screw-up which he is directly responsible for. A press that shows no problem with blaming individuals, just not Bush directly. There is the feeling that the press has gotten its stones back, that it is now more willing to rail and fight when they see something outrageous. But if that exists, it still stops at the White House porch.

This media is cowed.

Michael “Brownie” Brown, that lovable Bush crony who knows nothing about disaster relief, has finally been fired by Bush. Talk about closing the barn doors after the Arabian horses have bolted.

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And Brown wasn’t the only Bush crony at FEMA, according to the Washington Post.

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Bush has used his authority to set aside the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act which requires federal contractors to pay their employees the “prevailing wage” for said work in the area where the work is being done. Halliburton is among the first to benefit from this latest-among-many Bush administration sops to big business, as it was granted federal contracts almost immediately after Katrina struck.

So what does suspension of Davis-Bacon mean? It means that businesses involved in rebuilding, who were already going to cash in big-time from all the work after Katrina struck, will be able to cash in even more. It also means that people who live in the area, who need to make money to rebuild their homes and their lives are going to get their paychecks slashed, paid the barest minimum the market will bear. Disaster relief for businesses which don’t need it, and wage theft from the people who need it most.

Supporters of the plan say that it will reduce the costs of rebuilding. They do not offer any proof of this whatsoever, though–the fact remains that only the wages for workers is being reduced, not the amount being charged by the businesses for rebuilding. No caps on what can be charged. No limits to profit margins. Now, if Bush had added that kind of restriction, he might at least be able to argue he’s doing it to cut costs. But not now. This hurts workers, doesn’t help cut costs, and hands bonuses to businesses who were already looking forward to flush times.

Along with the GOP’s aversion to raising the minimum wage to anywhere near a living wage and its many corporate welfare giveaways to companies already making record profits, this only reaffirms that the Bush administration loves corporations and hates the average American worker. Is it any wonder that we have a jobless “recovery,” that average incomes are dropping, and Americans are falling into poverty by the millions?

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Dr. Ben Marble, an ER physician and new father whose home was destroyed in the hurricane, shouted “Go f*** yourself, Mr. Cheney! Go f*** yourself!” while Cheney was live on camera on CNN. The epithet was a reminder of when Cheney, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, used the same epithet when speaking to Democratic Senator Pat Leahy.

Think what you will of them man, he spoke his mind. And it’s been very rare that anyone harshly critical of the Bush administration has been played willingly by the news media. Cheney said before and after the outburst that he hasn’t heard any criticism, and that this was the first. Well, no wonder: even though Dr. Marble was allowed to leave the scene unmolested, once the news cameras had left, soldiers with M-16s came to Dr. Marble, handcuffed him, and questioned him for 20 minutes.

OpEd News (clearly not an unbiased journal) has the most detailed story here. In short, Marble was in part upset because Cheney’s visit caused him to take a long detour to get to his destroyed house. He was headed home when he came across a barricade 200 feet from his destination. Despite the closeness of his home, he was not allowed through. Then a motorcade honked at him to move, and when he did, the motorcade was allowed through the barricade. Dr. Marble had to take a 20-minute detour to get home, costing him even more in high gas prices that already had him roiled. When he got home and was sifting through the wreckage, he discovered that Cheney’s visit was responsible for his detour, and it was likely Cheney himself was the guy in the motorcade. So he set off to see him and the rest you know.

See the video here, lifted from Toolz Blog.

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It seems like having National Guard troops in Iraq did in fact hurt the response time after Katrina hit, by as much as one day, according to Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, Despite Donald Rumsfeld’s indications to the contrary.

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According to Josh Marshall, Army recruiters are starting to show their dorsal fins, looking to reach their quotas by finding people devastated by Katrina, looking for jobs. Fresh meat…

The new Firefox beta is out, and I’m going to give it a try starting now. Among the new features: improved pop-up advertisement blocking (which is a good thing, because pop-ups have been starting to break through the protection offered up to now); click-and-draggable tabs (you can now re-sort and re-arrange tabs as you like them–about time); better file handling (there used to be a long beach-ball pause when you tried to save or download something–no longer); RSS bookmarking (catching up with Safari); faster navigation system, better product updating, lots of bug fixes and a lot of other nice stuff.

What’s not there: the ability to turn off individual plug-ins. Which is why I will still be using Safari with Pith Helmet for most of my browsing. The inability to disable the endlessly annoying flash animations–especially the damned dancing ads–is a feature most browsers lack, and I have to wonder why? Am I the only one who can’t stand a dozen postage-stamp images swirling and jumping and shifting all over the place? Flash is the new animated GIF, and it’s even more annoying. If any Mozilla developers are reading this, for the love of God, put an “off” switch on the plugins! And make a switch to turn off animated GIFs while you’re at it.

So far, the new Firefox has performed well. The tabs are re-arrangeable, the performance is a lot snappier, and on initial start-up, it quickly and painlessly imported all my bookmarks from Safari. Sweet. One flaw noted already: it said it would also import my passwords–but I’m still being asked for them. I tried doing it again, from Mozilla (which should be more compatible), but to no avail.

Via DKos, photo of a TV with Sky News in Ireland. It pretty much says it all.

