The Fabulous Bill Bennett!

If we executed all the fat-hypocrite gamblers, there'd be fewer people & less global warming. Another trifecta! Thank you! 'Night, Herb.

"Well... I'm NOT a crook!"

[image via yahoo.com] Herb.

Paul Krugman on Scandals

From Krugman's Monday NY Times column

...all the scandals now surfacing are linked. Something is rotten in the state of the US government. And the lesson of Hurricane Katrina is that a culture of cronyism and corruption can have lethal consequences.

(no link, newsstand copy;) Okay, Herb.

BUSHVILLES...

"HOOVERVILLES" Littering Central Park in
New York City during Great Depression,
circa mid 1930s.(pic: wikipedia)

"BUSHVILLES"
They're everywhere!
Coming soon to your neighbor-
hood following the next "disaster."
(image: yahoo)

See here for more...
Later, Herb.

Naming Names... or: The List!

Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington,CREW,
has a new website, www.beyonddelay.org, with a current LIST:
The Thirteen Most CORRUPT Politicians in Congress, (after Tom Delay, of course!).

The 13 members are:
-- Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO)
-- Rep. Randy Cunningham (R-CA)
-- Rep. Tom Feeney( R-FL)
-- Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA)
-- Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-CO)
-- Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH)
-- Rep. Richard Pombo (R-CA)
-- Rep. Rick Renzi (R-AZ)
-- Rep. Charles Taylor (R-NC)
-- Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA)
-- Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA)
-- Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN)
-- Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT)

Is your state "represented?"
See the site, Herb.

Brownies Everywhere...

Regarding that Time article(referenced a couple posts down) about incompetents in charge of friggin' everything, Atrios@eschaton asks:

The question isn't really how many Mike Browns are there. The question is when will they be replaced by competent people?

I say "Amen," what are we (they!) waitin' for? Where are the grown-ups?
The kids have made a mess... a real big mess!
Ohhhh, Herb.

Of, By, & For THE PEOPLE!

Just replace "THE PEOPLE," in the title above, with
"FRIENDS, CONTRIBUTORS, AND HALLIBURTON,"
and some things start to make sense about our current federal government;

"... a government of, by, and for: friends, contributors, and Halliburton."

See? Great, huh? Thank you! Good night, Herb.

"Drownie, You're doin' a HECK-OF-A JOB... Heh, heh!"

Sunday, Sep. 25, 2005
How Many More Mike Browns Are Out There?
A TIME inquiry finds that at top positions in some vital government agencies, the Bush Administration is putting connections before experience
By MARK THOMPSON, KAREN TUMULTY, MIKE ALLEN / WASHINGTON

Check it out, seems we are THAT screwed...
Yikes, Herb.
(Thanks to someone at americablog.blogspot.com for that name, "Drownie.")

REALITY-BASED HISTORY! (Not Rove-based, damnit!)

History is
a set of lies
agreed upon...


-Napolean Bonaparte

Let's hope Napolean's centuries-old "wisdom" does not come to pass in the 21st Century... THEY ARE TRYING! Enough said, Herb.

"Bushvilles" via P. Krugman & Herbert Hoover

Paul Krugman writes:

By now everyone knows that the Bush administration treated the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a dumping ground for cronies and political hacks, leaving the agency incapable of dealing with disasters. But FEMA's degradation isn't unique. It reflects a more general decline in the competence of government agencies whose job is to help people in need. For example, housing for Katrina refugees is one of the most urgent problems now facing the nation. The FEMAvilles springing up across the gulf region could all too easily turn into squalid symbols of national failure... (emph. added)

Speaking of "squalid symbols of national failure" (read: Bush policy-failures), from another era, via wikipedia, Hoovervilles:

Hooverville is a term describing a series of villages that appeared following the Great Depression in the United States from 1929 through the 1930s and 1940s. These villages were often formed in desolate areas or unpleasant neighborhoods and consisted of dozens or hundreds of shacks and tents that were temporary residences of those left unemployed and homeless by the Depression. The government did not officially recognize these Hoovervilles and occasionally removed the occupants for technically trespassing on private lands.

The word "Hooverville" is a spin on the last name of the 31st President of the United States during the beginning of the Depression, Herbert Hoover.
(wikipedia.com)

Therefore, "Bushville"... you do the math, they're everywhere:
try the Superdome in Louisiana, or the Astrodome in Texas.
Convention Center(s)? Nervous, Herb.

Gulf Coast WAGE CUT!