It really is hard to find accurate language to describe how despicable Bush and the GOP are acting in the Katrina aftermath. Awful, horrendous, heinous, vile, abhorrent, abominable, detestable, sickening, atrocious–you try to apply these words and yet they feel insufficient to describe the true degree of disgust you feel at what they’re doing.

More reports from disgusted firefighters asked to do PR work for FEMA instead of saving lives. These two guys were so nauseated by the setup that they left and went home. They’re still packed and ready to go do real work, though–but they’ll have a long wait. Apparently Bush doesn’t want anyone he can’t gag to go into the area.

FEMA throwing a media blackout on New Orleans–now that Bush has been photographed with fake rescue efforts and firefighters not allowed to do any real work, it’s time to turn off those cameras. After all, we don’t want the American people to see what hell on Earth the Bush administration allowed to fester, or the bodies of the people they let die.

More and more comes out about how FEMA was gutted and staffed with political cronies of Bush. Current FEMA head Brown (“Brownie”) got recommended for the job by his college roommate, a Bush campaign flack. War and Piece reports how people in charge at FEMA are former Bush “war room” staffers and campaign spokesmen now running political interference and damage control for the administration. Which, after all, has been the Bush administration’s first and last worry: not to save people threatened by Katrina and the aftermath, but to save their own sorry political asses. And they’re even eating their own: having run out of Democrats to smear and blame, they’re going after Brown themselves–so long as Bush can get out of it blameless or at least looking not so bad.

Meanwhile, Republicans are scared spitless about the possibility of a balanced, independent investigation into the Katrina affair: they demand that Republicans run the show.

And the Rove PR machine is now in full gear. Impostors like this guy are getting full media play on many different shows and networks, spreading lies and blaming Democrats, including good ol’ Republican standards like Newt Gingrich. The White House is leading that full-out campaign to smear blame all over Louisiana Democrats, while Scott McClellan chides reporters for even suggesting Bush might be responsible, saying: “there are some that are interested in playing the blame game. The President is interested in solving problems and getting help to the people who need it.” More pure BS one cannot find. Aside from photo ops for Bush and preventing help from getting to those who need it most, blaming others is about all they’ve been doing. Standard Rovian tactics.

On the more just side of things, Bush’s numbers seem to be slipping. After the ABC News poll found that 46% approved of Bush’s handling of the Katrina crisis, two more polls have come out. CBS reports the number is now down to 38% (they had him at 54% a week ago), and Zogby has him down to 36%.

But it’s a bitter, small, and pointless justice, with most of the damage done; with the media bowing before Rove and the Republicans controlling the investigation, the people responsible for what happened will never face the light of responsibility. Bush & Co. will again paint over their lies and incompetence, blame Democrats and underlings, award themselves medals and call themselves heroes. And in the end, that 46% and probably then some will wind up believing them.

Some are saying that Americans deserve what they’re getting, reaping what they sowed, for putting Bush into office and keeping him there. But something tells me that the people who suffered and died weren’t the ones who voted for Bush in the first place, and that those who did still just don’t get it.

This is criminally insane. Criminally.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has had his own firefighters working round the clock, putting out the raging fires burning in the city, many new ones breaking out every day. They’ve been at it for a week now, and are exhausted. Nagin has been crying out for experienced firefighters to be brought in to give them assistance and relief.

One thousand highly-trained, experienced firefighters volunteered to help out, ready to join the fire-fighting and rescue operations–helping the people in the path of Katrina, saving their lives and fighting the fires. At the direction of FEMA, they converged on Atlanta.

So what did the Bush administration’s FEMA put them to work doing? Did they send them to New Orleans to help put out the fires? Did they set them out on rescue work in the devastated areas to save lives? Hell, no. They’re doing much more important work: PR and community-relations work. Answering phones. Handing out fliers.

Are these people completely batshit insane?

“They’ve got people here who are search-and-rescue certified, paramedics, haz-mat certified,” said a Texas firefighter.

“We’re sitting in here having a sexual-harassment class while there are still [victims] in Louisiana who haven’t been contacted yet.”

But at least the good people at FEMA have their politics and damage control in full gear:

The firefighter, who has encouraged his superiors back home not to send any more volunteers for now, declined to give his name because FEMA has warned them not to talk to reporters.

Gee, I wonder why the hell not? The firefighter called it for what it is: “It’s a misallocation of resources. Completely.”

But not to worry. At least some got out into the field. Fifty experienced firefighters were sent straight out to Louisiana on a high-priority mission: to appear in another fucking photo-op with President Bush, similar to the September 2nd photo-op below when Bush also allowed people to die so he could play dress-up with rescue teams. Pardon my French, but this is so goddamned sickening, it’s criminal.

People are still in harm’s way, a profusion of fires are still burning, and good, generous Americans are standing up to sacrifice their time, comfort, money and safety to take on the hard tasks. And the Bush administration puts them to work answering phones and acting as window dressing for Bush, so he can be photographed by a fawning press corps, looking as if he’s concerned, rolling his sleeves up as if he’s helping instead of getting people killed.

So I await the first Bush apologist who tries to say this is somehow Bush not being a fuck-up. Go ahead. Please. I can’t wait.

So, let me get this straight. We’ve got a lawyer here, mostly corporate. Did work as a political hack for two Republican administrations. Has served as a judge for just two years, having made fewer than 40 decisions.

And somehow this guy is qualified to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America? He is the most brilliant legal mind of our times? His qualifications were lackluster even as a regular justice. I had to stop watching a CNN interview with an analyst after five minutes due to pure disgust, with the CNN reporter and the analyst both crooning over Roberts as a superb choice because of the fact that he clerked for Rehnquist (no mention of his actual performance), because he worked for the solicitor general (no mention of any specific thing he did in that job), because he argued cases before the court (no mention of what cases he brought or how he performed), because it “seems as if he has the proper demeanor to foster that sense of collegiality” on the court–even because he looked, in their opinion, like a chief justice, for crying out loud! They brought up inane reason after inane reason, talking about his having young kids even, and never once talked about his pure inexperience as a judge, his partisan standing (they claimed the reverse), or the fact that the White House won’t let his real record be known. Not a single example of any legal case he argued and why it earned merit. Just that Bush made an excellent choice. Not one shred of evidence about his actual talent as a legal mind. Doesn’t matter! He looks like a justice, that’s all we need to know! It was sickening.

Any suggestion that Democrats have no standing to question his appointment is a joke, especially with the White House refusing to release huge numbers of documents that would give the Congress a better idea of what kind of legal mind he is–which is supposed to be their duty, advising and consenting, not blindly rubber-stamping. But the conventional wisdom of today suggests that Democrats have no choice but to accept Roberts because no one can find anything substantial to object to. Hey, how about not being qualified for the job? What specifically has he ever done to distinguish himself enough to stand out among all the other legal minds of the day?

No doubt Bush and the GOP will now use the fact that little time is left to rail at the Democrats for “shutting down” the Supreme Court and derailing the justice system if they don’t mindlessly approve whomever Bush throws at them. The real reason for the rush, of course, is clear: if no one gets appointed to fill the chief justice spot, then senior Justice John Paul Stevens, a liberal for heaven’s sake, would for even the shortest time take over the chief justice position and have some influence over how things work.

Bush has demonstrated a talent over the course of time for pulling roses out of his rear end after so miserably screwing up time and time again, and the Katrina debacle is no exception. Due to Rovian photo ops and the cooperation of an adoring press, Bush’s abominable mismanagement of the Katrina aftermath has no less than a 46% approval rate according to a new ABC News poll (via Kevin Drum).

Despite the fact that the number is below 50%, it begs the question, even if you take into account the 30% who would approve of Bush even if he abused a child on live TV, how could as many as 46% of Americans get even the impression that Bush actually did a good job? He failed to prepare. He continued his vacation, even days after the hurricane hit. He went on a political junket and played guitar, Rice went shoe shopping and took in a broadway show, Cheney stayed on his ranch to do fly-fishing–all while thousands died. His administration badly fumbled the relief efforts, bickering over who controlled what and what paperwork was where. His photo ops were phony as hell and probably wound up killing people. FEMA, Bush’s responsibility, so utterly failed to do its job that hundreds almost certainly perished as a result. He played politics like crazy, blaming all the failures on Louisiana Democrats, lying about how the disaster couldn’t have been foreseen–all bald-faced lies, too, easy to see through, now hastily and quietly withdrawn by the White House. And then the White House trying to grab control over the relief efforts just as things got moving, so as to take credit and avoid blame.

And 46% of Americans approve of this?

Or as Kevin Drum put it, what exactly has Bush done that deserves approval?

Approve of the massive outpouring of support from the people of the United States and the world. Approve of the people of Texas and elsewhere who opened their homes to the evacuees. Approve of the police who stayed on duty in New Orleans at a time of despair, despite so many others abandoning their posts. Approve of the National Guards soldiers and Coast Guard officers busting their asses to work things out.

But Bush? What did he do aside from screw up?

Yes, I know that 70% of Americans bought the whopper about Hussein and 9/11. Yes, the news of Rehnquist passing away helped Bush take people’s eyes off the ball. And yes, the media filtered the content so that little if any direct criticism of Bush leaked through–mostly people who were “satisfied” with how things were handled got through, or people upset at nameless ‘leaders.’ News of Bush’s fake photo ops played only outside the U.S., as did survivors railing at Bush. Bush’s obvious lies were quickly and quietly left behind by journalists. But despite all that, I did not see a campaign by the White House even a tenth as slick as they usually put out. He really screwed the pooch royally, and even the PR campaign afterwards wasn’t very good. And it was all rather apparent despite all the mitigating circumstances. So where did the 46% come from? Have half of all Americans become so easily taken in that they’ll believe even the thinnest of shams? Or have they just become so knee-jerk ready to approve of Bush no matter what the Bush need not even try?

Forgive the rant. But sometimes the profound gullibility and absolute dearth of independent critical thinking among too many of the American people is so stupendously appalling that one cannot help but scream in despair.

Sean has done a great job of listing places where you can donate money for and get information about the relief operations after Katrina. Please visit and donate. I’ve dropped $200 of my own via my family back in the U.S. Now you can feel all guilty and do it too.

Two more items have surfaced on Bush’s fake photo op to the damaged areas. The first item has to do with the already-observed fact that one of the backdrops for Bush’s visit was a coast guard hangar with at least two helicopters sitting idle while people suffered and died from lack of rescue not far away. Why were the coast guard helicopters and several coast guard officers just sitting there doing nothing when thousands were still in peril? So they could make Bush look presidential.