Josh Marshall at the link below calls a spade-a-spade... Pres. Bush's Davis Act Wage Differential Bacon Cheddar Yadda Yadda Executive Order, which may be the only thing he did QUICKLY in RESPONSE to Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of the Gulf Coast, is nothing but a friggin' WAGE-CUT! For WORKERS! Halibhurtin' management won't reduce their compensation/profits/fraud for mismanaging the jobs being funded, just the workers will get screwed... Thanks Georgie!

At this talkingpointsmemo.com link, Josh Marshall is working on a project:

But if you've already been able to find out where your member of Congress stands on the Gulf Coast Wage Cut, send us a note at the regular comments email address on the left. Maybe you called their office and asked, or saw some mention in the paper or a press release on their website. Whatever, let us know what you've heard. We want to know who's for the Wage Cut and who was against it. We've already heard reports of some pretty squirrelly answers from some of the usual characters. So more on that later.
-- Josh Marshall

Help @ the link above, or just see his site. (good stuff)talkingpointsmemo.com
Herb.

"Bad Daddy" (...not "protecting" us?)

A must read... this whole Buzzflash editorial, excerpted below:

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL
The great downfall of America is not some sort of precipitous moral decline -- unless you take into account the behavior of the offspring of Jeb and George Bush -- but rather that the "theatrical presidency" has been uncoupled from any accountability.

How Bush "performs" on television is the criteria by which the media judges him, not how he performs for the people of America. Word and deed have taken two separate paths -- and the media may cover deed for a day or two, but is always diverted back to writing reviews about Bush's dramatic reading of scripts written by Rove and Hughes -- or airing visuals of carefully orchestrated photo-ops.

It doesn't take a brain surgeon to put together a pattern of Bush being unable to cope with disaster and protect Americans. There is a straight line going from Bush's paralysis after 9/11 -- sitting in a classroom for nearly 10 minutes reading "My Pet Goat" before his speechwriters could give him something to say, while Dick Cheney oversaw the response, followed by Bush's bizarre odyssey of flying away from Washington, D.C. -- to his failure to respond to the Tsunami disaster for days, to his failure to respond to the disaster in New Orleans for days. We won't even get into the bloody, bankrupting quagmire he got us into in Iraq by lying us into war.

Any corporate board would know that they have a total incompetent on their hands and send him packing. We didn't just have Michael Brown as head of FEMA. Michael Brown is our President!

The fact is Bush is just a figurehead, with the domestic President being Karl Rove and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney sharing the role of President for foreign affairs

************************************/

This leads us to what must be a horrifying reality for followers of what George Lakoff calls the strict father protector model that Bush is supposed to represent. The tradeoff for the dismantling of our Constitution, the bankrupting of our nation, the start of an unending war through lies, the right wing social policies, the defiance of the international community -- the tradeoff for all of these for the Republican base is that Bush was to be the strict father protector, the Good Daddy who kept all evils at bay.

Ooops! Nine-Eleven, Iraqi black-hole, Osama?, AnthraxMailer, Katrina... etc, etc.
Herb.

Kurt Vonnegut quotes

Vonnegut, American icon, on The Daily Show:

"I was gonna title the book The Fifty-First State... Denial."

To Jon Stewart: "YOU are enormously popular... with the right sort of people."

" the dumbest man at the top of our government (is not George W.), it is the Secretary of Defense."

Cool, Herb.

Jon Stewart Wins Award (Emmy)

I agree with buzzflash.com that he deserves a Pullitzer Prize for exposing/reporting more NEWS & ANALYSIS than any of the "journalists" out there selling it...
Oh, the irony of a fake-news show being more informative and insightful about Current Events than ALL the mainstream (old) media...

Click HERE for an example of Jon Stewart's The Daily Show's insightful analysis.
Later, Herb.

Al, Fishing.

BLAME-GAME & FINGER-POINTING FISHING EXPEDITION BY ALBERTO GONZALEZ'S JUSTICE DEPT.!!! ("The Sierra Club did it"!)???
You gotta be kidding! Nope.
Hint: HE AIN'T FISHIN' FOR FEDERAL-FUNDING-FAILURES & FEMA-FLOUNDERS...
(Doesn't Al's DoJ have some torture to justify, or something?)

Full story at RawStory.com:

An email message which suggested the Bush Justice Department was looking to blame environmentalists for a break in the New Orleans levee and the ensuing flood has sparked vehement responses among the Democratic caucus in Congress, RAW STORY has learned.
One congressman, ranking House Judiciary Democrat John Conyers (D-MI), penned a stiff letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales demanding answers.
In the email, obtained by the Mississippi-based Clarion-Ledger, the Justice Department wrote: "Has your district defended any cases on behalf of the (U.S.) Army Corps of Engineers against claims brought by environmental groups seeking to block or otherwise impede the Corps work on the levees protecting New Orleans? If so, please describe the case and the outcome of the litigation."

Federal funding cuts! Ask the Army Corps of Engineers, Herb.

PRUDENCE

PRUDENCE / noun / (pronunc.: PRUE-dense)

Defined (Webster's Ninth, & dictionary.com)

1) The ability to govern and discipline oneself by the use of reason;
2) Discretion in practical affairs; Careful in one's conduct;
3) Wisdom in handling practical matters; exercising good-judgment or commonsense;
4) Skill and good-judgement in the use of resources;
5) Caution/circumspection as to danger or risk;
6) Marked by wisdom or judiciousness...

Would be nice, huh? (#4!) Also note: No "GUT" in ANY of those definitions! Nothin' else, Herb.

(Next week: competence!)

Gas Prices, Huh? Hmmph...

Ahhh, the CLINTON years (cnn photo 1996).

"Gee, our old LaSalle ran great;
THOSE WERE THE DAYS!"
(Archie/Edith Bunker.)

Walking, Herb.

NOT Prudent:

Yesterday, Steve Soto: We see crap like this... which we now know was nothing but a photo op for Bush to roll up his sleeves and misuse emergency personnel while people were dying in New Orleans!(The Left Coaster)

Today, Times editorial board:
[www.nytimes.com]

Editorial clippings:
It's not really all that surprising that the officials who run FEMA are stressing that all-important emergency response function: the public relations campaign. As it turns out, that's all they really have experience at doing.
************
...the people who decide where the president will stand on stage and which loyal supporters will be permitted into the audience - and how many firefighters will be diverted from rescue duty to surround the president as he patrols the New Orleans airport trying to look busy.
************
President Bush chose to make FEMA a dumping ground for unqualified cronies - a sure sign that he wanted to hasten the degradation of an agency that conservative Republicans have long considered an evil of big government. Katrina has proved that federal disaster help is vital, and that Mr. Brown and his team of advance men can't do the job. What America needs are federal disaster relief people who actually know something about disaster relief.

What a f**king Fake! Extra cheese? No thanks, that's plenty. (I bet those firefighters probably came to the Gulf Coast to rescue people, not to take pictures or "save" the Prez'nit!)
Herb.

Can they WEASEL out of this one too?

Can the W.H. weasel out of resposibility for their incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina? Like they WEASELED out of responsibility for rigged elections, 9/11, Iraq, the economy, CIA-Leaks, and everything, etc. Ask Karl:

(wikipedia image)

Robert Kuttner has a piece at boston.com, (excerpted):

[H]ow will the political winds shift as the enormity of the Katrina disaster sinks in?

We face two opposite prospects. The first is that Americans will finally grasp that what connects the catastrophes in New Orleans and Iraq is a witches' brew of self-delusion, deliberate deception, cronyism, and staggering incompetence on the part of the Bush administration. Republicans, meanwhile, will desert a president who is becoming a plain embarrassment even to his staunchest backers.

But there is a darker possibility. The Karl Rove team is gradually getting Republicans back ''on message." The message: There's no point in playing a ''blame game," as Scott McClellan said 15 times at Thursday's press briefing. The New Orleans disaster just proves the unreliability of government in general rather than this feckless president in particular. We should be looking forward to rebuilding -- with the private sector taking the lead.
If we aren't alert, Bush will not only wriggle out of political responsibility for diverting funds from New Orleans's flood defenses, eviscerating FEMA, and bungling the response, just as he evaded responsibility after Richard Clarke's testimony that the administration ignored warnings about Al Qaeda's plans for a 9/11 style-attack. Katrina could even be a political windfall, promoting the campaign to cripple government, permanently displacing some reliable Democratic voters from the swing state of Louisiana, causing the faithful to rally 'round their beleaguered president, and knocking even more unpleasant news off the front pages and network TV.

Yepp, Herb.

Give If You Can...

Donate if you can to
The Red Cross...
They HELP a lot!
Thank You, Herb.

History 201, New Orleans

THIS IS NOW:

Old Cemetary in New Orleans, {photo by Kyle(on-scene), posted to AMERICABLOG by DC Joe}... MORE AMAZING PHOTOS LIKE THIS, and some of the best real-journalism on the web [hands-down!] at the amazing AMERICAblog.blogspot.com,
one of Thee BEST!

Wow...