Here’s the new item: according to a NOLA.com (a Times-Picayune subsidiary) story, air traffic in the area was halted for security reasons while Bush was there:

Three tons of food ready for delivery by air to refugees in St. Bernard Parish and on Algiers Point sat on the Crescent City Connection bridge Friday afternoon as air traffic was halted because of President Bush’s visit to New Orleans, officials said.

The provisions, secured by U.S. Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-Napoleonville, and state Agriculture Commissioner Bob Odom, baked in the afternoon sun as Bush surveyed damage across southeast Louisiana five days after Katrina made landfall as a Category 4 storm, said Melancon’s chief of staff, Casey O’Shea.

“We had arrangements to airlift food by helicopter to these folks, and now the food is sitting in trucks because they won’t let helicopters fly,” O’Shea said Friday afternoon.

The second item: the U.S. media continues to whore for Bush: note that even in criticisms, none mention Bush by name; none point in his direction, though they do point at others, specifically Democratic Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin; and none of the aired interviews with survivors contain references to Bush, though a brief glance at international stories show that survivors regularly blast Bush severely–so why barely a hint of this gets through in the U.S. press?

The second item is in a story reported on by Dutch ZDF, a public television network, an organization with a reputation for good reporting. The story goes beyond the photo op that the American media slavishly abides by. It reports that Bush’s visit was carefully staged for the cameras: flunkies came through an area, disposing of dead bodies and clearing the worst or most unsightly of debris; disaster aid was brought in specially so Bush could be seen in front of assistance brought; and then immediately following Bush’s visit, the aid was removed, and the town left to fend for itself just as before. In short, a Potemkin village, a sham, a facade for the cameras. The story is here; this is a crude Google translation; this is a more sophisticated translation by a viewer:

“Clean-up operation only for Bush?

Where the US President visited the disaster area, aid units cleaned up the area. But only there. Reporting from Biloxi, ZDF correspondent Claudia Rueggeberg cited desperate inhabitants [of Biloxi telling her] Bush should have transported aid materials inside his limousines instead of a bunch of body guards and media correspondents.

Along his [Bush] travel route aid units removed debris and recovered corpses. Then Bush left and along with him, all aid troops left too. The situation in Biloxi remains unchanged, nothing has arrived, everything is still needed.”

In short, Bush grounded rescue operations and then prettied up small portions of the area so he could pose in front of faked relief efforts, while real food sat baking in the sun, and rescue operations ground to a halt. If these reports are indeed true, Bush would then be without question guilty of killing Americans in distress for the base purpose of a political photo opportunity.

But hey, there are two ultra-conservative Supreme Court justices to nominate–how can the U.S. media be expected to keep up?

These two photos were up on the news wires. They’ve been in the spotlight for a few days now, but here they are in case you missed them. It should be noted that while Yahoo News Photos has removed–at the request of AFP, which provided the caption–the images of the two white people walking away with groceries, the image of the black ‘looter’ (image and caption provided by AP) is still up with the exact same caption.

In anticipation of the wingnuts who will complain that the black guy was indeed looting and how dare a liberal pansy like me demand black people should never be called ‘looters,’ keep in mind that the point here is that the black man was labeled as a looter while the white people were labeled as “finding” food. The disparity and implied racism of the captions is what is at issue here, not the idea of whether or not the black guy was looting or not. All three were doing the exact same thing; call it illegal, call it necessary to survive. The fact that whites “find” and blacks “loot” when they are doing the exact same thing is the thing to rail at here. At its not just this, either; this is simply one small example of an institutionalized and subtle layer of racism that permeates our society. Another example is how the use of powder cocaine–used predominantly by whites–carries a far lesser penalty than the use of crack cocaine–used predominantly by blacks.

And then there’s the whole inability of conservatives to understand that the people who stayed in New Orleans for the most part were people who couldn’t get out, particularly the poor people. One commenter on this blog has already thrown that out there–talking about the blacks in New Orleans and commenting that people “decided” to stay behind–as it has been repeated endlessly in conservative circles on the web. This, mind you, in reference to the people who evacuated to the Superdome, not the ones who stayed at their houses out of sheer stubbornness despite having the ability to leave. And still, some of those who stayed at their homes were among the ones who had no means to leave and nowhere to go. Bill Maher said it very well:

This is what I call ‘unintentional racism.’ Because that’s the whole thing with the Bush people, they just can’t imagine, ‘Why don’t you just pack up your range rover, grab a case of Poland Spring Water out of the garage, and go to your summer home? What is the problem?’

An overstatement for comical effect, but the message is intensely viable. The days of outward racism are behind us, where men in white sheets are few and far between–but what has replaced it is a subtle bias, an institutionalized racism that doesn’t always register consciously, but is still very much there.

I dare the wingnuts to look at these two photos and claim that race had nothing to do with it.

Remember the whole giant operation that we saw rushing in to New Orleans when Bush came to have his photo op? Guess what. It was, to a large extent, faked. Remember seeing the equipment fixing the levees behind Bush? No longer there. Remember the fleets of buses to get people out of the hell-on-Earth that is the Superdome? Missing in action. The people living in filth and squalor without even the barest necessities in the Superdome? Believe it or not, I am not making this up–they have been locked in and not allowed to leave, by the U.S. government. I shit you not.

You have to see this segment from–of all shows–Hannity and Colmes on Fox (again via Crooks & Liars), where Geraldo Rivera and Shepard Smith report live from the spot, describing a scene of despair in inhuman conditions, belying the Bush administration fiction that, now that Bush came to the rescue, a corner has been turned, that help is now being supplied and the crisis is over. It is not. Both Rivera and Smith pointed out that the people there could simply walk to the next town where there is electricity and no dead bodies or filth or stench, they could walk to the Wal-Mart down the street where the people could get out of the horror that the Superdome has become–but troops have set up a checkpoint and will not allow the people there to leave.

While Hannity predictably tries to downplay what they’re seeing, neither Rivera nor Smith let him get away with it. Even though Rivera and Smith were not politicizing it (“This is reality, this is non partisan, there’s no Democrats or Republicans here“), Hannity tried to make it seem like it wasn’t happening:

SMITH: It’s the only way out, it’s the connection to the rest of the world, and they’ve set up a checkpoint. And anyone who walks up out of that city now is turned around. You are not allowed to go to Gretna, Louisiana from New Orleans, Louisiana. Over there, there’s hope. Over there, there’s electricity. Over there, there’s food and water. But you cannot go from there to there, the government will not allow you to do it. It’s a fact.

HANNITY: I want to get some perspective here, because earlier today, the–

SMITH: That is perspective! That’s all the perspective you need!

Hannity then tried to deliver a line of BS that since Fox had shown images of trucks and convoys earlier, that meant that “obviously” things were “getting a lot closer than they were.” But watch the whole video, so you can get the true sense of the despair these people are still living in. You can see the video here (Windows Media Player software for the Mac here).

Even CNN has reported on the “disconnect” between the administration version of events and the truth.

But that’s not the only evidence that the Bush photo op was full of bull. You probably saw Bush visiting the scenes of damage, with equipment often behind him–like the Coast Guard helicopters and guardsmen who sat idly by as scenery for Bush’s photo op while real people still were dying from lack of rescue equipment. The networks have not reported on that, as far as I am aware. They always buy full into the presidential PR and never expose the sometimes obvious harm caused by it. One more example surfaced in a press release from Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, who is now livid at Bush for showing up with rescue equipment for the photo op, and then yanking it away as soon as he was gone–or that possibly the equipment originally seen was useless window-dressing, not really good for anything. In her words:

Yesterday, I was hoping President Bush would come away from his tour of the regional devastation triggered by Hurricane Katrina with a new understanding for the magnitude of the suffering and for the abject failures of the current Federal Emergency Management Agency. 24 hours later, the President has yet to answer my call for a cabinet-level official to lead our efforts. Meanwhile, FEMA, now a shell of what it once was, continues to be overwhelmed by the task at hand.

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.

Mr. President, I’m imploring you once again to get a cabinet-level official stood up as soon as possible to get this entire operation moving forward regionwide with all the resources — military and otherwise — necessary to relieve the unmitigated suffering and economic damage that is unfolding. [emphasis added]

While Landrieu is appearing on some of the weekend shows and may get more coverage then, right now (from a Google News search) only two small media outlets in the U.S. are carrying the story. There’s more press on this in Australia.

And now that Rehnquist has passed away, coverage of the fake Bush rescue will likely get reduced or shunted aside.

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Update: A Dutch news viewer reports that foreign media is describing a somewhat different story about the staged Bush “rescue” photo ops than the U.S. media is. He reports this:

There was a striking dicrepancy [sic] between the CNN International report on the Bush visit to the New Orleans disaster zone, yesterday, and reports of the same event by German TV.

ZDF News reported that the president’s visit was a completely staged event. Their crew witnessed how the open air food distribution point Bush visited in front of the cameras was torn down immediately after the president and the herd of ‘news people’ had left and that others which were allegedly being set up were abandoned at the same time.

The people in the area were once again left to fend for themselves, said ZDF.

NBC censored the remarks of a performer on a benefit performance for criticizing George W. Bush. Rapper Kanye West departed from the script during the event, the same kind of scripting that you usually have to endure from star-studded ceremonies like awards shows, where the presenters have to deliver these awful, corny lines. West was trading off with Mike Myers, but West wasn’t having any of this cornball crap. He wasn’t obscene, he wasn’t suggesting violence. He was anguished, and he was angry for good reason. But NBC couldn’t bear criticism of Bush, so as soon as they could, they cut off the live broadcast, and on the West Coast rebroadcast they cut the segment entirely. Here’s the transcript:

Myers: The landscape of the city has changed dramatically, tragically and perhaps irreversibly. There is now over 25 feet of water where there was once city streets and thriving neighborhoods.

West: I hate the way they portray us in the media. You see a black family, it says, “They’re looting.” You see a white family, it says, “They’re looking for food.” And, you know, it’s been five days [waiting for federal help] because most of the people are black. And even for me to complain about it, I would be a hypocrite because I’ve tried to turn away from the TV because it’s too hard to watch. I’ve even been shopping before even giving a donation, so now I’m calling my business manager right now to see what is the biggest amount I can give, and just to imagine if I was down there, and those are my people down there. So anybody out there that wants to do anything that we can help — with the way America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off, as slow as possible. I mean, the Red Cross is doing everything they can. We already realize a lot of people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way — and they’ve given them permission to go down and shoot us!