Looks like everybody but the current US Gov't anticipated and prepared for decades, indeed CENTURIES for, let's just say... lots of water in New Orleans, even "burying" their dead above ground! I'm sure they anticipated flooding and something like the power of Katrina, but I don't think anybody EVER could've predicted the weak, feeble response and incompetence we've seen these last few horrible weeks. Deadly, toxic, and ongoing...

For a great, quick New Orleans HISTORY OVERVIEW, go to this page at wikipedia ... (I just realized how cool wikipedia is!) cool pictures, architecture stuff, links to jazz history, bayou/creole culture, foods, etc.
Excerpt from 20th century section:

Much of the city is located below sea level between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, so the city is surrounded by levees. Until the early 20th century, construction was largely limited to the slightly higher ground along old natural river levees and bayous, since much of the rest of the land was swampy and subject to frequent flooding. This gave the 19th century city the shape of a crescent along a bend of the Mississippi, the origin of the nickname The Crescent City. In the 1910s engineer and inventor A. Baldwin Wood enacted his ambitious plan to drain the city, including large pumps of his own design which are still used. All rain water must be pumped up to the canals which drain into Lake Pontchartrain. Wood's pumps and drainage allowed the city to expand greatly in area. However, pumping of groundwater from underneath the city has resulted in subsidence. The subsidence greatly increased the flood risk, should the levees be breached or precipitation be in excess of pumping capacity (as was the case in 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina). There were many warnings in the late 20th century that a major hurricane or a Mississippi flood could create a lake in the central city as much as 9 m (30 ft) deep, which could take months to pump dry.

Wow, Herb.

CNN's Cafferty gets it...

Via Eschaton, a great award-winning blog, "Atrios" posts the following clip fropm Jack Cafferty's comments on CNN. He seems to share much of my disgust with the BushCheney gutting of FEMA.

Somewhere along the way FEMA became a dumping ground for the president's political cronies with little experience in disaster relief. The agency's first director was Joe Albaugh. He was president Bush's 2000 campaign chairman. Albaugh brought in the current failure Michael Brown. His previous work was with Arabian horses. The number two guy, Brown's top deputy at FEMA, is a fellow named Patrick Rhode. He worked for the 2000 election campaign. The number 3 guy at FEMA is Brooks Altshuler. He used to work in the White House. His job was planning presidential trips. FEMA's long term recovery director is a guy named Scott Morris. He produced television and radio commercials for the Bush campaign. The federal agency charged with handling national emergencies is staffed at the very top by a bunch of political hacks with virtually no experience that qualifies them to respond to something like Katrina. But I digress.
...
Where are the qualifications of these people? None of these guys is qualified based on the stuff I'm reading, to head up an emergency management agency. One of these guys worked with Arabian horses, The rest are all off the campaign trial. Planned presidential trips. Produced TV commercials. Don't you need somebody at the top running the organization who has some semblance of an idea of what the hell is required when there's an emergency?

I would only add that these political hack LOSERS that were in charge of FEMA not only had no DISASTER-RELIEF experience, they also had NO MANAGEMENT EXPERIENCE! Unbelievable!
Thanks Jack for cuttin' thru all the crap!!!
Later, Herb.

FEMA Is A Disaster, Damnit!

Better call FOFEMA, which according to Ed Helms of The Daily Show stands for:
"FEMA Of FEMA" which is called into action by our leaders,
"when FEMA itself is a disaster"
And it sure is...
(A little badly needed sarcasm from Comedy Central.)
Pissed, Herb.

dennis hastert Is A Pussy

Congressional press-conference yesterday: Dennis Hastert, possibly the third most corrupt National-Failure in Washington these days, got his ass kicked by Nancy Pelosi! He ran off sulking...
He was talking some standard BS about how we shouldn't be pointing fingers and blaming anybody until the (fake) "investigation" is over.

Then Nancy Pelosi, brave House Minority Leader, stepped right up to the microphone, and said (paraphrasing):

"I'LL POINT FINGERS: The political HACK who some dipshit put in charge of FEMA, who has absolutely NO EXPERIENCE whatsoever in anything, should be summarily fired... immediately!"

And as she was speaking, you could see Denny running away(hobbling), scared of the truth... what a pussy! I think you could see tom delay carrying hastert's Depends from when he shit his pants after being pounded by Pelosi. It was embarrassing. Who would vote for such a corrupt idiot?
("doctor" Frist too, thanks for Nothing.)

Majority Leadership anywhere? NOPE!

God Bless America!
And hear our prayers!
God help those we have failed...

Thank You Nancy Pelosi!
And Damn those cowardly politicians!
(We know who they are, they know who they are... SHAME on them!)

Sadly, Herb.