Myers: [speaking quickly, trying to regain the meaning in the script] And subtle, but in many ways even more profoundly devastating, is the lasting damage to the survivors’ will to rebuild and remain in the area. The destruction of the spirit of the people of southern Louisiana and Mississippi may end up being the most tragic loss of all.

West: George Bush doesn’t care about black people!

Myers did a visible double-take on that one, and that’s when NBC cut the feed and switched to Chris Tucker, who was unprepared to take over. NBC later apologized for the criticism, and implied that they censored the comments because it might discourage people from donating money. Pure B.S., of course–what kind of idiot would be ready to give money to save people from starvation, and then hold back because a rapper ripped at Bush? I don’t know, maybe the serious wingnuts would–but I’d be willing to bet that more people decided to give more money than others decided not to give, as a result of the comments made by West. They were words that needed to be spoken, and a lot of people admired the rapper’s willingness to say so.

To get the full impact and the real nuance and emotion behind the statements, you have to watch the video–it is really quite surreal, watching Myers, knowing he’s aware that West is going off script, trying not to react to it. West, meanwhile, seems nervous, emotional, and genuinely upset, but not rapper-style-angry that you might expect. Not “Yo! Kill that motherfucker Bush!” Instead, he’s almost guy-on-the-street, relatively mild-mannered, I’m-nervous-but-I-gotta-say-this. Here are the videos from Crooks & Liars; if they don’t work here, try them at the original site.

Windows Media Video (Mac software here)
QT Video (if problems, download VLC and the video)

Remember the Mars Rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, which landed on Mars in January of 2004, and were only supposed to last 90 days? They were not expected to survive the cold and the dust of Mars for longer than three months, but the engineers apparently built them a hell of a lot tougher than anyone expected. One year and nine months later, they’re still going strong. Engineers usually over-engineer any given project, giving what they build an extra margin of safety–but these rovers are now exceeding seven times their expected lifetimes! Both of them. That is no small feat by anyone’s reckoning.

if you want to see the images they’re still churning out, including Spirit’s magnificent panorama from the vantage point on top of Husband Hill, check out their multimedia page.

Meanwhile, the Cassini probe continues on schedule to send back amazing images from Saturn. Picture below is a view of Saturn’s moons Dione and Rhea; the double line cutting through them is an edge-on view of Saturn’s rings, with the moons visible behind them. It’s practically straight out of Star Wars. For Saturn photos regularly returned from Cassini, visit that probe’s multimedia page.

Nine days. Four days before the hurricane hit, we knew that something very bad was coming. Certainly two days before Katrina hit, everyone was seeing the worst coming. And for five days after the hurricane hit, federal assistance was pathetic.

On a variety of forums discussing the disaster response, conservatives are all singing the same song: how dare the liberals “take advantage” of this crisis, and make political attacks while people are suffering. Such calls are so hypocritical, so manipulative, you have to wonder whether to laugh or cry. Of course, it is little more than an echo of the Republican lament that Bush cannot be criticized so long as soldiers are out on the battlefield: in effect, Republicans should be shielded from attack, using the sacrifice of soldiers and the suffering of victims as human political shields. Contemptible. And hypocritical because Republicans never wasted a second attacking Clinton, no matter that there were soldiers on the ground or disaster victims in need of assistance.

And in the response to Katrina, the president deserves no breaks, no grace period, no special considerations because others are suffering because of his ineptitude.

Of course, Republicans will now claim that Bush should be given a break because he “accepted responsibility.” Like hell, on both counts. He didn’t accept blame or responsibility, he only pretended to. His exact words were, “The results are not acceptable.” It was “the results” that were “not acceptable.” Very carefully selected language, designed to keep the blame off of himself. Nothing about “my administration,” “my response,” or anything else that would make anything here his responsibility–it was “the results” which were bad. And the use of “not acceptable” leaves unclear to whom the results were unacceptable, though in context, it would suggest that they were unacceptable to Bush.

These are what you can call “weasel words,” words designed to serve a purpose that the speaker wants to avoid (taking responsibility) while at the same time giving a clear impression of the opposite (someone else screwed up, and I don’t approve). If Bush wanted to take responsibility like a man and not a gutless coward, he would have at the very least said, “we failed to do what was needed.”

And if one reads the transcript of what he said, one will note that this one sentence, “The results are not acceptable,” is couched in the middle of ‘we’re doing everything we can’ language. Look carefully, and you’ll see the “not acceptable” line is jarringly out of place. “A lot of people are working hard to help those who have been affected, and I want to thank the people for their efforts. The results are not acceptable.” Followed by “I’m headed down there right now.” In the context of his remarks, that one five-word sentence is alien, so inconsistent and out of place that it was obviously placed there for a very specific reason. In fact, since it followed the comment about people’s efforts, it even sounded like Bush was criticizing the people who were on the job and doing things, which he had to later defend himself against. But I don’t see it that way. I think Bush was coached to slip in that phrase, and he just fumbled the attempt in the middle of his fictional tirade about how they are doing everything in their powers.

And again, conservatives–Bush most of all–are telling us to focus just on what they’re doing now, and not on the failures up until now. “All that can be done is being done,” Bush tells us–so what the hell was being done the past five to nine days? He won’t answer that one. And let’s not even get into the Bush whopper that “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.” Proof that Bush is full of it here, amongst many, many other places.

What’s more is the political backdrop of this whole thing, how Bush has vacillated between showing complete disregard and unconcern for the tragedy, and then taking photo ops and news interviews to make him look endlessly concerned. But the photo ops and interviews paled in comparison to the cavalier attitude Bush and his administration took to the disaster. Bush stayed on vacation for two days after Katrina struck, six days after trouble was first spotted, when he should have been working full-time to assure that all steps for rescue and recovery were being taken; instead, he went to California on a political junket to equate Iraq with WWII, and played guitar with entertainer Mark Wills while people died in New Orleans. Condoleezza Rice was on vacation in New York buying shoes and taking in a Broadway show. From reports, Dick Cheney is still on vacation in Wyoming. So while Bush strums a guitar, Rice buys shoes and Cheney goes fly-fishing, how could this administration say that they have done all they could when it took up to nine days for them to respond? And I have to ask, when Bush diverted Air Force One to fly over New Orleans, were emergency craft told to stand off while the president was occupying the air space?

But it doesn’t stop there. While no official comments were made, there were anonymous accusations from the administration that troops hadn’t arrived because Democratic governor of Louisiana Kathleen Blanco had not made the necessary request for federal assistance–except that she had already made that request on the 27th, along with other pleas for more troops. Bush similarly knocked Democratic governor Blanco and mayor Nagin; while Mississippi’s Republican governor Barbour’s handling of the crisis was fine with Bush, “the results can be better in New Orleans.” As if it were all the Democrats’ fault, not his.

New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin was furious to the point of tears at the politics of the whole thing. From a radio interview from September 1:

I told him [Bush] we had an incredible crisis here and that his flying over in Air Force One does not do it justice. And that I have been all around this city, and I am very frustrated because we are not able to marshal resources and we’re outmanned in just about every respect. …

I need reinforcements, I need troops, man. I need 500 buses, man. We ain’t talking about — you know, one of the briefings we had, they were talking about getting public school bus drivers to come down here and bus people out here. I’m like, “You got to be kidding me. This is a national disaster. Get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country and get their asses moving to New Orleans.” That’s – they’re thinking small, man. And this is a major, major, major deal. And I can’t emphasize it enough, man. This is crazy. …

I don’t want to see anybody do anymore goddamn press conferences. Put a moratorium on press conferences. Don’t do another press conference until the resources are in this city. And then come down to this city and stand with us when there are military trucks and troops that we can’t even count. Don’t tell me 40,000 people are coming here. They’re not here. It’s too doggone late. Now get off your asses and do something, and let’s fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country.

The most complete transcript I could find is here. To hear the emotion and the anguish, you have to listen to the interview; I have it here on a 12 MB MP3 file–though the beginning and very end of the interview were cut off. It’s the best audio I can find. Update: here’s one that’s only 3 MB, and goes to the end of the interview.

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The timing of events on Bush’s visit are very suspicious. For five days, people were dying from lack of water and medical attention, lack of buses, transports and troops on the ground. And then, coincidentally at the exact same time that Bush strolled in, five days late, all manner of supplies and personnel streamed into the area. Trucks loaded with water, waves of troops, supplies, and hordes of buses, all with news cameras pointed at them. On the news broadcasts throughout Bush’s visit, there were split-screens of the relief coming in and Bush doing his photo ops. What convenient timing–so coordinated that it could not have “just happened.” The only question is, did Bush hold back relief until he could be on the ground to take credit for it, or did Bush hold off his visit until he could be seen as the source of the relief? Neither possibility paints a pretty picture.

It has also been pointed out that in one of his photo ops, there are at least two coast guard helicopters and a number of coast guard troops standing idly by to serve as a backdrop for Bush’s photo op. These vehicles are not being repaired, and the troops are not resting up. The key fact is that they are standing idle, they are not out there doing work; they are just sitting there so that Bush can look good in front of resources for rescue, so viewers can associate him with helping out. And people are likely dying from lack of rescue while Bush pats himself on the back on national TV with the life-saving resources serving as a backdrop.

In short, Bush has used this trip and these resources for political play, letting people die so he can get some air time. He’s overseen a complete failure both in preparation and response, and his concern only comes out to win props, while stepping on the people he’s trying to get credit for saving. And he most certainly had enough time for a press interview: “I hope people don’t play politics during this period of time,” Bush told Diane Sawyer in a fit of unrepentant hypocrisy.

One last comment on this debacle. Something most people have refrained from pointing out in a political context is the fact that the victims here are by majority poor black people. And people are just beginning to ask: had Katrina hit an affluent white area and the victims were a different color, would the preparation and response been exactly as incompetent and far too late in the coming? Part of the answer came in a helicopter rescue. As hundreds of poor, predominantly black patients in Charity Hospital in New Orleans continue to suffer without power, some being given ventilation by hand to keep them alive, the private and more affluent–more white–Tulane Hospital right across the street had gotten helicopter assistance, and had already evacuated everyone. But then Tulane evacuated medical personnel on the helicopters. Instead of sending the desperately needed doctors and nurses to help people dying across the street, instead of using the helicopters to evacuate Charity Hospital patients in dire need, they airlifted “nonessential medical personnel” out instead. Meanwhile, coast guard helicopters which could have been airlifting the Charity patients out sat idle while Bush preened in front of them for the cameras.

None of this is building up to be a pretty picture. But we can be sure of one thing: President Bush will get on with his life. What a relief.

From a spate of blog comments spam I just received, it now appears that spammers are no longer just spamming, they are now using spam for no other reason than to abuse bloggers, perhaps even to turn them against each other. I got dozens of blog comment spams which had three URLs in them–all bloggers. I am giving them all the benefit of the doubt, as I sincerely question the idea that these three bloggers all got together and asked for spam to be sent featuring random posts from their blogs. One of them is even a blogger I read regularly.

So that means that some scumbag spammer out there probably chose blog posts from bloggers he usually attacks, and inserted them in the spam. No link to the spammer, no profit to the spammer, no comprehensible reason why the spammer would send such spam–except for the sole reason of pissing off bloggers. One effect may be that the bloggers’ URLs may now be added to spam blacklists, meaning that legitimate comments that link to these guys’ blogs may be blocked close to everywhere in the blogosphere from now on–the blogosphere’s equivalent of a bad credit rating. Hopefully the people who manage these blacklists will realize what’s going on and remove the URLs from the lists.

It may even have been a test of a new spam system, just to see if it works. In the past, there have been spam attacks with no rhyme or reason, using an inoffensive link or even having no links at all. I noted that in this attack, each spam had a different fake IP address, and rotated name and email addresses, making it harder to delete from the database; this is not exactly new, but it may be a test of a technique to make it harder to filter and delete the spam. Not that a single one ever got through Movable Type’s comment moderation on my blog, and previous versions of MT-Blacklist would have made it easy to zap the common URLs. This is also the second morning in a row I’ve awakened to a massive spam attack, both of different yet persistent types, so it could be the same sleazeball trying out different methods. If so, the idiot didn’t get himself anything. But then, it seems that such was not the point of the exercise.

Remember the good old days, when Republicans railed at Al Gore because gas passed a dollar and a half per gallon at the pump, and oil was at $25 a barrel? Remember how they screamed and yelled about the 4.3-cents-per-gallon tax that was bankrupting the American driver? Remember how Bush skewered Gore for not handling OPEC to get them to lower prices? Remember how refineries were a major issue, especially later in California, where oil and gas companies had shut down refineries there in an effort to gouge Californians, and how Bush completely ignored the crisis and let the companies gouge without restraint because it was Blue?

Ah, the good old days. But now oil prices have tripled and gas prices are on their way to doubling. Life under Bush/Cheney is now far worse.

Under the eight years of the Clinton administration, gas prices at the pump rose just 20%, adjusted for inflation. Under the Bush administration, prices have increased about twice as fast, and that’s even before Katrina. Bush has not “handled” OPEC, and not a single new refinery has been built. Bush backers will argue that $20 billion between 2000 and 2010 is being spent on refineries, but don’t believe the misdirection: almost all of that money, a tiny fraction of the industry’s profits, is being spent of bringing the refineries up to code–it is not being used to increase capacity, nor is it being used to build new refineries. Only one new refinery is scheduled to go online in the future, and won’t be operational before 2010. When was the last time you saw Bush get on the backs of big oil to build more refineries?

In 2000, Cheney blasted Clinton/Gore for not doing exactly that:

We don’t have refinery capacity. We haven’t built a new refinery in this country for over 10 years. And the refineries are now operating at 96 or 97% percent of capacity, which means even with more crude available, they’re probably not going to be able to do very much by way of producing additional home heating Oil for this winter.

Well, guess what? Bush and Cheney have not gotten a single new refinery built in the past five years, despite their being best buds with the oil industry. Despite? Because, more like it. Refineries were operating at 99% capacity even before Katrina, not just the 96 or 97 that Cheney wailed about. Oil company and refinery profits have exploded, and Bush just got through giving the industry a $14.5 billion handout–and now they’re gouging prices on top of all that, taking advantage of Katrina, and like always, Bush refuses to reign them in.

All this proves is that former oilmen Bush and Cheney haven’t done squat to increase capacity, haven’t lifted a finger to fix the problems they harshly accused Clinton and Gore of letting slide. And now that Katrina has hit, that failure is going to cost all Americans painfully at the gas pump. The hit to refineries in the south will be blamed on Katrina, but the blame for the country’s unpreparedness lies sharply on Bush, Cheney, and the oil industry. An industry whose profits will now soar from the merely usurious to the astronomically obscene. Prices will not go up because it is costing the oil industry more; prices will go up because supply will fall. This is about soaring profits, not rising prices.

And don’t believe for a moment that not drilling in ANWR is to blame–oil supply is not what’s causing this, it’s refining capacity and the national energy policy and planning.

On a side issue, the Iraq War has meant that rescue efforts in the South have been badly weakened–much of the manpower and machinery that should have been available to help victims of the hurricane is now in Iraq. Additionally, Bush’s dismantling of FEMA over the past few years has made disaster handling and recovery efforts far more strained and difficult than they should be. On the bright side, Bush is “getting on with his life,” playing golf and biking, while the storm victims live through hell.

Next: Why we need an energy Manhattan Project, and why Bush and Cheney will fail miserably at that, too.